Category: Research in Focus

Research in Focus

  • “Don’t blame the shopkeeper!!”: Food, drink and confectionery advertising and British Government market controls during the Second World War

    “Don’t blame the shopkeeper!!”: Food, drink and confectionery advertising and British Government market controls during the Second World War

    An article on the ways in which food, drink and confectionary companies used advertising to respond to the government’s control of the market during the Second World War by Mick Hayes, doctoral student in History at the University of Portsmouth, has recently been published in the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. See below for the abstract, and if you want to read the article, click here.

    Abstract The aim of this paper is to illustrate the impact of zoning and pooling on food, drink and confectionary brands during the Second World War, something that has not been covered in depth in historical literature, despite the significant amount of research that has been conducted into rationing and its effects on British society. In addition, the paper evaluates how brands in these industries used advertising in response to the government’s control of the market during the conflict. Based on a close reading and interpretation of food, drink and confectionery brands’ advertisements from the Daily Express and Daily Mirror newspapers across the Second World War, the paper argues that brands used advertising to provide information to their customers about rationing, shortages, zoning and pooling for a range of reasons: to keep them informed of developments, to offer their apologies regarding problems in obtaining goods, urge patience, and help them look forward to a time when the conflict was over.

  • If you go down to the Archives today …

    If you go down to the Archives today …

    In this post, Mike Esbester brings us up to date on the book he wrote earlier in the year, marking the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council – now picked up by The National Archives and health and safety professionals.

    2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the British Safety Council, one of the leading organisations aimed at improving health, safety and wellbeing in the workplace, in the UK and beyond. Fortunately the BSC is an organisation attuned to the value of the past, and – as discussed in an earlier post  – has been prepared to put its money where its mouth is, including creating an excellent digital archive , freely available to all.

    In the lead up to this anniversary, the BSC called upon me to advise and work with them. They drew upon my research in the field of modern health and safety, including work funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health. One of the things I was involved in was writing a book marking the anniversary; it was launched at the Regent St Cinema in London in March 2017 – I’d never been to a launch quite like that!

    The book was aimed at professionals and practitioners, drawing on the BSC’s archive and particularly the poster collections, but also grounding the imagery with a detailed contextual discussion. It was an interesting exercise in pitching the tone correctly, selecting engaging images and providing a sturdy analytical approach – but it’s been well received.

    And now, if you’re visiting The National Archives at Kew (perhaps as part of ‘Explore your Archive’  week, running this week), you might see a copy of the book in the ‘new books’ display in the Map Room! It was selected for the library and for display, which (as the author) is always pleasing. The Friends of The National Archives also put together a feature for the current issue of Magna, their journal – available here.

    In addition, the book was picked up by Safety & Health Practitioner magazine, a monthly publication aimed at health and safety professionals in the UK and received by all 35,000 members of the Institution of Occupational Safety & Health, the UK’s largest professional organisation in the field. The SHP piece was based around an interview about the book, drawing out its origins, the role I played in uncovering the BSC’s archive and then the process of writing the book itself. It’s available here.

    The book’s reach hasn’t been confined to the UK – it’s been sent worldwide, reflecting the BSC’s connections and interests beyond our shores. I was recently told – though must follow it up! – about favourable feedback on the book from Portugal, and I hope there’s more out there.

    All told, it’s great to see academic research reaching out well beyond higher education institutions – and that there is huge scope for and interest in this. There’s no doubt it takes time and effort – I’ve been working with the BSC for 7 or 8 years now – but it bears fruit, and that can only be to the good for the historical community. And a taster: watch this space, as it looks likes there is a lot more to come…

     

    All images courtesy of the British Safety Council

     

  • Nationalism, Regionalism and British identity in early 20th century England

    Nationalism, Regionalism and British identity in early 20th century England

    Dr Melanie Bassett is a Research Associate for the Port Towns and Urban Cultures project. She also teaches undergraduate units in History. Here she talks about her chapter which is published in the Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History. A (Dis)United Kingdom? edited collection, which is out now.

    In 2015 I gave a paper at the United Kingdom? Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History conference which prompted me to look at my research from a different perspective. My PhD thesis (completed at the University of Portsmouth) was entitled The Royal Dockyard Worker in Edwardian England: Culture, Leisure and Empire, and although I briefly considered the role of ‘Englishness’ and four nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) perspectives on the British Empire, it was not a central consideration in my argument.

    However, there were certainly parallels in my research with the Four Nations methodology. This approach was sparked by J.G.A. Pocock’s call in the 1970s for a more integrated approach to the history of Britain by incorporating the influences, perspectives and histories from the other nations that made up the British world (this also could include White settler colonies such as Pocock’s native New Zealand). In subsequent years historiographical movements towards a ‘New British History’ have illuminated new discourses for understanding what it meant to be ‘British.’ [1] This was really interesting to me as my subjects of study were state-employed Dockyard workers. These were the men who built the British Empire’s warships during the time of the great naval arms race which heightened tensions prior to the First World War. They came from across the United Kingdom for work and as a consequence Portsmouth, as Britain’s premier Royal Dockyard town, saw great expansion both geographically and in terms of its population.

    My research focused on how Royal Dockyard workers processed the messages of the British Empire, and how this was communicated through their culture and leisure patterns. What struck me when writing my abstract in application to speak at the conference [2] was that there was a burgeoning leisure culture of regional and national societies (such as the Portsmouth and District Caledonian Society, the Portsmouth Cambrian Society, the Portsmouth Society of Yorkshiremen, and the Portsmouth Pembrokeshire Society, to name but a few) which were being established around the Edwardian period. Their proliferation showed that, not only were the public aware of their roots, but they were very keen to highlight and exploit these! Certainly, these societies were not just about ‘having fun’, but were important mechanisms for migrant workers to establish networks and kinship-like relationships away from ‘home.’ They were also important conduits through which to explore ideas of citizenship (and citizen rights) both in their adopted city, and within a wider context.

    Following the conference I was invited to write a chapter for the book which was inspired by the conference. [3] The book combines prominent scholars in the field of ‘New British History’, and also Early Career Researchers such as myself, and will stand as an anthology which re-examines and challenges the four nations methodology as much as it celebrates and highlights its usefulness. My chapter, entitled “Regional Societies and the Migrant Edwardian Royal Dockyard Worker: Locality, Nation and Empire”, combines a four nations perspective with an understanding of social and workplace relations. Royal Dockyardmen, especially those who had relocated to work in the Dockyard, had many concepts about belonging to contend with – not least ideas about where they fitted in locally, nationally and in the British Empire as a whole. They also were subject to influential codes of conduct based on their place in society – as a skilled or unskilled worker and as part of the working class more generally – and they had limitations on what they could feasibly take part in in order to express their interests and wants.

    What I wanted to explore was the process of identity-making in-situ through a case study of the naval dockyard town of Portsmouth, in the South of England, c.1900-1914. I did this by comparing local newspaper reports, the surviving archives of regional societies, and cross-referencing Royal Dockyard employment and Census records. Using these primary sources I was able to quantify the migrant experience and build up a picture of the activities and attitudes surrounding ideas of regionalism, nationalism and imperialism in the Edwardian era. By doing this I was able to highlight the intersection between national and local identities, personal and professional identities, and articulate the nuanced and complex subjectivities of working people.

    The chapter extends and challenges the historiography of ‘New British History’ by adding nuance to the idea that there is a monolithic, one-size-fits-all interpretation of Britishness. Instead, the chapter highlights the importance of regionalism and the diffuseness of the British experience. It asserts that by investigating the national and regional societies formed in this period, alongside national and local expectations of the British ‘imperial citizen’, we can begin to explore the hybridity of British identity in a way that moves away from a ‘top down’, Anglo-centric history of the United Kingdom. A four nations approach is a useful conceptual model with which to seek out British patriotism and imperial identity. However, this should not negate other considerations which enable a more holistic understanding of the state of ‘Britishness’.

     

    Notes

    [1] J.G.A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2005). See also, D. Cannadine ‘British History as a “New Subject.” Politics, Perspectives and Prospects’ in A. Grant and K. Stringer (eds.) Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 2005), p.22.

    [2] In order to speak at a conference you are either invited as an established academic in the field, or more likely as someone who applies through sending an abstract. The abstract is generally 200-500 words about what you intend to speak about alongside an accompanying CV or profile. Speakers are then selected by a panel of the conference convenors.

    [3] I also wrote a short blog on the Four Nations History Network website. Melanie Bassett, “Working-class leisure and Four Nations History: A study of regional societies in Edwardian Portsmouth.” Four Nations History Network https://fournationshistory.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/working-class-leisure-and-four-nations-history-a-study-of-regional-societies-in-edwardian-portsmouth/ last accessed 09/11/2017.

     

    Out now: M. Scull and N. Lloyd-Jones (eds), Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History. A (Dis)United Kingdom? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

  • Forget gory Gunpowder – Jacobean England had a bloodcurdling appetite for violence

    Forget gory Gunpowder – Jacobean England had a bloodcurdling appetite for violence

    Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History, has published an article in The Conversation. Here she reflects on responses to the violent scenes in the recent BBC 1 series Gunpowder, in particular the depictions of executions of Catholics by the Protestant authorities. This discussion reflects her research interests in early modern Catholicism in England and Europe, which is one theme in her final year special subject unit, ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus: Religious Identities in Elizabethan England’.

    To read the article, click here

    The execution of the eight surviving conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot. Wellcome Images via Wikimedia , CC BY-SA
  • ‘Fodder for the masses’: Student recipes in the 1960s

    ‘Fodder for the masses’: Student recipes in the 1960s

    Dr Jodi Burkett is Principal Lecturer in History at the university, and teaches across the undergraduate course including a special subject on ‘Students and Youth in postwar Britain’. She is currently doing research on student activism around issues of ‘race’, racism and anti-racism between the late 1960s and early 1990s which includes reading a lot of student newspapers.

    While waiting in an epic queue in the Hub, or eating your Co-op meal deal, I’m sure many of you have asked yourselves:

    What did students eat in the late 1960s?

    For many undergraduate students, going to University is the first time that they are living on their own and having to cook for themselves. The student newspaper at the University of Warwick in the late 1960s saw this and decided to help students out by giving them some recipe ideas. In their weekly student newspaper, the Warwick Campus, during January 1969 there appeared a column titled ‘Fodder for the masses’. All of the student newspapers from this era at Warwick can be accessed digitally here:

    The recipes seemed to have two things in common – they are simple and they can be done on the cheap!

    For example, the recipes in the issue from the 10th of January 1969 all revolved around eggs. They included wonderful ideas like ‘Egg and Ham Moulds’ and ‘Egg in a window’. But my personal favourite (for the gross factor alone) was ‘Eggs stuffed with pate’.

    Source: Warwick Campus, 10 January 1969, p.2.

    The following week’s newspaper was themed ‘New Ways With Meat’ and featured ‘Liver Josephine’. What exactly that consisted of (and who was poor Josephine?) I’ll leave up to your imagination!

    In the wake of this, there appears to have been a move towards worrying about the health, or, more precisely, the calories, in food. In the newspaper on the 24th of January there was a long list of the ‘Horrifying Facts When Visiting the Food Machines’ which included the calorie content of everything from crisps, to scotch eggs, fruit pie, peppermints and apples. In order to offset the seemingly ‘horrific’ 25 calories in a carton of milk, they offered recipes for a ‘Devilled Cutlet’ (Approx. 280 calories) and a ‘Cottage Cheese Salad’ (Approx 300 calories). The ‘recipe’ for this last one was particularly simple:

    Top 2 tinned pears with 4 oz cottage cheese and eat with salad.

    Source: Warwick Campus, 24 January 1969, p. 2

    That’s it. That’s the recipe. And the entire column the following week was devoted to ‘Sandwiches’ listing 12 savoury and 7 sweet fillings that you could choose from to help break out of the ‘cheese and luncheon meat rut’. They included a number of ways to use ‘bacon juice’ including sprinkling it over peanut butter and apple slices (savoury) or tossing it with grated apple and mixing with honey and raisins (sweet).

    The interest in food among Warwick students, although short-lived in the newspaper having been largely phased out by February 1969, did not die out completely and was published in a recipe book in 1972

    Other than being disgusting and mildly amusing, what can this tell us as historians? There are a couple of key issues when using these recipes as historical evidence: 1) we don’t know if anyone actually read the students’ newspaper, and 2) we don’t know if anyone actually tried these ‘recipes’. That said, they can still be used as interesting and important historical sources. They can tell us about what kind of foods were readily available and considered commonplace, and they can tell us about how students were perceived, amongst other things. They can give us a ‘flavour’ of what life was like on Warwick campus at this time and encourage us to look at the offerings of the Hub’s ‘Thursday Curry Club’ with a bit more appreciation…

  • The Excommunication of Portsmouth, 1450-1508

    The Excommunication of Portsmouth, 1450-1508

    Dr Fiona McCall teaches on a first year module, Early Modern World, where we discuss the practice of the medieval Catholic church before the reformation, and a second year module, Crime, Sin and Punishment in Britain, 1500-1850, which looks at the extensive jurisdiction of the church courts in the early modern period, as well as the role of religious ideas in punishment. Below she relates how the town of Portsmouth was excommunicated in 1450, and what it had to do, fifty-eight years later, to end this predicament. This year, Patrick Johnson, one of the students who studied the above module last year, will be researching a dissertation on the social meaning of excommunication for individuals, using records from the published church court records for the diocese of Oxford, which Fiona will be supervising.

    In the medieval and early modern period, the church had an extensive jurisdiction over everyday life and behaviour as well as religious practice.   Individuals who transgressed the boundaries of acceptable moral or religious behaviour or belief might find themselves before the church courts, and if they remained contumacious, be censured via excommunication. This meant they could no longer take part in church services, receive communion, or be buried in consecrated ground.  Other members of the community were supposed to shun them.

    Sometimes whole communities were excommunicated: famously the whole of England was placed under a papal interdict between 1208 and 1214, after King John quarrelled with the pope. In 1450, the island of Portsmouth was excommunicated as punishment for the murder of Adam Moleyns, bishop of Chichester, an event recorded in an English chronicle of the time:

    And this yeer, the Friday the ix. Day of January, maister Adam Moleyns, bisshoppe of Chichestre and keeper of the kyngis prive seel, whom the kyng sent to Portesmouth, forto make paiement of money to certayne souldiers and shipmenne for their wages; and so it happid that with boistez language, and also for abriggyng of their wages, he fil in variaunce with thaym, and thay fil on him, and cruelly there kilde him [1]

    1450 was a bad year for England. Under the weak (and later mad) King Henry VI, England was losing the Hundred Years’ War, and there was extensive unrest.   Moleyns’s association with the unpopular faction of Queen Margaret of Anjou, led by the Duke of Suffolk, may have provoked the anger against him.  On the 3 May Suffolk was himself captured and beheaded on shipboard off the coast of Suffolk, while on the 29 June Bishop Ascough of Salisbury was killed while saying mass. In May, June and July rebels from Kent, Surrey and Sussex, led by Jack Cade, terrorised London until Cade was killed and the rebellion suppressed.

    You that love the commons, follow me / Now show yourselves men; ’tis for liberty / We will not leave one lord, one gentleman / Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon

    Jack Cade, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II

    Sentence of excommunication was intended to correct the culprit or culprits and was removed by absolution, after performing a suitable penance. Portsmouth, however, remained excommunicate for fifty-eight years, well after the Wars of the Roses had been and gone and with a new Tudor dynasty firmly-established on the throne. The exacting penance required is detailed in the records of the Diocese of Winchester. This took place in the hospital known as the Domus Dei, on the site of what is now the Garrison Church, and at the parish church, now St Thomas’s cathedral. As for other church records of the time, this was recorded in Latin, but Archdeacon Henry Wright, provides a translation, from which the following is an extract, where what drove them to seek penance is revealed. [2] Also observe the lengthy and theatrical nature of the ritual performed, the coming together of different religious orders to perform it, the importance of specific prayers, the Catholic idea of communication between the living and the dead, and the mix of communal and personal mechanisms towards the town’s absolution.

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