LAMAS 55th Local History Conference

---

---

Timetable

Britain’s Blitz and Rebuilding: Exemplary Resilience and Recovery?

Around the world in the aftermath of the Second World War were devastating remains of once beautiful cities but also the loss of infrastructure and severe economic impacts from the war. London was obviously particularly hard hit. This talk will center around urban trauma. It will reflect on how London responded to wartime trauma, recovered and rebuilt, and the potential lessons and questions for the present and future in terms of both climate change and the pandemic. Though based on research in British postwar history, it will make comparisons with similar examples from Europe to Japan, and will do so with an eye toward preparing for post-pandemic urban change.

Catherine Flinn has a doctorate in modern British history and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has taught at several universities in the US and the UK. Her research focuses on postwar reconstruction, in particular the political, economic and social impacts of rebuilding and redevelopment. She returned to academia following a professional career in architecture, landscape and planning. Her book “Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities” was published by Bloomsbury and is available in paperback.

Nathan Hazlehurst

Casualty Services and Civil Defence within London

Of all the various elements of Civil Defence created in the United Kingdom immediately preceding the Second World War, the Casualty Services are some of the least focused upon. Formed to supplement the peacetime medical services within a local authority area, the Casualty Service encompassed a wide range of groups, from teams deployed to the heart of an incident to Casualty Receiving Hospitals and emergency mortuary teams. Coordinated by two government departments, often with differing views as to their priorities, the Service was run at a local level by the Medical Officer of Health, who had to reconcile the needs of both departments, as well as the reality on the ground in their locality. They would also need to understand the needs of their specific areas, where bombing and direct contact with the enemy may not be the main concern, but evacuees and refugees may be. The talk will provide an overview of Casualty Services across the United Kingdom, understanding each section of the service on its own and as part of the wider organisation; focus will also be brought onto the Casualty Service in London and how this differed from the rest of the United Kingdom, with joint control between the Boroughs and the London County Council. It will also show how the Casualty Service has influenced the modern Emergency Medical Service, and how significant elements have parallels today.

Nathan Hazlehurst is a historian and PhD student at the University of Salford, specialising in the work of the Civil Defence Services during the Second World War. His current PhD is focusing on the Casualty Services and Emergency Medical Service in that conflict and the years immediately preceding it. Nathan is also an Emergency Planning Professional in the public sector, helping to prepare for emergencies and coordinating responses; this included being heavily involved in the Coronavirus Pandemic, in addition to a wide range of incidents including fires and terrorist incidents.

 

Dr Peter Jones & Professor Steven King

Shamefaced No More: Pauper Letter Writers, Resilience and the Workhouse Experience in Poplar and Bethnal Green, ca.1860-1890

Few Victorian Londoners faced challenges greater than those who found themselves, after a “good” life on the outside, confined to an East End workhouse as a result of sickness, old age or unexpected indigence. The Dickensian vision of these institutions as “pauper Bastilles” – places of great hardship, regimentation, discipline and drudgery, wherein paupers were rendered voiceless, powerless and were subject to arbitrary authority – has been difficult to shift in the academic literature, no less than in popular depictions. Yet new research based on the letters of complaint and appeal from paupers to the Poor Law Commissioners presents a serious challenge to this view, especially as it relates to the passivity and powerlessness of the workhouse poor. This paper explores the cases of a number of extraordinary inmates from the Bethnal Green and Poplar unions (all of whom would once have been characterised as the “shamefaced poor” – who explicitly challenged the authority of workhouse officials, boards of guardians, and even the Poor Law Commissioners themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although far from unique among pauper letter-writers in the nineteenth century, London’s workhouse correspondents exhibited particular determination and, at times, belligerence; and although their efforts were often not without some cost to themselves, they persisted in campaigns which were both informed by, and were an active part of, wider movements for the reform of workhouses in London. Their stories have, up to now, remained largely hidden in the histories of the New Poor Law. This paper is part of an ongoing research programme which seeks to bring them back into the light.

Prof. Steven King is Professor of Economic and Social History at Nottingham Trent University.

Dr Peter Jones is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow. Until recently, they worked together on Professor King’s AHRC-funded project, “In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law 1834-1900”, jointly authoring a number of outputs, including Pauper Voices, Public Opinion and Workhouse Reform in Mid-Victorian England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and ‘Fragments of Fury? Lunacy, Agency and Contestation in the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, 1890s-1900s’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 51:2 (2020), 235-265. A monograph arising from the project’s work will be published in 2022.