Scholarship Boys and Children’s Books: Working-Class Writing for Children in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s Haru Takiuchi Thesis submitted towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, March 2015 ii ABSTRACT This thesis explores how, during the 1960s and 1970s in Britain, writers from the working-class helped significantly reshape British children’s literature through their representations of working-class life and culture. The three writers at the centre of this study – Aidan Chambers, Alan Garner and Robert Westall – were all examples of what Richard Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), termed ‘scholarship boys’. By this, Hoggart meant individuals from the working-class who were educated out of their class through grammar school education. The thesis shows that their position as scholarship boys both fed their writing and enabled them to work radically and effectively within the British publishing system as it then existed. Although these writers have attracted considerable critical attention, their novels have rarely been analysed in terms of class, despite the fact that class is often central to their plots and concerns. This thesis, therefore, provides new readings of four novels featuring scholarship boys: Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime and Dance on My Grave, Robert Westall’s Fathom Five, and Alan Garner’s Red Shift. The thesis is split into two parts, and these readings make up Part 1. Part 2 focuses on scholarship boy writers’ activities in changing publishing and reviewing practices associated with the British children’s literature industry. In doing so, it shows how these scholarship boy writers successfully supported a movement to resist the cultural mechanisms which suppressed working-class culture in British children’s literature. The thesis ends by considering the legacies of their efforts and demonstrating, through close readings of Westall’s The Machine-Gunners and Garner’s The Owl Service, that the class context of the time is embedded in the texts in ways that have not previously been recognised. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as referring more generally to studies of scholarship boys in social sciences and education, this thesis also makes use of personal interviews and archival materials, which together yield significant insights on British children’s literature of the period. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would firstly like to thank The 21-Seiki Bunka Gakujyutsu Zaidan for generously providing partial funding for one year’s study, and the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University for funding travel for my archival and interview researches. Special thanks go to my supervisors, Professor Kimberley Reynolds and Professor Matthew Grenby, for their always helpful advice and guidance. In particular, I am endlessly grateful for Kim’s patience and constant support throughout the years of my struggling with writing. I would also like to thank all the members of the Children’s Literature Unit for their advice and encouragement. I am extremely grateful to archivists at Seven Stories in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Aberystwyth University for supporting my research at their archives. Finally, I would like to thank Aidan Chambers and Robert Leeson for kindly agreeing to be interviewed for this thesis. iv Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1 PART I ........................................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER 1: EDUCATION AND UNCERTAINTY IN AIDAN CHAMBERS’ DANCE ON MY GRAVE ................................................................................................... 20 CHAPTER 2: AIDAN CHAMBERS’ BREAKTIME: CLASS, ANXIETY AND HOME AS A CULTURAL BATTLEFIELD .................................................................. 35 CHAPTER 3: ROBERT WESTALL’S FATHOM FIVE: CLASS DIVISION, SCHOLARSHIP BOY AND SOCIALISM ........................................................ 51 CHAPTER 4: ALAN GARNER’S RED SHIFT: THE ANGER OF THE SCHOLARSHIP BOY ........................................................................................ 76 PART I CONCLUSION: RISK AND REALITY ........................................................... 97 PART II ....................................................................................................................... 101 CHAPTER 5: CLASS CULTURE AND CHILDREN’S BOOK PUBLISHING ......... 101 CHAPTER 6: ARGUMENTS OVER SWEARING IN ROBERT WESTALL’S THE MACHINE-GUNNERS ..................................................................................... 121 CHAPTER 7: CLASS AND CHILDREN’S BOOK CRITICISM ................................ 141 CHAPTER 8: THE CONCLUSION OF THE OWL SERVICE: CRITICAL IGNORANCE OF CLASS ANGER ................................................................ 161 CONCLUSION: “THE AWARENESS OF STANDING BETWEEN TWO CULTURES” .......................................................................................................................... 180 APPENDICES .............................................................................................................. 187 v vi INTRODUCTION A cluster of working-class children’s writers come to prominence in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. This thesis looks at their writings and activities, the beginning of their struggles and how they gradually, but effectively, re-shaped British children’s literature. The majority of writers from the working-class in the 1960s and the 1970s were examples of what Richard Hoggart, in The Uses of Literacy (1957), termed “the scholarship boy”.1 By “scholarship boys”, Hoggart means British children who, during the early-to-mid twentieth century, were selected at eleven-years-old to be educated in grammar schools. Hoggart himself was such a child, and The Uses of Literacy explores how this selection process served to educate children out of their class and place them in a new kind of social space where they found themselves caught between classes. Three main writers featured in this thesis, Aidan Chambers (1934- ) Alan Garner (1934- ) and Robert Westall (1929-93), were scholarship boys. Their writing for children, this thesis will argue, had a lasting impact on representations of class in British children’s literature. However, representations of class in their writing have rarely been examined. The central concern of this thesis is to address this silence and to show how it has affected understanding of British children’s literature from the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than looking across the range of work produced by scholarship boy writers, the focus here is on novels that feature characters who are scholarship boys, looking closely at how the texts portray their experiences and critique their ambivalent class position. Ultimately, it argues that the writers’ effective use both of their inherited British working-class culture and of the middle-class culture which they gained through education enabled them to be successful, and contributed to some of the radical changes in British children’s literature during the period in question. In doing so, this thesis also highlights how class oppression operated in the inter-connected spheres of children’s book publishing and criticism, and shows how scholarship boy writers for children consciously struggled to change long-standing stereotypes and attitudes. While this thesis is principally concerned with representations of the working-class in British children’s literature of the mid-twentieth century, it also begins the work of filling a gap in studies of British working-class literature of the period which, to date, have paid little attention to children’s literature. 1 Later scholars in sociology also use “the scholarship girl” to refer to the female version of the experience, but Hoggart’s original term was “the scholarship boy”, as it was based on his experience and observation. Scholarship Boys and English Literature The emergence of scholarship boy writers in British children’s literature cannot be separated from developments in adult literature and larger social changes. By the 1960s, the increasing number of scholarship boys had affected many aspects of British society. Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, two of the founders of modern Cultural Studies, are among the best-known scholarship boy writers and academics (Munt 4). Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy particularly inspired later generations of scholarship boys and girls by helping them to recognise the relation between their personal/emotional experiences and class, and so forging a new identity around the concept of the scholarship boy (see Ferrebe 72-174; Long 105-36). Richard Hoggart chose the term “scholarship boy” to describe the experiences and characteristics of grammar school-educated people from the working-class – in The Uses of Literacy, the term refers to adults as well as children of school age – because for his generation who attended school before the 1944 Education Act, children in primary schools took scholarship examinations at 11-years-old. The 1944 Education Act abolished fees for all state maintained grammar schools, but still pupils had to pass an examination at the age of 11. As will be shown in Chapter 1, the 1944 Education Act changed little about the experiences for working-class pupils from those of Hoggart’s composite figure of the