Barbara Wootton

Carol Dyhouse’s book is concerned only with girls, and mainly with those drawn from middle or upper-class circles, although she makes one substantial digression in which she contrasts their educational history with that of their working-class contemporaries in the elementary schools of the day. Stephen Humphries’s story, on the other hand, theoretically covers both sexes, though boys and youths loom larger than their feminine counterparts, and his horizon does not extend beyond the working classes. Both stories are exceedingly well documented, but whereas Dyhouse draws largely on written memoirs, biographies and other published studies, Humphries justly observes that most of what has been written about working-class youths of earlier generations has not come from the subjects themselves, and therefore necessarily presents interpretations of working-class culture by middle-class outsiders. His book is an attempt to redress the balance by ‘rewriting the history of working-class childhood and youth largely in the words of working-class people who themselves experienced it between 1889 and 1939’. Since, however, few such people have left written records, Humphries’s data have been almost exclusively gathered from interviews with men and women now of advanced age (there cannot be many who go back to 1889) recounting childhood experiences.

Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual’. For this she suffered a strong sense of guilt, as she earnestly believed that ‘whatever my mother might be, it ought not to make the slightest difference to my feelings and behaviour towards her. Honour thy Father and thy Mother was one of the greatest of Christ’s commandments.’ Nevertheless, as the eighth daughter in a family of nine girls and one boy (who died in infancy), Beatrice did sometimes feel neglected by her parents’ preoccupation with her older sisters’ numerous courtships and marriages.

The final entry in Volume One of this diary, dated 23 July 1892, left Beatrice safely married to her Sidney, but lamenting that, according to current convention, as ‘Mrs Sidney Webb’ she would lose both her names. The next entry is dated 16 August and is divided between a brief reference to two delightful days of ‘real honeymoon in the Wicklow Hills’ and interviews with trade-unionists in Glasgow and elsewhere relevant to the History of Trade Unionism, which was to be their first joint book. As soon as this volume was completed, its authors felt the need for some sociological analyses to explore the background of the events which the History had recorded. They immediately set to work, therefore, on a study of ‘industrial democracy’. To Beatrice, however, this proved a less engaging task, though the pace at which one book was intended to succeed another was reflected in the fact that the diary’s announcement on 30 April 1894 that ‘our book comes out tomorrow’ was followed less than three months later by a lament about ‘not getting on with our book’. As it turned out, however, ‘industrial democracy’ proved such an awkward subject that the finished product did not reach the publishers for another three years.

Fifty-eight years ago the man we now know as Sir David McNee was born in dire poverty in a Glasgow tenement. His father was a railwayman, and a staunch tradeunionist who rose ‘through a variety of jobs’ to be driver of many famous trains, including the ‘Royal Scot’. His mother was the daughter of a railwayman. In this book Sir David reports how he has often had occasion to refer with pride to these facts in later life, in face of suggestions that, as Metropolitan Commissioner of Police, he had no real insight into the problems of working-class life with which that office so often brought him into contact: ‘the lessons learned in Glasgow streets and tenements … taught me a lot about human nature which a more affluent and protected childhood might not have done.’