Up the Workers

Up the Workers by Carolyn SteedmanI just can't remember; there's so much I can't recall; all my dates are off kilter.It was a very long time ago.I have made inquiries about when I joined the HWJ editorial collective, and according to Anna Davin it was in 1986, and I left it in 1994.But is this true?(I just can't remember ) I have very clear memories of the first History Workshop I attended -HW 13, 'People's History and Socialist Theory', held at Ruskin College, Oxford, in November 1979.I'd met Raphael Samuel earlier in 1979, also in Oxford, which being so easy to get to from where I lived (and live) is an important part of this story-I-can't-remember.Raphael had written to me about my PhD thesis on the policing of Victorian provincial communities by working-class men who were just one step away from being a ploughman, or an agricultural labourer.He seemed to appreciate the idea that policemen were workers, too.But how did he know about the thesis in order to write to me about it?My book-of-the-thesis didn't happen until 1984.In 1979 he talked about another book, a possible book, on 'the uniformed working-class'soldiers, sailors, postal workers, firefighters, police Where did their class loyalties lie, if they wore the uniform of the central or local state?(At a distance of thirty-odd years I am astonished at and ashamed of how stupid we thought the workers of the past to be, as if they didn't have a perfectly clear answer to that one, tempered always by the need to bring home the bacon, and to keep your own counsel whilst doing so.)I remember that potential, imagined book, and although it never happened, there are fourteen items noted under the heading 'Uniformed Working Class' in the Raphael Samuel collection at the Bishopsgate Institute.When I told Raphael that my mother was a manicurist (she was still alive; this has to be before 1983) he gave that sweet, bemused smile and said I don't really know about people like that.'People like that' belongs to the linguistic repertoire of class distinction and class disdain in England; these days school students studying J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls (1946) for GCSE are alerted to it, along with 'that class of'/ 'that sort of'/ 'that type of' person. 1 I have to have replied that manicurists -and beauticians, and hairdressers -are workers too.I hope that I did say that.And made a joke about my mother being uniformed to boot, wearing a tabard embroidered with the name of the salon (whichever; there were many over the years) in which she worked.Things were easier for other people when I could show (off) my 'authentic', Lancashire, Labour-voting, cotton-weaving grandparents rather than their Conservative daughter.

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