Family and Kinship in East London
Michael Young and Peter Willmott
Having read it
★★★★☆
An insightful read of an interesting time that is somewhat prescient of parts of today’s societal situations; it’s research and study shows how the threads of connection through kinship, while still steady and important in the 1950s was slowly being more affected and remodelled by wider changes in the country, into the 1960s and beyond, and of new generations’ attitudes to achievement, status and independence.
As Kingsley Amis is quoted on the back of the paperback I read, it is...
Observant, tactful, sympathetic, humorous ... nobody who wants to know how our society is changing can afford not to read Young and Willmott.
...and worth your time reading and maybe even wondering, like I did, if the findings of sociological research was contributing to others forming ideas in the 1960s and 1970s that there is no such thing as society and individualism (and its somewhat natural seeking of status through acquisition) and the market will sort everything out.
A good passage
In one home we conducted part of the interview with Mr Cole alone while his wife was in the kitchen. Janice, his ten-year-old daughter, sat by his side listening with a rather bored expression on her face, to all the talk. Then when we came to the questions about grandparents, Janice suddenly became very excited and rushed off into the kitchen to tell her mother that the man was asking about ‘Nan’. When she returned, she burst out with a series of superlatives about her maternal grandmother. ‘Good old Nanny, she’s my pal. She’s a good old girl.’ When asked whether this granny was strict with her, she said gleefully, ‘No, she was strict to Mummy when she was a little girl. She’s not strict to us’ – this last with a note almost of triumph in her voice. The husband explained, rather sheepishly, that ‘they both like their gran’.
A second good passage
The streets are known as ‘turnings’, and adjoining ones as ‘back-doubles’. Surrounded by their human associations, the words had a glow to them. ‘In our turning we’, they would say, ‘do this, that, or the other.’ ‘I’ve lived in this turning for fifty years’, said one old man proudly, ‘and here I intend to stay.’ The residents of the turning, who usually make up a sort of ‘village’ of 100 to 200 people, have their own places to meet, where few outsiders ever come – practically every turning has its one or two pubs, its two or three shops, and its ‘bookie’s runner’. They organize their own parties: nearly every turning had its committee and celebration (and several built wooden stages for the display of local talent) for the Coronation of 1953.
A third good passage
Not only is there a bigger proportion of [television] sets on the estate; the increase between 1953 and 1955 was at a faster rate at Greenleigh [a fictitious name for research anonymity] than Bethnal Green.
The growth of television compensates for the absence of amenities outside the home, and serves to support the family in its isolation. Instead of going out to the cinema or the pub, the family sits night by night around the magic screen in its place of honour in the parlour. In one household the parents and five children of all ages were paraded around it in a half circle at 9 p.m. when one of us called; the two-month-old baby was stationed in its pram in front of the set. The scene had the air of a strange ritual. The father said proudly: ‘The tellie keeps the family together. None of us ever have to go out now.’