Observing the 80s

Partisan pasts: Left-wing approaches to recording the 1980s – Diarmaid Kelliher

Lucy Robinson — Tue, 20 May 2014 16:33:41 +0000

A long time ago I looked at Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners for my Phd. Although I included LGSM in my book Gay Men and the Left I had always felt that it was an important story of the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the history of the Miners’ strike that needed to be told. When I read Diarmaid Kelliher’s recent article ‘Solidarity and Sexuality’ I was delighted that someone had done it so well. I was even more delighted when Diarmaid agreed to write a contribution to the Observing the 80s blog.

Diarmaid Kelliher is studying for a PhD in Geography at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on London support groups during the 1984-5 British miners’ strike, and he has recently published in History Workshop on London Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.

I have been reading some debates on using archives for subaltern history recently as part of my research on support groups during the 1984-5 British miners’ strike. One aspect that stands out for me is a focus on how elites dominate not just the material recorded in archives but also the creation and governance of archives themselves (I am thinking, for example, of Pandey’s essay ‘Voices from the edge’). Clearly the kind of sources available for different places and times varies widely – but it does seem to me that this idea of ‘the archive’ as an elite creation is at best only part of the story for approaching 1980s Britain. In Theatres of Memory(1996) Raphael Samuel argued for a broader understanding of the way in which history is constructed. He attacked professional historians for fetishizing archival research while ignoring its conditions of existence, insisting that history was ‘a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands’ (p. 8). Samuel seemed particularly interested in the politically ambiguous ‘heritage’ industry – perhaps surprisingly, as the History Workshop movement in which he was so prominent is an example of what I am more interested in: a more explicitly radical, left-wing form of remembering and recording the past.

The History Workshop produced book on the miners’ strike, The Enemy Within: Pit villages and the miners’ strike of 1984-5 (1986), is a great example of this. It came out of a History Workshop conference held in February 1985 (a month before the strike ended) and – as well as analysis primarily from Samuel himself – includes letters between supporters and miners, transcripts of a speech at a union meeting, interviews, and reports from various people active during the strike. Though not simply celebratory, there is no doubt that the book’s sympathies lie with the miners. The History Workshops were, as Anna Davin and Luke Parks recently described them, ‘devoted to the study and development of “history from below” for use as a weapon in left-wing political campaigns.’ In Histories and Memories(2006), Tony Kushner argued that the establishment of UK Black History Month in 1987 emerged from the dual context of anti-Thatcherism and ‘history from below’. While Kushner focuses on migrant histories, I think this dual context is useful for approaching aspects of history/archive-making in this decade more broadly. For example, it was also in the 1980s that the Hall-Carpenter archives were founded to document the history of gay activism and life in Britain, developing from the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. One of the largest early grants came from the Labour Party run Greater London Council (GLC), which also helped fund the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in which the archive was based for a few years. Before it was abolished, the GLC was an important example of ‘municipal socialism’ – an attempt at a broad but radical left opposition to Thatcherism. Part of this project involved supporting initiatives such as Hall-Carpenter.

More directly related to my own work, I have done research on Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) during the 1984-5 strike, a group that raised funds primarily for the Dulais area in South Wales. Some material on the group is held at the Hall-Carpenter Archives (at the LSE since the late 1980s) but the largest amount is at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre in the People’s History Museum in Manchester. This raises two related but distinct issues around ‘political’ archives. The first is the institution that hosts it – The People’s History Museum developed from the National Museum of Labour History which was founded in the mid-1970s and dedicated to labour and working-class history. The Working Class Movement Library also has some material on the group – an institution which started life as the personal collection of Communist Party members Eddie and Ruth Frow before settling in its current Salford home in 1987. These are clearly then historical institutions with a political impulse from the left which should be understood as quite different from more official bodies such as the National Archives. But LGSM also provides an example of a grassroots activist group constructing its own archive. The LGSM secretary Mike Jackson seems to have been particularly involved in keeping the minutes of their weekly meetings, correspondence, leaflets, press clippings etc. which were eventually given to the National Museum of Labour History. Among at least some of the activists there was an early recognition in the group that what they were doing was ‘historic’ and for the need to record it. After the strike this archive was organised into an exhibition to promote what they had done to support the miners: the activity of recording, preserving and promoting after the dispute was therefore part of the political activity of the group.

The miners themselves were notoriously conscious of their own history, with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) playing a role in promoting this awareness. Throughout 1984-5 there were frequent references back to the 1970s and 1926 strikes. In the 1970s Kent NUM financially supported miner-historian Malcom Pitt‘s book on the regional NUM and its role in the 1972 strike The World on Our Backs (1979). The title page on my copy of the book reads: ‘Kent Miners’ Edition. Not for sale to the public.’ In 1979 Francis and Smith published a history of twentieth century coal mining trade unionism in South Wales, The Fed, commissioned by the area NUM. In a later edition (1998) the authors recalled the work being blamed for repeated strikes in the South Wales coalfield in the early 1980s before the national strike. This, as Francis and Smith suggest, was possibly exaggerating the effect of the book – but nevertheless the sense of tradition and history was important in the struggles of the 1980s. The preface to The Fed, attributed to the General Secretary, President and Vice-President of the South Wales NUM, summed up what they felt this historical knowledge should do: ‘We trust that this volume will assist our members in gaining a better understanding and appreciation of past sacrifices so that they, and succeeding generations, may strive more vigorously for the socialist society our forebears struggled valiantly to attain’.

There were a range of other endeavours in the period which weren’t framed in terms of ‘history’ but aimed to record non-elite lives and opinions and were clearly politically partisan. Examples can be found in alternative journalism and film-making. In terms of the miners’ strike, Tony Harcup has written about the ‘alternative press’ as an early form of citizen journalism during the dispute. He looked at the coverage of the strike found in Leeds Other Paper and highlighted a strong tendency to go to the coalfields and interview people, giving space to those ‘typically rendered “voiceless” in much of the mainstream media: that is, the “ordinary” men and women involved in the strike in the villages, on the picket lines, in the kitchens and in the support groups’ (p. 31). This echoes the typical concerns of ‘history from below’ with its emphasis on recording/uncovering the voices of people ignored in mainstream accounts. You can see this at work in some of the material on this website. In the ephemera section there is a pamphlet called ‘For as long as it takes!’: Cowie miners in the strike, 1984-5:it’s a clearly partisan account but a large proportion of it consists of interviews with the miners and their families in Cowie during the year.

One great source for looking at Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners was the documentary they made of the group, All Out! Dancing in Dulais. A leaflet in their archive describes this being shown alongside videos made on women’s and black support for the miners. There was a whole range of grass-roots film making going on, the best known being The Miners Campaign Tapes released a few years ago on DVD by the BFI. Similarly to the alternative press, the tapes were explicitly left-wing and on the side of the (striking) miners – they emerged out of independent film workshops that developed particularly through the 1970s. The tapes were a contribution to spreading the message of the strike and raising funds, but they also helped record the voices of the ‘ordinary’ people involved (as well as Labour politicians and NUM officials).

For someone researching the history of the political left in the 1980s with a broad attachment to the ‘history from below’ tradition, then, it is clear that a similar impulse was at work in a variety of contexts at the time. This film-making, journalism, self-archiving and so on, is part of what provides us with such rich material for thinking about the 1980s – giving us access to the lives of people who otherwise may well have remained hidden. But more than this, it was done with a strong sense of this being an important form of left-wing political activism, and is therefore itself part of the story of radicalism in the period.

Dunstan Bruce, and why is History so up for Anarcho-punk?

Lucy Robinson — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 13:59:51 +0000

There seems to be a lot of anarcho-punk knocking around historians. There have been a number of academic conferences and events around the politics and aesthetics of anarcho-punk, increasing numbers of academic publications, online resources, documentaries, homages, and the contemporary legacies of anarcho-punk seem to be woven through today’s Occupy and UnCut activism. These historical connections are often but not always embodied in the collectively organised band Crass. This year’s documents released by the National Archives included revelations of the government response to a hoax by Crass who faked and recorded a phone conversation between Thatcher and Reagan about strategy in the Falklands War. The hoax was momentarily thought to be the work of Argentine security services. In a context where there was little formal opposition to the Falklands War the hoax raises interesting questions for historians who are concerned with the limits of subcultural, countercultural or wider popular cultural production as a form of resistance. When the State responded to a countercultural prank as if it was part of their cold war security forces’ stalemate manoeuvres, then academic arguments about the extent to which culture is or isn’t related to ‘real politics’ don’t seem as abstract anymore. The way that anarcho-punk helps us slip through the cracks of the argument about whether subcultures are or aren’t really political seems to have some real purchase at the moment.

I’m not going to do a full on secondary literature survey here, but I thought I would just note some of the key texts that have been published over the last five or so years. Just glancing at the places where academic work on anarcho-punk gets published spoke to me of the ways in which we could use it to engage mutually with politics and cultural production: Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Socialist History, and Music & Politics, for example. Ian Glasper’s The Day the Music Died, used oral history testimony to weave together a chronology of the networks and spaces that map the diversity of anarcho-punk as a lived identity. Richard Cross’s work on Crass suggested to me what it was about anarcho-punk that has helped historians to use it to slip between models of political activism and cultural production more easily than other case studies. ‘Anarcho-punk’, he wrote, ‘lacked the strategic concerns, or the ideological and historical baggage of the formal anarchist movement, but it ignited the interest of tens of thousands of young punks with an anarchism visceral, passionate and angry, and through its insistence that punk rock itself might yet be refashioned into a revolutionary weapon’.(p2) Mapping networks, and valuing emotional connections as political experiences, aren’t just a methodological imposition on anarcho-punk; they were woven all the way through it. Although my own Phd research had been informed by George Mckay’s work, Cross wrote the first academic article on anarcho-punk that I included on the Thatcher’s Britain reading list, and his website The Hippies Now Wear Black is an invaluable resource. As the academic and wider analytical community around anarcho-punk has grown so have the digital connections between documents, posts and articles, so Cross’s article is now reposted on the Kill Your Pet Puppy blog, including critical engagement that has helped students position themselves in wider conversation about what is at stake when we write these types of histories. It has also allowed them to think about how it is that set piece narratives develop in historical and memory work – in identifying Crass as a starting point and key case study for the history of anarcho-punk, what other stories are flattened out? And what new set piece narratives are being consolidated? Worley’s work decentred Crass by using Discharge whilst positioning anarcho-punk as part of a wider historical analysis of how the cold war nuclear threat played out at both a global and local level. Pete Dale has pushed the focus beyond the retrospective, to begin the next stage of work on the legacies and events triggered by anarcho-punk. Dale helps us to start working out why there is so much anarcho-punk knocking around. Dale shows us why we all seem to think that ‘anyone can do it’ and why we are now investing in anarcho-punk.

All this work, and particularly my students’ growing engagement with it, has made me wonder what work anarcho-punk has been doing for us as historians – it seems to be helping us get at something that we couldn’t quite get at before. It seems to be getting us beyond some of the traps that we’d got ourselves into when talking, writing and researching about punk. Despite, or perhaps because, of the ever increasing amount of academic and popular history work being done on punk, we seem to be stuck with the standard hang-ups and largely reiterating a consolidated top down narrative. So, lots of the discussions have been around whether or not punk was ‘authentic’, or ‘art school slumming it’, whether it was ‘genuinely political’ or just a stylistic affinity. And despite the work of some brilliant female participant observer academics like Helen Reddington, you would be forgiven that there were really only about four or five women involved with punk and they spent most of their time wearing fetish wear and fishnet tights. The explicit nature of anarcho-punk’s engagement, with practical acts of solidarity, and theoretical as well as everyday engagement with the politics of sexuality, reproduction, industrial relations and cold war militarism does seem to help us out of the set piece positions beyond statements of style. The question for me is whether we will just turn it into yet another series of set piece narratives in the process. Sometimes the contradictions of teaching about punk in a university are, well, crass. We’ve trashed punk by artificially attaching rigid theoretical and political approaches to it, rehashing nostalgia led tales of authenticity and refashioning it into some form of traditional icon led history topped off with a new set of Dead White European Men. Now we’ve broken punk, bring on the anarchos and we’ll have a go at them.

These contradictions run all through my teaching about anarcho-punk, but so do the creative possibilities.; I’ve been using anarcho-punk as a way of teaching the history of cultural politics, with a focus on the importance of form and aesthetics since I started as a Lecturer at Sussex in 2007. In the masters course The Falklands War, we used it to think about the ways in which resistance to the war squeezed through the cracks of what Stuart Hall described as the ‘Authoritarian Populism’ of Thatcherism. One student on the first year this course ran, John Simpson, picked up on this theme and ran with it, literally to Dial House. Reading his term paper on anarcho-punk as a form of historical narrative was one of those teaching moments we dream of – he taught me the pedagogical possibilities of anarcho-punk and what can happen when students really do DIY.

Here is how John remembers what he got out of the research process and how it relates to his career as a journalist since graduating

“The anarcho-punk reaction to the Falklands War was an opportunity to explore the effect of fringe countercultures on broader society and to capture a period of history as reflected in its art. Music is a valuable primary source for historians, particularly in the form of protest songs, but presents challenges in that it is defined by the audience it reaches and the reception it gets. Punk music was the ultimate in provocative anti-establishment art, and its response to the Falklands was effective. Nowhere was it more evident than in the band Crass, whose song How Does it Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead faced calls in Parliament for a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act for its attack on Thatcher’s motives for fighting the war. The process of writing such a recent history was much like journalism – interviewing musicians, sourcing sales figures and using blogs and other online sources. Though the relevance of such a movement as small as anarcho-punk will be questioned, I think it stands proves and reproves itself as an important reflection of its time – the literal disharmony represents the fury of a disenfranchised youth in Thatcher’s Britain and the music captures universal outrage at the futility of many of the deaths of soldiers sent to the Falklands. Writing the paper also gave me the opportunity to repeatedly listen to Shipbuilding by Robert Wyatt, which although it isn’t anarcho-punk is probably the best protest song of all time.” John Simpson

Anarcho-punk also figures in my newest course Post-Punk Britain which is co-taught with Chris Warne and is in many ways developing into a sister project to Observing the 80s. It is a third year Special Subject course in which we use anarcho-punk to engage with ideas of space and of the implications of DIY sources for historians. Recent growth in the use of digitisation and social networking as forms of counter history and history from the margins have helped us access zines and writing that up to now might have been almost impossible for undergraduates to locate. The Special Subject is the course that most of our students choose to develop into their independent dissertation and despite the growth of academic work in the area locating primary sources can still be a problem. Kill Your Pet Puppy provides many of the sources used in that section of the course, as does Brighton based Schnews as well as some of the ephemera from Observing the 80s that was donated by Dunstan Bruce from Chumbawamba. I’m looking forward to adding Tom Vague’s digitised zines and writing from 1979 onwards to our reading on psychogeography next year and Matt Grimes’ forthcoming chapter on how we should relate the zine to the digital. As Matt Worley pointed out alongside the zines, the production of anarcho-punk records as propaganda, meant that they come with loads of useful texts, graphic design and images to be used as primary evidence. Alongside these sources the anarcho-memory boom also helps students engage with the ways in which memoir and memory have helped to structure the history of anarcho-punk. Memoirs by both Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant from Crass, and Boff Whalley from Chumbawamba are on the reading list.

One of our students, Jake Flynn’s dissertation has a particular affinity with this post, so I thought I’d ask him to add his reflections to it. His subject area is: There is no better time than the present to be a social historian; using anarcho punk as a means to construct a collective,

“My dissertation is mainly going to revolve around the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the way that the collective is constructed by both members of the subculture and by the historian. My justification for the use of anarcho punk as a means to unpack this relationship is that they were a subculture that refused to associate itself with the ‘system’ and resisted being incorporated into the mainstream, both musically and ideologically. Through the use of memoir/autobiography, biography and academic work that has been carried out, I am going to look at not only how anarcho punk established itself as a subculture, but how historians are able to use subcultures as a source of study in order to construct and reconstruct social history. This will all fall into my overarching argument that there is no better time to be a social historian than the present, due to the resources, methodologies and technologies that are now available to social historians.” Jake Flynn

With these strands of memory, narratives, participant observation, and representation in different types of evidence in mind I couldn’t resist ‘inviting’ film-maker Dunstan Bruce and ex-member of Chumbawamba to be part of the Thatcher’s Britain course. We pick up on anarcho-punk in our workshop seminar on different forms of resistance, and in the discussion of the Falklands War. Chumbawamba’s song on Clause 28 and the Alton Bill introduces the lecture on family values and feminism.

Dunstan takes over one lecture every year, shows sections of film projects that he is working on and we go through the history of Chumbawamba in a Q&A format. Although we always pick up on the miners’ strike, narratives around ‘selling out’ by signing to a major record label, the surprising experience of having a hit single, and challenging John Prescott at the Brit awards during the dockworkers strike, the format is always pretty loose. As a film maker and by virtue of ‘having been there’ the discussion slips between life history practice, (analysis of him and his memories as a type of historical evidence), and cultural commentary (analysis by him from the cultural practitioners point of view). I am delighted therefore that Dunstan has written something for this blog, reminding us that there is more at stake than an academic fresh new market, and reflecting on what he gets out of my ‘invitation’ to take part in Thatcher’s Britain.

“Ever since the inception of Chumbawamba in 1982 we always strove to champion the underdog, looking for stories that slipped through the cracks of history that would counterpoint the accepted version of events. Stories that illustrate the challenge, the struggle, the sacrifice and the small victories won against the odds that show that revolt, rebellion and revolution even, are constantly fermenting, and that there was and still is a culture of resistance.

I’m no academic but when Dr Robinson asked me to come and be part of her Thatcher’s Britain course at the University of Sussex, and talk about my own experience of the 80s I jumped at the chance. Here was an opportunity to give my own eye-witness account of the anarcho-punk world I grew up in and then specifically through my experience of the miner’s strike of 84/85 how my own political horizons widened massively and how that impacted on the methods Chumbawamba used to try and influence, firstly, the underground and then later, the mainstream.

It’s not just a one-way process though as the format of the class gives Dr Robinson the opportunity to input ideas and critique my responses which means that each year there is a new revelation or a new idea put forth, or a new interpretation of a collective decision that the band made. It feels like that the impact of what the band did changes in influence each year as we explore different ideas. And of course, each year I remember a different anecdote that illustrates some long forgotten idea which stimulates new thought on how politics and pop can combine effectively or how individual ethics may be compromised for the greater good.

It’s always interesting for me and always challenging; I think the dialogue between eye witnesses and a new generation of interested students is an essential and vital part of us reclaiming history from the accepted norm and helps to give a voice to those whose accounts are largely subsumed in the conventional narrative of accepted history.” – Dunstan Bruce.

UPDATE: Since publishing this blogpost Dunstan has embarked on a new and exciting music project. Whilst I’m not claiming the two facts are relating, Observing the 80s is officially an Interrobang? fan https://www.facebook.com/intrrbng

History 3490 at York University, Toronto

Lucy Robinson — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 15:31:04 +0000

The most exciting thing about moving into the second year of the Observing the 80s project is seeing how people are using the resources.

Project hero Prof Stephen Brooke has been inviting his students at York University, Toronto, to engage with the resources as part of their coursework for History 3490: 20th Century Britain in Film and Culture. Professor Brooke has written for us before and has integrated our resources into this year’s course’ focus on the 1980s – the intent was to use a variety of sources, some cultural (like Robert Wyatt, ‘Shipbuilding‘, The Specials, ‘Ghost Town’, documentaries like The Battle for Brixton [2006], and films like The Long Good Friday and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid), and some social and political, to think about the experience of the eighties. The Mass-Observation material was the basis for their research assignment – the students had to pick a subject and write a short paper on the basis of the directives, responses and meta data.

We invited the students to share their reflections with us. Here are the responses from Zainab Bari, Genevieve O’Grady, and Brittany Nolan who are members of the third-year history class on the history of Britain in the 1980s at York University, Toronto.

Zainab Bari: “Observing the 80s brings together a remarkable range of sources that offer insight into life in 1980s Britain. I used the site to conduct research for a history paper and was intrigued by the topics covered and impressed by the convenient manner in which they were organized. I feel that the expanse of primary sources the site makes available to the public is especially useful for people who were born after the 1980s, as it provides them with an alternative to experiencing life during the decade firsthand.

I find that I am particularly interested in the responses to the Mass Observation Directives, which is unsurprising, as I based my paper entirely on people’s accounts of the Royal Wedding in 1981. What I liked most about the responses was the fact that the authenticity of the sources has been maintained. As the diary entries have been made available in their original format, a number of them are handwritten and most of them are largely unedited. This leaves them open to interpretation and also offers further insight into the lives of the respondents by alluding to their age, social status or level of education.

I have yet to explore the recordings from the Oral History Collections and the documents from the University of Sussex Library, but I look forward to doing so. I will definitely return to the Mass Observation archive for additional reading, especially to read more of the special reports, which I believe add extra dimension to the participants’ responses.”

Genevieve O’Grady wrote “When Professor Brooke first introduced the assignment to the class, I was legitimately excited. Once I began to explore the site I was not disappointed. The material was easy to use, unique, insightful, and (most of all) it was fun. Observing the 80s is a well organized collection of invaluable material as the directives and responses bring the reader right back to the time of the event. Looking at the Falklands 1982 files, I gained access to the respondents’ thoughts, fears, concerns, and even family emergencies. I would recommend this site to anyone, whether they’re looking for research material or simply an interesting read. As a grateful student and amateur historian, I would like to thank those behind the collection and electronic preservation of these insights to the past.”

Zainab and Genevieve have very generously agreed to share their assignments with us. In Zainab’s paper The Royal Wedding: Its Impact on the British Public you will see that she has brought out the intertwined relationship between debates around national or familial institutions, and the personal – like the importance of making a nice cup of tea. Genevieve’s paper, Rule Britannia Observing the Falklands War through Mass Observation, builds from the two directives on the Falklands, thinking about how the archive guided content as well as the ways in which historians can use individual responses to think about how public sentiment can be evaluated. I felt that their papers and Brittany’s reflections exemplify the sort of creative possibilities students can bring to the project.

Brittany Nolan: “Extracting my own conclusions from the correspondents’ responses was refreshing. I did not have to rely on secondary material to write about the 1980’s—I just looked directly at people’s firsthand experiences during the decade. Mass Observation offers intimate perspectives to explore and the results were an informative but human analysis. It was great to be able to see the contrasts between correspondents’ responses. Some chose to focus on their personal experiences: going on vacations, buying new VCRs and becoming grandparents. Others barely mentioned their own lives despite the hardships they have might have endured. I think this contrast between correspondents’ different experiences is the most rewarding part of using Mass Observation.”

If anyone else has students who have engaged with the sources, please do ask them to contribute to the blog. Student collaboration was at the heart of the source selection and it is at the heart of the new meanings being constructed through use of the resources.

The History of the Falklands After Hobsbawm

Lucy Robinson — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 19:56:04 +0000

At the end of April I’m going to be presenting at the History After Hobsbawm Conference as part of a panel on Marxist and post-Marxist social history. Fittingly, I will be presenting a collaborative collective project on protest Political Protest and the Police: Young People in Brighton that I produced with Tom Akehurst and Louise Purbrick. We produced the report in response to what we had witnessed at the demonstrations in defence of further and higher education in 2011. There are clear echoes around debates about policing and protest in the 1980s and in more recent years. But there are also some methodological implications about what it means to record a movement from within, (or from very very close to the edge at least). One of the key issues raised by the protest project for me as an activist academic was to explore how traditional socialist history could fit in what seems to be a political world beyond the organised Left? What are the lines of difference and development between activist historians now, and the forefathers of radical history? So much of the contemporary history project has been informed by earlier generations of Marxist academics who worked through the political possibilities of academic engagement with the traditional organised working class. But politically engaged contemporary history today also embraces the complexity of taking individual identities, personal experience and testimony seriously, that might be more of a fit with present day forms of resistance around Occupy and lifestyle politics.

Working up to preparing for the conference (the other side of marking) whilst marking this term’s research proposals for 1984: Thatcher’s Britain made me wonder if I could pin down Hobsbawm’s contribution to Observing the 80s.

Eric Hobsbawm’s article ‘Falklands Fallout’ published in Marxism Today in January 1983 is one of the sources that was explicitly critical of the Falklands War at the time.

In Falklands Fallout Hobsbawm argues that the Falklands had been talked about more than any other recent issue, demonstrating that more people had ‘lost their marbles’ over the war than over anything else. In the absence of many personal lived connections between people on the mainland UK and the Falklands, people were incorporating the islands into their own narratives and concerns; around the nation, around memory and around the Left. One of the benefits of combining the different types of evidence in Observing the 80s is that we get to bring together lots of different types of talking about the war, that move between public discourse and personal exerience and engage with the cracks around mainstream political debate, so alongside Diana Gould and Tam Dalyell’s challenges to the legality of the sinking of the Belgrano, students explore the role of anarcho-punk as a form of anti war discourse, and of the use of the conflict by activist groups like the Socialist Society, Revolutionary Communist Party to create poles of debate, at least between each other. The life history evidence suggests more negotiated positions on the war, relatives of combatants challenge the price paid for the victory and the failures of the public to comprehend the importance of commemoration of the fallen, whilst maintaining the importance of military defence of the islands. Combatants themselves are critical of the politicians’ role in the war, and to some extent of the command decisions and power hierarchies, particular over equipment and communication. Whereas MOP respondents outlined different layers of analysis and evaluation. Some doubted the necessity and financial cost of maintaining the islands, others outlined the emotional politics of war describing feelings of ‘helplessness and incomprehension.’

For Hobsbawm, these narratives of past and present, however contradictory, in the form of ‘patriotism and jingoism’ could be used in Thatcher’s favour. The Observing the 80s collection suggests that experiences also encouraged people to question that narrative too.

Here is some more information about the conference

A major international conference, with plenary speakers and large parallel sessions, exploring where the study of history is heading and what it means to be an historian in the twenty-first century. Keynote speakers will include Mark Mazower (Columbia), Catherine Hall (UCL), Gareth Stedman Jones (Queen Mary), Chris Wickham (Oxford), Maxine Berg (Warwick), Rana Mitter (Oxford) and Geoff Eley (Michigan). The conference is organised by Birkbeck, University of London, where Eric Hobsbawm taught most of his life, and by Past & Present, which he co-founded. It will be held with the support and assistance of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities.

As Dr Brodie Waddell one of the conference organisers explained on her blog:

“It’s going to be quite an occasion – I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many big-name ‘Munros’ from the world of history on a single programme. Although the event will partly be a celebration of Hobsbawm’s legacy, it also promises to be a forum for leading historians to tackle big issues such as nationalism, protest, class, environment, and so on. I won’t attempt to list all the speakers except to say that I’m particularly looking forward to the panels on ‘the crisis of the 17th century’ (Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Geoffrey Parker, John Elliott), on ‘Marxist and post-Marxist social history’ (Andy Wood, Jane Whittle, Lucy Robinson), and on ‘Frameworks of historical explanation’ (Peter Burke, Joanna Innes, Renaud Morieux).”

The hashtag for the conference is #afterhobsbawm.

To register, visit https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/history/hobsbawm.

Bursaries are available for postgraduates

Using Observing the 80s – Dr Daryl Leeworthy

Lucy Robinson — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:32:12 +0000

One of the most exciting things about the Observing the 80s project is never quite knowing how and why it will be used. As a team we always felt that it was important that the raw data should be an open as possible in more ways than one. Not only is everything available under a Creative Common (CC BY) License we made the decision only to loosely order the raw documents around our themes, rather than have them tagged by key words or searchable. This was because we wanted to balance the integrity of the documents themselves, with our feelings that we shouldn’t try and second guess how people were going to use them. So really enjoyed seeing how Daryl Leeworthy had used the Observing the 80s resources in his blog post 1986: A Brief History of a Year that Changed. Its the sort of work that exemplifies the personal and political nature of the histories in our archive. He very kind agreed to share some reflections on how and why he used our resources.

Here is what Daryl wrote:

Nearly a year ago, I attended the Unofficial Histories conference organised by Fiona Cosson, Cath Feely and Ian Gwinn and came into contact with the Observing the Eighties project from the University of Sussex. I had used the Mass Observation Archive for research purposes since my PhD and was excited to hear of the materials available online as I steadily extended ‘my period’ from its inter-war heart to something that was able to encompass anything from 1850 onwards. It was with this in mind that in a recent post about my birth year over at www.historyonthedole.wordpress.com, a blog I’ve been running for nearly 18 months, I turned straightaway to the project’s website and began trawling through its holdings. Familiar themes leapt out at me, of course, from the Miners’ Strike to Thatcherism and beyond, but I was interested in people’s day-to-day reactions to events of an entire year and so I focused my attention on the diaries and directive responses submitted to the archive by volunteers nearly thirty years ago.

I found material about the Challenger disaster, about Chernobyl, about Thatcher’s deregulation agenda, about the World Cup in Mexico, to be sure. But I also found the gaps: nothing about the assassination of Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden, nothing about the emergence of Microsoft, nothing about the passing away of Harold MacMillan either. Proof that we historians often prioritise things that were much less important to the everyday lives of the people we lean on for our evidence – even though each of these themes was present in the newspaper and on the television and radio news broadcasts. But that’s the nature of contemporary history: it always runs the risk of someone saying to you ‘I don’t remember it that way’.

1986 – the year I was born – was a year of significant change and contrast: the sudden halt of the American space program, the launch into space of the Soviet space station, Mir; the assassination of Olof Palme on the streets of Stockholm, the peaceful passing of Britain’s last ‘Victorian’ Prime Minister; the destruction of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the rise of Microsoft and the home computer in the west; the hand of god in Mexico, the boycott of the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. The opening up of the Mass Observation archives by the Observing the Eighties project provided me with sources that enabled a balance to be struck between the privileged observations of the newspapers and the broadcast media and the relatively unprivileged observations of ordinary Britons. As that history begins to be written, this project leads the way in offering precisely those sources that historians of other periods both rely upon and lament the absence of. A truly inspiring insight, indeed!

Behind Bars; Observing the 80s at Lewes Prison

Lucy Robinson — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:17:04 +0000

Mass Observation has taken our work in many directions but in May last year we found ourselves entering a Prison…

( Image, Inside Lewes Prison – The Argus)

We had the idea of working with prisoners at Lewes, because back in 2011 we had put out a call to Prison Librarians nationally to encourage inmates to submit a day diary for our annual 12th May Day Diary event. This proved successful with over 14 prisons participating and the submitted diaries are now held within our archive and have been used on numerous occasions for teaching and group visits.

So, in partnership with East Sussex Library Service, we worked with Poet and workshop facilitator Evlynn Sharp to deliver three 2hr creative writing workshops that drew upon Observing the 80s as inspiration for creative writing exercises. As an experienced facilitator in prisons nationally, Evlynn was our much needed guide!

The challenge we faced was the restriction on technology and the internet in prison, so our workshop plans needed considerable creativity! This presented us with an appreciation that the term ‘open access’ does not in fact extend to all and certainly not to those in Prison.

The result, with the skill and warmth of Evlynn, was a truly inspiring, moving and educational experience for all of us involved.

It was like stepping into the unknown as we approached the impressive prison gates. Being reminded by the staff on duty that in wearing a lovely floral scarf, we were ‘asking to be strangled,’ brought home the potential risks.

In fact, in reality, the Prison library building was a perfectly formed, small room which felt comfortable, safe and secure. Very much like a local community library.

The first session took place before our 12th May Day Diary call, so it was a good chance to talk about the diaries we had received from prisoners and encourage them to write their own. The sense that they were being given a voice and that this could be heard amongst the thousands of voices within the archive was powerful.

From the start, the group were very open and keen to share their stories and their experiences, all fully engaging with the activities. The enthusiasm shown in undertaking exercises and sharing their stories, is perhaps suggestive of the limited scope for creative out put and cathartic writing in prison.

We talked about Observing the 80s and shared some duplicate examples of MOP materials. The Observing 80s materials were used as thematic starting points for the creative writing exercises and for prompting discussions about 1980s and MO itself. Some of the men talked about their regrets for the lives they lived during the 80s and the choices they made which had led to their incarceration.

The writings produced were raw and at times moving. It was quite an experience to see one of the participants physically change from an awkward agitated state to one of more calm, with a sense of pride in his writing. Evlynn’s ability to validate their work in her encouraging style visibly enhanced their self-esteem.

• Energetic, powerful, emotional

• I found the ability to write for experienced, sympathetic listeners to comment really eye opening

• Fun, friendly, positive

• It helps to reflect on how we feel and how we can move on

We are very keen to explore this work further if funding is successful, so watch this space!.

Kirsty Pattrick, MO Project Officer and Suzanne Rose, MO Education and Outreach Officer

Suzanne Rose

Kirsty Pattrick

Footloose and the Politics of Pleasure

Lucy Robinson — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 17:52:30 +0000

Image courtesy of UCU Sussex, Lewis Nielson one of the students currently facing disciplinary action at Sussex.

Youtube film courtesy of verymovingpictures

This post is a little bit different from usual Observing the Eighties posts, although it is certainly informed by the diversity and possibilities of our project.
I don’t usually engage with the autobiographical in this blog, and part of our initial inspiration for Observing the 80s was to try and move beyond the cliches of pop culture retro versions of the 1980s. But I recently gave a speech as part of UCU industrial action that made me think again about the ways in which the eighties as a period and the current context speak to each other. I had proposed that Union members and students shared our two hour strike on 28th January by watching the 1984 film Footloose. I’m not sure how I got away with it, but I did. Here is how I explained why to those who came to watch the film.

You can read the speech below or watch the film of the event

Why Footloose?
Personal, Political and Collective
When I first saw this film it changed who I was politically. I know that sounds odd. I’d been brought up within the Labour Party, and in Trade Unions. I’d been on marches since before I could walk, had run away to Greenham Common and raised money for the striking miners. I was very well brought up.
But I knew, I’ve always known what Emma Goldman and Sophie Ellis Bexter have taught us – If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
When I watched Footloose in the mid 80s, I was already sick of the poseur punks, the subcultural snobbery of the self elected folk devils. I recognised that their distaste for the poppiest of popular music was the same snobbery as the previous young generations had felt from their parents. I also knew it was gendered. Girls like pop so it can’t have any meaning. I’m not claiming that Footloose is a metaphor for our specific conditions here at Sussex – if I wanted a direct metaphor I would have probably gone for Dolly Parton’s 9-5 in terms of foregrounding the extent to which inequality in Higher Education is gendered, managements attempts to divide us and the everyday acts of sisterhood that have got so many of us through our day.
Footloose was released in 1984. In a nutshell Footloose plays out standard intergenerational conﬂict and teen censorship through the relationship that develops between small town pastor’s daughter and wild child and the boy from the city (with a dubious reputation) Ren McCormak played by Kevin Bacon. The assumed danger from the city and moral contagion associated with McCormak and his single mother, is in fact nothing to the brooding fear of small town life. The small town has banned dancing in response to a tragedy, the fear of the outside escalates to classic moral panic levels.
The city boy helps organise an alternative high school prom, and challenge the ban. The scene where Ren challenges the pastor using the bible – is reminiscent of court dramas, its even a bit to kill a mockingbird.
So why this film? I am not claiming any revolutionary working class authenticity in Kevin Bacon’s footwork. Nor am I interested in re-running arguments about Brecht and Macherey’s models of revolutionary art. But, the kids in this film win because they use the systems own words against it. They shine a mirror back at The Man. It is a film that wants to tell us that moral condemnation is the product of fear. Fear of a collective, bigger, stronger, more energetic and with better moves than the system. That austerity is an artificial mechanism to stop free thought. It is a film in which research has a genuine role in social justice. It is film in which a group of young people don’t just bemoan the inability of the system surrounding them to fulfill their needs – they do it themselves. They build the world they want. It is a film that puts pleasure at the heart of politics.
So, collectively. What I love most about this film. Is that my comrades invited let me play it to you all as part of this industrial action. That is what a university or a community should be. Where the passion of one can be shared, valued and maybe even enjoyed by the many. There is a well known game, The Kevin Bacon Game’. In it the assumption is that Kevin Bacon is only six degrees removed from any other actor. The degrees of separation between us beat that – we are not only connected. We are one!
Collective action, trade union membership have never been about economics alone. As the women textile strikers in Massachusetts told us in 1912 we want bread but we want roses too. We might be legally only able in this context to strike over our pay but this strike is about fairness, it is about gender inequality, it is about privatisation, it is about exploitative contracts. So Like Ren McCormack, Emma Goldman and Rose Schneiderman, I don’t just want fair pay, I want fair conditions for all of our community.

So I say to management We’ve got Ren McCormack – Who have you got?

ICA Debate on Counterculture

Lucy Robinson — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 22:03:45 +0000

Here is a recording of last Summer’s debate on Counterculture at the ICA which I shoehorned the 1980s into.

Has the world changed, or have I changed? The Queen’s Speech and Christmas ‘from below’ in the 1980s

Lucy Robinson — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 18:41:14 +0000

About a year ago I posted the Observing the Eighties first Christmas message. We were still in the snagging stage then. A year later the project is up, running and being used in ways we hadn’t even imagined. It seems appropriate to hand this year’s Christmas Message over to someone who has something new to say and has been using our archive in innovative ways – Sussex history postgraduate: Owen Emmerson.

Has the world changed, or have I changed? The Queen’s Speech and Christmas ‘from below’ in the 1980s

by Owen Emmerson

In the wake of Graham Stewart’s best-selling ‘Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s’ , the use of the Observing the 1980’s resources during our MA seminars has enabled us to think beyond the top-down ‘high-politics’ narratives that are being offered about this relatively un-historicised period. Such accounts of the 1980s openly dismiss ‘the unreliable memories of those who shaped the period’ – namely politicians – let alone those termed ‘the people’. Statistics of participation, such as those who watched the Queen’s speech, are offered as an indication of enjoyment and compliance, over the documented opinions of those who experienced them. The central thread of our particular course was explore ‘The People’s Century‘ by means of these often overlooked life histories, and to think critically about how and why historians have utilised life history within historical research. By focusing upon the digitised day diaries submitted to Mass-Observation from Christmas day 1986, we were able to explore how seemingly ‘iconic’ moments that dominate contemporary retrospectives of the 80s, such as the Queen’s Speech, were experienced.

During 1986 Thatcher famously refused to take sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid, the Queen allegedly thought her ‘uncaring’ for doing so, Andrew married Fergie, The Smith’s released The Queen is Dead and famously half of the population tuned in to watch Dirty Den serve Angie with divorce papers in Albert Square on Christmas day. The majority of Mass-Observer’s were amongst those who watched that particular EastEnders Christmas special, and the vast majority also were counted within the 28 million viewers who watched the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. It is clearly significant that nearly half the population watched the Queen in 1986, but in both top-down and retrospective narratives the significance is often held within the size of the statistic alone. Beyond their participatory role within making up these statistics, the day diaries of observers allow us to understand why they chose to do so, and crucially what they thought of their experience. Their responses problematize the suggestion that 1986’s Queen’s speech viewing statistics were demonstrative of a nation ‘predominantly in tune with the Monarchy.’

Whilst the majority of respondents mentioned the Queen’s Christmas Speech as a feature of their Christmas day, for many it was noted as a contentious tradition. Many took umbrage with the unorthodox location of the broadcast (The Sandringham Mews) whilst others felt the lengthy ‘Dickensian’ introduction with roasting chestnuts and horse drawn carriages was ‘daft’. Respondent W729 noted that she watched the speech with her mother whilst the men, who didn’t wish to watch it, washed up. She mentions none of the content, nor if she enjoyed it, but states that it is nice ‘not to feel guilty about sitting down for 10 minutes.’ Similarly respondent C108 doesn’t mention any appreciation of the speech, but states that she heard it whilst finishing the preparations for her lunch at 3:30. N403 opted out of the speech and instead tackled a Rubik’s Cube. L1002 also details that she was a participant, and also notes that ‘most of the men folk think this is a “bind” and want to watch something else’ but that she ‘likes to hear what she has to say’. She is, however, critical of how un-relaxed the Queen appears, and thinks that 10 minutes is ‘too short!’. However, respondent W633 listened to the speech on the radio, and was moved that the Queen’s message of ‘starting with love in our own homes’ had been the ‘thoughts going through my mind during the periods for private prayer in church.’

Coupled with the fact that there were only four million people in the UK with more than three other channels to choose from, and that viewing figures rapidly declined after a surge in Sky subscription in 1987, the Queen’s speech on 1986 was perhaps the last in which many impartial viewers sat through it. These respondents are counted within the statistics of those who watched this event, and yet the varied and detailed responses to it give far greater depth of understanding of its significance to, and an insight into what people’s participation actually equated to.

Reasons to Cheerful: ESRC Festival of Social Science

Lucy Robinson — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 15:22:39 +0000

On Friday 8th November I introduced and chaired the ESRC Festival of Social Science sponsored event ‘What is Happiness?’ organised by Mass Observation at the Quadrant Pub, Brighton. On a rainy, dark, Friday evening four different academics sat in the pub to talk about how their work illuminated the idea of Happiness. The project’s resident blogger has responded to the overall session, and the discussion, but I thought I’d share part of the introductory talk I gave. After introducing the Observing the 80s project generally I talked about what I might have gathered about happiness from Observing the 80s, and why it has made me so happy to be involved.

Partly Observing the 80s made me so happy because working with the team, as a collaboration was a way to get away from the individual isolation and anxiety of lone research. Obviously because the team are so lovely. But also because it brought together two things that whilst not perhaps causes of happiness per se, mitigated against unhappiness – and an absence of unhappiness is sometimes enough. They both relate to conditions of work and networks of people.

The first is the relationship between teaching and research, and indeed between staff and students. Often the two are rather at odds. One getting in the way of the other, or one being privileged over the other, by top down policy. For me blurring the boundary between the two was a genuine source of happiness; students as co-researchers, and teaching as a form of research. It felt like a reflection of the creative potential between the different elements of my work.

Secondly Observing the 80s produced the sort of outputs and connections that bring people together. Rather than hefty academic tomes, we produced , a youtube channel, spotify playlist, infographics and a facebook timeline. Its led me to go off in new directions, thinking about why the 80s is a list. Why listing, controlling and ordering things makes us happy. But also thinking about how social networking allows us to collaborate and interact with lists. Subsuming our lists of friends, links, photos into wider lists. Allowing people to connect, share ideas, and find recognition of their own interests in the contributions of other. I suppose here I’m alluding to the idea of happiness as a process of self-actualisation – of feeling like we are being who it is we really are, or becoming that person as a key to happiness.

Ok so beyond why the project made me happy – what did it teach me about happiness? I think these two points, self-actualisation, being who we think we are, and interconnectedness, being with those we think we should, are useful things to keep in mind.

I thought I’d explore two MOP directives that invited people to evaluate what had impacted them most, and think about how the values given to events correlate with their emotional significance – in other words with what makes people happy.

The Autumn 1986 directive invited respondents to reflect on the year 1986, particularly with a focus on the relationship between media representation and ‘experience’. In fact the responses suggest a complex relationship between the two. With how things were represented and how things were experienced blurring together. Similarly respondents read public events through their domestic experiences.

In the Spring 1990 directive, respondents were invited to produce a retrospective of a pre-defined period, the whole of the 80s. Again their experience is posited against media representation. With public events marked against a more linear sense of personal domestic change.

When I read through both sets of responses one of the things that jumps out is the sense of actual, possible, or just avoided, disasters. 1986 saw the Challenger Space Ship Disaster, Chernobyl, and Hillsborough for example. The roundups of the decade in 1990 broadened these specific disasters out to more general concern about the environment, homelessness, AIDS and Famine. Not a lot to be happy about it seems. But in between these public concerns MOP shows moments of public and private happiness were being found in hopes for the future; a child’s first steps, or the marriage of children and birth of grandchildren were marked and celebrated alongside the marriage of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew.

The public and private are understood in complex ways. Sometimes the public is understood through its impact on the domestic, individual, familial and everyday, sometimes the personal provides insight into the public. Each both links and boundaries. F1373F AUT1986 sums up the relationship ‘When looking back over this year the things you remember most are events which affect you personally or make you angry, happy or sad’. So a new porch can sit alongside Catherine Cookson’s 80s Birthday, Chernobyl and Myra Hindley (F1145F AUT1986)

So one of the men, H1369 AUT1986 finds that he has very little sense of engagement with the public world. The year was ‘overcast by [his] first year’s experience as a full time father’. Remembering the challenger disaster largely because it fell on his 10^th wedding anniversary and squeezing his daughter first walking in his numbered list between Chernobyl and the Superbowl.

Even one respondent who begins by called the 80s a ‘sinful decade’ is able to find first hope, and then personal happiness. He finds hope in the lessons learnt from the decade in terms of environmental awareness. But he finds happiness in elements of his life that bring people together. He writes of the ‘highlights’ being his children’s health, and that they are ‘enjoying life’. Taking pleasure in his family’s happiness.

On Jazz he wrote

‘I’m delighted to witness a resurgence of jazz music in Britain, a music that brings black and white people together, both to listen to and to play a music that can bring great pleasure.’

We have been crowd sourcing a playlist of songs about or that induce happiness. It is a collaborative spotify list so please feel free to add your music to the mix.

With these thoughts of the happiness of bringing people together I moved on to introduce our speakers, Annebella Pollen, Emily Robinson and Ben Jones.

Photos by: Kevin Reynolds, at VeryMovingPictures