Rethinking Folk Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain

Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 28, No. 4, 2017, pp. 543–569 doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwx038 Laura Carter* Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge ............................................ Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/4/543/4084208 by University of Cambridge user on 27 February 2020 Rethinking Folk Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain Abstract Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic ‘first wave’ folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a ‘conservative modernity’, which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a ‘second wave’ folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums’ perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization. Introduction In November 1968 the Welsh curator John Geraint Jenkins described the purpose of a folk museum: ...to illustrate the life and culture of a nation, a region or even a village or locality in miniature. It is the duty of those engaged in folk life to search for the key to the world of ordinary people: to throw light on their ill-documented day to day life and to study material * [email protected]. The author would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing funding to support this research, award reference number 04167. The author would also like to thank Peter Mandler and the reviewers of Twentieth Century British History for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In addition, the author is grateful to the staff at the Museum of Cambridge and Wardown Park Museum for help with the author’s research, as well as to Mike Petty for assembling the ‘A Century of Cambridge News’ open-access resource. Advance Access publication 17 August 2017 ß The Author [2017]. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 544 LAURA CARTER that to many other scholars seems commonplace, too obvious and too near at hand to be important.1 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/4/543/4084208 by University of Cambridge user on 27 February 2020 By the late 1960s, the British folk museum conundrum was apparently solved. In Jenkins’s native country, the National Museum of Wales at St Fagan’s had opened in 1948 and was thriving. The Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie was on sure footing, managed by a watchful committee of the four major Scottish universities, and a Folk Museum for Ulster had been established by the government of Northern Ireland in an Act of Parliament in 1958.2 In England, attempts to establish a national folk museum had failed. But from the mid-1960s a flowering of regional sentiment had produced several successful ‘open air’ museums such as the Beamish in the North East and the Weald and Downland in West Sussex. From this perspective, the history of folk museums in twentieth-century Britain appears straightforward: subordinated nations on the periphery asserting cultural nationalism, whilst ‘Englishness’, at the centre, proved too tricky to codify.3 Yet Jenkins’s definition implies that the scale of the unit mattered less than the task of revealing everyday life, that national identities were not as important as personal ones. Much research on folk culture has focused on politically transgressive episodes. Topics of enquiry have included Cecil Sharp’s romantic English folk music and dance movement on the right, and on the left, Leslie Paul’s scouting offshoot, the Woodcraft Folk.4 Both were performances of society reformed according to the visions of the avant-garde. Prominent Marxist readings of these folk revivals have criticized elites for wresting proletarian cultural products from their makers, and appropriating them to reinforce traditional hierarchies. But these aspects of folk culture were not its mainstream manifestations and have led to an overestimation of folk culture’s radical potential.5 This article instead turns to Jenkins’s world of museums, using the general term ‘folk culture’ to refer to the material objects and documentary and 1 John Geraint Jenkins, ‘Folk Museums: Some Aims and Purposes’, Museums Journal, 69 (1969), 17–9, 18. 2 Iowerth C. Peate, ‘Some Thoughts on the Study of Folk Life’, in C. O. Danachair, ed., Folk and Farm (Dublin, 1976), 229–34; G. Thompson, ‘The Social Significance of Folk Museums’, in Museums are for the People (Edinburgh, 1985), 26–39. 3 Cf. Peter Burke, ‘Popular Culture in Norway and Sweden’, History Workshop Journal (1977), 143–7, 145. 4 Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993); Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds, The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989); W. Bruce Leslie, ‘Creating a Socialist Scout Movement: The Woodcraft Folk, 1924–42’, History of Education, 13 (1984), 299–311. 5 For a discussion and critique of this historiography, see Christopher J. Bearman, ‘Who were the Folk? The Demography of Cecil Sharp’s Somerset Folk Singers’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 751–75. RETHINKING FOLK CULTURE 545 oral sources collected and displayed in these institutions. It demon- strates that in museums folk culture was, for the first time, in an active Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/4/543/4084208 by University of Cambridge user on 27 February 2020 dialogue with the needs of the modern democracy. Folk museums in twentieth-century Britain have been addressed in two different bodies of literature. Museologists have used a profes- sionalization model to understand British folk museology. They are primarily interested in how early museum methods contributed to professional practices of curating that developed from the 1970s.6 Gaynor Kavanagh finds many of the early English folk museums wanting in this regard, arguing that the persistence of haphazard antiquarian collecting hampered the realization of the modern professional social history museum.7 Secondly, anthropological scholars have stretched the focus back to the final third of the nineteenth century, when domestic ethnographic collecting had to accommodate a narrative of white imperial ‘civilization’. In this imperial mode, English folk objects and customs were explained as ‘survivals’ of earlier, less civilized cultures, a model advanced by the Victorian cultural anthropologist E. B. Tylor.8 Chris Wingfield has argued that as the confidence of Empire fell away, and as anthropology professionalized, folk museums became an expression of an insular national mood that relied on the ‘salvage paradigm’ to shelter itself from modernity.9 Both of these interpretations treat English folk museology as amateur and reactionary because it never amounted to a highly professionalized, nation-building project. Crucially, they do not register its connection to mainstream education and leisure in mid-twentieth-century Britain. This article will reveal this connection, arguing that folk museums were modern, democratic institutions that fostered the relationship between local identities and citizenship. The first two-thirds of the article analyse the project of ‘first wave’ folk museology after 1918, which thrived in the absence of a coherent national history narrative. The final section explores how these museums were eclipsed by the rise of a ‘second wave’ folk museology from the 1960s, a project tied to regional social change and the new academic social history. This shift 6 Catherine Ross, ‘Collections and Collecting’, in Gaynor Kavanagh and Elizabeth Frostick, eds, Making City Histories in Museums (Leicester, 1998), 114–32. Cf. David Fleming, ‘Projecting Social History in Museums’, Social History Curators Group Journal,13 (1986), 1–3. 7 Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship (Leicester, 1990). 8 Chris Wingfield and Chris Gosden, ‘An Imperialist Folklore? Establishing the Folk- lore Society in London’, in Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin, eds, Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 2012), 255–74; Oliver A. Douglas, ‘Folklore, Survivals, and the Neo-Archaic’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 223– 44. 9 Chris Wingfield, ‘From Greater Britain to Little England’, Museum History Journal, 4 (2011), 245–66. 546 LAURA CARTER enabled museums to meet the new physic and emotional needs of their communities, but it also significantly recoded how social–historical Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/4/543/4084208

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