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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Forbidden Britain
BBC2 Thursdays 9.45 p.m.
Instability. The word is instantly recognisable as a description of the current situation. The rich and powerful lurch from one scandal or crisis to another. The lives of ordinary people are blighted by poverty, violence, homelessness and insecurity.
Yet the myth persists that this is something new and unusual. British history is surely characterised by long periods of calm development, of a society broadly at peace with itself. Not so, as this television series and the accompanying book vividly show.
The unifying theme of the six parts of the series is the way in which official and unofficial censorship have worked to obscure the recent past. By dredging up facts on delinquency, sex, unemployment, public and private violence, and homelessness, the makers of the series provide two sets of fascinating insights, which show how much society has remained the same, and yet how dynamically it has changed.
The question of crime is always shrouded in the ‘we didn’t used to be like that’ myth. Yet the first episode showed the lives of many young people between the wars marked by the same desperation and alienation that afflicts young people today. Individuals stole to get by, gangs wrecked things to get through the day.
The story of crime in this period also lays bare the myths about punishment and its effectiveness. True, young people often got the proverbial ‘clip round the ear’ from a strict but father-like policeman. They also got slammed up in jails and prison hulks, subjected to beatings and slave labour. Each of the verbal histories shows the same pattern: poverty, a turn to crime, followed by a life in institutions broken only by the outbreak of the Second World War.
The episode on sex and marriage carried similar echoes from today – of royal scandal and the imposition of values on the working class that the ruling class could not itself maintain. However, the impression of change is overwhelming. Between the 1900s and the 1930s the annual number of divorces rose 15-fold, it rose four times again by 1947.
The social disruption of war, and two separate influxes of women into the workforce, cracked the late Victorian ideal of family life. For many the sole choice of life long monogamy was ended as men went off with the army and women found themselves in new situations.
The secret history was a product of a society in turmoil. Economic crisis produced tensions and then changes in the way people lived. These are found in the individual tales which make up so much of the series, but they also produced mass revolts.
The third part of the series, Bloodshed and Burning, shows that riots and other disorders were a common occurrence. Yet their nature was complex, and shifted according to the situation.
In 1919 soldiers and others rioted around Britain in frustration at being ignored and abused after the sacrifice of war. Overwhelmingly, such protests were directed at the authorities, such as Winston Churchill, who sent troops onto the streets of Liverpool. Sometimes, however, the most downtrodden were on the receiving end, as with attacks on black people in East London, Liverpool and Cardiff in the same year.
The 1930s saw a similar pattern of desperation, met with a patchwork of fightbacks and reaction. Sectarianism continued to seriously divide the working class in cities such as Liverpool and Glasgow. Worse, Mosley’s fascists grew and started to terrorise Jewish and other immigrant communities.
On the other hand, mass agitation against unemployment coupled with opposition to the Blackshirts produced a counter-movement which turned the situation around.
The makers of Forbidden Britain have done a service in collecting a wealth of information. Together it makes for a picture of society in which times were hard, the rich ruthless, and people responded either by lashing out against the weakest, or by fighting back collectively against their real enemy. Surely history for today.
Forbidden Britain: Our Secret Past 1900–1960
Steve Humphries and Pamela Gordon
BBC Books £12.99
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