Imagined Families and Vanished Communities: Memories of a Working-class Life in Northampton

Fig. 1. Burrow’s Pointer Map to Northampton, c. 1938, from Les Tebbutt’s archive. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Imagined Families and Vanished Communities: Memories of a Working-class Life in Northampton by Melanie Tebbutt It has been observed that families assume meanings through ‘imaginings’, ‘images, myths and rituals’, the significance of which is frequently accentuated at moments of crisis and dislocation.1 The death of a parent, for example, often divides ‘the pattern of our lives into a ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ ’,2 as the closing of a door into family memory intensifies the desire to find a key with which to open it. Such impulses have become noticeable over the past two decades in the work of writers and academics who have published family or parental memoirs which explore both their own subjectivities and family relationships, shaped by very different lives and expectations.3 These works complement broader intellectual trends across the arts, humanities Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University M.Tebbutt@mmu.ac.uk History Workshop Journal Issue 73 Advance Access Publication 5 March 2012 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbr025 ß The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Fig. 2. At the seaside in the 1930s. Les is in the middle, next to his mother. 146 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 and social sciences, which have encouraged interest in how culture and memory intersect. At a popular level, new technologies and better public access to record offices and libraries have also helped interest in family history and genealogy to expand dramatically.4 As social mobility and economic restructuring have altered and fragmented long-established patterns of family and community life, so the desire to connect with imagined families of unknown ancestors (and the ‘lost’ communities in which they once lived) has been reinforced. The decline of communal and religious cultures as sources of family symbolism has made the ‘domestic group’ more important as a producer of myths and images, giving to individual members particular roles, as storytellers, keepers of family rituals and memories, makers and inventors of its visual record.5 These changes have helped draw more men into the creation of the family’s ‘symbolic universe’, although women are commonly seen as the movers and shapers of family memory, the ‘kinkeepers’ and sustainers of ‘family relationships and connections’.6 The influence of mothers’ ‘casual story-telling and reminiscence’ is shadowed both positively and negatively, for example, in the work of feminist historians such as Penny Summerfield, Anna Davin and Carolyn Steedman, who have integrated aspects of it into their own historical engagement with the past.7 Fathers’ part in shaping the imagined family has received less attention although they too can be responsible for powerful meanings, as is argued here in this exploration of how culture and memory intersect through family letters and ephemera left by my father, Les Tebbutt, who died in 1997.8 This collection reveals him as, in John Gillis’s sense, an archivist, determined to keep the family memory alive through its written and material culture, although this was no archive in the conventional sense. The first deposits were laid down during the Second World War, when he joined the RAF as a mechanic and various mementoes of his youth were packed away in a chest of drawers in his parents’ house, including adolescent diaries and jottings, pamphlets, membership cards, newspaper cuttings, bills, holiday snaps and twenty-first birthday cards. These were subsequently augmented by bundles of letters received from family, friends and neighbours during the war, and by wage slips, birth and baptismal certificates, payment and medical cards, and a variety of other souvenirs and records from his parents, grandparents and siblings. All stayed in the chest of drawers until the 1970s, when that house was demolished and Les took the chest into his own home. New layers were added as older relatives died or moved home and Les salvaged other family keepsakes. In this process, I argue, a place-bound sense of belonging, set during childhood and youth, assumed new meanings as his home town changed with redevelopment and expansion in the 1970s.9 Les was born in 1919 in the East Midlands town of Northampton, where he spent most of his working life as a fitter-welder in small engineering firms. A Northamptonian born and bred, he was deeply rooted in a town with many family and personal associations, although as he grew older and less Imagined Families and Vanished Communities Fig. 4. Les’s mother, Clara Tebbutt in the backyard of the family home, 1930s. Fig. 5. Les’s sister, Gwen Tebbutt in the backyard of the family home, 1930s. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Fig. 3. Les Tebbutt. Practice with a box camera in the backyard of the family home, 1930s. 147 148 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 mobile this mental landscape increasingly became one of memories. He had always expected to end his days in Northampton, but became ill on a family visit to northern England and died after a protracted stay in a Stockport hospital which held little comfort, since no matter how friendly the staff, their northern accents were a constant reminder that he was out of place. His discomfiting death in a distant northern town epitomized many of the broader social and cultural changes which unsettled him in his final years. The family and social networks of the neighbourhood where he had grown up had gone, casualties of age and fragmenting trends which made working-class communities of the sort that had shaped him seem irrelevant.10 How much these changes had affected him became powerfully evident as we sifted after his death through the mementos of a lifetime. There were patterns in the apparent disarray of these bits and pieces whose accumulation had made him by default the family’s unacknowledged record-keeper. In a compelling mix of sentiment and pragmatism, some things had been kept for memory and others because of the hoarding imperatives of a materially deprived generation born and raised before the Second World War whose need to preserve and maintain as much as to consume reminds us of the novelty of consumer culture.11 Paper bags, string, old nails, represented sheer discomfort with waste, for Les was reluctant to discard anything which might come in useful some day, since most things could be put to good use, even if it was unclear what use that might be. There were also tokens of ‘special’ events – weddings, holidays; books and toys; souvenirs of chance meetings; material objects ‘enmeshed’ in the ‘everyday lived world’, ‘tangible records’ of relationships, events and feeling’.12 Much related to his youth and family life in the 1930s. He kept the first copy of D.C. Thomson’s Radio Review (price 2d), published in November 1935 with a free album and ‘silvertone photos of radio stars’, and also saved the next eight issues. These were markers of an important moment: a payment card revealed that in the same month the family had bought an H.M.V. Portable Radio on hire purchase, for £15.15s. with a ten shillings down-payment. It was finally paid off in May 1937, an expensive yet affordable luxury made possible because he and his older brothers were all working.13 There were family letters, several of which had been written to Les by his mother and brothers during the Second World War. There were also Les’s own diaries from 1936 and 1937, when he was sixteen and seventeen. These revealed little about his work but much about friendship networks and leisure routines, many of which helped reinforce an attachment to the local and familiar.14 Photographs, a ‘ubiquitous and insistent focus of nineteenth and twentieth-century memory’, were well represented in what had been set aside.15 Brownie box cameras became widely affordable in the 1920s and casual snapshots complemented the fewer, more formal studio portraits of family members. His diaries recorded snapshots taken at camp with the Boys’ Brigade, paid for on arriving home, and saved among the Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 149 many mementos.16 There were also gaps in the photographic record, missing family portraits deliberately discarded, as we shall see, by an elderly aunt compulsorily moved from the house in which she had been born, her symbolic rupture with the past a reminder of the intense emotional meanings of family photos and of the psychic impact of many clearance and redevelopment programmes in the 1970s.17 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 TOWN IDENTITY Northampton, sixty-five miles north-west of London, was in the 1930s a market and industrial centre and the county town of Northamptonshire, noted for ‘spires’, ‘squires’ and landed estates.18 The town was known for its shoe industry, which had been dominated by hand production until the late 1840s and early 1850s, with the transition from domestic to factory production not completed until the 1890s.19 Migration from the surrounding countryside in this period meant that many families in the interwar years still retained strong connections with local villages.20 The high-point of industrial expansion had passed by this time, and the service sector – trade, retailing, distribution and clerical work – had become important employers, along with printing and engineering. The population, stable between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, was 92,341 in 1931.21 About a quarter of Northampton’s working population was registered unemployed in 1932, but conditions were not as bad as in northern manufacturing centres and the town was never classified as a depressed area; in the early 1930s, despite much run-down housing in the poorest wards, it was described as having ‘no real slums’.22 The health problems of the boot-and-shoe industry (notably tuberculosis) stemmed from workplace rather than neighbourhood conditions, and Northampton’s lauded reputation for environmental cleanliness was enhanced by plentiful green spaces (fourteen parks and recreation grounds, comprising over 409 acres).23 Les’s own family lived close to the town’s compact centre, near good bus routes and with most places for work and leisure within relatively easy walking distance. Class relationships in Northampton were not marked by obvious residential segregation between town centre and suburbs, and shoe manufacturing retained a strong neighbourhood character. In 1931, a large lower-middle class comprised twenty-two percent of the working population.24 Most local businessmen still lived in the town and manufacturers and philanthropists often claimed a shop-floor background.25 Many former home workshops had been converted to small factories, and the town’s central districts were characterized by a mix of housing, warehouses and factories, often in the middle of residential areas. Trade unionism, strong in the boot-and-shoe trade, was weaker in the workshop conditions of many smaller local firms, where relations with the owner remained close.26 Les’s diaries, for example, record him attending the wedding of his boss’s daughter. Localism, expressed in a form of civic pride supported by both middle and working classes, was important to the town’s social and political identity and helped 150 Fig. 6. Les’s eldest brother, Lou, in the 1930s. History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 151 FAMILY IDENTITY Les’s sense of self and place were closely bound up with his immediate and extended family, as his diaries suggest, with their accounts of scuffles and negotiations with family and friends. He was one of four surviving children. Both older brothers, Lou (born in 1915) and Frank (born in 1916), were in the boot-and-shoe industry, while his younger sister Gwen (born in 1922) worked for a box-making firm. Their father, Fin, was a warehouseman in Northampton’s main department store. He had started his working life in the orders office until a work accident blinded him in one eye and forced him to move to deliveries and a warehouse job, where he earned about £2 a week. Fin, born in Northampton in 1882, was one of nine children. His father was a journeyman tailor, who reputedly sewed up the pockets of his son’s suits so that they would not become ‘sloppy’. The children were brought up strictly. Fin and his brothers had to stay in on Friday nights for house cleaning, supervised by their father, who would not allow them out until he was satisfied with their work. Fin, from the junior end of the family, was closest to his younger siblings who as adults all lived within half a mile of each other and kept in close touch. Fin’s father died in 1912 but his mother was still alive in the 1920s, when a couple of nights a week he would drop by after work to see her. After her death, in 1925, he continued to make similar visits to his unmarried sister, Retta, who remained in the old family home. There were regular visits to two other brothers who also lived within walking distance. Fin, formed by the late Victorian years, was described by Les as quite austere, not overly affectionate. His mother’s temperament was very different, and the Billinghams, her rural family, were more boisterous than the Tebbutts, who were ‘that little bit more reserved’.30 Les’s mother, born in 1887, came from a small village just outside Northampton, where her father, a shoe-finisher, had died when she was Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 shape both public and personal identities in the interwar period, although employer/worker tension was certainly not absent. The late development of the shoe factory system meant that a tradition of ‘benevolent paternalism’ did not emerge until the early twentieth century, and industrialists, philanthropists and councillors, ‘often one and the same people’, promoted a public culture rooted in ‘service to the common interest and meritocratic leadership’.27 Their consensual rhetoric was conspicuous in the Chronicle and Echo, a popular daily newspaper which helped to propagate the ‘Northampton ethos’ during the 1930s.28 A tradition of religious dissent along with locally fluid class relations encouraged respect for political independence and helped to shape a social and political landscape in which ‘most Northamptonians defined their social identity in terms of citizenship rather than class’; a civic myth of individualism and independence discernible in Les’s later descriptions of himself, which also influenced how he and others who had grown up in the town reacted to the urban redevelopment there in the 1970s.29 152 Fig. 8. Les’s parents, Clara and Fin (on the right). Fig. 7. Les’s mother, Clara, in 1942. History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 153 Well, p’raps we were a little bit more reserved, that, you know, you kept your family life and all that . . . to your[self], that was your life and your home, and it was reserved more for you than um, everyone to know your business. ‘Cause I mean, you used to get a lot of scandal . . . I mean, some of them had big families, and there was one not so far along that, um, the boys ’d steal, and all that, you see. Whereas, you see, our boys weren’t supposed to mix with them, you see. It’s not because you, you thought you were that much better, but it was just because how, you were brought up to know right from wrong.31 Clara had started going out with Fin in her teens. Neither had much free time or money, and they courted for many years; she was twenty-seven when they married in 1914. She went cleaning for a couple of hours each day when the children were small and carried on with such jobs throughout her married life, taking charge of the family finances and insurance, and handing money back to her husband for drink and cigarettes. Most of her socializing was with her sisters and a neighbour who lived a couple of doors away, and later with her daughter, Gwen, with whom she regularly went to the pictures. Fin, not in particularly good health, was viewed in some respects by his family as an old man by the 1930s and 1940s. His wage had always been supplemented by what Clara managed to earn through her cleaning, and her economic dependence on him declined once the boys were out at work and tipping up their wages. Changes in the dynamics of family life were reflected in letters the sons sent home during the Second World War, when Fin was described as ‘Old Chief’, or ‘old moaner Fin’, and teased for his grumbles and scrounging. Shortly before Christmas 1941, for example, Frank, now in the army, wrote to Les about ‘The laughs us boys had at times with the old reprobate, but he isn’t so bad is he really, and I suppose we shall have to suffer him’. His reminiscence of their father’s cantankerous ways was affectionate if slightly mocking: ‘remember how we used to ask each other for books and things, or a game of draughts at midnight, and how he used to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 four, leaving eight children. She left school at eleven, and worked in domestic service until she married. Baptised Rebecca and known as ‘our Bec’ by her own family, she became ‘Clara’ on entering service, which was what she was called by friends, neighbours and Tebbutt relatives. Several of her own family lived close by when Les was growing up, a brother on a neighbouring street and a sister, Lizzie, who lived within a stone’s throw with her husband and two children. Both families were often in each other’s houses. Two other sisters remained in the village and there were weekly visits between the families for Sunday tea, particularly in the summer and on special occasions and festivities. Clara was well known for helping out neighbours, which was a continuing irritation to her husband, although the close-knit family was also aware of the need to maintain its boundaries: 154 History Workshop Journal bridle up like an old war-horse’.32 Les’s mother also referred to him in her war-time letters: Old Chief is still going on O.K. and he still does is bit of moaning and he also moans about ow little money he as to spend, he was fire watching all last night down Adnitts, [the department store where he worked] so that will mean a few extra shillings for him.34 If references to Fin in these letters seem somewhat detached, her sons were clearly recipients of their mother’s devoted attention. When not working, they could lie in as long as they liked, often with breakfast and dinner in bed, a ‘treat’ which retained its homely associations even after the war, as Lou observed when he heard that Les was back on leave.35 ‘You lay in bed as long as you want to, and have a cup of tea brought, nothing like having a cup of tea in bed, does you the world of good.’36 Letters which Les received from his mother in 1942 and 1943, when stationed in Blackpool, training to be a flight mechanic in the RAF, convey something of the family relationships. Their conversational tone reflects how his mother spoke them to Gwen, who wrote down her words, sometimes adding her own comments. Fin played a lesser part in this correspondence, with only one short note, thanking Les for the 2/6d postal order he’d sent, for a ‘drop more’ beer.)37 Gwen had married when she was twenty, having known Perce since she was ‘not quite seventeen’, which had not exactly pleased her father. ‘And I can always remember Pappy, then, he said, ‘‘You know, I don’t think our Gwenny’s really old enough to go out’’. You know, because he was that sort, but our mother said, ‘‘Oh no, I can trust her with him, he’s a nice feller’’.’38 She was still living at home when the letters were written because her husband was away in the army. This joint letter-writing helped conjure Les through the very act of composition, as mother and daughter talked over what to include. Such writing and discussion were mutually sustaining, and letters sometimes included short messages from neighbours or relatives who had dropped by while they were being written. What was both sent and received shaped imaginative scenarios upon which to dwell in quieter moments, helping quell anxieties which grew with silence. Letters received and sent provided tangible emotional comfort, touched, folded and re-folded, read and re-read, handwriting scrutinized for the characteristic lettering which was also a valued reminder of the sender. The very act of inscription established a sense of physical connection, evocations of the absent brother and son which Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 old moaner Fin is going on alright he as just been moaning because he said there is nothing in the house for him to eat, but he as gone to have his beer now, he was on the borrow from me Thursday to pay his club, and last Monday his divvy.33 Imagined Families and Vanished Communities Fig. 10. The much-anticipated photo of Les in his RAF uniform. attended the letter’s composition renewed by replies often shared aloud, encouraging more stories and anecdotes. Letters sent and received were the emotional equivalent of a reading primer, their phrases returned to and rehearsed, both individually and as a family. The sharing and creation of these everyday memories shaped a particular sense of family life which helped to draw the absent son back into a distinctive ‘microclimate’ experienced also by Les, since he was well aware when reading these letters of how they had been written, his mother and sister sitting, chatting and composing over the back-room table.39 Correspondence suggests how affection and relationships were sustained through humour, news about relatives and close neighbours and casual reminders of the texture of life left behind, as in an aside about going to gather primroses from a neighbouring village because the weather had been so ‘grand’. Memories of food were often ‘privileged’ in working class autobiographies from this period, and the same is true in these letters. Much of their content resonates with Michael Roper’s observations on mother-son relationships during the First World War, when the range of ‘practical activities’ that mothers did in terms of ‘writing, baking, sending and receiving clothes . . . or packing parcels of luxuries’ had ‘an emotional significance for sons that it is hard to comprehend today’.40 There were frequent Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Fig. 9. Les’s grandfather, John Tebbutt, in his Volunteers uniform. 155 156 History Workshop Journal I am glad you are still in civvy billets duck, and that you are still with you two pals I should think you are bit crowded [sic] in your bedroom with 5 of you in it. I only wish I was near you so I could give you a good dinner, & plenty of sauce on the top, duck, but lets hope that it won’t be long before you are back at home for good with us, and I shall love to have you all back all around my skirts, and to have some fun altogether again and some little arguments like we use to do, but we always use to laugh in the end hadn’t we.45 The fact that Les was stationed in Blackpool, where the family had sometimes holidayed in the 1930s, triggered reminders which helped to reinforce a sense of connection even in his absence: I remember going up there Les do you when we had our photographs taken and you wouldn’t come on because you couldn’t sit in the front and drive the motor bike, old Lou was sitting there instead, but still you had a motor bike of your own didn’t you duck, do you remember when you kept going round the streets and couldn’t stop, and I said I don’t belive [sic] our Les can stop we had a good laugh over it didn’t we.46 Both Lou and Frank were also overseas in the army, and their mother’s letters kept all of them posted about the bits of news they sent home, as Lou observed in 1946 when writing to Les: ‘Have you heard from Frank, I have not since being back here, although Mother gives me all the griff [sic] about him, and also about dad and Gwen, and everything at home’.47 Joining the RAF became the ambition of many adolescent boys after the Battle of Britain in 1940 and letters also suggest how those left at home were Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 concerns about whether Les was getting enough to eat (and making new friends): ‘So you wasn’t at Padgate [Reception Station] very long then duck and you have gone to Blackpool, we were surprised to see you had gone there, but I am glad you are going on alright and that you have made some decent pals. I hope you are getting good food where you are now’.41 ‘Are you having to work very hard and do you get enough food to eat, I hope you do’.42 Hearing that he would not be coming home for Christmas, his mother and aunt carefully packed up a parcel with cakes, mince pies, chocolate wafers, saved chocolate and a pork pie, staple Christmas fare, with the instruction to make sure he ate the most perishable item, the pork pie, first.43 The emotional meanings of food were similarly revealed by his mother’s delight at hearing that her son was gaining weight: ‘So you are putting on weight then duck if you keep on you will be as fat as what I am, but that’s not bad going 8lbs more since you joined up’.44 Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 157 caught up in the glamour of Les being a RAF recruit. There were sly compliments about his attractiveness to other women in his RAF uniform. There were also frequent pleas for him to have his photo taken in his new uniform: So you have got your kit. I am longing to see you in it I bet you don’t half look smart and I hope you have had your photo taken to send us one.49 I do hope you had your photograph taken as I am longing to see how you look in your uniform I bet you look ever so smart.50 ‘I do hope you have had your photograph taken as I am longing to have one and see you in your uniform’.51 Finally, the much awaited photo arrived, which in turn led to an excited letter of thanks: Well duck we had your photograph come today, and we couldn’t get the envelope open quick enough as we thought there was a photo inside, I think it is lovely, and Gwen and me kept looking at it and couldn’t get over it as you look so lovely Gwen’s ever so thrilled because she had one too, and is going to take it to work with her tonight to show the girls, she said they will all fall for my smashing brother She thinks it is grand and we think your smile is lovely and your uniform suits you marvellous, and Les we are longing to see yourself in it when you come home, old Chief said isn’t it lovely of the boy, I have put mine on the side board and it looks just as though you are smiling at us.52 The photo caused much interest among cousins, aunts and uncles, several of whom commented on it and asked for a copy, while the phrasing of the letter itself hints at different layers of family identity, with the collective thrill of ‘we couldn’t wait to get the envelope open quick enough’, and hints of the glamorous appeal of the uniform to his sister, for whom the photo was a useful status symbol among her friends. His father’s understated affection was drawn into the depiction of the family’s pleasure at having even an image of the much-loved son and brother back among them, while his mother’s use of the possessive, as in ‘I have put mine on the sideboard’, is suggestive of a discrete maternal possessiveness. These were not the only letters Les received. Neighbours, friends and other relatives also wrote, the content of such correspondence often Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 We are all longing to see you and see you in your uniform I bet you don’t half look smart you’ll have all the girls running after you, Gwen said she hopes you [sic] pimple is better to make you look smart for a little W.A.A.F.S.48 158 History Workshop Journal suggesting how previous letters (and the arrival of the photo) had been mulled over and discussed, as was the case when one of his cousins commiserated over the fact that he had been refused leave: The familiar roles and terms of endearment which had marked the family’s lives in peace-time (and were also chronicled in Les’s 1930s diaries) remained an enduring aspect of this war-time correspondence. The loss of the noise and bustle of having young people around had left a large gap: ‘It seems ever so quiet without you, and Gwen hasn’t got anyone to tease her’.54 ‘We miss you so much at home and it seems so quiet in the house without you here and the wireless don’t seem to get put on half so much now you are not here, we are still putting our twopence in the box but we have to keep on old Finis to put his in.’55 Gwen said she wishes you were here to play her up she listened to Victor Silvester last Wednesday and she done the steps and wrote them down it was a tango and she is waiting when you come home on leave to take her dancing, and she is glad she is still you second girl, we are always thinking of you dear, and I am always sitting here thinking about you.56 With all the boys out of the way, the childhood hierarchy of relationships which had formerly marked out space within the home was no longer relevant, allowing their sister to usurp some of her brothers’ former privileges: ‘Gwen as claimed the chair now you are away and said its hers until you come home on leave’.57 The old family pecking-order was still there, however, in the terms of endearment which they all used. Gwen wrote how she was still glad to be Les’s ‘second girl’ and ‘Little Gwennie’, Lou addressed him as ‘youngster’ and ‘kid’, and signed off ‘your oldest brother’, Frank wrote to his ‘dear youngest Brother Les’, while his mother referred to him as her ‘Darling baby boy’, often finishing letters to him with ‘Love from your best girl, Mum.’ Temperament and personality marked the three brothers differently. The most significant vector of wider cultural trends into the family was the middle brother, Frank. He was something of a lad-about-town, always willing to try out anything new or novel, and an adolescent sense of not fitting in with his family led him sometimes to insist that he must have been adopted, much to their amusement. Frank was the life and soul of the party who was looked forward to for lifting everyone’s spirits, as Lou recalled when he asked if Frank had managed to get back home on leave: ‘I suppose Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 First of all I must say I don’t think much to the RAF making you wait so long for your leave I think it’s a cheek, still I expect you are making the best of a bad job. I like the photo you sent to your mother it’s a real smasher I can just hear you saying O.K toots, and you shure [sic] look O.K in your uniform.53 Imagined Families and Vanished Communities Fig. 12. Gwen’s daughter, Valerie Jones, in the 1950s, outside the house in St Edmund’s Rd in which Les grew up, demolished in the 1970s. that old Frank managed to get home to see you, I bet it was an house of laughter, he certainly starts the party going with his wisecracks’.58 ‘Mother says that Frank also came to see you trust old Frank to get a week off, he certainly knows the ropes, I suppose that you had a few drinks with him, he certainly knows how to mop the larrup up, but he is good company, and certainly is a boy.’59 Lou, by contrast, strongly aware of his position as the eldest son, was more influenced by the past and ‘tradition’ and had more of his father’s formality, which was reflected in the stylized handwriting and tone of letters which he sent home. Unlike Frank, who was a less frequent correspondent, Lou took the task of keeping contact while all the brothers were away very seriously, and a sense of what was appropriate was clear in his apology for the scrappy writing paper and pencil he was having to use in one letter, ‘I hope that you do not mind me writing this letter in pencil, or on the pieces of paper, but I am away from my room at the present moment, when I decided to write to you, but still what does it matter as long as you hear from me, that is what counts’.60 It was Lou who dutifully became the family scribe at the end of the war when his mother and sister were preoccupied with the arrival of Gwen’s first baby. Well, here we are again young fellow, sending you the news from home, it seems to me Les, that Mother as now appointed me as the chief writer for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 Fig. 11. Les’s grandmother, Emma Tebbutt, and Aunt Retta (Tebbutt), outside the family’s house in Spring Gardens, Northampton, demolished in the 1970s. 159 160 History Workshop Journal the old homestead. So put your old ‘peepers’ onto this letter and I will try to make it as interesting for you as I can.61 Well Les boy, your travels abroad will shortly be ended, and then once again the family will be complete, it will be an happy day for us all, when you walk into the old homestead and say that you have just been demobbed . . . My youngest brother, I am proud of you Les, I was just thinking, it is now four years and four months since we last saw each other, that certainly is a long time, so you can bet safely that I am certainly on the watch-out for the day to come when you arrive back home again. Well, Les, I am afraid, that I have been a bit sentimental there, but you know how I feel Les, now I suppose you are waiting to hear about the rest of the family. 65 ‘Les boy’ remained a term of endearment between the brothers until they were both in their seventies and the letter strongly evokes a sense of the brothers’ time apart as an aberration, the reference to the ‘old homestead’ conveying a flavour of the westerns and American films which filled so much of their leisure, a familiar metaphor of what home had come to represent to those who had spent so many years away from it. Les was the last of the brothers to be demobbed, and Lou’s desire to transmit his own happiness at being home and married was very strong. Despite many gaps in what survived, these letters were part of a regular correspondence which helped sustain the family in imagination even when all three sons were overseas. In another letter Lou lamented that he would Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 This wartime correspondence suggests the overlap and merging of different cultural interests and generational experiences within the family, whose expressions of affection and mutual support contest the frequently assumed ‘passivity’ and ‘psychological simplicity’ of working-class emotional life.62 Lou married his fiancée, Nancy, in December 1945, and the letters he sent back about her, like those already quoted, convey the emotional significance of food and treats. Lou described Nancy as ‘a good kid . . . one of the best’. She, too, had sent him a parcel ‘containing tobacco, matches, writing paper, and also some coffee, cocoa, and sugar, that is just what I need, a nice hot drink in the evening before going to bed, does you the world of good’.63 Lou’s letters often convey a feeling of his own role within the family as something of an ‘elder statesman’, a sense of seniority which permeated the phrasing of a letter he wrote asking Les if Nancy had been in touch with him: ‘Did Nancy come up to see you, as she told me that she was going to, did you see our wedding photograph and what did you think of it, she is a good girl Les, and I know I am proud of her’.64 The depth of Lou’s feelings about his family were couched in a similar idiom towards the end of the war, at the thought of seeing his youngest brother again for the first time in several years. Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 161 I bet Mother and Dad are pleased to see you, have they taken you out yet, they are two of the best in this world of ours, I know that I am proud of them, in fact I can say that for all of you, the name TEBBUTT wants some beating aye youngster.67 How many dances did you go to, you know Les, even if I was not there, my thoughts have been with you, how were Mother and Dad, they are two of the best, it makes me feel proud to know, that I have a good Mother and Father, and two splendid brothers and a sister, yes I reckon that the Tebbutt’s family want some beating.68 Mother is a good sport, and the best sweetheart that we have, I am proud of her lad, in fact I am of all the family, I reckon we have done our bit towards winning the war, what say you young fellow.69 The brothers were soon all back in Northampton, albeit in cramped living conditions, given the post-war housing shortage. Frank, Lou and Nancy, Les, their parents, Gwen, Perce and the new baby were all living under the same roof for a while. Gwen and Frank eventually moved out into houses nearby in the same district, while Lou and Les moved to housing estates at the edge of Northampton. Wherever they lived, however, the family continued to retain close links with its old neighbourhood where Les’s mother remained an important focus, particularly after Fin died in the early 1960s. The material circumstances of their lives changed and improved in the 1950s and 1960s, yet traditional patterns of behaviour, neighbourliness and respectability continued to shape their experiences in ways which do not support suggestions of a decline in traditional behaviours among working-class people after the Second World War. The world in which they had grown up may have changed but it was not yet lost, as seemed to be the case in urban areas experiencing more rapid social change, or where migration to large suburban housing estates from traditional working-class districts was more pronounced, as with London’s East End. Northampton was still small enough for those who moved to outlying estates to maintain tight kinship and social links with the districts from which they had moved.70 In Les’s case, it was the 1970s which really brought about a defining rupture with the past. To appreciate the meanings that these letters, diaries and other material reminders of the past had for Les in later life, one must Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 not be around when Les was home on leave: ‘What grieves me though is the fact that I shall miss seeing you, so all I can do young fellow, is to keep in touch with you by letters, but I shall be thinking of you, so do not forget, enjoy yourself, go where you want to, and do what you like, I always did when I was on leave’.66 Lou’s reflections on what the family meant to all of them just after the war suggest how these feelings had been made all the more intense by distance: 162 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 understand their relationship to a period of rapid house clearance and redevelopment which was much resented by many who had grown up in the town.71 The 1970s were significant in Northampton’s history, for its traditional mix of small-scale industry and its market-town character changed dramatically after it was designated for New Town development by the 1965 New Towns Act.72 The decision brought physical upheaval which shocked many residents, not least because the fifty-year period between the industrialization of shoe manufacturing and the 1930s had consolidated Northampton’s civic identity and brought apparently enduring stability. Even though the population had grown to over 100,000 by the 1950s, the town retained an atmosphere of ‘belonging to the country’, ‘sufficiently limited for everyone in each of the small industrial suburbs to know one another – perhaps 15,000 families in all, divided into five or six areas’.73 Northampton was ‘unquestionably urban’ but agriculture remained a visible presence in local economic life, ‘probably more so than almost any other town of comparable size in England’.74 Over forty percent of the borough’s 6,200 acres was taken up by ‘historic park and woodland’, ‘public open spaces’, ‘allotments and genuine agricultural countryside’, one of the highest percentages for a town of its size in Britain.75 Animals still grazed within the borough boundaries and the town’s weekly cattle market was ‘one of the largest and most popular’ in the Midlands.76 New Town redevelopment radically changed this character. Indeed, the demolition of so many well-known Victorian and Edwardian buildings in the town centre led to analogies with the war, when Northampton had received very little bomb damage: it had escaped ‘the worst ravages’ of the Second World War, only to experience its own ‘Luftwaffe, in the shape of various town planners’.77 A well-known local journalist described the town’ centre’s redevelopment as a ‘latter-day . . . holocaust’, and called the changes which took place ‘more fundamental than any of the 1880–1930 period’, as ‘whole districts’ were ‘swept away along with all the associations and community spirit that went with them’.78 Jeremy Seabrook, reflecting in the 1980s on the immense changes to the town in which he grew up, observed how he felt very differently towards it and no longer had the ‘sense of belonging’ which he had once felt ‘so strongly’; ‘the obliteration of that older red-brick, parochial town’ was ‘the disappearance of the essence of Northampton’.79 Stories of unsympathetic planning, lack of local consultation and charges of declining ‘community life and democracy’ were familiar in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.80 In Northampton by the new millennium it was officially acknowledged that much of the town’s architectural heritage had been unnecessarily destroyed. Unsightly new buildings included the Grosvenor shopping centre and bus station, which became for many an iconic symbol of how the town had changed.81 Even the leader of Northamptonshire County Council was lamenting by 2004 that it ‘was the beginning of Northampton’s problems’.82 The local newspaper concurred: Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 163 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 ‘Finally, a leading politician has dared to say what a lot of Chron readers’ had been thinking and writing about, as successive town planners ‘presided over the rape of the town centre which saw fine Victorian and older buildings torn down and replaced by concrete monstrosities’.83 Les’s own distress at how Northampton was changing was accentuated by the demolition of both his parents’ house and that in which his grandparents had formerly lived, in Spring Gardens, close to the town centre. This had been rented by the Tebbutts since at least the early 1860s, and his father’s elderly sister, Retta, was still living there when it was compulsorily purchased. She found her forced move so painful that she threw away all her old photograph albums, some of which went back to the Victorian period.84 Her sense of dislocation was echoed by a poignant cutting from the Chronicle and Echo, which Les had also tucked away. This was an interview with one of her neighbours, a woman of eighty-two who insisted that she would ‘rather die’ than leave the street where she was born and had always lived. ‘I feel as if I belong at the Gardens now’, said widow Mrs Robinson. ‘In fact I wish death would come to me before I am due to leave here – that is how strongly I feel.’85 A powerful sense of loss attended the many housing clearances in the 1970s, which often took a heavy toll of working-class families.86 Although Les himself was not forced to move away to another district, the changes which took place in his old neighbourhood did produce a similar sense of displacement. His district may have lacked the poverty and bold character of many working-class neighbourhoods in northern England, but it nevertheless shared the same features of a ‘very small world’ in which ‘every line and movement’ were familiar.87 How small and self-enclosed it could be is suggested by Les’s recollection of being surprised to find, when in his teens he started to venture beyond his home streets, that other families in the town shared the same surname. The sense of place was grounded in the particularities of family, life cycle and neighbourhood, but also shaped by the broader collective narratives of town and civic life described earlier. His family mementos, comforting tokens of belonging from a period shaped in part by rising working-class living standards, testified to regret at what had disappeared,. This is not to underestimate the tensions and disagreements of family and neighbourhood life in districts such as these, where living cheek by jowl inevitably gave rise to stresses, strains and petty jealousies.88 Family identities were themselves continually negotiated, fractured internally by small social disparities, as between the ‘reserved’ Tebbutts and ‘boisterous’ Billinghams, between aunts and uncles ‘by birth’ and those by marriage, and by the need to maintain discretion about certain kinds of close family business with more distant family members. Families such as these were aware of their status in relation to others, understood the street’s unspoken rules and the small signs of difference between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. They were attuned to the importance of maintaining respectability and putting on a good show, yet also of not appearing too ‘posh’ and 164 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 stand-offish, as was discussed in letters when Lou’s fiancée went to stay with the family for the first time. The reciprocity of street life was mirrored within the family itself, where there was a strong expectation that unmarried children should continue to contribute to the family finances. Les still paid his share after he joined up, and a continuing theme in several letters to him was the request that he put in for a dependent’s allowance.89 This is a story of the shaping effects of class-based attitudes and behaviours upon an imagined landscape of family and place.90 For Les, like others of his generation and background, the pace of urban change from the 1970s accentuated a sense of lost place. Nationally between 1955 and 1975 1.3 million houses were demolished and working-class autobiographies recalling this period often voice the distress which attended such demolition, even among those who had moved away from their former districts.91 Places shape personal identities, histories and narratives in important ways, as may be discerned in many autobiographical accounts from north-west England in the 1970s and 1980s, whose attempts to recreate the vanished landscapes of childhood and youth are marked by detailed portrayals of street life.92 ‘Thick’ descriptions of the ‘mundane and ordinary’ and the topographical elements which characterize many such memoirs, more complex than nostalgia, are suggestive of the broader changes which transformed late twentieth-century Britain. Les’s own personal history challenges views that working-class attitudes and patterns changed significantly in the post-war years as a result of growing affluence and rising living standards, for the close family and neighbourly relationships evident in the letters remained strong, even after he moved to a different part of the town in the 1950s. His individual story supports larger-scale research on small towns in the Black Country, which has also argued that traditional working-class attitudes and behaviours changed more slowly across the 1950s and 1960s than is often argued.93 Les would not have used the term ‘community’ to describe the neighbourhood in which he grew up, but he was very proud of the fact that he was both working-class and a Northamptonian. His sense of class embraced strong feelings of individualism as well as a more collective sense of identity with family, neighbours and locality. His insistence that he was above all else ‘an individual’ was also expressed in a strong dislike for mass production. This led him to remain a fitter-welder in a small engineering firm in Northampton rather than taking up a better-paid assembly-line job in Coventry, an important indication of the part which work also had in making him what he was. Indeed, this occupational identity infused the very tactile qualities of much of what he saved, a non-textual, material narrative similar to that noted of workers in some trades and industries, who often invested emotion in the objects and machinery with which they worked.94 A liking for familiarity and habit and dislike of change remained enduring aspects of Les’s personality, his view of the world infused by pre-war experiences and traditions which continued to shape his sense of place and imaginative sense of belonging. The ‘essence’ of personal existence Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 165 Melanie Tebbutt teaches in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her most recent book, which draws in part on the diaries mentioned in this article, is Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years (Manchester University Press, 2012). She is currently working on research for a book provisionally entitled Writing, Asking, Advising: Teens, Young Adults and Personal Advice Columns, 1920s–1970s. NOTES AND REFERENCES I am grateful to Penny Summerfield and John Walton for their comments and encouragement in the writing of this piece. 1 John R. Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values, Cambridge, MA, 1996, p. xvi. 2 Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self, Edinburgh, 2002, p. 3. 3 See, for example, Germaine Greer, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, London, 1989; Blake Morrison, And When Did You Last See Your Father, London, 1998; Margaret Forster, Hidden Lives: a Family Memoir, London and New York, 1995; Linda Grant, Remind Me Who I Am, Again, London, 1999; Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead: a Family Memoir, London, 1999; Frank Mort, ‘Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies 38, July 1999; Hilda Kean, London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories, London, 2004. 4 See, for example Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War, Manchester, 1998, p. 253; The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Kuchler, Oxford, 1999; Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, ed. David C. Rubin, New York, 1995; Bruce M. Ross, Remembering the Personal Past: Descriptions of Autobiographical Memory, Oxford, 1991; Marius Kwint, ‘Introduction: the Physical Past’, in Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Materializing Culture), ed. Jeremy Aynsley, Christopher Breward, Marius Kwint, Oxford, 1999, p. 1; David Hey, The Oxford Guide to Family History, Oxford, 1998, pp. 1–2. 5 Gillis, A World, p. xviii; Brian Elliott, ‘Biography, Family History and the Analysis of Social Change’, in Time, Family and Community: Perspectives on Family and Community History, ed. Michael Drake, Oxford, 1994, p. 51; Family Stories and the Life Course: Across Time and Generations, ed. Michael W. Pratt and Barbara H. Fiese, Mahwah and London, 2004, p. 4; Popular Memory Group, ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method’, in The Oral Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 is said to be captured ‘in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime’.95 Les’s preservation of the small signs of his family’s material past sought, perhaps, to capture the flitting qualities of the everyday and reinforce their meanings, as much of the physical fabric of the old Northampton with which he had grown up was being demolished.96 His archiving was tangible evidence of the adjustments he found so difficult, the ‘contradiction at the heart of everydayness’, that ‘everything changes’.97 His desire to connect the past with the present suggests how memories of places and families are shaped not only through talk and writing but also, memorably, through things, for the everyday material culture which comprised a significant part of what he saved tells its own non-verbal tale of how he negotiated family memories, feelings and a powerful sense of place. 166 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, London, 1998, p. 77; Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960, London, 1998, p. 186. 6 Pratt and Fiese, Family Stories, pp. 8, 15; Gillis, A World, p. xviii. For the part that oral tradition, passed on by his mother, played in Jeremy Seabrook’s Northamptonshire family see The Unprivileged: a Hundred Years of Family Life and Tradition in a Working-Class Street, London (1967), 1973; and ‘The Bushfires of Affluence’, New Internationalist, June 2005. See also Seabrook, Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives, Oxford, 2004. 7 Summerfield, Reconstructing, p. x; Anna Davin, ‘Flight to the Centre: Winnie Gonley, 1930s Colonial Cosmopolitan’, Journal of World Systems Research 6: 2, 2000; Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing Autobiography and History 1980–1990, London, 1992, p. 24; Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: a Story of Two Women, London, 1986, pp. 30–1. 8 For death, bereavement and the ‘mnemonic potency’ of ‘materialized memories’, see Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, Oxford, 2001. 9 Much has been written on post-war urban redevelopment and expansion. See for example: Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns, Manchester, 1998; Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964, ed. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters, London and New York, 1999; John Robert Gold, The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban Transformation, 1954–1972, London, 2007; Peter Hall, Great Planning Disasters, London, 1982; Peter Merriman, Driving Spaces: a Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1, 2007; Joe Moran, On Roads, London, 2009; Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: the History of a Social Experiment, London: 2001. See also n. 77. 10 Robert Colls, ‘When we Lived in Communities: Working Class Culture and its Critics’, in Cities of Ideas, Governance and Citizenship in Urban Britain, 1800–2000, ed. Robert Colls and Richard Rodger, Aldershot, 2005, p. 24. 11 My thanks to Hilda Kean for sharing her unpublished paper, ‘London Stories’, which was subsequently published as Hilda Kean, London Stories: Personal Lives, Public Histories, London, 2004. 12 Deborah Lupton, The Emotional Self, London, 1989, pp. 144, 148, cited in Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory, pp. 42–3. For memory and material culture, see Hilda Kean, ‘East End Stories: the Chairs and the Photographs’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 6: 2, 2000, p. 126. Also Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, vol. 1, London, 1996. 13 Payment cards, Wm. H. Russell and Son, Leicester’s Music Centre, 99 Granby Street Leicester; Mark Pegg, Broadcasting and Society, 1918–1939, London, 1983, p. 47. 14 For an extended examination of the diaries, see Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Working-Class Masculinities and Leisure in the Inter-War Years, Manchester, 2012. 15 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographs as Object of Memory’, in Material Memories, ed. Aynsley, Breward, Kwint, p. 221. 16 Les’s diary, 29 Aug. 1937. 17 Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory; Carol Mavor, ‘Collecting Loss’, Cultural Studies 11: 1, 1997, p. 119. 18 Ron Greenall, A History of Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough, Chichester, 1979. 19 Hugh Barty-King, Expanding Northampton, London, 1985, pp. 10–11. 20 John Stephen Adams, ‘The Politics and Administration of Financial Support for the Elderly, with Special Reference to Northamptonshire, 1900–1948’, University of Leicester MA Dissertation, 2002, p. 11. 21 Marks Northampton Directory, 1929; 1931 Census. The population was 51,881 in 1881 and 87,021 in 1901. 22 Barty-King, Expanding Northampton, pp. 15–16; Cynthia Brown, Northampton, 1935–1985: Shoe Town, New Town, Chichester, 1990, p. 144. 23 Northampton Official Handbook, 1936. 24 Census Report, 1931. 25 Marie Dickie, ‘Town Patriotism and the Rise of Labour: Northampton 1918–1939’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, 1987, p. 57. 26 Dickie, ‘Town Patriotism’, p. 157. Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 167 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 27 Brown, Northampton, 1835–1985, p. 138. 28 Brown, Northampton, 1835–1985, p. 123. 29 Dickie, ‘Town Patriotism’, p. 49. 30 Interview with Gwen Jones (née Tebbutt) 5 Jan. 1993. In my own archive of family records. 31 Interview with Gwen Jones. 32 Letter, Frank to Les, 14 Dec. 1941. 33 Letter, Mother to Les, 5 Dec. 1942. 34 Letter, Mother to Les, (undated) January 1943. 35 Working-class mothers were frequently criticized by the middle class for spoiling their children, particularly boys. Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914, London, 1996, p. 130. 36 Letter, Lou to Les, 23 Jan. 1946. 37 Letter, Mother to Les, (undated) 1943. 38 Interview with Gwen Jones. 39 Elliott, ‘Biography, Family History’, p. 4. 40 Michael Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal 59, 2005, p. 63. See also, Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War, Manchester, 2009. 41 Letter, Mother to Les, 5 Dec. 1942. 42 Letter, Mother to Les, 12 Dec. 1942. 43 Letter, Mother to Les, 17 Dec. 1942. 44 Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918, Oxford, 1993, p. 30; Letter, Mother to Les, January 1943. 45 Letter, Mother to Les, 5 Feb. 1943. 46 Letter, Mother to Les, 6 Feb. 1943. 47 Letter, Lou to Les, 9 Jan. 1946. 48 Letter, Mother to Les, 12 Dec. 1942. 49 Letter, Mother to Les, 5 Dec. 1942. 50 Letter, Mother to Les, 9 Dec. 1942. 51 Letter, Mother to Les, 12 Dec. 1942. 52 Letter, Mother to Les, (undated) December 1942. 53 Letter to Les, 15 March 1943. 54 Letter, Mother to Les, 5 Dec. 1942. 55 Letter, Mother to Les, 9 Dec. 1942. There was a family joke that Finis had been so named because he was supposed to have been the final child, although he did, in fact, have a younger brother and sister. 56 Letter, Mother to Les, 5 Dec. 1942. 57 Letter, Mother to Les, 12 Dec. 1942. 58 Letter, Lou to Les, 18 Jan. 1946. 59 Letter, Lou to Les, 15 Feb. 1946. 60 As previous note. 61 Letter, Lou to Les, 14 May 1946. 62 Steedman, Landscape, pp. 11–12. 63 Letter, Lou to Les, 9 Jan. 1946. 64 Letter, Lou to Les, 28 Jan. 1946. 65 Letter, Lou to Les, 18 June 1946. 66 Letter, Lou to Les, 23 Jan. 1946. 67 As previous note. 68 Letter, Lou to Les, 28 Jan. 1946. 69 Letter, Lou to Les, 15 Feb. 1946. 70 For post-war concerns about the decline of the ‘traditional’ working-class community, see, for example, Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old People: an Inquiry in East London, London, 1957; Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb, London, 1960; Peter Willmott, The Evolution of a Community: a Study of Dagenham after Forty Years, London, 1963; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, London, 1963. 71 Brown, Northampton, p. 195; Chronicle and Echo, 4 Aug. 1993; Guardian, 25 Sept. 1974, quoted in Introduction to Northamptonshire Life, 1914–39: a Photographic Survey, compiled and ed. Ronald Leslie Greenall, Northampton, 1979. 168 History Workshop Journal Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 72 http://www.englishpartnerships.co.uk/newtowns.htm. Nine other New Towns were designated: Skelmersdale (1961), Redditch (1964), Washington (1964), Runcorn (1964), Peterborough (1967), Telford (1968), Warrington (1968), and the new ‘city’, Milton Keynes (1967); Brown, Northampton, pp. 182, 206. In 1951, Northampton’s population was 104,000, in 1971, 133,000, and in 2004, over 200,000. 73 Seabrook, ‘Bushfires of Affluence’. 74 S. Gordon Joseph, ‘Northampton: the Town Country Relationship’, Official Architecture and Planning 21: 3, March 1958, p. 113. 75 Joseph, ‘Northampton’, pp. 113, 117–18. 76 Joseph, ‘Northampton’, p. 116. Seabrook viewed this rural-urban juxtaposition rather differently. For him, being able to see ‘through the red-brick funnel of the streets, the hills and meadows that enclosed it’ made the courts, squares and alleys feel even more enclosed and claustrophobic: Seabrook, ‘Bushfires of Affluence’. 77 Chronicle and Echo, 4 Feb. 2004; 12 Feb. 2004. 78 Lou Warwick and Alan Burman, Northampton in Old Picture Postcards, Zaltbommel, Netherlands, 1989, Postcard no. 140. 79 Jeremy Seabrook, ‘Lamenting the Lost Essence’, Chronicle and Echo, 15 May 1984, p. 19. Seabrook was born in 1939. His analysis of the decline of provincial towns like Northampton contrasts with the account of BBC radio presenter Andrew Collins (born 1965), whose unreflective evocation of a ‘happy childhood’ and ‘idyllic provincial upbringing’ in the Northampton suburbs during the 1970s struck a nostalgic chord with many of his generation (www.wherediditallgoright.com/index2.html, accessed March 2006). Seabrook’s lament differs too from the youthful observations of Ray Gosling, also born in 1939. Gosling insisted in his autobiography, written when he was twenty-one, that he felt ‘no sense of belonging’, and had ‘no sense of being an old Northamptonian. I was born here, and brought up to some extent here, but that is all’: R. Gosling, Sum Total (London, 1962), Hebden Bridge, 2004, p. 13. 80 Graham P. Martin, ‘Narratives Great and Small: Neighbourhood Change, Place and Identity in Notting Hill’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29: 1, 2005, p. 1; Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron, Michael Young, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, London, 2006, pp. 19, 116; William J. V. Neill, Urban Planning and Cultural Identity, London, 2004; Peter Neal, Urban Villages and the Making of Communities, London, 2003; Peter J. Larkham, Conservation and the City, London, 1996. 81 www.northamptontoday.co.uk, 8 Dec. 2005, 10 Jan. 2006. In 2005 Northampton Bus Station was voted one of the UK’s three worst architectural eyesores on Channel 4’s programme ‘Demolition’. 82 Chronicle and Echo, 4 Feb. 2004; 15 May 1984. For New Town developments in the 1960s and 1970s see Meryl Aldridge, ‘The Wasted Potential of the New Towns’, Town City Plan 47: 203, 1979, pp. 67–71; Stephen Potter, Ray Thomas, The New Town Experience, Milton Keynes, 1986; Frank Schaffer, The New Town Story, London, 1972; Peter Self, New Towns: the British Experience, London, 1972; Colin Ward, New Town, Home Town: the Lessons of Experience, London, 1993. 83 Chronicle and Echo, 4 Feb. 2004. The winding up of Northampton Development Corporation in 1985 was accompanied by a specially commissioned work published by Secker and Warburg. According to Graham Martin (‘Narratives Great and Small’, 2005, p. 1), Hugh Barty-King in Expanding Northampton (1985) illustrates how ‘developers and other dominant groups’ rewrite ‘the symbolism of places’ at the expense of ‘subordinate populations whose neighbourhoods’ are ‘symbolically and materially overhauled’. 84 Similar responses by elderly people to clearances can be found elsewhere. When the Cheadle district in which Dora Perry grew up was cleared in the 1970s, memories came ‘flooding back’ as she watched the demolition workers: ‘I felt as though my life had all been swept away and all that I had left was a vast blot of emptyness’. Dora (née Perry) Steel, in Cheadle Remembered, compiled by Heather Clarke, Manchester, 1983, p. 41. See also Oral History 28: 2, autumn 2000, ‘Memory and Place’. 85 Undated Chronicle and Echo clipping. 86 Talja Blokland, ‘Bricks, Mortar, Memories: Neighbourhood and Networks in Collective Acts of Remembering’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25: 2, 2001, p. 270; Dench, Gavron, Young, New East End, p. 116. 87 Colls, ‘When we Lived in Communities’, p. 2. 88 Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity, London and New York, 1994. Imagined Families and Vanished Communities 169 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/73/1/144/654025 by KIM Hohenheim user on 24 April 2022 89 ‘Thank you very much duck for allowing me the 7/- shillings a week it is very good of you & you are a good boy and I appreciate it very much but I will reward you one day for being good to me.’ Letters, 5, 9, 12, 30 December 1942; January 1943. 90 Gavin J. Andrews, Robin A. Kearns, Pia Kontos, Viv Wilson, ‘ ‘‘Their Finest Hour’’: Older People, Oral Histories and the Historical Geography of Social Life’, Social and Cultural Geography 7: 2, April 2006, p. 154. 91 Chris Waters, ‘Representations of Everyday Life: L. S. Lowry and the Landscape of Memory in Postwar Britain’, Representations 65, 1999, pp. 131, 135. See also Waters, ‘Autobiography, Nostalgia, and the Practices of Working-Class Selfhood’, in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Society in Modern Britain, ed. George Behlmer and Fred Leventhal, Stanford, 2000. 92 There are many examples in the extensive publishing list of the local history publisher, Neil Richardson. 93 Rosalind Watkiss Singleton, ‘Old Habits Persist: Change and Continuity in Black Country Communities, Pensnett, Sedgley and Tipton, 1945–c.1970’, University of Wolverhampton PhD thesis, 2011. 94 Peter Pagnamenta, Richard James Overy, All Our Working Lives, London, 1984, p. 43. 95 James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: the Archaeology of Early American Life, New York, 1974, p. 161. 96 See, for example, Juliet Ash, ‘Memory and Objects’, in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham, Manchester, 1996; Judy Attfield, Wild Things: the Material Culture of Everyday Life, Oxford, 2000. 97 Henri Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, in Yale French Studies 73, 1987, pp. 7–11.