Alun Howkins

Structural conflict and the Farmworker: Norfolk, 1900–1920

In Britain the farm labourer has presented a severe organisational problem to the trade union organiser and the socialist agitator: a phenomenon which has been explained, conventionally, by different versions of the ‘idiocy of rural life” theory. A general orthodoxy has emerged to the effect that the farmworker is acquiescent in his bondage. In the following article this orthodoxy is questioned. It is shown that in Norfolk, between 1900 and 1920, there was a certain kind of conflict on the farm which went on beneath the apparently calm and ordered relationships of what has been categorised as a paternal and deferential society. Behind the show of deference lay a world in which conflict was potentially endemic: conflict which derived from the simple fact, clouded by much modern sociology, that the relationship between master and man was one of exploitation. Those tensions which exist in any work relationship were present and manifested themselves in struggle: over, for example, wages, hours and job definit...

Adaptable and Sustainable? Male Farm Service and the Agricultural Labour Force in Midland and Southern England, C.1850-1925

This article argues that farm service was an adaptable and sustainable system of hiring labour in areas of midland and southern England after 1850, having much in common with the model recently identified for northern England and Scotland. Analysing the Census Enumerators Books from selected parishes in seven counties in 1851, 1871, and 1891, we reveal an intricate pattern of farm service ‘survival’ both within and between counties. We then use a range of reports printed between the 1860s and 1920s to examine the national picture. The later regional persistence of farm service has implications for broader debates on the rural workforce and social relations.

A Country at War: Mass-Observation and Rural England, 1939–45.

The history of the rural areas during the Second World War is virtually unstudied. There is some work on agriculture and agricultural policies, but the extent to which these rely on K.A.H.Murrays ‘official’ history, published in 1955, is testimony both to the quality of Murrays work and the general paucity of more recent published research. Moving away from the directly official, or economic history, we move into the field of memoir and reminiscence. Good as many of these are, they obviously seldom make any attempt at sustained analysis. Crucially, the rural areas have been left out of accounts of the social history of the war, such as Angus Calders magisterial studyThe Peoples War, first published in 1971.

Raphael Samuel, 1934–96

Raphael Samuel, who died tragically of cancer at the end of last year, was one of the outstanding social historians of post-war Britain. A founding figure of the History Workshop movement as a tutor at Ruskin College, he went on with others from that movement to found the History Workshop Journal in 1976. He was also series editor, as well as an editor and author, for the 30 or so books published in the History Workshop Series between 1975 and 1991.