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		Contents	[ Close all Abstracts ]		Current issue
		Editorial By: ALAN CROSBY [ Read Abstract ] What is local about local history? For over thirty years this apparently simple question, to which there are no simple answers, has been one of the great points of debate and discussion in our subject. On one level it is a matter of geography: where do we draw the line in defining our area of investigation or, alternatively, which line drawn by someone else should we adopt? Is the parish boundary, or the county boundary, a valid perimeter for our research, or are these artificial constructs which do not relate to the realities of social, economic and cultural patterns? Did they do so in the past but have now lost their meaning, or have they always been superimposed upon more deep-seated and less definable geographies? And, if that is the case, how can we identify and measure and assess such other dimensions? On another level, though, the debate about the localness of local history concerns the degree of self-containment displayed by any community (however that contentious concept might be defined). Can we properly study any place, time or subject without being clearly aware of its context, and understanding how it fits into the wider schemeof things? The realisation that the topic which we have chosen to investigate is strongly influenced by patterns and processes elsewhere in time and place is one which for many local historians is exciting and challenging, yet for others represents a genuine deterrent. To circumscribe the area of interest or investigation closely, and not to stray beyond its familiar bounds, is often a reassurance. An editorial in the recent newsletter of a local history society suggested that 'The larger the area to which we are required to relate, the more impersonal it appears and the more it becomes a monstrosity, like the London Borough of [name supplied'>more... or even worse, much worse, Europe. That is why the speaker has chosen a limited area and a long span of time'. I find that sentiment somewhat disturbing, not because a small area and a long time-period are necessarily inappropriate for study, but because it conveys the impression that nothing outside that society's geographical district is apparently of relevance or concerm. Yet that is manifestly not the case, as the same editorial obliquely points out. One of the features of the area in question was a 'little factory built... to make muskets to fight the French'. Europe might or might not be a 'monstrosity', but English local history is and always has been constantly and deeply influence by Continental Europe and our national relationship with it. Two articles in this issue of The Local Historian demonstrate the same ever-present reality that regional, national and international dimensions to local history are of major importance, and that what happens in individual localities is not self-contained and should not be seen in isolation. In his detailed and thorough analysis of the experience of the Poor Laws in Petworth (Sussex) during the 1830s, Spencer Thomas shows how the lives of the paupers in the area were influenced by the political and social perspectives of the aristocracy, by arguments over the application of the legislation of 1834, by personalities and conflicts between strong-minded individuals, and by differing notions of the appropriate way of dealing with poverty in its local context. But ultimately the fate of many of them was also determined by a quite different set of circumstances - the opening up of new areas of the growing British Empire, the reaction against penal colonisation in Australia which meant that non-criminal settlers were increasingly preferred, and the opportunities which these developments represented in terms of assisted migration. We cannot understand the lives of these individuals or the social and economic history of the parishes of north-west Sussex, if we discount and disregard those global processes of empire-building and colonisation. Neither, it must be added, could we fully understand the local history of quite a few places in south Australia and Ontario if we were ignorant of the events in the Petworth Poor Law Union during the 1830s, or overlooked the Wyndham family and their distinctive role in peopling those new lands. Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms investigate another, even more famliar, flow of migrants, those from Ireland to England in the nineteeth and twentieth centuries, looking at the mythology of that movement and comparing it with the ascertainable facts taken from census returns, supported by a rich vein of anecdotal or personal evidence. The authors argue that it is not enough to say that 'many Irish came to London in the years after the Famine'. Instead, the question of who those people were, why they came, and what their circumstances were after arrival, need to be asked to understand fully this very important element in the history of the study area, Kilburn and West Hampstead - and, of course, that equally central theme of Irish history. As more questions are asked, so the apparent certainties of the simple explanation give way to doubts, and to a more complex and changing picture, but one that more closely matches the evidence. The result is that historical understanding is more convincing and more effective. We can never have a complete picture - the notion of 'total history' is an idealistic aspiration, not a practical possibility - but we can move closer to a proper appreciation of what happened. The conclusion of another recent study reinforces this view(1). It indicates that the majority of Irish immigrants to Lancashire in the twentieth century were relatively well-educated young women with social and economic aspirations, and not, as in the universal popular belief, unlettered navvies from County Mayo coming to build the M6. If we wanted to assess the impact of Irish migration upon Lancashire since the 1940s we ought to look first at the nursing element of the National Health Service, not at the motorway network, but if we want to understand why these young women came we need to look at the special circumstances of Ireland between 1922 and the early 1960s, those strange, introverted, puritanical de Valera years from independence to Vatican II. The phenomenon of the 'chain reaction' in local history, whereby events thousands of miles away can help to mould and shape what happens in a more immediate locality were summed up for me when I heard it suggested that if the American pioneers in the Mid West in the 1870s and 1880s had had more respect for human rights, Basildon would still be a small country town. This suggestion was that by killing off or evicting the Indians, confiscating their lands, and developing a huge grain-exporting business, these colonisers destroyed the economic basis of agriculture in south Essex, leading to stagnating and collapsing property values, the cheap disposal of land, and the development of plotlands and squatter settlements. The creation of the post-war Basildon New Town was in part a response to the perceived need to sort out the resultant inadequacies of infrastructure and the untidiness of landscape and society which were anthema to the orderly and utopian visions of post-1945 governments, and an insuperable challenge to Billericay Rural District Council. Can we understand Basildon with out knowing about Nebraska? It is an uinteresing thought. 1. S Lambert. Irish Women in Lancashire 1922 - 1960: their story. (Centre for North West Regional Studies, Lancaster University, 2001) Continuity and change: the future of the Victoria History of the Counties By: CARRIE SMITH [ Read Abstract ] A short article which reviews the recent changes in the work of the Victoria History of the Counties of England [VCH'>more..., including its new approaches to publication, the use of local communities as a basis for collaborative projects, publishing on the internet, and developing relationships with outside organisations. There is discussion of the problems of, and potential sources for, finance and of the need to make the VCH more inclusive, in order to convince possible funding bodies that it is a worthwhile project for allocation of money. The author is Assistant Editor of the Wiltshire VCH Elementary head teacher and the inter-war entrepreneur: By: PETER LUCAS [ Read Abstract ] 'Food is the most important thing in a child's life': so wrote the famous progressive, A.S. Neill. This study examines an inter-war elementary school headteacher, from the perspective of Michael Young's notion of the social entrepreneur. Barbara Benson, 'commanding' Roose Junior and Infants School from 1937 to 1958, pioneered school-based catering in remote and proletarian Barrow-in-Furness, an armaments, shipbuilding, and steelmaking town. At a time when many policy-makers at local and central levels had yet to appreciate the importance of the link between food and pupils' capacity to learn she set up and ran for almost ten years her own canteen. In doing so, this able, hard, demanding and fear-provoking head - a legend in the communities she served - was part of a great reform tradition. The literature does not indicate many such initiatives by elementary school headteachers. She knew how to 'get a show on the road'. Her story suggests that unromantic and prosaic activities beyond the classroom door but bearing on our understanding of the culture inside should not be neglected in the new social history of schooling which is emerging. It raises questions: What activities were 'on the menu' in particular elementary school settings? How many other 'Barbara Benson' were there? What were they doing? And just how much diversity was there in the elementary school system? Power, paternalism, patronage and philanthropy: the Wyndhams and the New Poor Law in Petworth By: SPENCER THOMAS [ Read Abstract ] The earl of Egremont and, after his death in 1837, his son the 1st Lord Leconfield, and their supporters sought to alleviate the appalling conditions of the poor in the Petworth area of West Sussex in the early nineteenth century, by initiating a wide range of public works and sponsoring emigration to reduce population pressure. The paternalistic 'model' has become unfashionable, but the manipulation of the needy, the local elite and a state institution by Egremont, Leconfield and their chief ally, the Reverend Thomas Sockett, rector of Petworth, is a classic case of control of a local community. The struggle between the 'noblemen' and (after 1834) the Poor Law Commission reflected the determination of the former to preserve and protect their local power base in the face of external pressure. The conflict between centralisation and decentralisation; local traditional flexibility and nationally-imposed rigidity; discretion and uniformity; generosity and parsimony; personal daily interaction and impersonal remote absenteeism; and the forces of conservatism and reform, can be replicated in many communities. Opposition to change was not entirely altruistic, but a marriage of convenience between economic and philanthropic imperatives. The Petworth Emigration Committee was central to the measures employed to suppress latent unrest, by meeting and massaging the needs of the poor. Assisting emigration to Upper Canada and South Australia was preferable to the cost of distributing poor relief at home. The scheme, financed by Egremont and Leconfield, but masterminded by Sockett, had few imitators because of the resource and administrative implications, but it attracted interest from far afield. Petworth's singularity eventually succumbed to the enforcement of national measures and the adoption of a more flexible government policy. The Irish in Kilburn: myth and reality By: DICK WEINDLING AND MARRIANNE COLLOMS [ Read Abstract ] The authors take as their starting point the conventional views of Irish migration to England - and specifically the Kilburn and Hampstead West End area of London - in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting that 'Irish equals Catholic plus poverty' is the typical stereotype. They show that for this most famously Irish part of London there was in fact very little post-Famine migration, despite the stimulus of several important Catholic religious foundations, and that even the displacement of Irish from inner London, said to have been a cause of the growth in the Irish population in the area, provided little increase. While there undoubtedly were Irish in Kilburn in the early nineteenth century, they were mainly seasonal agricultural workers, not impoverished refugees. Instead, Weindling and Colloms argue, the majority of the Irish-born and Irish-descended people of the area can be traced back to post-1945 influxes, so that the Irishness is a more recent phenomenon than is usually supposed. The article employs contemporary descriptions, census data, post-war autobiographical and narrative accounts, and personal testimony to emphasise its case. The aim of the article is to provide a corrective to the stereotypical view and to demonstrate that the detailed analysis of local circumstances will contradict the sweeping generalisations and popular myths which make up much of the 'history' of the Irish in England. Reviews Recent Publications in local history A historian and his community: an appreciation of Theo Barker 1923 -2001 By: MARY PRESLAND
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