The twentieth-century codification of British nationality, beginning with the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, had a profound impact upon British settler communities on the edges of empire, where the loss or acquisition of British status determined access to passports and extraterritorial protection. Although the 1948 British Nationality Act has often been privileged as a watershed moment in the intertwined histories of national belonging and post-war migration to Britain, this study instead draws attention to the longer genealogy of this political dialogue by positioning the inter-war period as a time when the parameters of British nationality were defined and refracted through the circumstances of putative Britons overseas. Consular responses to applications for British status in the Chinese treaty ports suggest that the parameters of British legal belonging, which required more careful definition against the backdrop of extraterritorial rights and protections, were worked out in detail in jurisdictional borderlands on the edges of empire. Petitions from individual constituents grappling with an evolving statutory landscape demonstrate that nationality became increasingly meaningful in concrete ways in the lives of ordinary settlers and sojourners in the twentieth century. The formal exclusion from this legal category of specific groups of people living beyond the boundaries of British territory, particularly 'illegitimate' children, married women, and children born to British mothers, had sharply felt effects upon the mobility, personal freedoms, and family cohesion of scores of settlers.
Between 1925 and 1975, the British railway industry elected beauty queens from the daughters of employees. Focusing upon the Railway Queens, this article will reveal the importance of beauty queens as 'civic celebrities', a novel role for public figures that emerged between the wars and helped to sustain a vibrant civic culture across the early to mid-twentieth century. It combined the traditional ceremonial function of 'civic' representative with the modern consumerist ethos of media 'celebrity'. Despite the gendered constraints of such competitions, this article posits that serving as a beauty queen enabled young working-class women to become legitimate representatives of various civic communities for the first time, whilst also enabling participation in the media's image-making of glamorous, consumerist femininities. As such, the role rendered civic and consumer cultures more inclusive and increasingly inextricable. This article further suggests that civic celebrities altered how communities were represented to themselves within British civic culture. If elites continued to represent hierarchical communities of authority and deference, then from the 1920s onwards, civic celebrities such as beauty queens began to represent relatively democratic communities of non-partisan inclusivity and consumer aspiration.
Throughout the 1950s, the Daily Mirror led a campaign by the popular press against petty, tyrannical discipline, commonly known as 'bull(shit)', within the British Army. Acting as moral entrepreneurs, tabloid newspapers positioned what they regarded to be the deviant behaviour exhibited by over-zealous non-commissioned officers towards national servicemen as a threat to the normative contours of British society. By doing so, the campaign against 'bull' sought to exploit latent fears about large standing armies in peacetime to pressure the Army to reform and modernize its methods of discipline. The article argues that the campaign against 'bull' was effective in that it elevated military discipline as an issue of public concern during a period in which the British Army was actively seeking to enhance its public image to improve soldier recruitment and retention as it prepared to revert back to being an all-volunteer force after the decision was made in 1957 to terminate National Service. By framing 'bull' as an archaic form of social control that was damaging to both morale and efficiency, the moral crusade compelled the Army to explain and justify its methods of discipline amidst increasing public and parliamentary concern.
This roundtable reflects on the intellectual contribution of the Scottish activist, journalist, and theorist Tom Nairn, who died in 2023. Nairn was a leading figure in both the British New Left and the movement for Scottish autonomy and independence. His writings had a formative impact on two major strands in the writing of modern British history: the turn towards a 'Four Nations' historiography and the debates over British 'decline' and modernization. This roundtable interrogates the extent to which his work still speaks to current and future agendas for our field. Individual contributions address Nairn's role in the history of the Scottish left, his examinations of monarchy and empire, and his complex interpretations of millennial discourses of multiculturalism and globalization. What emerges is a picture of a flawed yet indispensable shaper in modern British historiography, whose work inspired and may continue to inspire new work and new insights: not despite, but because of, his polemical style, his powerful political commitments, and his restless appetite for provocation.
Research into the history of the British anti-Apartheid movement and its efforts to isolate South Africa from international sport acknowledges that the 1970s were a 'difficult decade' for campaigners. British athletes and teams still competed regularly in South Africa, while exclusively all-white South African athletes and teams still toured or played in Britain. Although the boycott stalled for various reasons during this period, this article argues that Edward Heath's Conservative government, elected in June 1970, played an important role in maintaining British sporting ties with Pretoria and in empowering a British sporting establishment that preferred to keep politics out of sport. While the Labour leadership under Harold Wilson (1964-70) had denounced sporting relations with South Africa and taken steps to prevent them, Heath and his Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, completely reversed British policy. From 1970 to 1974, Heath's Conservative government openly encouraged British sporting interactions with South Africa, and even went as far as to fund them.
This roundtable reflects on the intellectual contribution of the Scottish activist, journalist, and theorist Tom Nairn, who died in 2023. Nairn was a leading figure in the British New Left and the movement for Scottish autonomy and independence. His writings had a formative impact on two major strands in the writing of modern British history: the turn to a 'Four Nations' historiography and the debate over British 'decline' and modernization. This roundtable interrogates the extent to which his work still speaks to current and future agendas for our field. Individual contributions address Nairn's role in the history of the Scottish left, his examinations of monarchy and empire, and his complex interpretations of millennial discourses of multiculturalism and globalisation. What emerges is a picture of a flawed but indispensable shaper of modern British historiography, who inspired and may continue to inspire new work and new insights: not despite, but because of, his polemical style, his powerful political commitments, and his restless appetite for provocation.
The rise of Sinn Féin as an electoral force in Northern Ireland after 1981 presented the British government with a fundamental dilemma: How should it deal with a political party that was closely associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and which expressed open support for political violence? Should Sinn Féin be treated as a party like any other, or should it be isolated-and potentially proscribed-because of its links to 'armed struggle'? At stake were wider issues about the functioning of political legitimacy, engagement, and exclusion in a democratic system amidst ongoing conflict. Drawing on internal government debates and policy discussions, this article explores the way in which the governments of Margaret Thatcher confronted these dilemmas in practice. It argues that, despite the Prime Minister's uncompromising public rhetoric and own ideological preferences, British policy towards Sinn Féin was shaped by a pragmatic calculus developed by ministers and senior civil servants. In doing so, this article reinforces recent historiographical interpretations of the Thatcher era that question the rigidity of 'Thatcherism' as an applied political doctrine and the importance of institutional and administrative dynamics in the making of policy.
Histories of British policing in the 1970s focus on the 'inner-city'. These accounts develop a compelling narrative: as economic crisis undermined the authority of the state, it sought to rebuild legitimacy through the production of racialized categories of crime, developing authoritarian methods-often drawn from colonial police playbooks-to coerce and contain working-class residents. Many of these accounts articulate policing to urban policy, revealing how policing was intensified in pockets of abandonment created by deindustrialization and suburbanization. But while urban historians have emphasized the relationality between city and suburb in this period, accounts of suburban policing are few. This article links the policing of cities to British new towns, analysing new police methods which sought greater control over the composition of social class through urban planning. It argues that new towns-developed as quiescent, orderly environments by the state-were later positioned as test sites for new models of 'community policing'. Attention to a hitherto overlooked corpus of archives highlights the unexplored early significance of planning to policing, revealing how the interventionist administration of urban space became increasingly central to the extension of the coercive functions of the state. Through comparative analysis of the policing of new towns designated under the 1946 New Towns Act and the violent administration of an unofficial 'new town' in Kirkby, Merseyside, I show how conceptions of planned suburban order were centred on hierarchical concepts of social class, emphasizing the increasingly authoritarian impulses of the welfare state.
This article examines the brief flowering of spaces for children in British museums in the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that managing museum space for both adults and children became an important issue for curators, merging with and to an extent replacing nineteenth-century concerns with managing space to accommodate different class groups. It investigates the children's galleries, 'corners' and museums which emerged between 1900 and 1950, comparing them with fuller provision in the USA. In the UK, children's museum spaces were constrained by a lack of space, expertise and money, and a concern not to make the museum childish; and by an association of children's provisions with slum areas and women experts. Curators were unsure how far to adopt a child-focused approach, or for which age groups they should provide. For a few commentators, children's presence was seen as incompatible with adult use of museums, to the point where they should be totally barred. Thus, children's spaces were partly a way of separating children and adults in museums, and reinforced a sense of difference between adult and child visitors. Most children's spaces disappeared after the Second World War, as slums and unaccompanied child visitors declined, and a focus on more 'professional' curating emerged. Fewer children seem to have visited, a trend accelerated by the wider context of familial and leisure change. The development of more engaging displays for all, not just children, served to narrow the apparent intellectual gulf between adult and child.
The BBC offered broadcasts for schools almost from its inception; a significant strand of this programming focussed on teaching children about the material remains of the past in their own localities. Employing an impressive roster of historians, writers, and educationalists, the BBC experimented with innovative formats to engage children with what we would now call 'heritage'. In Scotland first, then England and Wales, programmes aimed to construct national identities on the basis of children's aural encounters with specific historical sites and artefacts. Young listeners were encouraged to become 'heritage makers' themselves, investigating their historical environments, collecting local stories, archiving objects, writing guidebooks. While at first, these programmes seem largely concerned with the preservation of historic sites from the encroachment of modernity, gradually the localized remains of the past were used more explicitly as a means of moulding citizenship in the nation's youth. The Second World War gave this nation-building programming a new urgency, while post-War broadcasts challenged children to use their historical environments as a basis for building better places for the future. Analysing broadcasts from the 1920s to the 1940s, this article shows how this local history, 'Rural Environment' and 'Regional Survey' school's programming constitutes an overlooked chapter in the history of the BBC's attempts to reach and influence new audiences. It argues that these broadcasts pioneered new ways of deploying place-based history to fashion future citizens, anticipating the educative function that has now become an expected part of the heritage provision.
Anti-imperialism was central to the anarchist critique of the Second World War. Throughout the war, the anarchist publication War Commentary became a platform for challenging the British Empire and garnered the active involvement of key anti-imperialist thinkers such as Jomo Kenyatta and Chris Jones. George Padmore, another notable anti-imperialist in this period, was on the board of the Freedom Defence Committee (FDC)-established in 1945 to defend the arrested editors of War Commentary-an organization that would later become a springboard for anti-imperial solidarity. Through an analysis of the publication War Commentary and relations with the FDC, this article highlights the often-overlooked convergence of anti-imperialism and anarchism during and immediately after the Second World War. It begins with the domestic intellectual context, demonstrating how anti-imperialism was at the heart of the anarchist rejection of the war, and how this stance was influenced by anti-imperial actors from the colonies. Additionally, it reveals how these networks developed in the British Empire through a focus on the FDC's connections with Ghana. In doing so, this article will reveal how anarchist responses to the Second World War contributed to connections between anarchist groups in Britain and anti-imperialist groups in the colonies, while also highlighting the growing disillusionment of colonized activists with these alliances.
This roundtable contribution begins with a brief letter exchange between Tom Nairn and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in 2000. It explores how Nairn's nationalism challenged the liberal optimism of Britain's multiculturalist moment-and what he saw as its London-centric assumptions. Returning to Nairn's account of 'Two Englands', it suggests that his Marxist-nationalist commitments, though not without problems and limits, can help us think in new ways about the spatial politics of economic life in late twentieth-century Britain. Nairn's nationalism draws attention to the territorial dimensions of inequality and political identity, urging us to bring into a single frame the racial and regional peripheries of British rule.
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is widely regarded as epitomizing statist healthcare. However, before its launch in 1948, Britain had a 'mixed economy of welfare' in which charity loomed large, most notably in the voluntary hospitals. This article examines the legacy of this charitable past in the NHS's early decades. Although at its foundation, the Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevan, was determined that the NHS should end reliance on the 'caprice of private charity', political considerations meant that teaching hospitals retained their charitable wealth. Bevan's policy was that the Exchequer would cover all 'ordinary expenditure', with voluntary reserves used only for special purposes, including research, additional comforts and amenities. Thus, a theoretical border between state-funded essentials and charitably financed inessentials was drawn for hospitals in the early welfare state. This article asks whether this border held true in practice. Its method is a comparative history of three case studies: St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, the United Sheffield Hospitals, and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. We present quantitative and qualitative analysis of endowment expenditure between 1948 and the NHS's reorganization in 1974. Our findings demonstrate that expectations of a simple division between essential and non-essential aspects of healthcare proved naïve. Charitable spending notionally on research, amenities, and equipment was soon geared to clinical care. It also sustained capital programmes, disproportionately advantaging those hospitals with large inherited assets. Hospital charity also served as a rhetorical and visual device, promoting an ideal of humane care and legitimizing the place of voluntarism within the NHS.
The earliest morphologically identifiable dogs are from Europe and date to at least 14,000 years ago1-5, although early remains are also found in other regions. The origin of early dogs in Europe, and their relationships to other dogs, has remained elusive in the absence of genome-wide data. Similarly, although dogs were the only domestic animal to predate agriculture, little is known about how the arrival of Neolithic farmers from Southwest Asia affected the dogs living with European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Here we analysed 216 canid remains, including 181 from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europe. We developed a genome-wide capture approach that enriched endogenous DNA by 10-100-fold and could distinguish dog from wolf ancestry for 141 of 216 remains. The oldest dog data that we recovered are from a 14,200-year-old dog from the Kesslerloch site in Switzerland, and we find that it shares ancestry with later worldwide dogs-inconsistent with the hypothesis that European Upper Palaeolithic dogs derived wholly from a separate domestication process. The Kesslerloch dog already displays more affinity to Mesolithic, Neolithic and present-day European dogs than to Asian dogs, demonstrating that dog genetic diversification had started well before 14,200 years ago. We find a Neolithic influx of Southwest Asian ancestry into Europe, but this seems to have been of smaller magnitude than in humans, suggesting that Mesolithic dogs contributed substantially to Neolithic, and, ultimately, probably also modern, European dogs.
Focusing on three specific organizations-The Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), Blackliners, and The NAZ Project (Naz)-this article explores the different ways in which voluntary organizations responded to Black gay men (BGM) in Britain during the AIDS crisis from the 1980s to 2000. Illustrating how the place of BGM in Britain at this time was multidimensional and often contradictory, the first section demonstrates how they required safer-sex messaging that took account of the heterogeneous ways in which they experienced the intersection of racism and homophobia. Situated in this context, the second section explores for the first time the well-documented work of THT as it applied to BGM. It shows how although the Trust increasingly recognized the need to reach BGM, white activists struggled to grapple with issues of race. It demonstrates how their work on race was shaped by the broader context of changes to voluntary organizations' relationship to the state. In doing so, it makes clear the challenges of intersectional activism with communities of colour for white-dominated organizations and sheds light on how the HIV/AIDS voluntary sector responded to communities with particular needs. Taking Black AIDS organizations as its focus, the final section uncovers how Blackliners and Naz centred gay men in their work and reveals their nuanced and culturally sensitive initiatives. By tracing the contrasting ways in which these organizations navigated contested understandings of race in the final decades of the twentieth century, this article demonstrates the real-world consequences of the fragmentation of political conceptions of Blackness.
Much has been written about the history of policy and practice on venereal diseases/sexually transmitted infections in twentieth-century England, but one key group of actors has been overlooked: sexual health advisers and their predecessors. From the introduction of venereal disease clinics c. 1918, workers variously titled hospital almoners, health visitors, contact tracers, social workers, and, latterly, sexual health advisers have been involved in a range of interconnected activities including counselling, health education, contact tracing, and seeking defaulters from treatment in the community. Leading medical venereologists have generally expressed strong support for the value of such workers, but throughout the century there has been continuing diversity in the background, employment, training, roles, and responsibilities of those workers. In the last decades of the twentieth century, sexual health advisers sought to professionalize by establishing a professional organization and seeking other professional attributes including certified training and professional registration. Although there appeared to be policy support for such steps, by the early twenty-first century a change of government disappointed such professionalization hopes. The history of sexual health advising provides a unique lens on the challenges facing occupational groups seeking to professionalize within the National Health Service.
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Between his birth in 1873 and his death in 1944, Walter Sidney Bromhead lived an eventful life. He owned land on four continents, sat on the board of several fraudulent insurance companies, published in the Eugenics Review, was mocked in Australia's parliament, briefly ran colonial Kenya's largest white veterans' association, and claimed he met nearly every notable person of the twentieth century from Shackleton to Lenin. Yet his life's work centred around his obsession with starting a global social movement he dubbed 'Fedrity'. By binding Britain's colonies into a global federation of farming cooperatives, Bromhead claimed that Fedrity would inaugurate a new supranational currency, abolish wage labour, and ensure global white supremacy. A closer study of this globetrotting confidence trickster's life and lies expands the boundaries of British imperial history, revealing how those who lived at the margins of legality generated new understandings of law, space, and race. His life demonstrates how Britain's colonial frontier served as a laboratory for new understandings of whiteness, developed in response to the exigencies of Britain's chaotic interwar years. He synthesized Victorian settlerism, interwar radicalism, and eugenics into a demand that the British Empire's political economy be reoriented around the reproduction of whiteness. His ideas, and the tricks he used to sell them, are uniquely reflective of the tensions that ran through the late British Empire, and which led eventually to its collapse.
Delivered a day after Britain's National Health Service (NHS) reached its 75th year since its opening on the Appointed Day of 5 July 1948, the Pimlott Lecture for 2023 explored the culture of NHS anniversary-making. What can the marking of these anniversaries tell us about changing attitudes towards the service, and indeed, the British state? Here, examining evidence from the media, government archives, and Mass Observation, we argue that NHS anniversaries have long functioned as points of reflection but that their role as moments of national celebration and even communion has come to the fore only recently and culminated in the apparent 'anniversary fever' of 2018. We will explore the reasons behind the growing public fervour, what it can tell us, and the lessons offered by our work on this (still) best-loved of British institutions for historians working on highly politicized objects in 'fevered' times.
In January 1984, seven British and one US national were jailed in the 'independent' Bantustan of Bophuthatswana for their roles in a complex fraud at a Sun City casino. This article demonstrates how the Bophuthatswana 'government' tried to use the detainees as pawns in their efforts to gain recognition of the territory's independence, and the difficulties this created for British policymakers. While the Bophuthatswana authorities initially allowed British and US officials to visit the detainees, they soon became obstructive and demanded that permission be sought from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As neither the UK nor the USA recognized Bophuthatswana's independence, such formal contact was ruled out. However, as this article will demonstrate, a well-orchestrated campaign by the families of the detainees put pressure on the British government, which ultimately made concessions to Bophuthatswana regarding the visa process its ministers had to undertake prior to visiting the UK to allow contact with the prisoners. This article will also demonstrate the degree of sympathy that certain sections of the British elite had for Bophuthatswana's quest for international recognition. Indeed, the deal regarding the visa restrictions and access to the detainees was arranged through Sir Peter Emery, a Conservative member of the British parliament and chairperson of Shenley Trust, a firm hired by the Bophuthatswana government to facilitate its gold sales.