4993 - Credit, Class and Community: Working Class Belfast, 1930- 2000

4993 - Credit, class and community: working class Belfast, 1930- 2000. This document was supplied by the depositor and has been modified by AHDS History Summary of aims and objectives The project aimed to collect detailed oral testimony from 40 retired working-class people on their experiences of credit, debt and consumerism. The interviews were to gather innovative historical information on the changing circumstances of financial management in working-class homes over the period from the 1930s through to the 1990s. Information was to be sought on the impact of family gender, generation, neighbourhood, occupation, income, and religion on financial decision making. The project also set out to identify and describe the various forms of credit used by working class consumers in Belfast and to explain changes over time. Forms of long standing credit that information was sort about included money-lending, pawnbroking, mail order catalogues, check traders, retail credit and corner shop ‘tick’. It was also intended to probe interviewees’ experiences of the more recent credit facilities, such as credit unions, credit cards and store cards. The credit union promised to be a particularly interesting topic given the movements success in Northern Ireland in comparison with the rest of the United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland an estimated 8% of all personal loans are obtained via credit unions in comparison with just 0.1% in for the rest in of the United Kingdom. The applicant had previously conducted research with records in government and commercial sources and intended to contrast the evidence uncovered therein with the testimony offered by the interviewees. The end results of this strategy were to contribute to historical articles and a monograph and to produce reports and testimony that could be forwarded to the two very different user groups for this project, Provident Financial Plc and Church Action on Poverty. As very few of the target group of interviewees (those aged 65+) provided detailed testimony on credit unions, it was necessary to conduct a small number of interviews with individuals below retirement age. The thinking behind this decision was that as credit unions have emerged since the 1960s usage of them has been greatest amongst younger individuals than amongst the 65+ age group. This initiative also helped to establish factors of change and continuity within the working class economy of Belfast. Forty-one people were recorded, several more held informal pre-interview conversations with the researcher. But only 32 interviews proved suitable for the final dataset and were with individuals who agreed to sign the appropriate consent forms. This total included interviews with two licensed moneylenders from families with long experience of providing loans to working-class communities in Northern Ireland. Notes of a further, unrecorded, interview with the board of well established credit union are also included in the eventual dataset and provided an insight into the history and operations of credit unions in Northern Ireland. Significant achievements The research has created a dataset of interviews dealing with the history of credit, debt and household management in Belfast. They also deal with other previously uncharted aspects of working-class life in that city that will be of value to historians of British and Irish societies. The project results highlight the complex nature of attitudes towards credit and debt and the role that community networks have played in the past and in the present in producing frequently complex and often ambiguous attitudes towards various forms of credit. The interviews demonstrate the various experiences of credit and debt of people with different life histories. They also reveal the existence of separate male and female credit markets that operated in the past and demonstrate the extent to which the working class wife’s recourse to complex money management strategies remained as dependent on her husband’s approach to the family economy in the post-1945 period as it had been in the inter-war decades. The interviews reveal a myriad of resources, often community-based, that were used to make ends meet. This testimony, together with that on ambiguous attitudes to credit/debt will be of interest to those engaged in contemporary social policy debates about debt. Main research results The major result of this research has been the creation of a database of interviews that address the issue of working-class credit, debt and money management since the 1930s. It provides a unique resource for those interested in this area. Moreover, the interviews represent the only accessible systematic collection of oral history interviews carried out in working-class Belfast and can be used by those with broader interests in gender history or Irish/British social history. As was anticipated the interviews indicate a wide variety of financial experiences and strategies. Less anticipated was the openness with which many interviewees discussed issues such as money-lending and pawnbroking, although there were marked variations in the tone in which these matters were addressed by various respondents. One of the most interesting findings was the degree to which `credit’ was understood by interviewees. A significant proportion of the female interviewees in particular argued that they had never used credit and had never been in debt: only towards the end of their interviews did information on their use of such forms of credit as provident checks and mail order catalogues emerge. For these women a system involving weekly payments to an agent did not represent credit as they understood it. Rather credit was represented by the more formal, legalistic and longer term agreements represented by hire purchase purchases of furniture and more expensive items. Of course, such agreements consistently required their husband’s signature and thus also represented one point at which the working-class wife’s financial power ebbed away. Continuing in this theme the interviews reiterate historian’s understandings of the working-class wife’s prime role as financial manager. They demonstrate the complex range of her financial responsibilities within the home. For the working-class woman the choice of husband proved to be as important in post-1945 Belfast as it was for those inter-war women studied by historians. The interviews reveal the danger of assuming that a working-class male’s presence in a skilled job or well-paid employment automatically meant economic security for his family. A high proportion of interviewees indicate the extent to which a working-class male’s involvement with alcohol or gambling regularly forced his wife into complex financial coping strategies, regardless of occupational or income based factors. Amongst the testimonies are two from men who can be considered to have been in this category. One is a reflective interview from a recovering alcoholic, whilst the other is unapologetic in tone. Other testimonies reveal a diverse pattern of economic relations within working-class marriages in Belfast. Many female interviewees professed ignorance of their husband’s wages. Not surprisingly, the majority of this group reported usage of short-term or crisis credit. However, others recalled how their husbands brought home an unopened pay packet each week and this cohort were least likely to record first hand experience of financial struggles. Whether as a result of low income, their spouse’s spending habits, or family size, many female interviewees provided information about the coping strategies used by their mothers or themselves in making ends meet. In this aspect of the interviews there were clear differences in terms of what people were either prepared to speak about, or to speak about in the first person. In particular interviews with east Belfast Protestant women were least likely to feature first person testimony about credit in general, but particularly provident checks, pawnbrokers, and moneylenders. This may well have simply been a function of that part of the city’s relative prosperity (it hosted the Harland and Woolff’s shipyard and Short’s aircraft factory). However, I also believe it reflected a stronger adherence to classic notions of working-class respectability amongst those interviewees who had lived in east Belfast. This group stood out from both Protestant and Catholic interviewees from other areas of the city. All the latter groups provided testimony, in one form or another, about the use of short-term credit or crisis credit. This testimony was often presented in a humorous tone: the comic element often provided by stories about husbands unexpectedly looking for their best suit, which unknown to them was in the pawnbrokers. However, the interviews reveal that such matters placed a lot of strain on those women involved. The interviews shine a light into the operations of separate male and female credit networks. They provide information on street-based (mainly female) and work-based (mainly male) unlicensed moneylenders, revealing the origins and the methods of these individuals. This aspect of the testimony is one of many examples that demonstrate the mixture of altruistic and instrumental behaviour that operated in working-class neighbourhoods. At the other end of the credit hierarchy the interviews provide evidence of how experiences of credit changed during the twentieth century, with the mortgage and hire purchase replacing experience of pawnbrokers and crisis loans for a significant number of

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