Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 4-19-2017 12:00 AM The Ruin of the Past: Deindustrialization, Working-Class Communities, and Football in the Midlands, UK 1945-1990 Neil Stanley, The University of Western Ontario Supervisor: Don Morrow, The University of Western Ontario A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Kinesiology © Neil Stanley 2017 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.ca/etd Part of the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Stanley, Neil, "The Ruin of the Past: Deindustrialization, Working-Class Communities, and Football in the Midlands, UK 1945-1990" (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository.ca/etd/4512 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact wlswadmin@uwo.
i Abstract and Keywords As a social history of deindustrialization in the Midlands (U.), this study explores how loss informed working-class conceptions of identity, culture, and community. By shutter- ing factories, disrupting social networks, defamiliarizing the landscape, and relegating thousands to the unemployment lines, deindustrialization marooned the Midlands work- ing class in a world they struggled to recognize. Using oral histories to interrogate the ways loss informed everyday life, this study examines how the meanings attached to football transformed the sport into a metonym for the past. The dynamics and values specific to working-class communities are analyzed through the lens of four key working class relationships.
Composing the fabric of reality, by dissecting relationships to the body, employment, sociality, and the everyday, this study illustrates how work organized and influenced life. Acting as a before picture to the trauma of deindustrialization, this study emphasizes football’s ubiquity in the lives of the Midlands’ working class. Dedicat- ing attention to absence, automation, mergers/liquidations, and redundancies, this dis- sertation is also devoted to detailing deindustrialization’s destruction of the working- class community, leaving a landscape defined by absence, memories of football entan- gled with private histories of loss. The departed family members, workplaces, shops, and even smells continued to live on, as deindustrialization transformed football into a trace of the rich Midlands’ industrial heritage.
Keywords: Deindustrialization;The History of Football in the Midlands; English Working Class History; Loss; Oral History; Community; Cultural Meaning of Sport, Wolverhamp- ton; Coventry; Walsall; Birmingham; West Bromwich ii Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my advisor Don Morrow for his unwavering support and belief in me. When I arranged a meeting with Don five years ago to see if he would be interested in supervising my Master’s cognate, it was the start of a relationship with someone who was always engaged and willing to help. I am also grateful to Michael Heine, Kevin Wamsley, Janice Forsyth, Jonathan Vance, and Alan McDougall for serving on my ex- amining committees. In England, I would like to thank all the archivists who aided my research, but in particular Carolyn Ewing of Coventry who helped guide me through the vast reserves of the Herbert Art Gallery’s oral histories.
To my Mom, Dad and Macken- zie, you’ve ceaselessly championed me and encouraged my creativity since I came into this world. Each of you inspire me everyday with your kindness and love of knowledge. To my friends Phil, Corey, Dan, Pat, Mat, Alex, Ruby and Sasha thank you for travelling through life with me. Your love and friendship provided a warm respite from days spent indoors hunched over books and screens.
Lastly, I want to thank my beautiful girlfriend Pilar Magoulas who sacrificed hours of leisure to sit by my side and keep me company. Without you the world becomes unimaginable. iii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Andrew Lomax Strathdee. Table of Contents Abstract and Keywords…………………………………………………………………….i Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………ii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………….iii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1 Definitions, Contextualizations, and Frameworks………………………………….12 Chapter 1: Incoming Storm: The Dynamics and Relationships of Working-Class Communities Before Deindustrialization…………………………………………44 Working-Class Relationships to the Body……………………………………………48 Working-Class Relationships to Work……………………………………………….66 Working-Class Intersections with Social Environment…………………………….81 Working-Class Relationships to the Everyday…………………………………….104 Summary………………………………………………………………………………129 Chapter 2: Living With Absence: Landscapes of Loss and Memory…………….132 The Persisting Wound: Landscape after Deindustrialization…………………….133 Contesting Absences: Histories of Loss in the Midlands…………………………145 Summary……………………………………………………………………………….157 Chapter 3: Deindustrialization, automation, and the changing experience of work Inscriptions of Loss: Technology of its discontents……………………………….158 The Meaning of Labour: Automation and Identity…………………………………160 The Queen’s Naked Army Marches on: Empire, Arrogance, and the Economy 171 Summary……………………………………………………………………………….180 Chapter 4: A Loss of Intimacy: The experience of Industrial mergers and liquidations…………………………………………………………………………182 Constellations of Factories: Football and the Intimacy of Industry…………….183 Losing Place: The Defamiliarized community…………………………………….201 Chapter 5: Redundancy as Loss: The End of Mass Industrial Employment….203 The Shape of Redundancy: Differing Responses to workplace change…….228 Chapter 6: Industrial Palimpsest: Football, the Past and the Midlands Working- Class…………………………………………………………………………………231 The Living Lost: Football’s role in preserving the past………………………….233 Loss and its continued memory: Football, time, and change………………….271 Recommendations for Future Research………………………………………….276 Appendix~ Map of the West Midlands…………………………………………………279 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….304 1 Introduction Loss and its continued memory shape human life.
A form of disorientation, loss separates individuals from what is familiar and places them in a state of uncertainty. Responses to loss, whether hidden or forthright inform the stories we tell about the world. History, as a concept, is a progression of loss and ruins, a series of lives ma- rooned in an impenetrable, fading past. In his poem “Die Verganglichkeit” Swiss- Ger- man writer Johann Peter Hebel approaches loss and our understanding of its inevitabili- ty through a frank exchange between a father and son as they make their way home by oxcart in the dark of night.
Do you see how the sky is splendid with bright stars? Each star is as it might be a village, and farther up perhaps there is a fine town, you can’t see it from here, and if you live decent you will go to one of those stars and you’ll be happy there, and you’ll find your father there, if it is God’s will, and poor Bessie, your mother. Perhaps you’ll drive up the Milky Way into that hidden town, and if you look down to one side, what’ll you see— Roetteln Castle! The Belchen will be charred and the Blauen, too, like two old towers, and between the two everything will be burnt out, right into the ground. There won’t be any water in the Wiese, everything will be bare and black and deathly quiet, as far as you can see; you’ll see that and say to your mate that’s with you: “Look, that’s where the earth was, and that mountain was called the Blechen. And not far away was Wieslet; I used to live there and harness my oxen, cart wood to Basel and plough, and drain meadows and make splints for torches, and potter about until my death, and I wouldn’t like to go back now.G Sebald, A Place in the Country.
(New York: Random House, 2014), 2 Perched high above the earth and reflecting upon the impossibility of return, the memo- ry of Hebel’s narrator restores his world from a geography of oblivion, long after he has died. Not unlike an historian drawing conclusions from the physical remnants of the past, this passage conveys how the concept of loss leaves indelible, but often invisible marks upon identity, physical geography, memory and the writing of history. Like the blackened wreckage of Hebel’s Basel, the post-World War II communities and cultures of England’s industrial working class exist now, only in ruin and memories of loss. Dis- placed physically by the bulldozers and wrecking balls of urban regeneration and slum clearances, working-class communities were also dispossessed of their basic social fabric by deindustrialization.
Provoked directly by the sterling crisis of 1966 and the sub- sequent implementation of a deflationary budget by the Labour government, the dis- mantling of England’s industrial workforce profoundly fragmented the country’s social and psychological landscapes. Addressing the extent to which deindustrialization chal- lenged working-class identities and self-image Simon J. Charlesworth stated: Deindustrialization has, clearly, had the effect of wrapping many in a powerful sense of entrapment, as low wages, the cheapening of the qualifications they might reasonably aspire to obtain, and the shortening length of time that they hold jobs, have given them a sense of inescapable destiny, of being individuals collectively overwhelmed by historical change.2 Estranged from their own time by the shattering of social continuity, members of dis- placed working-class communities attempted to reconstruct the past by continuing to enact the customs and cultures of their lost worlds. Of these rituals imbued with loss, 2 Simon J.
Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71. 3 attending a football match was one of the most visible ways dissolving working class communities could temporarily restore a sense of the past. Like Hebel’s castle, football teams were ruins of a world existing and adapting to the present. Carrying with them vast histories of loss, they were perhaps one of the few functioning traces of a once vivid world.
Coexisting with the present through memory (or the lack thereof), traditions and archival preservation, loss and its relationship to historical time is perhaps best articu- lated by the French medievalist Philippe Aries in his book Le Temps de L’Histoire. Ex- panding upon the concept that “History” (the total aggregate of past human experience) encompasses both tradition and the practice of history, Aries perceives “History” as “an interplay between two ways of understanding historical time; one as it flows through liv- ing tradition, the other as it punctuates historical reconstruction.”3 For Aries the time of tradition is distinctly existential. It embodies lived experience as it emerges out of the past and confirms our sense of continuity. The time of history is hermeneutical; it decon- structs the meaning of the past by dividing it into distinct eras, enabling us to interpret the differences between the present and the past.4 If we are to approach historical time as an interplay between the past and the present, loss allows us to understand how fragmentation, ruptures in continuity and dispossession imbue tradition, culture and lan- guage with a distinct symbolic property; the embodiment of the past in the present.
While loss has always informed the time of tradition and lived experience, historians 3 Patrick H. Hutton, Philippe Aries and the Politics of French Cultural History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 15 4 Ibid 4 such as Peter Fritzsche assert that loss, melancholy and nostalgia have only recently become a defining characteristic of historical consciousness. In his book Stranded in the Present, Fritzsche argues that the French Revolution and its fragmentation of social continuity permanently changed the ways individuals interpreted the past. Fritzsche proposes that the trauma of displacement, mass arrest, execution and occupation trans- formed the past into a source of melancholy.5 Drawing examples from the writings of Chateaubriand, Francois Buzot, Dorothea Schlegel, and the poetry, memoirs and letters of individuals experiencing the aftershock of revolution firsthand, an image of an irre- trievable past emerges.
Exiled from their homelands or cut off from their old ways of life, late 18th century Europeans became “stranded in the past.” While the majority of Fritzsche’s writing emphasizes the melancholic relationship individuals were developing with the past, it would be incorrect to characterize his interpretation as exclusively nega- tive.6 Through the processes of exile and the attempt to create a society unburdened by the customs and laws of the past, Fritzsche argues that Europeans began to develop a contemporary historical consciousness. By actively participating in this redrawing of the social fabric, individuals were coming into closer contact with their contemporaries and were contextualizing their own lives within a larger social narrative. This increased awareness of other people’s lives and the similarities or differences to their own, gave the ‘present” new historical dimensions. Paired with a pronounced longing for a past which they could not return, historical time (as Aries has conceptualized it) became 5 Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present : Modern time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass.
; London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 33.