85
Book
ReviewBoth
Warning and Memorial: a Major Book On Working-Class LifeThe likes of us: a biography of the
white working class. Michael Collins, 2004. London: Granta Books; ISBN 1862076006,
240 pp., £12, paper
SAGE Publications, Inc.2006DOI: 10.1177/09675507060140010502
ValWalsh
Michael
Collins was born in Walworth, southeast London, in 1961, and has written `the
inside story of a tribe on a particular reservation and during a particular
period, as told by an erstwhile native son' (with special thanks to his dad
in the Acknowledgements). His age, class and gender are significant ingredients
and vantage points within this biography: `A native attempt to take an audit
of the area and its inhabi- tants, including my family, from the early nineteenth
century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and to cast an eye over
those afore- mentioned missionaries who attempted to bring about change' (p.
11). Collins' tripartite structure further evokes a sense of ethnographic
quest. `An Excavation', `An Evocation' and `An Expedition' draw you in through
history and auto/biography, as he identifies southeast London as `an educational
desert' of `destitute and depraved children' (p. 30) with 68% below the poverty
line in the 1890s (p. 44); `a culture created in isolation, distinct from
the official culture of the country' (p. 54). Stigma, social and economic
disadvantage, marginality, disruption, endurance mark this story; as well
as `lives of love and perseverance' (cited p. 80), lived in conditions of
gruelling poverty, indefensible overcrowding and inhumane working conditions
(p. 101). It was in the 1930s that Collins's grandmother, `an efficient working-class
housewife' (p. 118), whose story threads through the book from beginning to
end, reached her lowest point since losing her first child, a two-year old
son: `Even though she and Bill were in work, their incomes could barely help
them sustain a decent standard of living. The bills piled up, and she seriously
considered suicide' (p. 119). The familiar features of white
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working-class
lives in the early nineteenth century and into the 1930s are given an extra
edge by the way that Collins ties his own family history to class history
throughout his narrative. Object of scrutiny, subject to change The slum journalism
of the 1880s and the slum fiction movement a decade later would take the circumstances
and materials of working-class lives as their impetus, just as social and
religious missionaries and `radicals' saw them as material for conversion:
as ever, the object of inquiry, disparage- ment, policy and intervention.
Unlike the languages of recent immigrants, `the local dialect, native to the
working-class Londoner' (p. 85) was not a heritage to be respected in school.
The Conference on the Teaching of English in London Elementary Schools, 1909,
reported: `The cockney mode of speech ... is unworthy of being the speech
of any person in the capital city of the empire' (cited p. 85). Would my father
(two at the time and growing up in the East End of London) have been aware
of this stigma later in life, I wondered? Or did his socialist politics protect
him? After all, in the 1930s, `within the upper classes there emerged a gen-
eration that positively embraced the idea of the proletariat' (p. 113), if
not their actual bodies. And while, according to upper- and middle-class observers
(pp. 115, 123, 126), neither the politics of fascism (upper-class offspring)
or socialism (upper and middle class) attracted `the working man', those in
the working class were deemed to have revolutionary potential by those who
documented, theorized and sought to direct their lives. Collins counters with
an insider's view (p. 11): This class more than any other is inextricably
linked with the concept of home, a street, a neighbourhood, a community. Yet
historically, the landscape of the urban working class has been subject to
more change than elsewhere because of redevelopment, the arrival of migrants
en masse, and incessant attempts to accommodate its dense population. Mass
culture, consumer goods, no books After the long build-up of the opening section,
`Excavation', it is clear that Collins's book is more than the audit he announces
in his Preface. He tracks his `tribe' from their `reservation' to `the satellite
suburbs of south-east London' (p. 10); then, in the 1980s, the mass exodus
spilling further afield into Kent (p. 207). Despite more affordable consumer
goods towards the end of the 1930s (p. 128), and the beginnings of `mass culture'
and consumerism in the 1950s (p. 137), Collins notes that `the working class
... did not become
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middle
class and continued to have little contact with those from other classes'
(p. 151). Even the younger generation of Southwark `held fast to many of those “older” values, living by habit, aphorism and ritual, adher- ing to an oral tradition'
(p. 152). Collins's childhood spanned the 1960s and 1970s, and he notes: `like
most of the neighbours, we lived in a home where no one bothered with books'
(p. 170). There are many such jolts to the system throughout the book. I found
myself regularly checking: what was I doing at the time, what were my circumstances?
And thinking how lucky I was to grow up with books, education and politics; and without the shadow of poverty. Cinema (from 1917, the year of Chaplin's
Easy Street, through the boom cinema years of the 1920s and 1930s), radio
(from 1922) and then TV would make greater inroads into working-class culture
and habits than reading books. These could be accommodated as family and community
activities, as opposed to the solitary and individual nature of reading, which
signals the beginnings of `separation' and difference within the white working-class
family. Suzanne Moore's mum used to say when her working-class daughter showed
signs of growing up `shiny': `Suzanne's reading. She's a bit depressed' (Burchill,
1998: 62). And reading may be a greater risk to working-class masculinity,
being both associated with middle-class lifestyles and identified as effete.
The class and gender connotations and the social and political significance
of reading (and therefore not reading) cannot be overstated, as Julie Burchill
notes in her own autobiography of a white working-class childhood: It looks
like the most passive activity known to man; people who give `reading' as
their hobby qualify themselves as automatic wallflowers. Yet reading has rocked
more worlds, turned more heads, changed more lives than sex, drugs and Nintendo
put together.... If you don't read books, you really have been fucked over
in a major way.... To read, voluntarily, is the first step to asserting the
fact that you know there is somewhere else. (Burchill, 1998: 46) But for those
white working-class boys who had not already adopted read- ing as a significant
and pleasurable activity, reading has perhaps been somewhat bypassed in this
function by the visual media: by film, TV and advertising, which now promote
`see and buy/be'. From the outset, thanks to hire purchase and rentals, the
majority of TV sets were in the homes of low-income families. And `seventy
percent of those with TV licences had not been educated beyond the age of
fifteen' (p. 171). This is how `information from the global village flooded
into family homes' (ibid.). Working-class writer Richard Hoggart would mourn
what he saw as the corruption of [white] working-class culture and values
by the mass media.
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The fact
that white working-class boys in numbers still refuse to read suggests that
social isolation, cultural insularity and territoriality remain persistent
features of traditional working-class masculinity, which men in general accept
and/or identify with (see Walsh, 2005). Writing nearly fifty years after Hoggart,
Collins shows the situation to be more serious, more damaging, more complex
than Hoggart foresaw in his own ground- breaking book, The Uses of Literacy:
unforeseen and different. Englishness: citizens, natives, immigrants After
1960s classlessness and 1970s multiculturalism (p. 221), `race was embraced
and class relegated to the back burner' (p. 222), and after the economic,
demographic and political changes of the 1980s, it became evident that: `Many
of the urban white working class saw themselves more as part of an ethnic
group united by colour and culture [pub, street market, street, football],
than as a class united by their work' (pp. 188–89). The social and
political consequences of this were unforeseen by politicians and commentators,
who do not see the white working-class `diaspora' (p. 80) as an uprooting:
a consequential loss, not just of community and place (a geo- graphy), but
of the roots of white working-class identity and its attachments (auto/biographical
meaning). Reading Collins, it feels like a wound, ignored at our peril. And
that `our' is all-inclusive. Significantly, the book's Preface, `Everybody's
Obituary', takes as its point of departure the murder of young, black Stephen
Lawrence, in southeast London: `what became apparent in the aftermath of the
inquiry was that reports on racism had segued into a demonization of the white
working class' (p. 8). This injury is the trigger for Collins to put the record
straight, and signals his deep purpose. His account is both raw and astute:
simultaneously an accumulation of compelling detail and a kind of mourning; moving to explicit indictment, particularly in the hard-hitting final section,
`An Expedition', in which he is scathing about the role of the media and other
cultural movers in the misidentification, marginalization and demonization
of an indigenous population: these native sons, his tribe, his community.
He cites the fear and failure of white middle-class professionals to challenge
the demonization of white working-class people in the midst of multiculturalism.
And now, the undeniable unlov- ability of the ranting white working-class
racist is allowed to drown out the fact that (p. 223): Modern-day white working
class had a more varied, more honest, more intimate experience, having known
non-whites as lovers, muggers, husbands, killers, wives, victims, neighbours,
rapists, friends, foes, attackers, carers. For decades, the urban white working
class had largely
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been
educated in multiracial schools, worked in multiracial environments, and lived
in multiracial neighbourhoods. White working-class people have proved their
`tolerance' and adaptability on the ground, despite initial fears. By contrast,
Collins `names and shames' (a roll-call of `left' establishment artists, critics,
commentators), and asks: `What could be a pain-free Englishness that wouldn't
upset the sensibilities of any of the nation's citizens in these post-imperial,
multicultural, EU days' (p. 229). `Us English' have been airbrushed out by
`multicultural rebranding' (p. 263). For the natives themselves, the greatest
threat to white working-class culture was not mass media or American-style
consumerism, but `the arrival, en masse, of black immigrants' (p. 189). The
spotlight fell on the issue of Englishness, which the white working class
were said to be as attached to as the aristocracy. This has been my experience
of the tribe, who see patriotism, even nationalism, as an extension of their
attachment to a street, a neighbourhood (pp. 228–29). Collins's biography
culminates in a social and political time bomb, which renders his book as
itself incendiary. Loss, exile, opportunity Collins wants commentators and
readers to look deeper: at the foundation of white working-class views that
express a sense of having been ousted, becoming foreigners at home, of being
second class. And he reiterates `the insularity and attachment to place that
defines the white working class, and which is born of a lack of opportunity'
(p. 237, emphasis added). In the final pages, there is poignancy, as he and
several former neighbours look back and recall: `That ubiquitous eye of the
neighbours that helped cocoon us as kids, translated into nosiness and interference
when we were adolescents, and how it seemed to be checking for a code to which
we were expected to conform, and which appeared to threaten any ambitions
beyond the familiar and the well-trodden, when we were heading for adulthood'
(p. 254). Born in 1959, two years before Collins, Burchill has also testified
to this `trap', and the particular form it would take for a white working-class
girl in Bristol in the 1970s: `death by matrimony' (Burchill, 1998: 19). The
issues of class and literacy, of class and language, of reading as access
to and engagement with mainstream culture, remain contentious, not just because
so many working-class children (and boys in particular) still fail to achieve
sociolinguistic confidence in a `native' language which still counts as an
`other' language, another culture. Oral tradition is internal to the tribe; it does not serve communication with Others, rather it serves to define `outsiders'.
In these circumstances, cultural participation
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as opposed
to consumerism, and social/political dialogue as opposed to insularity, are
problematic, even objectionable. `I don't do dialogue with the middle class',
one Mersey activist retorted to me online, after, on stum- bling into what
felt like a boys' playground of fighting and conflict between various `left'
activists, I suggested dialogue and alliance (as opposed to macho linguistic
and communication styles) as vital ways forward! There's a fixity about this
stance, which is both futile and scary. Money can be acquired without the
loss of class identity and allegiance: without class guilt. However, reading
and education are cognitive, cultural processes with significant and complex
consequences, not just for employment. For example, for white working-class
people there are risks of both public exposure/failure to achieve, and (worse?)
`class betrayal' (see Walsh, 2005). Take-up of higher education (particularly
by working-class boys, black or white) is still low, and the white working
class has split into those who have entered the middle class via education,
and those who have become (labelled) lower middle class via money (p. 208).
Collins points out that moving nearer the rural areas into better housing
and cleaner air, has not endeared the latter to the middle and upper classes,
including their erstwhile `promoters' on the left (pp. 208–10). Belonging
Unlike Hoggart before him, Collins identifies whiteness as crucial to his
narrative about working-class identity and culture, but like Hoggart, his
working-class is a default masculinity, which he fails to make explicit or
reflexively interrogate. This has the effect of subsuming white working- class
women within the men's lives, as happens, and fails to highlight gender as
a significant social and psychic difference within white working-class narratives.
While Hoggart and Collins are preoccupied with oral tradition, loss and social
justice, the auto/biographical testimony of women from white working-class
backgrounds demonstrates different motivational drives: `my mother's longing
shaped my own childhood', writes Carolyn Steedman (1986: 6). Shame, `shameless
defiance' (Steedman, 1986: 2), desire and exile (see Steedman, 1986; Burchill,
1998; Walsh, 2005) feature prominently, and as gendered phenomena, understood
as specific to life as a working-class woman. But I knew that my life couldn't
go on as it was. For a long time now ... I had felt as though I was in exile....
Yet how could I be – there I was, living in the house I had lived in
all my life? I was in exile, obviously, from the life not yet known; the life
which was meant for me. (Burchill, 1998: 89)
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There's
an unsentimental and focused fierceness that informs many white working-class
women's leaving of territory which not only never felt like theirs, but which
is identified as a danger zone to them as women. `I knew as surely as I knew
my own name that if I stayed I would get fucked, pregnant, married. And after
that I wouldn't get anything but old' (ibid.: 45). A woman does not mourn
such a necessary departure (see Walsh, 2005). I draw this contrast because
it is the rising crisis in white working- class masculinities which haunts
Collins's narrative (not least because it is not made explicit). Throughout
the period covered by Collins's biography, society had avoided the entwined
issues of class and gender, and the relationship between masculinities; the
situation is now daunting, even life-threatening on the street. I was reminded
of an incident on an underground station platform one evening in Liverpool
recently. I had politely asked a passing young man to remind his friend, who
had gone ahead of him, that this was a non-smoking area. He turned on me:
`Where do you come from? You're not local, are you?' (I've lived here probably
twice the length of his life.) When I asked why he was so obsessed with where
someone comes from, he replied aggressively: `We're tribal, this is our territory,
we're like dogs. You don't belong here.' Identifying me as `not belonging',
trespassing on his territory, was clearly about class, gender and neighbourhood.
Our common whiteness was an irrelevance. This book is both warning and memorial.
It has the potential to alter our understanding of what has happened and why,
and help us move away from the impulse to criminalize rather than understand:
to acknowledge a part in this process of social breakdown. Collins gives us
`a story worth telling' (p. vii) in the form of a biography which requires
more than reading. For readers need to position themselves auto/biographically,
to identify their position and responsibility within this unfinished story.
Where does it leave us? We've had `neglect and punish': what are we going
to put in its place? Are we up to it? Can we be bothered? How much time do
we have?
REFERENCES
Burchill, J.
1998: I knew I was right: an autobiography. London: Heinemann.
Steedman, C.
1986: Landscape for a good woman: a story of two lives . London: Virago Press.
Walsh, V.
2005: Shameless: art, politics and auto/biography. Paper for presentation at Auto/biography Conference: Defining
Identities. London Institute of
Education, 14/15 July.