Graeme J. Milne

British business and the telephone, 1878-1911

Most research into the early telephone system has focused on telephone providers rather than users, and this article begins to address that imbalance. The telephone was initially used to improve internal communications within firms, by connecting offices with warehouses, or by enabling staff working away from the office to report back. With the expansion of exchange networks, the commercial, intermediary and brokering sectors became heavy users of the technology for routine information transfer within business districts. Business elites continued to favour face-to-face contact for strategic business negotiations, however, and delegated telephone use to their employees.

'Memory and place on the Liverpool waterfront in the mid-twentieth century'

This article explores the changing urban form and society of waterfront Liverpool in the last generation of the citys role as a traditional general cargo seaport. Deriving much of its evidence from a collaborative public history project, it demonstrates the continuing vitality of the near waterfront zone into the 1960s, and interprets the subsequent sudden collapse of the district with the closure of the south docks in 1972. Interviewees identified sites of memory that cast light on both the routine working of the district and the nature of its fall into dereliction and abandonment.

Business Districts, Office Culture and the First Generation of Telephone Use in Britain

Abstract The early growth of telephone networks offered business a powerful new tool, and had the potential to reshape the working environments of offices and business districts in major cities. From the 1880s, the telephone became a favoured means of communication for firms conducting large numbers of routine transactions, especially in trading, shipping and related intermediary activities. However, senior businessmen continued to prefer face-to-face contact with their peers, and insisted on having offices close to trading exchanges, banks and other traditional focal points where they could meet, negotiate and network in person. In many cases, they also delegated telephone use to their subordinates. Early business telephony therefore tended to reinforce rather than undermine office hierarchies and business clustering alike.

INSTITUTIONS, LOCALISM AND SEABORNE EPIDEMICS ON LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY TYNESIDE

Abstract This article analyses factional and institutional tensions on late-nineteenth-century Tyneside, using disputes over maritime public health and the prevention of seaborne epidemics as its central case study. The Tyne had a complex institutional landscape in this era, much of it created in the middle decades of the century to meet the challenges of increasing trade, mobility and industrial growth. Institutions such as the Tyne Improvement Commission and the Tyne Port Sanitary Authority struggled to balance their specialist missions against the demands of the town councils and sectional economic interests that were represented on their boards. They also faced difficulties in managing the new professional officers who worked for them, most notably, for the purposes of this article, the physicians responsible for port health. Although highly successful in protecting its communities from epidemics, the Tyne PSA casts revealing light on the tensions of late Victorian public service, and the pronounced localism that permeated Tyneside throughout and beyond this era.

Collecting the sea shanty: British maritime identity and Atlantic musical cultures in the early twentieth century

This article explores an important phase in the survival of the sea shanty as a collected, recorded and documented musical form. The final demise of the sailing ship as an economic mode of transport in the early twentieth century inspired a plethora of books and memoirs celebrating the age of sail, and many authors focused on the sea shanty. Collectors debated the accuracy of written versions, the sanitisation of lyrics and the likely origins of particular songs, trying to establish both the ‘authentic’ shanty, and their own varied maritime qualifications for writing about it. The shanty also became important to wider debates about national identity, with its multicultural origins sitting awkwardly with the mainstream folk movement’s search for an English musical tradition.

Revisiting the sea shanty: Introduction

This Forum considers the changing place of the sea shanty in musical culture since the late nineteenth century. Its three articles explore successive phases in the genre, from the first major published collections in the 1900s, through an important revival in the 1960s, to the dramatic recent growth in shanty festivals. This introduction locates the Forum in wider historical, musicological and related issues, and explains the research context from which the articles emerged.

The Seafarer in the Age of Sail

The entanglement between the seafarer and the shipping industry was at the heart of sailortown. This chapter analyses the representation and self-image of the seafarer, and the danger and fragility of maritime work. This was a time of extreme economic and industrial disruption, as the seafaring workforce made the transition from sail to steam. The national and ethnic diversity of maritime labour increased, while sailing-ship mariners became ever-more marginalised. Although often envied for their freedom, seamen faced harsh labour laws and could be imprisoned for breaking their contracts. The expendable, footloose image of the seafarer set much of the tone for exploitative, controlling relationships with employers, and with individuals and institutions on shore.

Legacies: Sailortown in the Twentieth Century

The classic sailortown declined with the age of sail, and the dominance of steamships in the early twentieth century undermined the old economics of crimping. But wartime dislocations revived old sailortown problems of transience and insecurity, provoking an inter-war building boom in missions, hostels and clinics that raised the standard of support available to visiting seafarers in most major ports. At the same time, however, the old sailortown districts were increasingly defined racially, as the descendants of black seafarers struggled to escape the waterfront and its outdated and irrelevant stereotypes. Regeneration projects from the 1980s created new waterfronts that often incorporated elements of imagined sailortowns, while further marginalising residents of the poorer districts a little way inland.

The Maritime-Urban Frontier

Seafarers came ashore into a culture of threat, exploitation and violence, but also one of spectacle, opportunity and liberty. They celebrated with flamboyant spending on drink, entertainment, clothes and prostitution. A waterfront economy of consumption, leisure, vice and crime grew up around them. The theatricality of waterfront streets, bars and dance halls challenged ideas of public order, and proper class and gender roles. Sailortown exhibited a strange kind of cosmopolitanism, influenced both by the trans-national maritime labour force and by the dominance of British merchant shipping on most major trade routes. For all those layers of symbolism and imagination, these were also physical places where some seafarers suffered real harm, and that reality drove half a century of commentary and reform effort.

The State in Sailortown

Sailortown was an early focus of the surveillance state, which created documentation regimes and tried to regulate accommodation, drink and prostitution. The international mobility of seafarers challenged nation states to address questions of jurisdiction and authority over each other’s subjects. The British state in particular extended its global information-gathering systems by having to monitor the world’s largest merchant fleet. State intervention intensified further with the late-century rise of nationalistic ideologies, and black seafarers in particular were subject to increasing levels of documentary scrutiny. States also intervened in the public health of waterfront districts, inevitably intruding into issues of morality and sexuality because of the prominence of venereal diseases in medical assumptions about the health of seafarers and women working in prostitution.