Emma Robertson

Harmonious relations? Music at work in the Rowntree and Cadbury factories

The history of music in the workplace is a neglected area of study. This article explores the policies towards music in the paternalist Rowntree and Cadbury confectionery factories from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. We argue that the two firms were pioneering in their early use of music before becoming key players in the industrial welfare movement following the First World War. The broadcasting of music by Rowntree and Cadbury in the mid to late twentieth century is then placed in the context of a widespread adoption of tannoyed music in factories. We argue that music was employed as a means of easing the monotony of factory work whilst simultaneously aiming to improve productivity levels. However, as we demonstrate through oral history, women workers experienced music in ways not always in tune with management objectives.

'We Sang Ourselves Through That War': Women, Music and Factory Work in World War Two

This paper examines the role of music in womens experience of factory work in the Second World War — an important topic but one largely overlooked in the existing literature. Two important forms of music flourished in war factories — the relaying of Music While You Work through loudspeakers, and the collective singing of workgroups. Drawing on a range of sources, the paper shows that music served to both express and create community in the workplace, and came to be seen as an anthropological necessity for survival in the context of exposure to repetitive and monotonous labour. The music also expressed a complex mix of simultaneous accommodation and resistance to womens position in munitions factory production. A key motif in womens musical cultures was autonomy, suggesting important continuities with the autonomous texture of other shopfloor cultures in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. The widespread nature of womens singing also has important implications for how we understand the hist...

The last British work songs: Music, community and class in the Kent hop fields of the early-mid 20th century

Abstract This article examines the widespread practice of singing during the picking of hops in the Kent hop fields from the 1920s through to the 1950s. The singing is analysed both in terms of its position as a late, rare and therefore potentially revealing example of British work songs in the 20th century, and in terms of the light it casts on the musical culture of the singers, working class women of London’s East End. It is argued that the songs expressed and sprang from the strong sense of community amongst the hop-pickers. Further, singing emerged in hop-picking precisely because it was a ‘working holiday’ in which the dichotomies of work and leisure broke down. The musical activity of the hop-pickers is seen as expressing an active culture of creativity, class and community – in contrast to Stedman Jones’ influential characterization of London’s working class as enmeshed in a culture of passive consolation.

‘Belles from Bristol and Bournville in New Surroundings’: female confectionery workers as transnational agents, 1918–1928

ABSTRACT In existing histories of the development of multinational business, women are usually absent. Yet when the British confectionery companies of Cadbury, Fry and Pascall took the bold step to build an entirely new factory in Tasmania in the early 1920s, women workers were important, and mobile, actors. This article draws on business history archives and genealogical material, from both Britain and Australia, to explore how a select group of British women became the ‘pioneers’ of the Cadbury-Fry-Pascall company. It examines why women were key to the formation of an Australian subsidiary, how they influenced, and sometimes challenged, the creation of workplace culture and practice, and the consequences of this mode of female labour migration.

Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954

tory in a copiously documented, sophisticated analysis, fittingly published in the Pickering & Chatto ‘Empires in Perspective’ series. What is genuinely original about her brilliant book is her cultural reading of the French stay in Sydney, both in terms of class and political differences between the sailors and how they saw the British and Aborigines with whom they mingled. Starbuck tells us as much about post-revolutionary France as about the cultural fluidities and cruelties of Port Jackson. The tensions between revolutionary notions of equality among the sailors and attempts to impose older forms of naval hierarchy are captured most insightfully. Similarly, she writes movingly of the mix of disillusionment and idealism in attitudes towards Aborigines among French officers who had assumed that they would always encounter ‘good’ and ‘peaceful’ (85) people like Labillardière in Tasmania in 1792. Starbuck argues cogently that Baudin’s expedition was despatched at a particular postrevolutionary moment, when Napoleon was still a republican consul and happy to indulge his own passion for knowledge of the great south land. By the time Baudin’s expedition returned to France in 1804, its leader dead, Napoleon had launched an unprecedented military struggle for French imperium over a new Europe remodelled along the lines of the Napoleonic Code. Baudin’s claims to southern Australia, expressed by naming natural features after France and its leaders, could not be contested for years while Flinders was detained at Ile-de-France (Mauritius) for more than six years as an enemy naval officer, for France and England were again at war by 1804. Baudin had died in Mauritius three months before Flinders sought refuge there in December of that year. It was late 1810 before Flinders reached England; he died aged forty in 1814. By then, Baudin’s cartographer Freycinet had comfortably won the race to publish a complete map (in 1811), and hundreds of French names remain on the southern and western coasts of the continent. Baudin’s expedition returned to France with no fewer than two hundred crates and many thousands of specimens of fauna and flora, as well as Pierre-Etienne Lesueur and NicolasMartin Petit’s astonishing paintings and drawings, some of them of Aboriginal people and their cultures. According to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, it was the largest collection it had ever received. Among the specimens were live animals and birds for Josephine’s garden at Malmaison; some of the species are now extinct, such as the King Island and Kangaroo Island dwarf emus. It is intriguing to have two radically different books on a pivotal moment in Australian history. Like their respective explorers, Hill and Starbuck go their own ways: their excellent books end up passing each other like ships in the night. They have been written for essentially different audiences (reflected in the pricing). Both are nicely illustrated: Hill’s with a colour insert of portraits and contemporary maps; Starbuck’s with in-text black and white reproductions of Lesueur and Petit’s captivating drawings. Each succeeds brilliantly in its objectives, and adds to the rich layers of scholarship laid down earlier by Frank Horner, Edward Duyker, Margaret Sankey and many others.

‘And Spinning So With Voices Meet, Like Nightingales They Sung Full Sweet’: Unravelling Representations of Singing in Pre-Industrial Textile Production

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between music and work in pre-industrial textile production and the ways in which it has been conceived and represented. Focusing on the processes of lace making, spinning and weaving, we consider whether working conditions were conducive to music making and the nature of the music being performed. In so doing we unpick idealized conceptions of singing by pre-industrial workers, studying music as taking place in work contexts structured by social hierarchies of gender, age and class. Our approach brings social and cultural history together with theories of musical structure and process in order to further our understanding of music in everyday life.