Brad Beaven

Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850?1945

Working-class culture has often been depicted by historians as a fragmented entity lacking any significant cultural contestation. This title challenges such assumptions, examining gender, class and cultural issues in Britain between 1850 and 1945.

Creating the Exemplary Citizen: The Changing Notion of Citizenship in Britain 1870–1939

Recent historiography on the development of citizenship in Britain has drawn attention to the changing nature of citizenship discourse, shifting from active to passive forms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be argued here that this binary notion of passive or active citizenship tends to underestimate the subtle changes that the concept underwent between 1870 and 1939. Indeed, we argue that citizenship was an amorphous concept that was shaped by the cultural imperatives of the day. Thus the real value in examining the dissemination of citizenship between 1870 and 1939 is that it provides an insight into the hopes and anxieties of the authorities at both a local and national level during a period that underwent considerable social and cultural upheaval.

The provincial press, civic ceremony and the citizen-soldier during the Boer War, 1899-1902: a study of local patriotism

The paper will investigate the growing importance in the late nineteenth century of civic identity in helping nurture a sense of ‘local patriotism’ during an imperial crisis. In doing so it will challenge recent studies that suggest working-class patriotism was a ‘top-down phenomenon’ or simply a devotion to nationhood and empire cultivated by state institutions and imperialist mass commercial leisure. This study will adopt a more nuanced approach and argue that working-class patriotism characteristically prioritised local identity over the national. In contrasting three English communities during the Boer War, it will be argued that, by the end of the nineteenth century, changes in the local press, the development of civic identity and a growth of a popular local patriotism became fused, at key moments, with grand imperial adventures. Viewed within this context, the great desire to celebrate the volunteers was not so much an example of successful state hegemony but more an amplification of local patriotism within an imperial setting.

The resilience of sailortown culture in English naval ports, c.1820-1900

Sailortowns were districts in ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. However, while historians have made significant strides in exploring sailors in merchant ports, naval sailortowns have largely been overlooked. It will be argued here that in the English naval towns of Portsmouth and Plymouth, sailortown exhibited a sense of ‘Otherness’ and a subaltern resilience to the cultural hegemony of civic progress and modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Those living in naval sailortowns were geographically and culturally marginalised from the centres of economic and political power and their relationship with the civic and naval authorities was one which varied between compromise and resistance.

Challenges to civic governance in post-war England: the Peace Day disturbances of 1919

This article analyses the problems encountered by municipal authorities in containing social unrest in the aftermath of World War I. Focusing on the Peace Day disturbances of 1919, the article examines how the civic elite failed to respond to the challenges of the post-war period and instead reverted to a Victorian model of governance that emphasized civic ritual and deference. It will explore how the towns that experienced the most severe disturbances were governed by elites who were unable to appreciate the significance of changing demographics, new political landscapes and the popular dissatisfaction with municipal traditions that the war had ushered in.

The City and Imperial Propaganda A Comparative Study of Empire Day in England, Australia, and New Zealand c. 1903–1914

This article explores how the meaning of Empire Day in the British World was manipulated and transformed through a range of urban institutions before reaching the public at large. Selecting cities in England and the Antipodean colonies for comparison, we shall challenge the assumption that a hegemonic imperial ideology was streamed uncontested and unaltered to urban populations. Indeed, it is argued here that because of significant differences in urban development in Britain and colonial towns, the meaning of the imperial message was variable. In the British context imperial meaning was directed to cure perceived local crises while, alternatively, within a colonial setting imperial propaganda came secondary to national priorities. The conclusion is that, in the case of Empire Day, the urban setting is decisive to understanding how imperial propaganda was transformed to meet the needs of local or national environments. Key differences in the way civic culture and the provincial press evolved in Britain and her colonies ensured that Lord Meath’s desire that Empire Day would nurture a unifying and homogenous imperial identity proved an elusive aspiration.

London's Sailortown 1600–1800: A social history of Shadwell and Ratcliff, an early modern London riverside suburb

Sailortowns were the districts of merchant and naval ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained. It was a distinct area characterized by its public houses, brothels and low enter...