Inhabiting Institutions in Britain, 1700-1950 – conference page

in Academic Service - Archive by on September 15th, 2010

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

Tuesday 14th September
Spaces and Institutional Structures



Workhouses
  • Jeremy Boulton (Newcastle):
    Paupers and their experience of a Georgian workhouse: St Martin in the Fields, 1725-1824
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Alysa Levene (Oxford Brookes) :
    Family life and London workhouses in the later eighteenth century (AUDIO HERE)
  • Alannah Tomkins (Keele) :
    At Home in the Workhouse? The View from Working-Class Autobiographies, 1780-1920 (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 1 questions .

Institutional environments and boundaries

  • Fiona Fisher (Kingston):
    Viewing the institutional interior through the pages of Living London (AUDIO HERE)
  • Jane Hamlett & Rebecca Preston (Royal Holloway):
    Spaces and Material Cultures in Charitable Lodging Houses in London, 1840-1914
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Stephen Soanes (Warwick):
    “The Place was a Home from Home”: Patient Identity and Belonging in Cottage Homes for Convalescents, 1910 – 1939 (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 2 questions .

Asylums

  • Louise Hide (Birkbeck):
    People in their place: space, gender and class in the late 19th century asylum (AUDIO HERE)
  • Clare Hickman (Bristol):
    “Conceive a Spacious Building Resembling the Palace of a Peer. Airy, and Elevated, and Elegantly Surrounded by Swelling Grounds and Gardens”: The role of the gardens in domesticating the environment of the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Katherine Rawling (Royal Holloway):
    Asylum Snapshots: Institutional Photographic Practices and Patient Images at Holloway Sanatorium, Surrey, 1880-1910
    (AUDIO HERE)
  • Anna Shepherd (London):
    The Domestic Environment as Therapy in Two Surrey Asylums’ (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 3 questions .


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Wednesday 15th September
Living in Institutions


Material cultures

  • Matthew Newsome Kerr (Santa Clara University ): 
    Pauperised by the Public Health?:  Taste and Citizenship in London’s Infectious Disease Asylums, 1871-1891 (AUDIO HERE)
  • Carmen Mangion (Birkbeck):
    ‘a bright home to the little ones’: Late-nineteenth-century English Hospitals and the domestic paradigm (AUDIO HERE)
  • Ayla Lepine (Courtauld Institute): 
    Manifesting the Rule: Designing for Monasticism in Victorian Oxford (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 4 questions .

Education

  • Quintin Colville (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich): 
    Designed, inhabited and exploited: the naval training establishment HMS Ganges, 1905-1950 (audio not available)
  • 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 (AUDIO HERE)
  • Michelle Johansen (Raphael Samuel History Centre): 
    Inhabiting London’s Public Libraries c.1890-1914 (AUDIO HERE)
  • William Whyte (Oxford): 
    An essential part of the best kind of University training’: Halls of Residence at the Civic Universities, 1900-1950 (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 5 questions .

Home in the institution

  • Mary Clare Martin (Greenwich): 
    Refuge or prison? Girls’ experiences of a “home” for the mentally defective in early twentieth century Scotland (AUDIO HERE)
  • Krisztina Robert (Roehampton):
    At Home in the Armed Forces: Living Quarters of the Women’s Services in First World War Britain and France (AUDIO HERE)
  • Vicky Long (Manchester): 
    Industrial Homes: Domesticating Factories in Interwar Britain (AUDIO HERE)
  • panel 6 questions .

Round table (AUDIO HERE)

Speakers: Sandra Cavallo (Royal Holloway), Virginia Crossman (Oxford Brookes), Sue Hawkins (Kingston), Andrea Tanner (Kingston) others TBC

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

in Academic Service - Archive by on September 15th, 2010

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


Living in Institutions

Home in the Institution

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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