When I started to teach at Ruskin, I was very shocked at the ways in which students were treated, adult students, worker students. And they were treated as being sort of under-privileged, educationally retarded people who had somehow or other to be dragged up to the level of university entrance. Well, to me, these people were politically my comrades. They were people who were then the same age or older than me, whom I found impossible to treat as… lesser intellectual beings or human beings, and so from very early on I was concerned with trying to find forms of collaborative work, and ways in which their experience could be brought to bear on their history. I mean, I found that there were all kinds of realities that I was attempting to address in history which in some sense they already knew. I mean… I read passages in class from The Journeyman Engineer (Thomas Wright) – written in 1868 or thereabouts – about the inner life of the workshop, and they already knew all that, even the vocabulary.
And at the same time, in the 1960s there were various efforts being made to liberalise the teaching syllabus, to introduce project work and ‘learning by doing‘, and to broaden history in inter-disciplinary ways and I suppose to escape from the aggressive and narrow professionalism of history.
Ruskin had been very radicalised indeed by May 1968: it had been radicalised before the rest of Oxford; it had been radicalised, as a matter of fact, before the student revolt in Paris. But in Ruskin, democratisation of knowledge really meant something. Whereas in some other places, the student revolt presented itself as a revolt in part at least against learning, in Ruskin it was a revolt for learning.
Transcript of a discussion between Brian Harrison and Raphael Samuel at the home of the latter, 23 October 1979

At Ruskin, a College of mature students, recruited from working men and women, the History Workshop was in the first place an attempt to replace the hierarchical relationship of tutor and pupil by one of comradeship in which each became, in sort, co-learners. The object was to ‘demistify’ the leaning process and put students on a par with the authorities. Retrospectively one can see that it was a rather cunning device for turning absolute beginners into apprentice historians.
Raphael Samuel, “Editorial Introduction”, History Workshop: A Collectanea, 1991

This is the first History Workshop pamphlet. The pamphlets are based on History Workshop meetings held at Ruskin over the last four years. They have been written by worker-students, and collectively they represent an attempt to bring past and present into dialogue with one another. We hope they will encourage working men and women in other parts of the country to take the writing of their history in hand, instead of leaving it to the Academy or allowing it to be lost.
Raphael Samuel, “Preface” to Frank McKenna, A Glossary of Railwaymen’s Talk, 1971

This pamphlet is about a trade that is dying. Coopering was an important trade in the past. But little is known about it, and practically nothing about the working life of coopers. So far as I am aware there is no autobiography of a working cooper, past or present.
There is a book on the coopering craft, published in 1845, but it is about how barrels were made rather than about who made them. Henry Mayhew wrote about the trade in 1850, in the Morning Chronicle; the Webbs collected a lot of material on it during the 1890s; and so did Charles Booth. But they were outsiders looking in, and they missed a great deal. Mayhew, for instance, writes about the wine vaults, but doesn’t say anything of the drinking that went on there – a gap which pleasant personal experience enables me to fill. All three mention coopers’ earnings, but they don’t explain how price lists worked. It is only when you have hand-jointed a stave, and experienced yourself the difference between Chestnut and Russian Oak, that you can understand.
Without Anna Davin’s patient work unscrambling my long sentences this pamphlet would have been much more difficult to read. My thanks also to Raphael Samuel, who has been my teacher, companion and fellow explorer. Surprisingly firm beneath a gentle exterior, Raphael painstakingly taught me to wield a pen as easily as a coopers adze and to read an old manuscript with the same ease as a piecework price list. If this pamphlet gives pleasure, the reader should thank Raphael; if it gives pain, he should blame me.
Workers’ control (the workers’ capacity to control over the labour process) is little more than a phrase today, but it was being practised by journeymen coopers a century and a half ago. Now, at a time when the strongest solidarity is needed (and dare I say lacking?), trade unionists would do well to reflect on the actions of their 18th century forbears. Men went on strike when the law of the land was against them, and they were willing to strike for as long as six months at a time, though they had little enough to fall back on. These 19th century strikes are an object lesson in the steadfastness of men united in a common bond. All that is needed is the wisdom to learn from them.

Bob Gilding, The Journeymen Coopers of East London. Workers’ Control in an Old London Trade, 1971

The first time I recollect encountering my father at his work as dairyman occurred on a sunny afternoon when I was about 4; I went with my mother, elder brother and younger sister to a small cowshed and found my father crouching on a stool at the rear end of a cow. From then on our life was a succession of different cows, farms and dung heaps and wellington boots.
By 19th-century standards, my childhood was comparatively easy. My brother and I used to rise at five and help our parents with the dairy and calf rearing work. The summer and spring mornings were beautiful with the sun rising and the first warmth of the day falling upon you, the rich aromas of the drying grass and the feeling of well-being; but in the winter it became a bog. I would venture out with Lassie, our farm dog, as company to go and fetch the cows in from the fields for milking – how I hated the dark, the cold, and the thought of my warm, but empty, bed. It was not unusual for fingers and feet to be so cold that you could not get the boots off without assistance. Some mornings after sessions like this, I would feel pretty miserable and cheesed off with farms; but knowledge that I did not have to face this sort of situation every morning of my life made the times when I did have to get up just that much more bearable. I would probably have gone round the twist if I had thought it was my fate for life.
But had I been born in the 19th century into a similar agricultural surrounding with my father working on the land, then the chances were that this would have been my destiny. Working on the land or going into service would have been the only choices open to me – if indeed one could call it a choice.
At the same time, country girls of that century were by nature and necessity more hardy and practical than I was as a child. Unlike the 19th-century girl, the fact that I worked on the farm made me a peculiarity with my friends. The feminine ideal – a now institutionalised hangover from Victorian times – percolated its way into my life. The fact that I used to climb trees and generally join in with the lads earned me the label of ‘tom boy’ which was decreed to be ‘just a phase’ and one which I would, by various means, ‘grow out of’, and become ‘a little lady’ (i.e. meek and mild wife and mother!). By contrast, endurance and stamina, mental and physical – required of those who worked to survive in the conditions which would have been considered barbaric today – these qualities were possessed of necessity by the country girl.

Jennie Kitteringham, Country Girls in 19th century England, 1973

The name ‘History Workshop’ was transposed or adapted from the Theatre Workshop of Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood, an inspiring amalgam of the experimental and the popular. For Ruskin purposes it suggested not only the improvised and the informal but also the idea of a shared and common task. Still more potent, in a workers’ college, was the analogue with craft production, the idea of history as unfinished, of the miniature which could be built up to make a larger whole, of a task which united hand and brain…

The first History Workshop – ‘A Day with the Chartists’ – was a modest affair, which drew some fifty people, most of them Ruskin students. The speakers were academics, albeit Socialist ones. If there was novelty, it was in the attempt to take matters which had previously been discussed in the socialist-academic world into the more raw setting of a worker-student audience; as well as in a small experiment in ‘living history’, the assignment of the afternoon to a visit to Charterville, the Chartist model village.
The second History Workshop was a much more largely attended affair. The proceedings certainly contrasted with the coldness of an academic meeting. The most electric session was the third one, ‘Art, Poetry, Science’. Here Ruskin student Stan Shipley’s paper on 19th-century working-class astronomers was particularly striking both for the novelty of the voice (that of a forty-year old London engineer) and for the unexpectedness of the subject matter (at once a demonstration of the ambition of the self-educating working man and an indication too of some of those metaphysical yearnings which might help to explain the fascination exerted by astronomy). Ruskin student work became the core of the proceedings.
Numbers were still further swelled from History Workshop 4 onwards (November 1969) by a burgeoning radical counter-culture. The Workshop became a focus for a kind of free-floating utopianism, some of it feminist, some of it socialist, some of it anarchist, in which the past became a licence for impossibilist imaginings about the future (the 2,000 people who descended on Ruskin for History Workshop 6 – ‘Childhood in History; Children’s Liberation’ – may have included numbers of these). ‘Childhood in History’ had two historical plays, one of them written by a primary school pupil.

The workshops themselves were a deliberate attempt to escape from the conventions and the coldness of the research seminar. They set up discussion in crowded smoke-filled halls. The crowding and physical discomfort certainly helped to generate a degree of informality, while the impromptu living conditions (people who come to workshops often had to sleep on floors) imparted a sense of urgency to the proceedings. Folk song helped to raise the emotional temperature, and the early workshops also engaged in a species of action research, e.g. a walk around “proletarian” Oxfordshire.
Workshop meetings were tense with political expectancy, and there is no doubt that many of those who came to them did so in the course of a search for (or in some cases perhaps as a substitute for) political belonging as members of an invisible church. The meetings at this time were also marked by a powerful libertarian undercurrent. In the sphere of education, it was strongly opposed to the examination system, and it was also, from the circumstances of Ruskin students – many of whom had experienced education as oppression – sympathetic to the idea of ‘children’s rights’. In labour history, its main focus of attention was on movements from below, and the more spontaneous forms of working-class action.
The Workshop’s central early preoccupation with movements of popular resistance is clearly related to political events; though it may be that our historical studies in some sense prepared us to anticipate them. The first Workshop which was held under feminist influence – ‘Childhood in History’ (no.6) – was a fairly simple extension of Workshop preoccupation with autonomy.

Raphael Samuel, “Editorial Introduction”, History Workshop: A Collectanea, 1991

I must have gone to the first History Workshop to hear Dorothy talk about Chartist culture – and I do remember this thing on London Chartism and then I remember tramping about somewhere with all these little cottages with Raphael telling us about the cottages. I think I can remember some pigs but I can’t remember why. I went in Paradise Square for lunch and I don’t have a very clear recollection of what happened in the afternoon. Perhaps I’d had a few drinks or something. I think it’s possible I didn’t get back to the afternoon session, I don’t remember an afternoon session. It must be said that one of the things about the History Workshop – one of the things which made it exciting – was the fact that there was a certain amount of dalliance going on; there were attractions as well as the history. Every year there was something going on. It was very romantic. I think that was what gave these events that element of expectation.
In History Workshop 3, when this surge of people came, it became a great kind of social and political scene. I remember hearing Edward Thompson at History Workshop 3. He was speaking particularly about rural resistance. I can remember it was like somebody arousing the people to be rushing off and doing all these things all over again. He was reading a paper but he was reading it in this incredibly dramatic way and the atmosphere was a kind of passionate identification with the people in the past which was a feature of this new spirit in ’68. We wanted to expand the scope of what politics was and History Workshop was our past and our tradition. So people did identify with speakers and people packed in by that time.
There was a whole history developing in France about crowd action. History Workshop was sympathetic to this interest in more spontaneous forms of resistance. There was a lot of this at History Workshop 4. Arielle Aberson, who was studying the role of students in the Paris Commune, gave a paper on them at this Workshop. One of the points I remember her making was that student activism often preceded periods of workers’ rebellion, or more popular rebellion, and actually this did occur in the early ’70s in Britain. She spent a lot of time talking with me about women incendiarists, the Pétroleuses, the women who were active in the Paris Commune. She was a student at Ruskin. She was very, very important to me because we spent a long time discussing the problems of how Marxism saw history and women.

Sheila Rowbotham, “Remembering 1967“, History Workshop: A Collectanea, 1991

Brian Harrison: Can you explain just one thing, which I still don’t really understand. What is this ‘socialist history‘ that you think exists, as presumably you do, in the subtitle to the History Workshop Journal?
Raphael Samuel: It’s terribly complicated, Brian, it’s got to do with, partly, quite negative things. We didn’t want the Journal to become a vehicle for career-history, and we thought that if we called ourselves ‘socialist historians’ that would prevent anybody writing for it.
Transcript of a discussion between Brian Harrison and Raphael Samuel at the home of the latter, 23 October 1979

A study of the founding document of the Journal makes sobering reading. Most striking, and perhaps retrospectively endearing, there are the wildly incompatible aims which we set ourselves.
We were confident that the Journal would be taken up ‘in all walks of life‘. It was to sell to teachers, researchers and students, but also – perhaps on the model of the History Workshop pamphlets – to labour movement ‘activists’. We also believed that it was the special vocation of the Journal to discover and nurture what were variously called ‘worker-historians’ and ‘first-time writers‘.
Articles were to be written urgently and ‘accessibly‘, taking no prior knowledge for granted. Footnotes were wherever possible to be Anglicised; Gallicisms and Latin tags translated or better still eschewed. At the same time, the main articles were to be ‘much longer than those customarily found in a scholarly journal’.
The editors, anyway those who had followed the conventional route to university (the three former Ruskin students among the editors might have thought differently about it) were evidently not enamoured of academy. ‘First year at the university’ was the title of a projected article which two of the editors volunteered to write, ‘an account of the narrowing of perspectives which takes place between Sixth Form and university, the rise of cynicism and apathy among students’. We believed that history should be a ‘common property’, and hoped that our readership would be ‘democratic‘.

These hopes were not realised.
History Workshop’s circulation stalled at 2,000, and though this included a gratifying number of city libraries, we could hardly lay claim to a popular readership. In fact, if not in name, History Workshop Journal bears the character of a learned journal, that is one which, even if it bears a special relationship to the world of adult education, and has the ambition of speaking to the general reader, circulates principally among students, researchers and teachers. It serves as a tool of the trade, keeping abreast with, or on occasion anticipating, developments in historical enquiry and thought. It was indeed our reputation within the historical profession which saved us when, after quarrelling with our publisher over a price rise, we were taken up by our present publisher, Oxford University Press.
As a form of publication the Journal turned out to be much less hospitable to first-time historians than pamphlets or even books.
Articles typically follow the protocols of high scholarship.
Because of the work involved in producing History Workshop Journal, after it was launched in 1975, no more pamphlets were published in the History Workshop series. The Journal eschewed the monographic study, where the pamphlet form of publication put a premium on it.
The relationship between the Journal and the workshops is usually distant, sometimes strained. At any given time, only a minority of the editors are involved in the History Workshops.

Raphael Samuel, “History Workshop Journal”, History Workshop: A Collectanea, 1991

The object of the session was to discuss E.P. Thompson’s attack on Althusser in The Poverty of Theory. Stuart Hall drew attention to weaknesses in Thompson’s approach. It was too polemical. It elevated History in a mystical manner. It failed to acknowledge that ‘experience’ remains a difficult problem. Hall attacked the dangers of the view that ‘in the end history speaks for itself’ – a view to which Thompson and the History Workshop fall victim. Stuart Hall is a compelling speaker. Thompson’s main antagonist of the evening, Richard Johnson, is not. Thompson proceeded on a demolition job which caused evident personal pain and discomfort to many of those present. The result was that subsequent discussion was almost impossible. The aftermath of the Saturday night’s fusillade hung like a pall of smoke over the rest of the conference.
Perhaps it was a pyrrhic victory. In routing the Althusserian philistines, the History Workshop seems to have been drawn so far away from its central task that its support lines appear to be dangerously overstretched. ‘There’s not much for us to relate to or contribute to‘, says Keith Jerrome, a trade union official from Reading, who is at his second workshop. Tom Mole, a Rotherham bus driven in his second year at Ruskin, said that: ‘Last year, we Ruskin students made the soup and all the editorial people waltzed in and out. This year we wanted to give papers, but we’re still making the soup and they’re still giving the papers‘.

Martin Kettle, “The experience of history”, New Society, 6 December 1979

The oral tradition

The value of oral evidence in a rural area like East Anglia is very high. But the question may well be put at this stage: ‘Are you then saying that an unlettered countryman can inform a scientist who has devoted a lifetime specially to his subject?’
The question would expose the questioner. For what he would be doing would be to confuse two different kinds of knowledge acquired in entirely different ways; and they are not in their essence antagonistic but complementary.
It is not simply that one is practical and the other theoretical; for the scientist certainly puts his theories to the acid test of practice.
He does this repeatedly but – and this is the important consideration – not over a sufficiently long period, as often transpires with regard to man himself and the soil on which he lives directly or indirectly. The main difference is this: although the countryman has no knowledge at all of the physics of soil structure or little of the chemistry of soil composition, the knowledge he does have has been tested in the extended social laboratory that – at least in farming in this particular region – has [come down from the Neolithic period]. His knowledge is not a personal knowledge but has been available to him through oral tradition which is the unselfconscious medium of transmission. It is in his bones, you could say, not demonstrable in a logical way but there as an insight, an intuition, and none the less valuable for that.

The components of history

I left Blaxhall [the East Anglian village] with mixed feelings because I sensed that it was there I had found my life’s work, although I did not fully realize this at the time.
It was only some years after I left that I identified the village as my second academy when I began to learn the technique of what later became known as oral history.
But more importantly, I had then an experience which sank in gradually and imperceptibly as though it was a natural growth from the environment. It was undramatic and ordinary, and hardly to be remarked upon in detail, in the then subjectively eventful course of my life. It was here at this time, and with the dressing and elaborating on it later, that I transposed the Blaxhall community in my own mind into its true place in an ancient historical sequence, keeping the continuity that was for ever changing, and for ever remaining the same, until an irreparable break substituted the machines for animal power, and put an end to a period that had lasted well over two thousand years.
Yet I learned from this experience that the main components of history are not things but people. This is to make a song of a discovery of the obvious; but it is something that needs to be repeated now, especially at this time of wonderfully ingenious discoveries and inventions that have cascaded on people in an embarrassment of rich promises.

The pattern under the plough

My subject bears an analogy to the crop marks seen in the aerial photographs of some of our fields. Just as the pattern of the ancient settlements is still to be seen in spite of years of repeated ploughings, so the beliefs and customs linked with the old rural way of life in Britain have survived the pressures and changes of many centuries. They are so old that they cannot be dated; and on this count alone they are historical evidence, as valuable as the archaeological remains that are dug from those sites so dramatically revealed since the development of the aeroplane.

Childhood

It was in such areas as Helmingham, where dibbles [i.e., a wooden hand tool with a pointed end; used to make holes in the ground for planting seeds or bulbs] have been used without interruption right up to the present, that some of the lore connected with them has survived. Here are two rhymes which the children recited occasionally while dibbling, to break up the monotony of the work:

Four seeds in a hole:
One for the rook, and one for the crow;
And one to rot, and one to grow.

or:

Four seeds in a hole:
One for the buds (birds),
One for the meece (mice),
And two for Maaster.

The living conditions of the school children varied from village to village. William Spalding, a stallion leader, knew some of the worst:
‘There were nine of us and we had a very hard time to get enough food to live. We had to work very hard after tea, after we come home from school, doing various jobs like carting wood and so on. I had no boots in them days. I was often hungry.’
At Helmingham during the lean times no children went as hungry as this. Mrs D. Manning recalls:
‘During the worst part of the winter – that would be just before Christmas or just after – Lady Tollemache used to provide soup for the poorer families. We used to fetch the soup from the Hall when school finished.’

Sam Friend of Framsden, Suffolk, has been a farm-worker all his life apart from his war service during the First World War; but he has become a kind of rural philosopher with an earthy wisdom and an apt word – usually a dialect one – for most aspects of the old culture. He points out the main difference between the conditions affecting the children of his ‘young time’ and the position today:
‘Some of ’em didn’t have enough to eat; though, of course, at that time o’ day what you did have you had to stay. I mean they used to bake the bread in the oven and brewed – home-brewed beer; and some of the ones who were better off they’d have pork in the pot. But if there was a family of five or six children what could they have with wages as they were? Ten or twelve shillings a week!
It’s like this: those young ‘uns years ago, I said, well – it’s like digging a hole, I said, and putting in clay [i.e. argile] and then putting in a tater [i.e., a potato] on top o’ thet. Well, you won’t expect much will you? But now with the young ‘uns today, it’s like digging a hole and putting some manure [i.e., fumier] in afore you plant: you’re bound to get some growth, ain’t you? It will grow won’t it? The plant will grow right well. What I say is the young ‘uns today have breakfast afore they set off – a lot of ’em didn’t use to have thet years ago, and they hev a hot dinner at school and when they come home most of ’em have a fair tea, don’t they? I said.’

George Ewart Evans, The Crooked Scythe. An anthology of oral history, 1993

Chapter One. Facts and Figures

Black fen they call it round here. Black – for the dark peaty soil; black – for the mood of the area, for its history and for its future. Flat, flat, flat land, extending as far as the eye can see with no distiguishing characteristics which for a stranger would separate one monotonous stretch from another. Hedges and trees are fast disappearing, creating for the farmer a few more valuable feet per acre but also encouraging the wind, which needs no additional incentive here. ‘Fen blows’ they’re called, dust-storms as thick and as black as smog. Fenland – isolated, rebellious, frustrated.
‘Tell us again how you met your husband’, one of the village women, a landworker in her fifties, asked me. ‘I love that story. I love romance and true love. They weren’t none in my life’. ‘Nor mine’, agreed her friend, ‘I married my man out of pity’. Romance and glamour – the opium of women – had, they felt, passed the fens by. For life on the land is neither romantic nor glamorous. Just hard work, in uncompromising weather, in rough old working clothes padded out with newspaper against the wind. Small chance to catch a young man’s fancy. Marriage for convenience or marriage to conform, particularly for the older women. Then back to the soil. Land worker, home servicer. Poverty and exploitation – of men and women by the landowners, of women by their men.
The big landowners have gone but the exploitation remains. Women are cheap labour. They also bear the responsibility of keeping the body and soul of their family together. A double burden still, and no recognition. They have been left with a limited belief in their own importance and substance as people. Even their menfolk, they felt, had had a more valid life than they. ‘I can’t tell you nothing’, I was constantly being told, ‘but if you ask my husband or old Dick So-and-So they can tell you far more.’ And even after we’d talked they’d often say: ‘I don’t see that that could have been interesting for you, you should have asked my man…’. Their view of the world and their place within it is one supported by books on country life where the ploughboy and the farrier have a far more romantic and popular appeal than the ploughboy’s wife.
But gangs of women working on the land and mothers’ stories to their children provide as great a creative field for story-telling as the old boy in the pub. Maybe more so now. Mechanisation has largely taken over the work a man did on the land and isolated him with his harvester in the field. But the women still go out in gangs. The work the women do is still done by hand.
The women’s story must be told, but it must be seen in a perspective of its own. While this book may not dispel their belief in romance as something existing beyond their experience, I hope it will go some way towards giving women a sense of their own importance and relevance.

Chapter Two. Girlhood

Mary Coe is a widow of 86. She lives by herself in a tiny cottage built into the side of the Pits. Most of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren still live in the village. Her husband used to be a farm labourer.

‘I’ve always lived here – I was brought up in the house opposite and I’ve lived in this cottage for 54 years. And the houses – there was nearly 50 houses down this place, the Pits as they’re called. There’s about 14 houses now, I think. They didn’t have doorsteps, some of them. Just hand the washing on the hedges up the road to dry. And we always used to have to get the water out of the well. And the earth toilets! My old father, he only earned ten shillings a week, and he had to go and feed the animals twice on Sunday. He was just a landworker, with the Coatesworths. They were big farmers.
And for Christmas, if we got a sixpenny toy and an orange or an apple, we thought that was ever so grand. But that’s all we got. People say they can’t make out how we lived that life. But I say, remember, we’d never had anything else. Our parents before had had the same life. You see, when you’ve never had anything, you never miss it.
After my mother did her housework, she’d go and help her mother and her grandmother too, older people. But she didn’t go out to work. Well, there was only land work. But she’d take us picking. They used to buy dandelion roots and different weeds. You’d go and get them and they’d pay so much a stone for them. They’d dry them and make herbs and different drinks, I expect. There wasn’t any other work in the village, only weeding and potato picking, there wasn’t no factories, nothing else. Most of the men got their living in the village – if you wanted to go, you had to walk. No bicycles then.
I used to help my Dad, too. He had allotments and I used to help him weed and do the things for him. I can remember one day he told me to weed the onions and he said to pull any runaways, nip them out, and when he come home he say ‘Oh, what have you done? You’ve pulled all me seed onions out’. I said, ‘I didn’t know. You told me to pull the runaways out. I thought them were they’. But you didn’t get much in them days, so you had to be very careful.
We had lovely concerts, the village got up. We got a lovely brass band then. Beautiful band. We used to think that was wonderful. But that went. Wireless, television, done away with that.
A lot of people couldn’t write. My mother couldn’t write. If she got a letter that were a grand day. We’d read it for her. But then there weren’t the people to write to. No one hardly ever left the village. And there were no outsiders in the village either. They was all married to someone in the village. You was afraid to talk of anyone, because they was all relations. You couldn’t get far, that’s why you kept together. But now, you go down the street and you don’t know half of them. They’ve all married a stranger. But when I was young, we didn’t like strangers. If there was a stranger about, you wanted to know who they were, and where they come from.”

Mary Chamberlain, Fenwomen. A Portrait of Women in an English Village, 1975