Last year Emily Burgess produced an outstanding dissertation on the all-female working-class gang from South London known as the Forty elephants. Here she writes about how she came up with the idea and carried out the research, with Rob James as supervisor. Emily concludes with some useful advice for all our students currently writing proposals for their third-year dissertation. Emily has since set up her own consultancy for historical research and consultancy – see our previous post.
From a young age I was fascinated by criminal history. My grandmother and family from the East End of London would often tell me tales about the Krays and other villainous figures from the area, filling my head with stories of the criminal underworld. My fascination was only enhanced further by childhood visits to museums, particularly Dartmoor Prison and Kilmainham Gaol which left considerable impressions and sparked my intrigue in Victorian and Edwardian criminality.
As I grew older, I became fixated on television programmes and films that depicted organised gang crime, causing me to develop an interest in the representation of criminal types. However, there was a common occurrence between these types that I became more aware of while attending university, and that was that they were almost always male. So that left me thinking, what about the women?
This prompted me to do some archival research where I came across an all-female working-class gang from South London, labelled as the Forty Elephants, whose activities spanned over a seventy year period and influenced the criminal underworld from the late nineteenth century, to the mid twentieth century. I wondered why I had never heard of them before if they were so infamous, and I soon realised that it was because they were women. Specifically, there were common misconceptions within historiography that female criminality was limited and incapable of ‘serious’ organised offences. Therefore, the Forty Elephants had been relatively neglected in favour of male gangs from the period. This made me even more determined to write about them as they challenged common attitudes and opinions surrounding female crime.
After forming a question with the help of my tutor, I began my hunt for primary and secondary sources in the summer before starting third year. By focusing on newspaper reports from the 1920s and court records I was able to develop an understanding of their offences, and the media fixation that came to surround them. I found that this was due to their ability to break from gender and class boundaries within the metropole which caused a moral panic over contemporary criminality. Most striking were their crimes and sentencing, and the fabrications within media concerning their appearance. This caused me to split my dissertation into three sections, historiography, official documentation and the reality of female gang crime, and newspapers and accounts showing the fantastical elements that shrouded them in criminal celebrity. With the structure formed I began writing the dissertation and enjoyed putting my research together.
I would advise students who are trying to choose a research area to pursue what fascinates them the most, even if it is unusual or a little out of the box, these make for the most interesting dissertations!
On 10th March 2021 the paper in our UoP History Research seminar series was by UoP history lecturer Dr Fiona McCall, who gave a paper on female deviance during the English interregnum, including fighting in church, sexual harassment, drinking, swearing and cursing, adultery and witchcraft. This paper has been recorded for those unable to attend on the day, see below. We hope to upload further recordings of History Research papers in the near future.
Click here for a link to the recording of the seminar (you will need the password: %MT6U8&S)
As a naval town, Portsmouth’s history has tended to have a masculine focus. But many Portsmouth women have actively campaigned for women’s rights and set up practical initiatives in the Portsmouth area to improve the lives of women. A Heritage Lottery Fund grant enabled the setting up of a project to interview these women and capture their stories. UoP history reader Sue Bruley was one of the project leaders. Project co-lead Laurel Forster, Reader in Cultural history in the UoP School of Film, Media & Communication explains more about the project and its outcomes.
Sue Bruley speaking
The main aim of this project was to document the activism of women in the Portsmouth area by interviewing women from a range of backgrounds and with different interests in community issues. The project, initiated and co-lead by Dr Sue Bruley, Reader in Modern History, of the School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, worked with the local library, the U3A, volunteers, schools and community groups to unearth and record the impact of feminism and women’s activism.
The project began some years ago with a Women’s Liberation Memory Day, and was followed by a conference in 2014 called ‘Situating Women’s Liberation: Historicising a Movement’. Out of the conference came a journal special issue and a book, edited by Dr Laurel Forster and Sue Bruley called Historicising the Women’s Liberation Movement in the Western World (Routledge 2018). A Heritage Lottery Fund grant made the project possible and the work of the project: interviews, volunteer training, public lectures, touring exhibitions and memory days began. The project garnered a huge amount of support in the city, with over 200 people attending the public lectures and even some artwork to commemorate the project.
Many Portsmouth women who have, since the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, actively campaigned for women’s rights and set up practical initiatives in the Portsmouth area to improve the lives of women and their families, came forward. As a Naval Town, with an important Dockyard, the recorded history of Portsmouth has had a particular masculine focus, so it was especially important to record this history. Portsmouth’s own branch of the Women’s Liberation Movement was remembered by many, with its consciousness-raising meetings.
The women of Portsmouth actively campaigned for peace and many stories were told of Greenham Common Peace camps and anti-nuclear demonstrations. Many of our interviewees focused upon the grass-roots campaigning that supported the development of one of the earliest rape-crisis telephone lines and women’s refuge centre.
Others spoke of their work in minority groups within the city, fighting racism and supporting women from all backgrounds. Women working as teachers, city counsellors, faith leaders, or to improve housing conditions for families, have all been interviewed. There are accounts of women’s pioneering work in the Royal Navy and elsewhere in local factories, offices and the university, campaigning for equal rights at work.
All these stories are captured in the project booklet and stored in the archive in the city Library’s History centre.
For further information on the project see the many resources on the project website. These include a learning resource pack suitable for using in teaching ages 14-18 and a bibliography.
Please contact project co-lead laurel.forster@port.ac.uk for further information.
Brad Beaven has a new blog published on the Social History Society’s blog, looking at the history of ‘sailortowns’, seaport’s urban quarters where sailors would stay, eat, drink and be entertained. These were transient and liminal spaces and a unique site of cultural contact and exchange. Despite the rich array of research areas in class, race and gender relations that these districts have to offer, sailortowns have tended to be overlooked in historical study. This is because they sit at the cross-roads between the urban and maritime realms, and have tended to fall between these two schools of history.
Brad writes about his new article published for the journal Social History. This looks at nineteenth-century London, then the largest port in the world, and its infamous Ratcliffe Highway, as the ideal case study to explore this relationship between sailors and working-class communities.
In November 2020 the University of Warwick Network for Parish Research organised an online symposium on ‘Remembering the Parish’. Fiona McCall, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, presented a paper, ‘Remembering the ‘Wickedly Wicked’ Times’, looking at loyalist memories criticising the interregnum religious regime. She was one of four speakers on the memories of the civil war in English parishes; there is a feature on these papers here on the My-Parish website.
In this blog, Rob James explores how the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution impacted British film production in the mid-twentieth century. Rob tells us that the chance of a film being made depicting those tumultuous events depended on how they were presented. If the film demonstrated any sympathy towards the revolutionaries, then a ban was inevitable. Rob’s research covers society’s leisure activities and how they were shaped and controlled from both within and outside the entertainment industry. His research feeds into a number of optional and specialist modules that he teaches in the second and third year.
Still from the film Princess Charming (1934)
In the 1934 film Princess Charming, produced by Michael Balcon, one of Britain’s leading filmmakers at the time, Captain Launa, the upper-class suitor of the eponymous Princess, criticised the Bolshevik revolutionary activity taking place in the fictional Ruritanian country the action is set in, pointedly remarking: ‘There are no revolutions in well-governed countries’.[1] It’s a clear message for cinemagoers, particularly those living in Britain, that revolutions only occur in countries without adequate governing structures. The implication, therefore, was that the British state, with its long-standing history of democratic government, could be trusted to solve any difficulties that the country was currently facing.
The Jarrow marchers, 1936
And Britain was certainly facing significant difficulties in the decade in which this film was made. Suffering from economic decline, high unemployment and rising poverty, and confronted by a series of national and international crises, Britain was a divided country, with many of its citizens feeling deep social and political discontent. Historians have described the period as a ‘devil’s decade’, a near-apocalyptic era that witnessed a rupture in the normally stable system of government.[2] With many of the country’s inhabitants looking outwards towards Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany for an answer to their problems, this bubbling discontent was brought to the fore, and seemed to be encapsulated in, two events that took place in October 1936: the Jarrow March – when 200 men from that Tyneside town marched to London to protest about rising unemployment in traditional heavy industries; and the Battle of Cable Street – which saw clashes on London’s streets between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and 100,000 anti-Fascist protesters.[3]
The battle of cable street in 1936
On top of these tumultuous events, in December of that very same year the King, Edward VIII, renounced the throne so that he could marry the American-divorcee Wallace Simpson, creating a constitutional crisis.[4] The fallout from the Abdication crisis was huge. Society’s leaders were concerned that if this important pillar of the British constitution could fall, then so could the others – namely democratic parliament could come crashing down at the whim of political extremism. As a result, any depiction of revolutionary activity in popular cultural media, like film, became a touchy issue. The political censorship of the film medium thus increased dramatically throughout the decade, and any film that attempted to deal with some of the most pressing social issues of the day was likely to be banned by the British Board of Film Censors, the organisation in charge of overseeing the censorship of the film medium.[5] Reading the reports written up by the censors, it becomes clear that whether a film was passed or not was dependent on how it presented the ‘revolutionary’ element. In 1931, for example, The Red Light, a film said by the censor to depict London ‘on the eve of Red Revolution’, was prohibited. The film’s setting was its undoing – it was based too close to home![6] Another film, Red Square, despite being set in Russia, was prohibited in 1934 because it contained ‘sordid settings’.[7] However, two other films that dealt with the revolutionary topic, Soviet and Knight Without Armour, were allowed to be produced; the former because, the censor noted, it emphasised ‘the forced labour and hard striving of the working class under the five year plan’; the latter because, it made ‘no attempt at political propaganda’.[8]
The censor’s comments about Knight Without Armour‘s political neutrality aren’t quite true, however. The film does contain political propaganda. In its depiction of the Bolsheviks it openly condemns revolutionary activity. Produced by Alexander Korda, another leading filmmaker of the time who was sympathetic to the British constitution, Knight Without Armour is set in the throes of the 1917 Russian Revolution and depicts the Bolsheviks as brutish, self-indulgent, and only interested in personal gain.[9] The country they have taken over is shown to have been thrown into chaos because of their activities. By contrast, the Russian aristocracy, epitomised by Marlene Dietrich’s Countess Alexandra, is portrayed in a sympathetic light. In one stunning sequence during which the revolutionaries storm the Countess’s palace, Dietrich is clothed in white and bathed in light: the embodiment of aristocratic purity and virtue.
Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armour (1937)
The revolutionaries, in sharp contrast, are darkly attired and cast in shadow: a sinister, anonymous mob descending the hill to brutalise the Countess and lay waste to her home. By juxtaposing the protagonists in this way Knight Without Armour makes a powerful statement against Soviet Russia. It both instructs and educates the audience against the folly of trying to overthrow the system. It is film as political propaganda, persuading the audience to think in a particular way about the Revolution. In a time when the very foundations of British society were appearing to crumble, this was a very powerful message indeed. And this was undoubtedly the reason why the film was passed by the censors.
Knight Without Armour: revolutionaries
Of course, no film ever reflects reality, but all films will reveal something about the time in which they were made. And the British films that were made in this period that featured any form of revolutionary activity are perfect examples of this.
The messages they presented to cinemagoers who may have been agitating for radical change were clear: any form of violent overthrow of the established order was to be avoided at all costs, and there would be no need for a revolution in this well-governed country!
[2] Early proponents of this view include Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, whose Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971) painted a picture of a country on the brink of collapse.
[3] Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History (London: Harper Press, 2010), 441-446.
[4] Frank Mort, “Love in a Cold Climate: Letter, Public Opinion and Monarchy in the 1936 Abdication Crisis,” Twentieth Century British History 25, no. 1 (2020), 30-62: 33.
[5] Robert James, “‘The People’s Amusement’: Cinemagoing and the BBFC, 1928-48”, in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age ed. Edward Lamberti. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 16-27: 17.
[6] British Board of Film Censors, ‘Scenario Reports’, British Film Institute, London. 15 December 1931.
[8] See Ibid., 24 July 1933 and 18 February 1935 respectively. Soviet was initially opposed (Ibid., 11 March 1933) but was allowed to be produced after amendments were made.
