History

Supervisors / contacts: Prof Laura Ugolini, Prof George Gosling

The public perception of the impact of the First World War on British women is dominated by the notion that the war helped to emancipate them and brought them new opportunities, allowing them to enter previously male-dominated arenas, most notably as munitions workers. Different perspectives on women’s wartime lives generally receive scant attention, either in public discourse or in historical scholarship. Making use of two important National Archives collections (the MH47, ‘Central Military Service Tribunal and Middlesex Appeal Tribunal: Minutes and Papers’ and the 1921 Census), the aim of the proposed PhD is to turn the spotlight on the experiences of women who did not enthusiastically embrace new wartime roles and identities. It will focus on the experiences of women who sought to maintain pre-war patterns of employment and family responsibilities on the English home front and did not join uniformed services or enter masculine workplaces and other domains.

Its aim is to explore voices and experiences that have hitherto received surprisingly little attention, despite the rich variety of existing research into the First World War. This project will thus take the PhD student beyond one-sided narratives of either female emancipation and change or continuity and conservatism, encouraging reflection and dialogue about the diversity of female experiences at this key historical moment.

Paying due attention to differences in experiences and conceptions of femininity linked not only to class and economic background, but also locality, age, marital status, family circumstances and health, the PhD will thus consider the understandings of femininity and feminine capabilities and skills that were adopted and endorsed by these women. How significant were well-established feminine ideals that stressed domestic, maternal and family responsibilities? Were these ideals modified in the course – or because – of the war? Were they challenged by patriotic appeals that emphasised the importance of women’s contribution to the war effort, or by the increasingly dominant rhetoric of equality of sacrifice?

The PhD will question the extent to which such women were successful in maintaining the status quo: did they develop new practices and strategies to cope with wartime economic and consumer pressures, as well as challenges that might include the loss (temporary or permanent) of a male breadwinner or other family members? Did these women’s economic and family roles change, and were any such changes rolled back after the war? Were experiences influenced by factors such as class, health, marital status, or family circumstances and if so, how? The PhD will consider the impact of policy initiatives, the ongoing vicissitudes of war and, indeed, male decision-making on women’s wartime lives, but will pay especial attention to evidence of women’s agency and autonomy, both during and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, as they coped with the effects of war.

Supervisors / contacts: Simon Constantine

I’m happy to supervise doctoral research on any aspect of the history of the Romani in late modern Europe (1789-present).

I would be keen to support projects on state persecution, including those which focus on the development of government policies towards Romani and other traveling groups, or (more specifically) on policing, the role of the courts and the institutionalization of Romani minorities. Further, fruitful areas of enquiry might include the economic and social relationship between Romani traders and craftsmen and non-Romani / majority communities or the media representation of ‘Gypsies’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Supervisors / contacts: Dr George Gosling, Prof Laura Ugolini

The sheer numbers of wounded men returning from the First World War posed a major societal challenge for all combatant nations. In Britain, the task of rehabilitation and restoration for wounded veterans fell largely to charities (Cohen 2001). One of the leading charities in this field was St Dunstan’s Hostel for Blinded Soldiers and Sailors, established in London in 1915 by the now-blind founding editor of the Daily Express and President of the RNIB and soon known simply as St Dunstan’s. Still operating today as Blind Veterans UK, they quickly became well known for the rehabilitation and industrial retraining provided in their homes, along with life-long after care and the development of pioneering assistive technologies, aimed at making the St Dunstaners independent men (Castleton 2013, Anderson 2013, Rubery 2015).

Handicraft training in the home’s workshops was a core element of the residential programme, as with many disability charities of the day (Borsay 2005). This led many St Dunstaners to make a living selling the craft items they had made. However, an aspect of this long forgotten until recently was the extent to which they not only sold their craft items through the charity and its prestigious Regent Street shop, but in their own shops around the country. Long-term after care supported basket-makers and cobblers to diversify, picture framers to sell art supplies, but also the establishment of newsagent’s, confectioner’s and tobacconist’s shops. Their numbers grew until the charity was supporting over 100 blind shopkeepers after the Second World War, before a rapid decline in their number (Gosling, Green & Millar 2024).

This project will examine the pre-war and wartime social, economic and medical backgrounds of these men, their continued relationship with the charity, and the variety and trajectories of their professional lives in retail. A collective biography of these blind shopkeepers will be compiled, using a mixed methods prosopography drawing upon three different source types: First, the administrative records and case files of the charity itself, which often maintained monthly visits throughout the lives of the men. Second, a range of local and retail history sources, including trade directories, local press and in rare cases business records. Third, oral history interviews with surviving relatives (usually grandchildren) of the men might be possible. Key information gathered from these sources will allow for a synthesis of overarching trends in relation to the professional lives of this distinct group of blind ex-servicemen in the decades following the First World War.

References

Julie Anderson, ‘Stoics: Creating Identities at St Duntan’s 1914-1920’ in Stephen McVeigh and Nicola Cooper (eds), Men After War (Routledge, 2013)

Anne Borsay, Disability and Social Policy in Britain since 1750 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

David Castleton, In the Mind’s Eye: The Blinded Veterans of St Dunstan’s (Pen and Sword, 2013)

Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (University of California Press, 1999)

George Campbell Gosling, Alix R Green & Grace Millar, ‘Retail and Community: English Experiences and International Encounters in the Long Twentieth Century’ in Green, Green & Millar (eds), Retail and Community: Business, Charity and the End of Empire (Bristol University Press, 2024)

Matthew Rubery, ‘From Shell Shock to Shallac: The Great War, Blindness, and Britain’s Talking Book Library’, Twentieth Century British History

Supervisors / contacts: Dr George Gosling, Prof Laura Ugolini

Today’s charity shops sit within long and multifaceted histories, but ones that are only now beginning to be seriously researched.

Around 25 years ago there was a boom in contemporary research into charity shops by sociologists, geographers, and marketing researchers (Parsons 2002; Horne & Madrell 2002; Gregson & Crewe 2003). They mapped out the patterns of charity shop retailing and consumption, volunteering and professionalisation, and investigated the subversive potential of the charity shop as a site of counter-cultural alternative economies. This research generally treated the increase in the number of charity shops in the 1980s as the starting point for considering them a noteworthy retailing phenomenon.

Until recently, historians had only challenged this idea by emphasising the longer retailing history of Oxfam (Black 1992). Their flagship store, opened in 1947 and is still trading on Broad Street in Oxford today, and the relationship between their shops and the origins of the modern fair trade movement have been revealing subjects for historical study (Field 2016; Anderson 2015). However, this focus also reinforced the myth that Oxfam invented the modern charity shop and that the pre-1980s story is one concerned primarily with international development charities. On both counts, this overlooks the importance of the British Red Cross, the Salvation Army and local charities across the country, not least disability charities.

New research, just beginning to be published, has used the archives of numerous charities and historic collections of local newspapers to elaborate and extend the history of charity retail (Gosling, Green & Millar 2024). This new research relocates the pre-1980s charity shop in its local setting, driven by the associational cultures of local communities rather than the increasingly business-like fundraising operations of national charities. It shows there was a place for professional and paid work, and male shop workers, but that women had always predominately staffed the sale of donated second-hand goods. Above all, it reveals that charities often ran shops as sites of social projects above and beyond their value as fundraising initiatives.

It is the intention that this archival research should form the basis for further studies that explored different aspects of the longer history. Three possible approaches would be an oral history, a case study, or an international comparative study.

An oral history might focus on the history of charity shops from the boom of the late 1960s, exploring how memories of charity shop buying, selling and donating feature in participants’ life stories. The charity shop history of childhood in particular is yet to be written. A PhD project might ask: to what extent are the findings of contemporary researchers universal to longer history of charity retail or specific to their current incarnation? How has changing consumer culture been

experienced by charity shoppers over recent generations? How did the charity shop serve as a site of generational and gendered social change over this period? How do memories of charity shops influence our views of charity shops today?

A case study approach would allow for an in-depth analysis of one charity or a small number of charities, connected by locality to field of charitable work, exploring the place of retailing in their history. Local charities, such as Beacon (previously the Wolverhampton Church of England Society for the Blind), are amongst many that have longer histories than could be accessed through oral histories today. This approach would be especially useful for considering the use of shops by charities for different purposes, raising funds but also using the shops as part of job creation schemes for the unemployed and the disabled.

An international study might compare and explore connections between the British charity shop tradition and those of other parts of the world. This might be the North American thrift store, the op shops (short for opportunity shops) of Australia and New Zealand, or the world shops (previously third world shops) of Western Europe, found most commonly today in Germany. Given the cost of international travel, primarily remote supervision might be provided for a research student already based in that part of the world. An international comparative study would suit exploration of issues around the balance of business and philanthropy, consumerism and second-hand cultures, fundraising and fair trade.

References

Matthew Anderson, A History of Fair Trade in Contemporary Britain: From Civil Society Campaigns to Corporate Compliance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Maggie Black, A Cause for Our Times: Oxfam the First 50 Years (Oxfam and Oxford University Press, 1992)

Jessica Field, ‘Consumption in lieu of Membership: Reconfiguring Popular Charitable Action in Post-World War II Britain’, Voluntas, 27:2 (2016), 979-997

George Campbell Gosling Alix R Green and Grace Millar (eds), Retail and Community: Business, Charity and the End of Empire (Bristol University Press, 2024)

Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003)

Suzanne Horne and Avril Madrell, Charity Shops: Retailing, Consumption & Society (London: Routledge, 2002)

Elizabeth Parsons, ‘Charity retail: Past, present and future’, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 30:12 (2002), 586-594

Supervisors / contacts: Dr George Gosling, Prof Laura Ugolini

In the two decades running up to the First World War, a new professional figure appeared in London’s major charity hospitals. These ‘Lady Almoners’ quickly became commonplace in voluntary hospitals across the Britain in the 1920s, before entering the municipal public hospital in the 1930s.

By the time these hospitals were nationalised as part of the newly established National Health Service in 1948, they were an established feature of the modern hospital (Gosling 2018).

These were the early generations of British hospital social workers, who were key figures in the evolving welfare services of the hospital as it underwent a change from being an institution focused on serving the poor to the sick of all classes. This emergent field of social work, with links to organisations such as the Charity Organisation Society and the early social science departments of British universities, was at the core of this new female profession. Initially appointed to assess whether and at what level a patient might be able to financially contribute to the hospital, the so-called Lady Almoner began to utilise her wider knowledge of local charity and welfare to complement the medical services of the hospital in ways that would become the beginnings of both hospital social work and occupational therapy (Doyle 2014; Gosling 2017). Despite being such a key figure in the social history of medicine in modern Britain, the focus on the people who made up this new profession has been largely limited to very early pioneers based at London hospitals (Willmott 1985; Waddington 1998; Simmons 2005; Cullen 2013).

This project will employ a mixed methods prosopography to develop a series of collective biographies for the members of this new profession over its first 70 years. It will do so primarily using three sets of historical sources: First, the records held at the University of Warwick’s Modern Records Centre for the precursors of BASW (the British Association for Social Workers), which included the Institute of Almoners and Hospital Almoners Association, which were later merged and later still renamed in1964 to reflect the shift away from a focus on payment to medical social work. Second, the records of the small number of British universities which provided the two-year course necessary to qualify as an almoner from very early in the history of the profession. Third, hospital records from local archives around the country, as part of which almoner department records rarely survive, but appointments to and the work of which is often traceable from other administrative records and reports.

Key information gathered from these sources will allow for a synthesis of overarching trends in relation to the social backgrounds and professional lives of over 1,000 women (and 1 man) who worked in the field of British hospital social work as the new profession adapted to major changes including the rise of mass hospital treatment and the inception of the National Health Service.

References

Lynsey Cullen, ‘The First Lady Almoner: The Appointment, Position and Findings of Miss Mary Stewart at the Royal Free Hospital, 1895-1899’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 68, no. 4, (October 2013), 551-582

Barry M Doyle, The Politics of Hospital Provision in Early 20th-century Britain (Pickering & Chatto, 2014)

George Campbell Gosling, Payment and Philanthropy in British Healthcare, 1918-1948 (Manchester University Press, 2017)

George Campbell Gosling, ‘Gender, money and professional identity: medical social work and the coming of the British National Health Service’, Women’s History Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (2018), 310-328

Angela Simmons, A Profession and Its Roots: the lady almoners (Michelangelo Press, 2005)

Keir Waddington, ‘Unsuitable Cases: the debate over outpatient admissions, the medical profession and late-Victorian London hospitals’, Medical History, vol. 42, no. 1 (1998), 42–45

Phyllis Willmott, ‘1895–1945: the first 50 years’ in Joan Baraclough, Grace Dedman, Hazel Osborn & Phyllis Willmott (eds), 100 Years of Health Related Social Work 1895–1995: then––now––onwards (BASW, 1985)

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Eamonn O'Kane

I am available to supervise students on topics related to the events during, and resolution of, the Northern Ireland conflict (“the Troubles”). Areas examining the role of the British and Irish governments during the conflict and reasons for the emergence and success of the peace process are particularly welcome. I am also willing to supervise topics related to the “outworkings” of the peace process such as projects examining the challenges that Northern Ireland still faces; how to deal with the legacy of the conflict; the impact of international actors on Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland’s impact on other conflicts.

More widely, I am happy to consider supervision of PhDs related to conflict resolution theory and practice.

Supervisors / contacts: Professor Keith Gildart

In recent years the miners’ strike of 1984/5 has attracted the attention of historians, sociologists and political scientists. There have been major studies of specific coalfields such as Scotland, Durham, and South Wales. This project will explore the strike through the experiences of mining communities in the Midlands. The specific focus will be on trade union culture and politics in Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Warwickshire. Methodologically, the research will develop an oral history project involving former miners and their families and the recently catalogued records of the National Union of Mineworkers (Derbyshire/Warwickshire) held in Matlock Record Office.

Supervisors / contacts: Professor Keith Gildart

Histories of popular music in twentieth century Britain have largely focussed on the cities of London, Liverpool and Manchester. Yet the West Midlands (particularly the cities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton) have been central in contributing to the development of youth subcultures and music scenes. In particular, both cities have been spaces where race, class and deindustrialisation have formed the backdrop to the music of important groups of musicians in the 1970s and 1980s including Slade, UB40, and Dexys Midnight Runners. This project will use oral history and archival research to trace the cultural responses to the decline of the steel, coal, and car industries in the West Midlands and the contribution of popular music in opposing the politics of Thatcherism.

Supervisors / contacts: Professor Keith Gildart

The British coal crisis of 1992 led to the closure of a number of British collieries and contributed to the growing unpopularity of John Major’s Conservative Government. In contrast to the 1984-85 miners’ strike the event has largely been ignored by historians. The records of the National Union of Mineworkers are currently being preserved by the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick which will shed new light on the politics of the 1992 coal closure programme and the political responses. The University of Wolverhampton has a collection of oral history interviews with former miners and their families which provide a crucial resource for examining the impact of colliery closures on villages and towns in England, Scotland, and Wales.