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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Vicky Long (Northumbria): Industrial Homes: Domesticating Factories in Interwar Britain

In the early 1920s, the nascent profession of industrial welfare attempted to reconcile nineteenth-century arts and crafts ideals with a new era of mass production by replicating domestic spaces within factories. Drawing on advertisements, factory plans, descriptions and photographs of factory spaces, this paper explores how welfare supervisors sought to recast the antithetical relationship between the domestic sphere and the institutional workplace through the provision of gardens, kitchens, dining rooms, bathrooms and restrooms. Home-like workspaces were designed to facilitate the expansion of female labour while curbing industrial unrest. Adopting a maternal role, welfare supervisors used the disciplinary construct of the factory family to mould behavior and maintain hierarchical relations. They expressed the belief that the factory environment could be transformed to shape the interiority of its inhabitants: concerns that workers had become alienated cogs in the machine could now – in theory – be redressed through artwork, décor and the inauguration of spaces which facilitated social interaction. Photographs of such spaces frequently point to a compromise between domestic and industrial space, in which industrial features were only partially camouflaged by flowers, curtains and artwork.

Over the course of the 1920s, a symbiotic relationship developed between domestic and industrial space, blurring the boundaries between home and work. Policy makers, architects, advertisers and women’s groups embraced mechanization, mass-production methods and scientific management practices as liberating forces which could resolve housing problems and ease the burden of domestic labour within the home. In so doing, they reconfigured home space and workplace as mutually reinforcing rather than oppositional. By the 1930s sleek modernist factories eclipsed Arcadian visions of the homely garden factory as the appeal of industrial welfare lost ground to the practices of scientific management and industrial psychology.

The paper presented here is an abbreviated version of an article forthcoming in Journal of British Studies in April 2011.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Krisztina Robert (Roehampton):
At Home in the Armed Forces: Living Quarters of the Women’s Services in First World War Britain and France

Between 1917 and 1919 the British military experienced a massive influx of female auxiliary workers into their ranks. As members of the government-established Women’s Services, they released soldiers for active duty by replacing them in military support jobs and thus helped relieve the manpower shortage of the armed forces. Requiring the integration of some 90,000 women into the exclusively male world of the military, the scheme represented a radical initiative in the history of warfare. Consequently, it attracted significant opposition at the time. Members of the public were anxious about the impact of the rough martial environment on the auxiliaries’ femininity, while military officers worried about the softening effects of women’s presence on the fighting capacity of soldiers. For the success of the scheme, it was vital to win over both parties. Since anxieties focused on the lack of an appropriate environment for women in the forces, the authorities and female corps leaders sought to reassure opponents by creating a new type of military accommodation for women. The paper explores this process by examining the living quarters of the female auxiliaries. Focusing on their dormitories, ablution and recreation facilities in hutted camps and hostels, it analyses the design, material culture, control and habitation of these locations. I argue that in their effort to satisfy critics’ conflicting demands, the authorities and female corps leaders combined elements of domesticity with military principles in their design and regulations. The resulting martial female accommodation exemplified a new ideal of modern living characterised by comfort and homeliness, but also by simplicity, utility and hygiene. The paper also explores corps members’ experience of inhabiting these environments. It concludes that members’ class background had a significant impact on their ability to adapt to their new living quarters and alter their material surroundings.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Mary Clare Martin (Greenwich):
Refuge or prison? Girls’ experiences of a “home” for the mentally defective in early twentieth century Scotland

While many institutions founded in the nineteenth century emphasised their “home-like” character, with the passage of time, and greater numbers, a much more regimented organisation might develop. This paper will analyse the experiences of inhabitants of Waverley Park Home, Kirkintilloch, founded in 1906 by the Glasgow Association for the Care of Defective and Feeble-minded Children. While survival of records is uneven, this case-study presents valuable insights into the lives of the 526 inmates as well as staff, before the home was handed over to the National Health Service in 1948.

Early annual reports, from 1915-18, were quick to emphasise informality, the absence of uniforms, and children’s freedom to play. By the 1930s, with over 100 inmates, even the schoolteachers considered it was too regimented. Staff were subject to dismissal, if, as in one case, they stayed out all night. Between the ages of 16 and 21, children left the school and worked in different domestic tasks, for which there were different coloured aprons, and which were also stratified according to ability and behaviour.

Some inmates subverted the regime in a variety of ways. There are more references to fighting and violent behaviour than to friendships. Some escaped, or got into each others’ beds at night, while workmen complained of sexual advances being made to them. The ever-present possibility of punishment might seem to have produced an intimidating atmosphere. Yet others considered it as “home”, and would beg to be allowed back. The case-notes, though refracted through the perceptions of “professionals”, indicate the poverty, dislocation and severe health problems encountered by many children before admission.

In conclusion, this paper will consider whether such an institution could function as a “home” in the early twentieth-century context, paying due regard to the shifting and diverse meanings of the concept.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

William Whyte (St John’s College, Oxford)
‘An essential part of the best kind of University training’: Halls of Residence at the Civic Universities, 1900-1950

In the first half of the twentieth century, the hall of residence became a distinctive and important element in student life at the ‘Redbrick’ universities. It became, in fact, ‘An essential part of the best kind of University training’. Hall life, it was argued, would help create community, foster academic excellence, and instil a proper university spirit. This paper will explore the halls and the debate they engendered. It will counter those writers who have seen in the halls nothing more than a fruitless imitation of Oxbridge, arguing instead that the halls of residence were part of a distinctive Redbrick university life. It will examine the rules and regulations of the halls – and especially their design, looking at the ways in which those who built them and ran them sought to inspire occupants with a sense of university community. It will also attempt to assess how students responded to these ideals.

Although neglected or disparaged by most other writers, I hope to show that these establishments provide a unique insight into civic university life in this period. The hall of residence was, on one hand, a marginal place: it was not central to the actual process of studying at university; it had to negotiate the difficult balancing act of being distinctive but not separate from a unified institution. On the other hand, the hall was seen as a vital component of university life: the solution to many of Redbrick’s problems. The tensions and opportunities that this ambivalence created will not only illuminate the halls themselves but also shed light on the wider question of what inhabiting institutions actually means.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Michelle Johansen (Raphael Samuel History Centre):
Inhabiting London’s Public Libraries c.1890-1914

Charles Goss (1864-1946) was chief librarian of Lewisham rate-assisted library in south-east London from 1891 until 1897. In 1897 he was appointed chief librarian of the Bishopsgate Institute, a library and cultural institution situated on the border of the City and the East End. Goss remained in charge at the Institute until 1941.

In 1895, Goss co-founded the Society of Public Librarians (SPL), a group of thirty-plus London librarians who met monthly until 1930 to discuss professional issues and offer mutual support and friendship. Examining the SPL archive alongside the writings of Goss, it becomes apparent that the inhabitant experience enjoyed by Goss at Lewisham then Bishopsgate reflected the experience of others of his generation of public librarians. Here was a cohort of young men utilising particular elements of their working environments to augment their relatively fragile socio-cultural status as subaltern professionals.

Between 1890 and 1906 almost eighty new rate-assisted libraries were opened in London. Many included residential provision for the librarian in charge: purpose-built apartments, located over or alongside the library buildings. The available evidence suggests an imprecise boundary separated the private from the public arena. Goss and his SPL colleagues possessed their own book-lined studies. These officially public spaces were sometimes used as an adjunct to their private homes, the setting for social gatherings and club meetings, wives and daughters on hand to assist with refreshments or provide entertainment after the evening’s business had been concluded.

My paper will use the case of Goss and his SPL colleagues to describe the experience of institutional living in the first public libraries in London. It will show how these librarians exercised agency in influencing spatial provision to accommodate their own needs and desires and it will indicate how class, gender and age all played a part in this particular ‘inhabitant’ process.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Susan Skedd, (English Heritage)
Everything necessary to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge’. Eighteenth-century girls’ boarding schools and their contribution towards the institutionalization of education

This paper proposes to cast new light on how boarding schools for girls were conceived and managed as educational institutions during the period 1700 to 1840. The growing number and popularity of boarding schools took place against a backdrop of continuing and often heated debate about the competing merits of public and private education, especially for girls. One of the strategies used by boarding school proprietors to address and allay parents’ anxieties about sending their children to a public institution was to emphasise the private and domestic nature of their particular institution. From the evidence considered in this paper, it could be argued that such concerns directly influenced the size, setting and organisation of girls’ boarding schools in the eighteenth century, which in turn created institutional norms that were perpetuated in the reformed boarding schools established from the 1840s onwards.

Drawing on the promotional literature created by boarding school proprietors and the testimony of pupils and teachers alike, this paper will examine how an institutional setting offered girls new opportunities and experiences, both academically and socially. Furthermore, it will look at the physical environment inhabited by boarders and staff, both in terms of the architecture of the school buildings – which were only in a few instances purpose-built – and also the rural or urban setting of these establishments. Finally, this paper will consider the similarities and differences between eighteenth- and late nineteenth-century models of schooling and suggest that girls’ boarding schools played an important part in normalising education as an institutional activity that took place outside the home.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Ayla Lepine (Courtauld Institute): Manifesting the Rule: Designing for Monasticism in Victorian Oxford

The Rev. R. M. Benson established the monastic community of the Society of St John the Evangelist in Oxford in 1866. Men who joined the organization were subject to its strict and ascetic rule. The forming of religious institutions such as these was a consequence of the Oxford Movement – a product generated from within the intellectual culture of the University – and its members’ advocacy of a controversial return to pre-Reformation theology and rituals in the Anglican church. This paper seeks to consider the Order’s buildings and liturgical vestments designed by the architect George Frederick Bodley from the 1866-1905 as strategic extensions and reflections of its institutional identity, taking its surroundings and social contexts into account.

G. F. Bodley’s church, cloisters and textiles for the Society of St John the Evangelist attempt to provide a cohesive sacral aesthetic to describe the relationship between God and humanity. These materials are therefore manifestations of conviction: they enclose, enwrap, protect, deflect, and most importantly proclaim. The blurring of simultaneously inward and outward tactics will be explored through analysis of Bodley’s designs with reference to Benson’s lectures on monastic life from 1870-74 and recent scholarship on architecture and theology, especially Timothy Gorringe’s understanding of dwelling as assertion of corporeality and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s analysis of the domus in urban modernity. The discussion will pair Lyotard’s argument for a fluidity of being where ‘it is in passing that we dwell’ with Benson’s assertion that, ‘the religious life is not a mere kind of spiritual aristocracy…But [it] is a real dedication of the soul to God, parting with all that is in the world’. Consequently, this paper will investigate the emergent Victorian negotiation of anxious tensions between corporeal desires and spiritual aspirations in a semi-cloistered homosocial community.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

British hospitals in the nineteenth century were more than simply medicalised spaces.  While hospitals touted the expertise and the medical skills of their physicians and surgeons as well as the modern equipment and scientific methods that were used, hospitals, especially those that catered to patients with chronic symptoms or convalescing patients, were also residential institutions.  This paper shifts the focus of the hospital onto the residential interior and looks at the living practices in hospitals.  First, it shall discuss the material culture of the hospital spaces from a variety of sources including nineteenth-century images of hospital interiors found in annual reports.  Then, the analysis of these images will be compared to the descriptions found in newspaper clippings of hospital openings, with the numerous material gifts given by benefactors listed in annual reports and with a set of narratives written about patients that indirectly referred to the patient’s homelife.  This paper shall argue that to some extent, the domestic paradigm was adopted within hospital spaces.  This paradigm was intended as a pedagogical tool to encourage middle-class domestic values and christian morality.  This paper shall draw on the archives of St Thomas’s Hospital (London), Evelina Hospital (London), St John & St Elizabeth’s Hospital (London), Providence Hospital (St Helens) and St Mary’s (Stone)

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Event Date:
14 and 15 September 2010
11 Bedford Square, Royal Holloway (Central London)

Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950

Matthew Newsome Kerr (Santa Clara University ):
Pauperised by the Public Health?: Taste and Citizenship in London’s Infectious Disease Asylums, 1871-1891

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, nearly 300,000 Londoners passed through a period of hospitalization as a consequence of contracting an infectious disease. The Metropolitan Asylums Board (founded 1867) possessed thousands of beds for the isolation of smallpox and fevers. Periods of detention lasted from a few weeks to a few months. As a Poor Law body, the MAB hospitals were ostensibly for paupers only; but, as no other public hospitals existed for isolating infectious persons, during epidemic periods they tended to contain patients from a variety of classes. In a legal sense, every hospitalized sufferer was automatically pauperized by virtue of being an inmate, with all the social stigma and political disenfranchisement implied in that term. The pauper regime notoriously valorized deprivation and parsimony in the name of vigilantly protecting the interests of ratepayers. Principles of the New Poor Law stipulated that distributions of parochial relief be subject to the “workhouse test” to deter the undeserving poor from seeking assistance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, patients from the very beginning voiced objections to being treated like paupers. But specifically they complained most vociferously and repeatedly about the quality and quantity of the hospitals’ food. I argue that it was upon this register of “taste” that criticism of the institutions’ Poor Law governance crystallized. Taste – both physical sense and social distinction – became the almost universal gauge of institutional living. Indeed, by this time, food had been for decades a key measure by which the pauper was abjected. Distastefulness had sensorially and morally haunted the pauper since Dickens’s screed against the workhouse system in Oliver Twist. MAB patients who grumbled bitterly about the monotonous and unappetizing menu demonstrated that refined tastes could not be accommodated within the Poor Law. In a real sense, disliking the food and complaining about it was one way of refuting the pauper label and asserting claims to untainted citizenship.

What is most surprising is that these criticisms did not remain merely instances of internal disgruntlement. Allegations of mistreatment and insufficient nourishment sparked a series of explosive public scandals between 1871 and 1891, each of which were widely remarked in the public press and prompted official investigations that were also widely reported. These inquiries provide a rare glimpse into the everyday routines of hospital life from the patients’ perspectives. Further, they emphasize the contentious nature of poor relief at this time, especially in its relationship to public health reform. Protests over hospital food were an unmistakable measure of the essentially non-pauper composition of these pauper hospitals. The right to decent food whilst in isolation eventually combined with the notion that hospitalization for sickness was a right held by any ratepayer. Taste became a fault line in the negotiation between pauperism and sanitary citizenship, a cultural component in the genealogy of the welfare state.

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