Childhood in coalfield communities from c. 1945 onwards

By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson

Accounts of how childhood has changed in the decades since the 1930s often focus on negative shifts – children are often thought to have become more consumerist and less respectful of their elders. As Mathew Thomson’s book Lost Freedom suggests, from the late 1970s onwards children were allowed much less freedom: no longer allowed to play out all day with their friends, but rather stuck inside, and increasingly parked in front of a screen. But Mary’s words suggest another shift, a much more positive one. When Mary reflected, in an oral history interview in 2018, on how she had parented her own daughters (born in 1965 and 1962), she focused on a positive shift, an increased desire to recognise and nurture each child’s individual personality, a desire to have a closer relationship with each child.

This is a major theme that has emerged from an oral history project we conducted, with Research Associate Dr Victoria Dawson, between 2018 and 2020. The project examined the experiences of women from coalfield communities and mining families in the miners’ strike of 1984-5, but interviews did not focus solely on the strike; rather, we conducted life-story interviews encompassing everything from youth to the present day. We interviewed nearly 100 women, mainly working-class women from mining families born between 1944 and 1968, from coalfields across Great Britain. The main interviewing areas were East Scotland, South Wales, Kent, Nottinghamshire, and South Yorkshire; this interview material thus gives us insights into the experiences – as children and later as parents – of working-class women from communities across England, Wales and Scotland in the decades after 1945.

The sociological studies of John Newson and Elizabeth Newson, conducted in the 1960s,  suggested that there was a shift in working-class parenting styles underway, with many parents aspiring to a more friend-like and playful relationship with their children: they used physical discipline less and wanted more open and communicative relationships with their children. The oral history research of Selina Todd and Hilary Young suggests similarly that many working-class parents in the later 1950s and 1960s, far from participating in a “moral panic” over the development of new forms of youth culture, were instead pleased that their children had more disposable income, more leisure and more freedom than they had had as adolescents. Our research supports these conclusions, suggesting, furthermore, that these shifts in approaches to mothering among working-class women were often the result of a rebellion against their memories of their own childhood, and that shifts in parenting practices were bound up with a broader shift to focus more on the development of the individual. This shift had roots in the 1950s and 1960s, and intensified in the 1970s and 1980s.

Many of our interviewees emphasised that when they had their own children, they wanted to place love and communication at the heart of family life. “Veronica”, for example, who was born in 1946 and lived in Nottinghamshire, remembered that ‘my mother never showed me any affection whatsoever, and I always showed my children affection’. Many of our interviewees rejected the idea that children should be “seen but not heard”. “Polly”, born in 1944 in the midlands, said she wanted her children to have ‘the love that I felt I didn’t get’, and to know they could ‘talk to me about anything’. Adrienne C. (1956) recalled that her childhood home was ‘very busy, and very – little time for individual needs’, but said she had been determined to do things differently with her own children. Valuing and developing each child as an individual was, thus, at the heart of these new parenting practices.

As sociological and historical studies suggest, the acceptability of corporal punishment declined from the 1960s onwards. Many of our interviewees suggested not only that they rejected corporal punishment as a means of disciplining their own children, but also that they wanted to inculcate in their children a new attitude to authority in general. Tanya Dower, for example, born in 1967 in South Wales, thought her mother, ‘because of her cultural experience, her upbringing, I don’t think she believed that she could do what she wanted to do, rather than do what was expected of her’. Tanya felt she had been socialised in a very similar way, but she said she had tried to encourage her own daughter to think differently: ‘to question things, where my mother taught me perhaps not to do that’, just to ‘keep your head down’. “Elizabeth Ann”, born in 1943 in South Wales, said she was ‘determined – or trying anyway’ to bring her own children up ‘to be questioning, not to accept authority just because they were authority’.

This shift in parenting styles was a gradual one: some interviewees felt that in their childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s they were encouraged to express themselves and seek individual fulfilment; some who were young in the 1980s felt they had been expected to be “seen but not heard”. While in some ways the 1980s marked a distinctive shift in experiences of childhood – in particular, this was a period where children were given much less freedom to roam outside their homes in the way children had in earlier decades – in other ways the 1980s marked a culmination of trends which had begun in earlier decades. In our interviews, a general trend emerges from the 1950s to the 1980s and 1990s: many of our interviewees described a shift over time to reject what they came to see as “traditional” or “old-fashioned” parenting styles, and instead to embrace a more affectionate, communicative style of parenting. Importantly, this was premised on the belief that it was important to value each child’s unique personality, their needs, desires and individuality. In the 1980s and 1990s, stigmatisation of the poor and the working classes in Britain grew, as Thatcherite rhetoric emphasised what she called the “bourgeois” virtues; one part of this was a growing chorus of criticism of working-class mothering. Listening to the memories of working-class women, however, the story that emerges is one of gradual positive shifts in the practice of motherhood.

You can hear extracts from our interviews at our online exhibition.

To find out more about women in the miners’ strike, download the exhibition essay.

References

Mathew Thomson. Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
John Newson and Elizabeth Newson. Childhood Into Adolescence: Growing Up in the 1970s. London: Routledge, 2019.
Selina Todd and Hilary Young. “Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’.” Cultural and Social History, 9:3, 451-467, 2012.

Read more about women’s activism in the miners’ strike

Fiona Measham and Sheila Allen. “In defence of home and hearth? Families, friendships and feminism in mining communities.” Journal of Gender Studies, 3:1, 31-45, 1994.
Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson. “‘Side by Side with Our Men?’ Women’s Activism, Community, and Gender in the 1984-1985 British Miners’ Strike.” International Labor and Working-Class History, 75(1), 68-84, 2009.

About the Authors

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century British History at UCL. She is an historian of twentieth-century Britain. Her PhD examined political and popular ideas about class in England between c. 1969 and 2000.
Natalie Thomlinson is Associate Professor of history at Reading University. She is an historian of feminism and gender in modern Britain, and her work is fundamentally concerned with how both of those categories are mediated through race and class.

Cite this article as: Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson, “Childhood in coalfield communities from c. 1945 onwards” in Changing Childhoods, 15 September 2020, https://changingchildhoods.com/childhood-in-coalfield-communities