John Benson

The rise of consumer society in Britain, 1880-1980

Part 1 Context: changes in demand and supply. Part 2 Changes: shopping tourism sport. Part 3 Consequences: the consolidation of national identity? the creation of youth culture? the emancipation of women? the defusion of class tensions?

Action and reaction: competition and the multiple retailer in 1930s Britain

This paper considers aspects of the competition between multiple and independent retailers in 1930s Britain. In particular, it explores how multiple retailers used spatial competition for economic advantage, and how the independent retailers reacted. The paper argues that multiple retailers contested and reshaped retail space in three critical and interrelated areas: locational space, store space and perceptual space. Evidence of this contestation and reshaping is drawn from a detailed reading of the trade press. The paper concludes that the spatial competition of the multiple retailers in this period was disruptive in nature, and that the optimistic nature of the arguments and the rhetoric put forward by the trade journals acting for the independents cannot disguise a deep-seated despair at how to react to this type of competition.

The Evolving Culture of Retailer Regulation and the Failure of the ‘Balfour Bill’ in Interwar Britain

The authors explore the interactions between retailer conflict, types of competition, and retail regulation. Their study is set within the wider debates surrounding the attempts to retheorise retail geography, and, more specifically, in the context of retail competition within interwar Britain. The specific focus is on the attempts to control large-scale corporate retailing, and the failure of such strategies. The authors also draw on comparisons with the situation in the USA and show that the British case was very different, as illustrated by the failure of the ‘Balfour Bill’. Within this context they debate a number of reasons why the attempts to regulate retailing failed in Britain. On a broader front they also demonstrate the need for further research into the complex relationships between retailer conflict and regulatory control.

Structural and spatial trends in British retailing: the importance of firm-level studies

This essay seeks to draw attention to important structural and spatial trends in British retailing within the period 1850- 1939. In doing so three main issues are raised. First, discussion focuses on the fragmented nature of existing literature on retail change and in particular the increasing bias towards North America. This serves to underpin the second theme, which describes the methodology of a new research project aimed at examining the growth of British multiples prior to 1939. Particular emphasis is given to the issue of competition and its impact on retail location. The third part of the paper explores some early ideas from the research project by considering the spatial strategies adopted by variety store multiples operating in southwest England.

Coalowners, Coalminers and Compulsion: Pit Clubs in England, 1860-80

It is suggested that, insofar as coalowner stereotyping rests upon the denigration of pit clubs, it stands in need of substantial modification. It is true that many coalowners organised pit clubs for their own purposes, and that the assistance they provided was seriously and sometimes scandalously deficient. However, it is shown that many owners offered their pit clubs significant financial support, and that the clubs provided their members with benefits in a form, and on a scale, which both contributed towards the relief of coalfield suffering and compared well with the assistance provided by the other agencies to which coalminers and their dependants had access.

One Man and his Women: Domestic Service in Edwardian England

The aim of this article is to modify the view of female servants in Edwardian England as the epitome of working-class subservience and powerlessness, drawing on recent analysis of their ability to challenge their employers only by expedients such as sulking, mishearing orders and wasting time. Through detailed engagement with the relationships that one Wolverhampton businessman, Edward Lawrence, had with the servants in his life, it argues that female domestic staff were less compliant than the existing historiography allows, and had more ways of protecting their interests than we are usually led to believe.

‘The Office Boy’s Triumph’: Deceit and Display in early Twentieth-Century Wolverhampton

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between office work, spending and respectability in early twentieth-century England. It does so by focusing upon the ‘Varley affair’, a case in which an employee of Wolverhampton Council defrauded the Corporation of almost £85,000 between 1905 and 1917. It is argued both that offices were not necessarily as tightly controlled as we have been led to believe, and that it was possible for office workers – provided they had sufficient funds – to spend their way to a solid, respectable standing in local middle-class society.

Sport, Class, and Place: Gerald Howard-Smith and Early Twentieth- Century Wolverhampton

Abstract The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between the gentleman amateur, the middle class, and the working class in early twentieth-century England. It does so by examining the ways in which one man, upper middle-class solicitor Gerald Howard-Smith, was able to engage in, and benefit from, elite sociability in a quintessentially working-class town such as Wolverhampton. The conclusion is that, primarily because of his sporting interests, it was possible, and probably easy, for him to isolate himself from most traces of the town in which he worked, near to which he lived, and on the fringes of which he spent so much of his leisure time.

The Making of Consumer Culture in Modern Britain

– and widely derided. It is certainly not a definition that Peter Gurney is ever likely to find congenial. Indeed his new book The Making of Consumer Culture in Modern Britain can be read as an extended repudiation of any sympathy that may remain for such a view. This is social history with the politics included, and included explicitly and insistently centre stage. As Gurney explains at the outset, his argument is that the consumer culture which emerged in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ‘was shaped as much by political relationships as it was by economic and social factors’ (p. 5). This is not to say that Gurney eschews economic, social (and cultural) developments. Drawing both upon the burgeoning historiography of consumption and the voluminous journalistic, autobiographical and fictional sources that are available, he provides a clear and enlightening analysis of the major developments that have taken place over the past two hundred years. He shows, for example, how advertising grew and prospered, discusses the success of department stores, and assesses the impact that late twentieth-century prosperity had upon retailing and consumption. By the millennium, he maintains, the British people were regarded, in some quarters at least, primarily as consumers, whether as parents or patients, as students, tenants or voters. As befits a distinguished historian of cooperation, Gurney is particularly interesting on the growth of the movement and the ways in which it adapted to the challenges it faced. The enormous strides that the co-op made during the final third of the nineteenth century were due, he argues, not just to its retail offering but to the fact that ‘it got under the skin of life’ (p. 110). The result was that membership increased from 350,000 in 1873, to 628,000 ten years later, over two million in 1905, more than three million in 1914, and upwards of twelve million during the early 1960s. However, it is Gurney’s emphasis upon the political that sets this book apart. Drawing upon his previous work in the field, he confirms that late eighteenth-century workers, like their late nineteenth-century counterparts, tried using their consumer power to strengthen their position in the market. He suggests that until around 1850 consumption issues tended to divide the classes, whereas thereafter they were inclined to draw them closer together. Nevertheless, he is at pains to stress that neither Liberal free traders nor Tory protectionists succeeded in mobilising ‘ordinary’ rank and file consumers in the years before the First World War. Analysing the rivalries between advertisers and conservationists, independents and department stores, multiples and cooperatives, the high street and out-of-town shopping centres, Gurney ranges high and low, from street theatre to press pressure and party political manoeuvring. He tells us that in 1909, for example, hoardings advertising ‘Carter’s Little Liver Pills’ and other products were removed in one Kent community by ‘several old women ... to the accompaniment of the village Brass Band’ (p. 82). He explains that the attack which Beaverbrook and his supporters launched upon the cooperative movement during the early 1930s not only politicized consumption but backfired because it ‘served as a marvellous advertisement for the movement’ (p. 154). One reason for the co-op’s failure to forge political alliances towards the end of the century, Gurney concludes, lay in what he describes as its ‘unwanted baggage from Labour’s “cloth cap” past’ (p. 199). Nor is Gurney afraid of big claims about the relationship between consumer culture and The Making of Consumer Culture in Modern Britain, by Peter Gurney, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, 274 pp., £85 (hardback), ISBN 9781441137210, £27.50 (paperback), ISBN 9781441191663 282 B OOK REVIEWS

A thirst for empire: how tea shaped the modern world

role as a loyalist in the 1790s, belting out patriotic numbers that, amongst other things, helped create a more positive image of the Royal Navy during the struggle with Napoleon. Finally, Dibdin seems to have been an early architect of the one-man show. Dibdin’s life was a tribute to the miscellaneous, innovating in different genres and dashing headlong into contrasting cultural styles, often in the same evening’s entertainment. This tells us something about the Georgian world which allowed a figure like Dibdin to flourish. The idea of the miscellany gave way in the nineteenth century to increased focus on specialisation across the arts. Writing about concert programming, the editors argue that ‘it would be a mistake to think of the transformation from miscellany to specialisation as a shift from riotous confusion to orderly classification. Miscellany is itself a form of order, requiring a robust, organised sequencing of elements’ (p. 10). Dibdin was the opposite of the Romantic genius, drawn ever further into a deep interior life; instead, he was a craftsman who knew how to work with networks of power and influence. Dibdin was associated with a number of different spaces in London which are well captured here. In 1782, he ran the Royal Circus Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy in what is now Waterloo. As its name suggests, it was a place where you could catch concerts and talented horses. He established his own theatre called the Sans Souci, on the Strand. Here his one-man show offered patriotic songs that contrasted with the radical lectures and pamphleteering of figures like John Thelwall close by. As David Kennerley shows, he developed a persona that was defined by its authenticity, manliness and patriotism. Oskar Cox Jensen explains how the simplicity of the song ‘True Courage’ is its real message: the simple melody was intended to bring people together in contrast to the discordant notes emerging from revolutionary France. Harriet Guest employs the song ‘Margate Hoy’ to understand Dibdin’s relationship with his audience but also the way he portrayed the British at play. The book has been sharply edited with a conscious attempt to make the separate articles speak to each other. It thus builds into a larger interrogation of Georgian culture whilst re-establishing Dibdin’s importance. The copious illustrations and use of sheet music are also a conscious part of the argument, developing a strong sense of the visual and aural cultures of the era. I closed the book full of admiration for Dibdin as Georgian polymath and performer. He helped create the modern idea of the celebrity.