PROOF Contents Series Editors’ Preface viii Acknowledgements x List of Figures, Maps and Photographs xii Abbreviations xiii 1 Introduction: Moving Histories 1 2Place 36 Interlude 1: Tom Crowther (1929–2006) 71 3 Poverty 76 4 State 108 5 Class 140 Interlude 2: Flo Smith 173 6 Moves 178 Afterword 212 Notes 215 Bibliography 221 Index 233 vii February 18, 2009 10:20 MAC/ROGA Page-vii 9780230_219939_01_prexiv PROOF 1 Introduction: Moving Histories Prelude I’m sorry in a way because I know that you’re quite keen to break down the stereotypes ...but I do feel, and again this is perhaps another source of my shame, that our family ful- filled absolutely every stereotype you can think of. So ...my Mum had a drunken Irish Catholic father who everyone called Paddy ...[her] mother died so the children were taken. My youngest aunt who was only a couple of years older than me was literally handed over the fence at the age of three to a neighbour who then brought her [up] ...It was a mess ...but I was obviously reasonably oblivious, or it was just ordi- nary to me then. All the family shipped around, stayed with various people on the estates ...my granddad [sighs] went from ...strength to strength in his drunkenness ...living with various members of the family including us for a lot of years ...I just remember his sitting on the corner of the bed with his false teeth out and nothing on his top half and he had this kind of breasts and chickeny skin, hacking his guts up and dipping his toast in his whisky ... (Lorna Haley1) In her recollection of childhood in 1960s’ and 1970s’ England, Lorna spoke of the shame she had felt because of where she came from. The Larkman social housing estate in Norwich, where she grew up, and the adjacent estates of Marlpit and North Earlham, which were often 1 February 17, 2009 14:42 MAC/ROGA Page-1 9780230_219939_02_cha01 PROOF 2 Moving Histories of Class and Community associated with it, had a reputation in the rest of the city. Here is Lorna again: if someone says the Larkman, ‘Oh, she lives over the Larkman, she comes from the Larkman’, that engenders a very particular response from people in Norwich ...even people who come from what I would consider other big council estates. From at least the 1950s, the name of the Larkman estate was associ- ated not only with the kind of family breakdown described by Lorna, but also with violence and criminality. As Harry Collins, another resident put it, the Larkman was classed as a very violent estate in the fifties ...if anyone used to say ‘oh are you going to the Larkman?’, they’d [follow up by saying] ‘Cor. What? You going up there? It’s too rough’. For Harry, this reputation carried forward into the present, based not on current reality but on past events: they only go on reputation. Years ago when that was a rough area, I mean in the teddy boy days there was always fighting up there, up the Larkman and things like that ...when I was a young lad, I used to use the Larkman pub from the age of fourteen, until ...they pulled it down. I had many a punch up in there when I was a youngster ... The old Larkman pub was a lovely little haunt where all the crooks used to go in there and clerk this and buy ...that.2 The descriptions of the estates given by both Lorna and Harry superfi- cially reinforce what some commentators have referred to as a ‘common sense’ depiction of poverty and council estates in late twentieth-century Britain (see for example Damer, 1989; Jones and Novak, 1999). Such an outlook seems unproblematically to elide poverty, use of the welfare system, criminality, ‘deviant’ behaviour and family structures. Crucially, it sees both the causes and the outcomes of such patterns as being the responsibility of the individual or the area concerned. This ‘com- mon sense’ depiction of the causes and results of poverty might best be summed up in former Prime Minister John Major’s injunction that Britain should learn to ‘condemn a little more and to understand a little less’ about the poorest in society. February 17, 2009 14:42 MAC/ROGA Page-2 9780230_219939_02_cha01 PROOF Introduction 3 As we write, towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we find that mainstream media, with TV series such as Little Britain, seem to have taken Major’s words to heart, with stereotypes of ‘white trash’ and ‘chavs’3 used as short-hand simultaneously to describe and write off vast sections of Britain’s population – often white, often living on council estates and nearly always poor. Such phrases deploy universalizing stereotypes that link style of dress and speech with educa- tional aspirations, involvement with welfare and social control agencies, and patterns of family behaviour. They also focus their spotlight solely on ‘individuals’, ridiculing or blaming them for their situation, and in so doing leave the context surrounding those individuals firmly out of the picture. In this book, in contrast, we aim to turn this phenomenon on its head. Using the case study of a specific area and through exploring the lives of individuals within it, we argue instead for the importance of understanding how individual lives are closely entwined with changes at the local, national and international scales. The book is set in a rapidly changing England, covering a period from the 1930s’ depres- sion to Blair’s New Labour regime in the twenty-first century. What became clear over the course of our research was, rather than being a bounded and isolated outpost of deprivation on the edge of a provin- cial city, the Norwich estates were intimately tied to the deep structural changes of the twentieth century. There was not a life revealed to us that had not been affected by the expansions and contractions of the state, by the shifts from the mid-1970s towards a neo-liberal deregulation of the labour market and consequent re-regulation of workplace relations, nor by profound changes in experiences of class, gender relations and cultural expectations. Thus the context throughout is one of structural inequalities in English society – inequalities that shift over time, and have particular spatial characteristics. The area we study – the Larkman, North Earlham and Marlpit estates in Norwich – is neither metropolitan, nor rural. Such places have become associated with poverty and deprivation, with the kind of ‘community’ responses to individual and more collective prob- lems of the kind outlined by Lorna Haley; and, in provincial cities like Norwich, with whiteness, stasis and isolation. We set out, as Lorna pointed out, to question such stereotypes, which were in part about these specific estates, but were also more generally about class, as working class lives and social housing estates are often closely associated in public discourses on English society (Hanley, 2007). Our work is distinctive because, unlike many other studies, we insist February 17, 2009 14:42 MAC/ROGA Page-3 9780230_219939_02_cha01 PROOF 4 Moving Histories of Class and Community that it is not possible to study the experience and identifications of any particular class in isolation from other classes. Moreover, discussions of working class lives in Britain are too often elided with discussions of whiteness, so that working class black and minority ethnic people in Britain are defined by their ethnic heritage alone. Indeed, white British- ness is often seen as being exclusively working class,4 and, contrary to a long history of migration both within the UK and internationally, white working class people in Britain are portrayed as immobile, ‘impacted on’ by the immigration of foreign nationals. From the outset we were interested in the ways in which in Jenkins’ formulation (1996), people were categorized by others, and in how this influenced their own social identifications, whether individual or collec- tive. Structural inequalities, produced and perpetuated in part through categorization, limited people’s room for manoeuvre. But from the start of this work we were also interested in what people were able to do within changing structural contexts, within, for example, the kinds of jobs or housing or schooling that were available to them as estate res- idents, including through the instrumental use of social identity. To find out about this and other forms of individual agency, we wanted to record how people remembered their experiences in their own words. It is precisely because structural inequalities have continued stub- bornly and even worsened in the UK (and elsewhere) since the 1970s, that understanding the role of identification in people’s responses is so pertinent. Class and community have been written about by many authors but this book breaks new ground through its simultaneous use of dynamic historical analysis and a spatial approach to identity, which brings out the importance of migration and transnationalism in rela- tion to white working class people often constructed as entrenched and immobile, indeed, some would argue, ‘fixed in place’ by middle class social scientists (Skeggs, 2004). Life histories reveal the migratory pat- terns of individuals over the course of their lives and, crucially, when taken together, can show shifting patterns across generations. Throughout the book we argue for the importance of grounding this understanding of individuals’ lives within a wider material and struc- tural context. From the 1940s to the 1960s, residents leaving school, male and female, could expect to be able to get work, most commonly a factory job in Norwich’s boot and shoe, food processing, printing or engineering industries.