"Moving on," men and the changing character of interwar working-class neighborhoods: from the files of the Manchester and Liverpool City Police

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2004 by Joanne Klein

The history of English working-class culture has relied on oral interviews, court records, newspapers and middle-class charity records since ordinary working-class people rarely left behind written accounts of their lives. Elizabeth Roberts, Ellen Ross, and Melanie Tebbutt have used such sources in their path-breaking work on the lives of working-class women (1) and Andrew Davies has in his impressive study of the leisure of working-class men and women. (2) An untapped written record of working-class life, the investigations of complaints made to the Manchester and Liverpool City Police forces in the 1920s and 1930s by working-class people about their police neighbors, expands and refines the patterns they found. Even though these records are hampered by missing interviews, contradictory testimony of neighbors, and policemen doing the interviews not always comprehending the dynamics of neighborhood quarrels, the letters, interviews and petitions from personnel files and disciplinary report books bring to life vivid incidents in working-class neighborhoods. The police evidence is by nature negative but nevertheless indicates who was involved in neighborhood disputes, what expectations people had about their neighbors, and how they tried to enforce neighborhood standards.

From this evidence a more complex picture of working-class neighborhoods between the two world wars emerges. While women remained the main presence due to their responsibility for domestic life, men were also present in neighborhoods, defending their wives and families as well as threats to their masculinity. This supports and builds on Catherine Hall and Joanna Bourke's conclusions that men were becoming more involved at home after the First World War. (3) With more families moving in and out, unlike more stable prewar neighborhoods, both women and men tried to secure congenial neighbors, with strategies and tactics designed to support good neighbors and pressure unsatisfactory neighbors to conform or move out. The increasing involvement of men made these struggles more acrimonious than they might have been with only women present. Generally speaking, neighbors desiring quiet and privacy had less success in imposing their will on more sociable people and were more likely to be forced to move. Regardless of improvements in standards of living, attempts to impose a more reserved idea of neighborliness experienced difficulties in displacing the existing, more outgoing culture when the two ideas were in conflict. When Constable Jones got tired of Mrs. Woods' habit of asking him where he was going, and told her to "Get in you old hag. What the h--has it got to do with you where I am going?", he was the one compelled to move elsewhere after Mr. Woods protested such rudeness to his wife. (4) While conflicts between competing families or factions might be centered on privacy or noise on the surface, underlying problems often involved perceptions of subtle differences in status and respectability in jeopardy. A shift in the dynamics in neighborhoods was clear. Unlike the more stable and homogeneous streets that Ross found in pre-war London, post-war neighborhoods were slowly losing long-term residents and becoming more diverse and variable; men were spending more time with their families and were more entangled in neighborhood interactions, resulting in disputes becoming more full-blown.

In many ways, the basic picture of working-class neighborhood life remained much the same as that which existed before the First World War. In crowded conditions, neighbors recognized the necessity for similar standards of conduct along each street or block. A comfortable life required a common awareness of space, including noise and boundaries. Streets could be noisy, quiet, tidy or casual. Neighbors could be gossipy or keep to themselves. Children could be subdued or boisterous. Wives developed diverse survival networks to help each other from one pay period to the next. (5) Each area created its own character. Then during the 1920s and 1930s, working-class families began to move more frequently due to improvements in transportation, construction of new housing, and changing job markets. The character of established streets and survival strategies evolved as families came and went. Usually this happened slowly as new families both adjusted to and modified local standards but occasionally a sharp change could throw a street into confusion. A family could be perceived as abruptly lowering the status of a street or as flaunting its superiority over existing residents, creating anxiety over respectability. If a new family was too different from a street's character, neighbors did not suffer in silence, but started campaigns of complaints, arguments, and harassment to enforce conformity. New families trying to impose their own standards on streets fought back with similar tactics. If different standards became too aggravating, efforts could be made to force families to move.