FOLKLORE AS POLITICS IN GREAT BRITAIN: WORKING-CLASS

CRITIQUES OF UPPER-CLASS STRIKE BREAKERS IN THE 1926 GENERAL

STRIKE. By: Saltzman, Rachelle H., Anthropological Quarterly, 00035491, Jul94,
Vol. 67, Issue 3

FOLKLORE AS POLITICS IN GREAT BRITAIN: WORKING-

CLASS CRITIQUES OF UPPER-CLASS STRIKE BREAKERS IN
THE 1926 GENERAL STRIKE

Contents

Believing their privileged existence and their world to be threatened by the 1926
British General Strike, upper-class volunteers came out as strikebreakers and
transformed a potential working-class revolution into a nine-day May festival. Their
behavior was reminiscent of larks, rags, fancy dress, and leg-pulls--traditional
university and Society play genres also used to raise charity funds, to criticize others,
or "to cloak serious purposes or ideas." Because of the apparently playful nature of
the volunteers' conduct, however, most scholars have ignored the political import of
such activities. Individual and media commentary from a working-class perspective,
however, reveals a complex reading of the volunteers' performance and a critique of
their misappropriation of traditional forms to defeat the strike and narrow the
definition of Englishness.

KEYWORDS: folklore; Great Britain; festival; politics; humor

Introduction

The British working classes have for centuries used traditional dramatic forms derived
from seasonal holidays (n1) to protest political and economic injustice. Curious about
the persistence of such forms in the twentieth century, I began to examine the 1926
General Strike for evidence of similar activities. During that event, four million
British workers came out for nine days in May to express their sympathy with the coal
miners, who were protesting lowered wages and lengthened hours. While there was
the occasional mock funeral held for blackleg miners in 1926 (Tucket 1976: 294-295),
the striking workers tended to obey their leaders' requests not to engage in disorderly,
that is, traditional, behavior such as strikers' blackening their faces, demanding money
and food from propertied people, or threatening to indulge in arson and riot if their
demands were not met.( n2)

Although the striking workers of 1926 did not engage in the rough-musicking and
other behavior associated with the Swing, Rebecca, and Luddite uprisings of the
previous century,( n3) symbolic forms of protest did emerge from an unexpected
source--from the half-million members of the upper and middle classes who
volunteered to do the strikers' work for the nine days of the General Strike. University
students and young businessmen costumed themselves in workers' uniforms, assumed
roles as lorry drivers, bus conductors, and special constables, and threw Strike parties;
Society women offered rides to those without transportation, acted as telephone
operators, served tea to the volunteers, and--according to one Punch cartoon--debated
what to wear to the strike. People compared the volunteers' role to play-acting, to a

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holiday during which the elite of British Society did the work of the working class,
diverted attention away from the issues of the strike, and enabled the Government to
achieve its goal of protecting the country's business interests. Such manifestations of
traditional upper-class expressive culture combined with working-class commentary
about that behavior to make explicit the debate over the rules for class relations and
obligations, and national identity in 1926.

Because of the apparently playful nature of the volunteers' conduct,( n4) however,
most scholars have not considered the political import of such activities--nor do they
give any indication that such behavior was typical of the British elite.( n5) In fact, the
volunteers' activities featured many of those elements that mark working-class
uprisings as traditional: role inversion and reversal (upper-class women acting like
servants, university men taking on workers' jobs), costume or disguise (women
dressing like men, upper-class people dressing and acting like members of the lower
class), verbal artistry (rhyming slogans, jokes, and puns), and a general atmosphere of
festival license (offering rides to or accepting rides from strangers, parties taking
place in offices, temporary workers bedding down in train sheds, and volunteers'
taking part in sing-alongs or impromptu dramas in their temporary work places). The
prevalence of so many "traditional" responses led me to explore the existence and
meaning of similar behavioral patterns within other spheres of upper-class culture.
Examining upper-class play genres lent further meaning to the volunteers' strike-time
activities, just as studying seasonal quoting( n6) rituals and celebrations, which had
provided the context for lower-class protests, has allowed scholars to interpret their
symbolic code.

Significantly, I found the key to the volunteers' performance--and the explanation as

to why they were treated so lightly during and after the strike--during the course of an
interview with Rose Kerrigan, a working-class Londoner. Her comments made me
aware of how and why working-class people connected undergraduate charity rags,
larks, fancy dress parties, and upper-class patronage behavior and charity work with
the volunteers' behavior during the 1926 General Strike. According to Rose Kerrigan,
an Irish-born octogenarian raised in Glasgow, Scotland and a founding member of the
British Communist party,

The people who scabbed in Glasgow were the students.… They were all middle-class
types and so-called upper-class, and they turned out almost to a man to support the
Establishment and to break the strike. And they tried to drive the trains, the students
did, and the police supported them on the tram cars.… The students tried all sorts of
things, but they weren't much good. Then they were no good in the mines.…

My husband had an anti-student attitude for years.… When they used to come out in
their rags for charity, we never, ever supported them. We looked upon the students as
being allowed to have liberty to do things that ordinary people would be told they
were hooligans if they did. That's true.

They had what they called the rags for charity.… They have a charity day, so they
come dressed up and do some silly things in the streets and all that. And everybody
turned out to watch them and thought this was marvelous.… [They'd wear] funny
costumes, clowns or Charlie Chaplin, or that sort of thing. They'd dance around the
street. They did all sorts of things that if ordinary chaps would do they'd get jailed for

2
it in many cases. Jumping on to trams and walking along the tram, shaking the
[charity] box in the tram. We would never have been allowed to do that sort of
thing.… They were doing it for a good cause but, … the attitude toward them by
people like myself and others who were politically aware--you just had no time for
them.… We had a terrible contempt of them. If I wanted to give to charity I gave it,
but I didn't give it to them! You didn't forget what they did to try and break the strike
(Kerrigan, Interviews, 1985, 1986).

As Mrs. Kerrigan points out, upper-class play was sanctioned by the working-classes
only when it had some kind of charity or patronage function. During the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, for instance, the English upper classes made an effort to
enact ceremonies that marked the structural relationships between classes and the
rules for appropriate behavior for different status groups. Calendar festivals especially
tended to be more symbolically loaded with both affective and instrumental
representations of communal obligations (Girouard 1981; Bushaway 1982; Burke
1983). The highly dramatized behavior that characterized such occasions was
intended to convince everyone that the ideal and reality were one.

Abundance, elaborate settings, dramatic costumes, and public enactments of ideal

relationships usually occurred during yearly holidays such as Christmas or harvest
homes and rites of passage like weddings and coming-of-age parties. As
interconnected communities grew into industrial villages, the more elaborate and
privately controlled dramatizations of the obligations implicit in a hierarchical small
community faded and were replaced by increasingly public displays of "good works"
performed throughout the year (Houghton 1979; Laslett 1971). In the twentieth
century such dramatic public exchanges tended toward more pragmatic
representations of hierarchical structures; there were few opportunities to express
mutual relationships of obligation--only those of power.( n7)

Unlike the annual round of reciprocal displays of upper-class largesse and lower-class
license, the General Strike unmasked the subjective, class-based meaning of what
service and duty signified for different status groups. The government and most of the
upper and middle classes regarded the volunteers' playful efforts at temporary work
during the strike as an extension of their duty to serve the public good by keeping
things moving; as many middle and upper-class people reiterated to me in interviews,
they were not against the workers but for their country. According to my working-
class informants and contemporary testimony, however, the strikers read the message
differently and regarded the volunteers' activities not only as a betrayal of their duty
to serve the entire community (instead of their narrow class interests) but also as an
act of violence against the working classes.

In 1926 the General Strike served as a social drama; since then it has become a key
metaphor for British society, which like all such powerful symbols encodes a variety
of conflicting meanings about British and English identity, class relations, and
appropriate behavior. The strike appears in memoirs, plays, novels, histories,
television programs, and museum exhibits as the event that quintessentially defines
what it is to be English. Working-class and leftist studies are reproduced on each
anniversary to reiterate the "never again" message the strike's failure came to embody
for the Labour Party. The strike's very embeddedness in the English world view was
further epitomized in the mid-1980s during the largest miners' strike since 1926, when

3
a chain of restaurants called "Strikes" was established in London; the walls of the
restaurants were covered with photographs of Society women and undergraduate
volunteers--an image that apparently continues to symbolize Englishness sixty years
after it emerged.

Thus the General Strike was not merely evidence of a post-war society in transition;
the event and its participants became national folk symbols. People remember the past
selectively and in ways based on implicit categories that they use to structure their
identities and their world view. Exploring such processes can demonstrate why events
like the General Strike unfold as they do as well as how they become powerful
cultural symbols, capable of transforming ethos into mythos.

Although there are a number of perspectives from which to examine the behavior of
the volunteers during the General Strike, this article will focus on working-class
interpretations of an upper and middle-class attempt to misappropriate elements of
traditional culture and re-contextualize the criteria for English identity. A review of
some background material on the 1926 General Strike and early twentieth-century
upper-class culture and practices follows in order to explain why the working classes
did not indulge in folkloric protest methods and the upper classes did. The rest of this
study will be devoted to examples of volunteer folklore, individual and media
examples of working-class commentary about those activities, and analysis of the
power inherent in displays of traditional behavior in an extraordinary context.

Historical Background

In the 1920s the British coal industry was faced with both a sagging international
economy and a reduced market for its product, conditions that resulted in declining
profits. Mine owners and managers responded, as had those in charge of other
industries, by attempting to lower wages and lengthen hours. By the summer of 1925
the miners had the support of the entire Trades Union Congress, the institutional body
for organized labor unions, and in the late spring of 1926 the TUC voted in favor of a
general strike. The theory of the general strike, first articulated in the 1830s (Benbow
1832; Symons 1957: 50-51; Morris 1976; Jenkins 1980; Wrigley 1984), held that
even the dullest and most a-political among the general public could not fail to notice
the connection between labor and the maintenance of society if that labor were
withdrawn all at once. Organized labor believed that such a sympathetic action would
convince the general public to put pressure on Parliament to preserve the coal miners'
then current wages and hours. Yet, as with most strikes, people's hostility to being
inconvenienced outweighed much of the sympathy they might have felt for the
miners' plight.

Contemporary testimonies and more recent ones from my informants indicate that
although most residents of Great Britain didn't really fear a revolution per se, events
of the previous decade had so threatened and attacked traditional notions about what
constituted a stable society that people were wary about any indication of further
assault. By 1926 protests by suffragists, organized labor, the Irish, and the Indians,
unrest elsewhere in the Empire, the Great War, and a Red Scare had challenged the
old notions of pre-war Liberal England (Dangerfield 1935). During the First World
War, the desperate need of government for the services and goods that only labor
could provide had given the latter some leverage, which resulted in better wages and

4
conditions, temporary changes with roots in pre-war social reforms.( n8) The granting
of full manhood suffrage in 1918( n9) also seemed to confirm Labour's accession to
economic power as a political reality. Partial labor union victories,( n10) as well as
the election of the first Labour Government under John Ramsay MacDonald in 1924,
further encouraged the workers' sense that they deserved and were capable of
attaining for themselves certain rights as British citizens. These successes also led the
working classes to believe that such rights were attainable via legitimate, overt
displays and public negotiation, and not by way of the more customary and covert
methods of the previous century.

The Volunteers: Social Identity

While the majority of striking workers did not indulge in traditional forms of protest
in 1926, there were others who did not abandon their customary roles in this social
drama. Male university students and young businessmen volunteered to perform the
strikers' work and in some cases, even wore working-men's clothing. But
contemporaries readily identified most as undergraduates from their multicolored
leisure wear of plus fours, argyle socks, and fair isle sweaters,( n11) as well as by
their oft-cited upper-class accents and manners, which they put to use while driving
the buses, trains, and lorries, or serving as dockers, porters, and so on. While the men
were engaged in physically strenuous and mechanical activities to "keep the nation
moving" (a war-time phrase invoked in 1926), Society women and their debutante
daughters donned fancy hats and pearls, along with overalls, to work in canteens, and
as telephone operators, messengers, and occasionally bus conductors. Although
mostly middle-class volunteers were responsible for offering rides to the multitudes
trying to get to work, the media of all stripes gave the greatest publicity to the
undergraduates who had such fun driving trains and buses and to well-known Society
women who performed uncharacteristically domestic and maternal labors, such as
washing clothes, hanging out laundry, scrubbing pots, serving tea, and mothering the
male volunteers, mostly their friends and relations, in the temporary encampments set
up in parks and railway stations throughout London.

Ironically, those most celebrated for their volunteer activities during the General
Strike were the same people characterized by their parents and the media, as useless,
disorderly, frivolous, feminine, and--most importantly--"non-workers" in normal
times. But because they treated the strike and their part as volunteers as an
opportunity to indulge in yet one more fancy dress party, one more lark, the
volunteers were not taken seriously either by contemporaries or by scholars.( n12)
Historians, social anthropologists, and folklorists have tended to study symbolic forms
of protest only when they are employed by the lower classes and take at face value
governmental claims to have eliminated inter-class traditional culture (Shils and
Young 1953; Hay et al. 1975; Moore and Myerhoff 1977; Pearson 1983; MacAloon
1984; Cannadine 1985). Thus aristocratic largesse at Christmas as well as the duties
of Poor Law Guardians, local magistrates, and charity welfare workers are read as
only the increasingly dysfunctional survivals of an old world of community and
reciprocal obligations that were largely upheld by those with no other responsibilities
(Samuel 1983b: 31).

I would argue, however, that upper and middle-class groups have continued to employ
those traditional expressions and in a purposeful way: to invoke the a-structural order

5
of folk drama and play to invert and thus reinforce an ideal social order--to act
symbolically for overtly political, economical, and class-conscious purposes. While
the workers or servants were being waited upon at various holiday occasions, the
upper classes were those doing the waiting, albeit "playfully." They were not merely
"allowing" their workers to be on top. Acts such as serving one's tenants punch and
food at an heir's coming-of-age party, presenting gifts to servants on Boxing Day, and
distributing soup with unwanted advice to the needy became highly foregrounded
occasions designed to demonstrate to those whose destiny it was to serve how to do it
properly: cheerfully, politely, and enthusiastically.( n13)

Similarly, youthful members of the establishment and Society women acted as

obedient workers during the 1926 General Strike. As Phineas May, a middle-class
Jewish Londoner, explained:

People who were in better positions to go down and directly help … did … try to help
those in not such a fortunate position as they were. And anybody who came from my
type of home would have volunteered for something like that, the same way as we
volunteered for the special constables [during the General Strike].… You felt it was
the proper thing to do, in the same way, when there's a war you, you join up, or join
some service that will help your country (Interview, 1986).

Thus the volunteers presented to the strikers the ideal ways in which they might
resume their proper places in the community: by cheerfully accepting their duties as
conductors, drivers, and maids, by conducting themselves in a gracious, mannerly
fashion, and by willingly doing the jobs that the community designated as theirs.

But the strike was not just about service for the volunteers--its attraction was that it
provided an opportunity to combine social duty with fun. Sophia Baron, a student at
Oxford in 1926 and "on the side of the miners," affirmed, "All the strike volunteers I
ever spoke to were male and regarded it as a great lark. I regarded my crêche [child
care] running activities in rather the same light" (Letter, 1986). According to Lady
Bullard, a Girton (Cambridge) alumna, "young upper-class undergraduates at Oxford
and Cambridge regarded the volunteer work in the strike as a lark and a change from
their ordinary lives. My family applauded them" (Letter, 1987).

Upper-Class Play Genres

Various forms of every-day play provided the contextual meaning for the behavior of
the upper-class volunteers during the strike. In ordinary times those who fit the
stereotype of the volunteers--the university lads and Society women--were best
known for the way they flaunted pre-World War I social conventions and took
advantage of their privileged status to stage treasure hunts and elaborate, often public,
spoofs in the streets of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, Edinburgh, and
Glasgow. The main preoccupation of the Bright Young People, as they were called by
the media, was with inventing new and original entertainments, which extended from
the fashionable London district of Mayfair to Oxford, Cambridge, and the country
houses of the elite. In keeping with the English "passion for dressing up" in the 1920s,
elaborate disguises usually accompanied their dramatic enactments (Hawarth 1978:
64), and fancy dress (costume) parties provided homemade, elaborate entertainment.
Baby parties, for which the young folks dressed in children's clothes and ate nursery

6
food, as well as bath, Greek, Circus, and Wild West parties occupied much of their
time. These occasions created the opportunity for the upper-class young to try out new
roles, to turn a small portion of their world upside down, to make life into a game they
could control--merely by switching their outfits and thus their personae. Like
adolescents in more "primitive" cultures, they were expected and permitted to indulge
in certain types of licentious behavior (van Gennep 1960; Abrahams 1972; Geertz
1973; Babcock 1976; Turner 1982; Hebdige 1979) that emphasized ingenuity,
especially when it could be employed in inventing new pranks( n14) and staging
elaborate practical jokes.( n15)

Such activities were collectively known as "rags" to people of the day, who were
quite careful to differentiate between those activities and behavior that could be
described as hooliganism--a contemporary gloss for lower-class pranks (Hawarth
1978: 64). One upper middle-class woman told me that a lark was "a light-hearted
happening, a jolly frolic" (Maddox, Letter, 1987). Irene Bullock, an alumna of Girton
College, Cambridge, noted that a rag, was "a more organised, bigger affair than a
'lark,' something harmless but unusual, even outrageous, often organised in aid of a
charitable object" (Letter, 1987). Few took such activities seriously or assumed these
games to have particular, if any, meaning--except those members of the lower classes
who were the direct or indirect victims of these "jokes."( n16)

For instance a London taxi cab driver wrote in to Titbits in May of 1926 to report that
he'd lost his cab, which members of the Bright Young People had hired late one night
for a treasure hunt. They left the driver and ran off with his cab, which the police
found in a ditch with its radiator and headlamps smashed. The driver finally found out
the name of the young man who 'had engaged him, only to discover that he'd gone
abroad (London Taxi Cab Driver 1926: 372). Barbara Cartland commented, by way of
an apology for such situations, that the Bright Young People were original and
enjoyed themselves; "if a few people got mobbed up and made fools of in the process,
well it really didn't hurt them. We made a lot of people laugh" (1970: 208).

Volunteer Activities During the Strike

Service and Duty

The constructs of both play and service dominated the General Strike, and both forms
of behavior provided the metaphorical playing field for participants to contest the
rules of social place and function. Defining their volunteer activities as similar to their
play genres--and allowing others (members of the working classes and the media) to
do so--enabled the volunteers to enjoy childhood dreams of driving trains, buses,
lorries, trams, ships, and other conveyances, organizing canteens in parks, tube
stations, and railway stations, or serving as conductors, telephone operators, and
message carriers during the strike. They could have a good time while serving a
designated patriotic function that denied any ideological basis or political affiliations--
disinterested service not only fulfilled their noblesse oblige but became fun. In the
words of one Cambridge alumna, "many undergraduates looked on their efforts in the
general strike as a lark--for the sake of their country" (Dawson, Letter, 1986).

For example, the Hon. John Jones (pseud.), who drove a bus during the strike, was a
member of a country gentry family in Suffolk and belonged to the Territorial Army, a

7
military reserve somewhat akin to the United States National Guard. The Territorials
were among the quickest to sign up for strike duty. According to Jones:

We were all clerks in the offices … and undergraduates.… We had no

responsibilities.… The volunteers were all the younger ones, eighteen to twenty-
five.… We'd drive for the afternoon, or it might be for the morning and afternoon.…
We were sleeping at headquarters the whole time. We had paillasses on the floor and-
-well, we just laid down where we were. We had plenty of beer and we were all right!
… The whole thing was a joke. You got up on the bus and you had a "special" sitting
beside you with a truncheon, so if anyone tried to get up on the bus [he'd] knock him
off.

And [when] people got on the bus,… you'd say, "Oh where do you want to go love?"
and—

"We want to go round to Tack street."

"Oh, well--where's that?"

"We'll show you!" And they pointed and we'd go down and we didn't mind about the
proper route. As long as we got to the end eventually it didn't matter. And everyone
was roaring with laughter. And we'd go round and we'd drop some of the dear old
ladies that wanted a lift. They got on and we'd take them to their front door, and we'd
see them off there, and go on to the next one! And we had a lot of fun with this.…

But that was what broke the strike, because everyone then who was my age in those
days--we simply treated the whole thing as a joke--which it was! And eventually it
broke the strike!

… I had nothing to do with the politics of the thing at all.… With London it was the
transport workers there who came out in sympathy with the miners and tried to cripple
London; … they failed entirely because we took on the jobs.… [When it was over] we
just went back to our jobs again.… Oh, we had a jolly good time! One of the best
holidays I ever had, eh! (Interview, 1987).

Jones' narrative, like many volunteer memorates,( n17) points to a number of themes
common to the male volunteers' experience. Like the Great War, the General Strike
served as a rite of passage for young, middle-class males (Fussell 1974). Not only
were the participants all about the same age, they were removed from everyday life,
isolated from their normal surroundings, and permitted to indulge in excessive
drinking. Stripped of their pre-strike office attire, the Territorials donned uniforms
and took on the role of temporary public servants. Unlike regular bus drivers,
however, they were accompanied by a special (temporary) policeman armed with a
truncheon to knock off any undesirables. The volunteer drivers exhibited an
exaggerated degree of politeness to their passengers and even provided door-to-door
service, once they found their way around. After they had performed their ritual work-
-defeating the strike--the men returned from their temporary holiday and went back to
their offices.

8
For men like Jones and other members of the Territorials, the strike also provided an
opportunity to demonstrate loyalty to Crown and country. As one of the upper middle-
class General Strike volunteers in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead revisited puts it: "You
and I … were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps fought, millions of them
dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead chaps we can fight, too" (Waugh
1979: 205). Such men were merely acting according to their class interests; many told
me explicitly that they did not consider this to be political but in the national interest.
When unions threatened a similar protest in 1921, Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary,
"It seems to me that it has now ceased to be a matter of right or wrong and is merely
war.… If I was a miner I know that I should be only too anxious to strike; since I am
not, I try to break them" (Waugh 1976: 24). Like Waugh and Jones, many volunteers
simply did not recognize the connection the strikers were trying to make between a
general strike and the working-classes' rightful stake in the community.

As many people explained to me, the volunteers were not against Labour and for the
Conservatives or Liberals; they were for their country. Frequently, people who
volunteered were not even aware of the political issues. Ellen Havelock, a Girton
alumna, recalled that the atmosphere reminded her of wartime.

The call went out "our country needs you"!! And, of course, the best and the brightest
responded including my fiancé who joined up at once and dashed off to London with
a truck full of volunteers as special constables.… My impression is that the most they
really did was to direct traffic.

A year later we visited my fiancé's spunky little grandmother in London--She, out of a

tiny budget, had sent money to the miners--out of sympathy for their terrible working
conditions and minimal pay.

I have wondered whether my husband ever questioned his hasty response because his
sympathies were with Labour … (Letter, 1987).

The strike represented a chance, as in wartime, to contribute to the defense of the

realm. Elizabeth Stamp wrote to me:

My father, who was killed in the war, and his brother--now Lord ( ), manned the
signal box at Bletchley Junction (after only a few hours training) during the General
Strike. There was a rather splendid photo of them in the Illustrated London News of
the time. They were currently students at Cambridge.… Don't call it strike-breaking.
They didn't see it that way. Hundreds of students offered to help "to keep the country
going" (Letter, 1985).

For many of those who volunteered the strike was a working holiday, a welcome
break in the ordinary routine of school, banking, clerical work, or even leisure.
According to Lady Smith, M.D.:

As far as I myself and my immediate circle were concerned I think that we were
amazingly selfish … we really only thought of ourselves. I can remember enjoying
the General Strike very much with never a thought for the miners. We were quite
sorry when it came to an end.… My contemporaries and I had no particular feelings
about the rights or wrongs of the strike. We simply had no feelings either of sympathy

9
of antipathy towards the miners, but felt that it was our job to help the country as a
whole to be as little affected as possible (Letter, 1986).

As many people told me, they joined up as volunteers or did what they could to keep
things moving because it was simply what one did. Volunteering was a duty and, for
some, a way to have fun as well. The media, however, provided a much more strident
view of the strike and the character of those for and against it than did most of my
correspondents and those I interviewed.

Male Rites of Passage

Among the middle and upper classes, as well as in the magazines and newspapers
intended for their consumption, the accomplishments of undergraduate male
volunteers were most often described as heroic, while those of Society women were
usually referred to as their social duty. Both characterizations foreground the
functions expected of persons in particular positions in the social structure. For male
volunteers, the more public a job was and the more room for dramatic, active display
it allowed, the more prestigious--despite the higher financial rewards that could be
earned in other positions (by those in the docks, for example). Glamorous jobs
included driving buses, underground trains, trams, and railway trains, preferably in
and around London. Next best was being a special constable, then serving as a docker,
then working in an electrical plant, and then driving a lorry.

The status criterion for those volunteer jobs was that they apparently involved serving
other people, which counted for more than moving goods. In an inversion of the usual
situation, personal relationships were privileged over market values during the
General Strike, emphasizing the ideal relationship between workers and employers.
The volunteer effort could be and was vociferously designated as socially useful and
even necessary--in a way that larks could never be. And as the Sphere, a glossy
magazine, noted, the strike reinforced the iconic meaning of upper-class leisure wear.

One thing the strike has done--it has given the pull-over a place in history.… As
things are, it will remain for ever a symbol of the gallant outburst of the spirit of
youth, which brought a glory of high and joyous endeavour in among all the
dismalnesses and meannesses of the strike-fortnight, as it did into the years of war,
and will ever do.

In signal-boxes and train-cabs, dockyard and mean-street, engineroom and workshed,

the "fair-isle" throughout those wonderful days stood for courtesy, keenness, courage,
for all that it means to be young in England. '"Ere come the college-boys!" It was a
jeer one heard often enough in the first week of the strike as a new batch of "fair-
isles" made its appearance. But after a day or two, when it was found that Peter Pan--
in however many colours--could do ten men's work at need, the vision was received in
an altogether different mood (S.R.L. 1926: 155).

As do other strike commentaries, this passage emphasizes the normally liminal status
of those males, those perennial Peter Pans, who came to be known as volunteers. The
fair-isle pull-over or sweater becomes an icon for upstanding young manhood in the
midst of battle when the garment (and its wearer) is conspicuously mis-placed in the
work sites of laborers. Using a crude but common linguistic device to index the

10
lower-class status of those criticizing the volunteers (the dropped "h" in the jeer, "'Ere
come the college-boys!"), the author reveals the absurdity of the comment and takes a
swipe at the working-classes who in their ignorance criticize the boy-soldiers. For it is
the (college) boys, not the unnamed strikers, who achieve heroic stature ("do ten
men's work") and show themselves to be the real men.

Female Rites of Passage

Like their brothers, women volunteers were also involved in a rite of passage that
intensified gender roles while inverting the overall social structure. For women,
however, the experience was somewhat different. During the First World War,
women of all classes did precisely the physically active jobs that male volunteers
were doing in 1926. In wartime a woman could acquire a broader range of alternative
behaviors that didn't detract "from male identity, because men had also moved on to
other activities--such as killing each other. A woman bus driver or even special
constable could not be anything other than feminine and domestic, especially when
"home" became Britannia and "she" was contrasted with the ultimate maleness and
aggressiveness of war.

By 1926 women of all classes were visibly present--not just as household servants but
in factories, offices, hospitals, and even as business owners. But in the public mind
women had been transformed back into girls: "it" girls,( n18) Society girls, office
girls. Not adult women but frivolous females in search of new entertainments. Thus it
is not surprising that Society magazine articles implied that female interest in the
General Strike rested solely in the benefits they could derive from it--with particular
regard to fashions, men, and gossip.

Most of those who officially volunteered in 1926 were Society, upper-class and upper
middleclass women and their daughters. In contrast to what they did during the war,
however, the jobs women performed during the Strike were explicitly categorized as
domestic; the more directly concerned with taking care of people their temporary jobs
were, the better. Those with the most social cachet performed a sort of public
caretaking and housework--while those of lower social status frequently took on the
lesser positions of service, rather like the descending hierarchy of housekeeper,
upstairs maids, parlor maids, kitchen maids, and so on (Dawes 1974). Upper-class
women who had served as volunteers during World War I regrouped and recruited
their daughters and friends to organize food Stalls in Hyde Park and in railway
stations. For example, Lady Lindsay, formerly the Duchess of Westminster,
remembers:

My mother ran the canteens during the war. My mother and some of her friends were
given the job of welfare, I suppose would be the word, at Paddington Station. So her
friends all corralled all these debutante daughters. And this was so absolutely filthy
dirty, this canteen. And so she decided that the burden had been put on us to clean it
up. It was not particularly a pretty job because it was absolutely knee deep in old
grease, where things had been spilt down. And we spent most of our time on our
knees. The other upper classes were [volunteering]--every one of them! were doing
something. Oh, there was a terrific feeling of, what's the right word? Patriotism, I
don't re ally know, but you would have died with shame if you hadn't done
something!

11
In a way, we all had great fun, you see. As I said, we weren't at all seriously interested
in the problems of the day. I really didn't know whether the miners had enough or not.
It sounds bad, but I mean that is the truth of it. [We were] so young! I don't remember
anybody sort of discussing the rights and wrongs. You did what your parents said! Of
course it was, as I was saying, rather a joke!

[When the strike was over] we just went back the way we were, shook out our party
dresses and went to the next ball (Interview, 1985).

Thus mature, married women of the highest social level directed domestic duties in
the makeshift canteens, as their housekeepers did in upper-class homes. Others,
including their daughters, took orders and scrubbed out the station areas to be used as
canteens, ran errands, served as telephone operators, and delivered newspapers and
messages. Those secondary jobs tended to go to those of lesser social status or to
those situated at a distance from London.( n19) And they were generally not given as
much publicity in the newspapers of the day,( n20) which delighted in printing
photographs of titled women in overalls,( n21) pearls, and fancy hats( n22) serving
food and performing other duties in Hyde Park.( n23)

Oddly, the telephone operator positions, which were the most anonymous and
required the least amount of personal contact with outsiders, were also co-opted by
those of the highest social standing, such as Lady Louis Mountbatten.( n24) Besides
that job, she worked in the Hyde Park YMCA canteen, and, like other "distinguished
women, sold copies of the Sunday Express in the streets as cheerfully as they sold
Armistice Day poppies," while "two duchesses, a viscountess, and the daughter of a
marchioness drove lorries for the Times" (Farman 1974: 178). Apparently, if one
were of high enough position, one was entitled to violate even the rigid structures of
the emergency state; conversely, high social status might simply override everyday
social restrictions based on sex and entitle such persons to more rather than less
license and privilege. Or--like the Bright Young People during less critical times--
Lady Mountbatten, for example, may simply have decided that more exposure would
only enhance her position rather than diminish it; thus she took advantage of the
emergent status for women that both the precedent of women's service in the First
War and the actions of the Bright Young People indicated was an available option.
Significantly, although middleclass women were involved in charitable work and in
helping out during the General Strike in far greater numbers than upper-class women,
the photographs of the latter were the ones most often featured in the press. Thus,
while actual charity work was declining among the wealthy, published photographs
served the metonymic function of persuading the public that the reverse was true.

The General Strike encouraged upper and middle-class women to fulfill an

exaggerated maternal and domestic model--just as Wendy in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan
was able to play at taking care of the Lost Boys. Although once the play was over, the
role was easily discarded in anticipation of the next fancy dress opportunity, it did
have the effect of reiterating some rather simplistic gender roles--for members of the
upper classes as well as for those of the lower. More ironic was the underlying theme,
however: if upper-class folks engaged in physical labor, their lives would be both
more enjoyable and more satisfying. Volunteer activities thus transformed the
oppositional nature of actor and activity into complementary forms( n25): the menial
labor of "lady volunteers" of high character became their "noblesse oblige" when

12
those unaccustomed to such labors successfully performed them--and thus
regenerated one image of British "community."

Social Identity and Otherness

Class Markers

According to Anya Peterson Royce (1982), social identity is a matter of negotiating

amongst the differing group identities each person maintains. In each instance,
however, identity is determined by contrast and contact with others: "we" can be
defined as "us" only if there is an other that can be designated as "them." This process
works itself out through social enactments that serve to express and legitimate these
distinctions and the status roles, behaviors, and social functions that are constituting
and constitutive of social identity--in this case, of an implicitly upper-class notion of
Britishness (Paredes and Bauman 1972; Bauman and Abrahams 1981; Coils and
Dodd 1986).

As has been noted, class markers, such as clothing style, accent, and manners, rarely
associated with persons employed in service jobs, pointed quite markedly to the
volunteers' social position--as did the juxtaposition of upper-class status with
working-class costume or duties. For example, "at White's, Duff Cooper found half a
dozen of the members in full police uniform, including the Hon. Lionel Tennyson,
who had the rank of inspector. Sir John 'Buffles' Milbank looked very 'smart as a
sergeant' " (Farman 1974: 241). Dorothy Whittle, a middle-class woman then working
in an office, wrote that "the only volunteers I noticed were driving the buses, mostly
undergraduates wearing their normal Plus-fours or Oxford bags" (Letter, 1986). Some
of my working-class male informants related that the volunteers were also known as
the "plus force," so prevalent were university students and their typical manner of
dress (Segal, Interview, 1985; Elsden, Interview, 1986). Such a pun also points to the
extra-ordinary nature of the "force."

Although members of the working classes and the upper classes noted the connections
between upper-class leisure traditions and strike behavior, the working-class
commentary was, not surprisingly, more pointed about the ironies involved (Kerrigan,
Interviews, 1985, 1986). Interestingly, individuals from both ends of the social
spectrum were quite explicit about the volunteers' actions merely reflecting the
"natural" state of affairs (for example, Lady Lindsay's comments above and Frederick
Coombes' below). Members of the working class, however, direct their criticism at the
inherent unfairness of that seemingly natural order, contesting the Establishment view
about national duty and the upper-class role in upholding it. Frederick Coombes, who
was a chief petty officer in the Royal Navy in 1926, was stationed on a submarine
during the strike. He recalled:

In the evenings [the volunteer dock workers] went over to the Port of London
authority Canteen.… And you found all the students, Oxford, Cambridge, and people
like that.… It was pretty obvious that they were; … the way they talked. They talked
differently from us as well and everybody knew that they were students, they didn't
have to say that they were.…

13
As I said, they were all there and they thought it was great fun even--[lifting] crates,
because they were great big athletic fellows, even moved lumps of beef. They didn't
mind doing it for that week. They would not like to do that forever--for a living--but
they thought it was all fun. And then they used to go in and they'd sing songs, all
lovely singing, all getting half-drunk and all that!…

We talked like it was anybody else, we talked to them. They didn't say anything much
about it; they thought it was great fun.… Sometimes you could tell because they …
are much more casually dressed than a lot of--working [men]. You could tell the
quality of the clothes they were wearing. We knew perfectly well who they were.
Anyway, they were very happy, that sort of thing. No snobbery amongst them when
they had a few pints of beer. And they're never snobs, those sorts of people.… They're
always very nice; that's part of their charm, you know? They were just having a good
time, perhaps a few felt patriotic.… Perhaps they started off with that--all for Britain
and--of course their Britain was lovely, isn't it? Their Britain is all right. They keep
what they've got. Don't blame them in some respects (Interview, 1985).

For Coombes as for everyone else at the time accent, clothing style, pleasant attitude,
and courteous treatment of their social inferiors marked the volunteer dock workers as
upper class. And Coombes bore them no personal ill will for that. He is philosophical
about the upper-class effort to maintain the status quo, to "keep what they've got." But
in expressing admiration he also implies an ironic critique of a society that permits
one class to experience a "lovely" existence, while others experience a life that is
clearly not "all right."

Besides employing irony, many among the working classes used traditional forms of
mocking humor to comment on the absurdity of university students and Society
women doing the work of laborers. Kay Ekevall, a young working-class woman at the
time, recalls the way in which, after the strike, regular workers would employ
exaggerated upper-class accents and manners.

The aftermath of it was the funniest.… Students in those days were very sort of
reactionary, they were all wealthy people who could afford to go to college … and
they manned the tubes. And after the strike was over the real tube men had great fun
because they used to stand on the platform and say [very U-accent (Buckle 1978)],(
n26) "Mind the doors please, pahss along the car please." They had us in stitches for
weeks afterwards. "Pahss along the cars please." And they had great fun taking them
off, you know, the students, imitating their highfalutin voices, you know.

… We didn't hear the bus drivers doing it, but we did hear it on the tubes because they
were all on the platform and you could hear everything that was said.… They had
almost everybody laughing.… [It lasted] about three months, yeah.… They couldn't
do anything about it because everybody was laughing you know. They would show
themselves up [RHS: There was no question about what they were doing?], no
(Interview, 1986).

Ekevall's comments note the workers' sarcastic commentary about the class origins as
well as the "work" of the temporary tube men. In mocking the manners and accent of
the upper-class volunteers, the regular laborers transformed the volunteers' efforts and
the volunteers themselves (male and female) into something trite and superficial.

14
Media Commentary

While individuals noted certain aspects of role switching that occurred during the
strike, the media also contributed to the atmosphere of festival inversion during the
strike. Although newspapers and magazines from the entire political and social
spectrum featured strike commentary, of particular interest to the folklorist is the use
that the working-class press made of the traditional verbal genres to engage in
discourse about the volunteers. Catchjokes,( n27) doggerel, memorates, and word play
were employed to comment upon the innovative public display of upper-class
traditional culture. All of the media picked up on the playful attitude of the volunteers,
exaggerating the "upper-class" characteristics of the young society folks. Yet there
were subtle but important differences in the images conveyed--and in the critique
implied.

Those publications sympathetic to the volunteers or produced by their peers noted the
absurdity of the elite's doing the work of the workers and at the same time pointed to
the extra-legal and sexual license acquired through such role reversals. An article in
the Isis, an Oxford University journal, notes:

How is the man who has been driving a train going to settle down to the higher
criticism, and is the man who conducted a 'bus with the legend, "Threepence all the
way and a kiss from the conductor," ever again going to enjoy monastic Oxford?…

It has been a lovely experience, too, to be on the right side of the police; to dash
through quiet suburbs at sixty miles per hour, merely waving a blue license in the face
of agonised constables ("The Varsities Vindicated" 1926: 8).

In contrast, commentary in Labour papers such as the British Worker, the Daily
Herald, the Scottish Worker, and many a locally produced union newsheet portrays
the upper classes as inept and impotent. An issue of the British Worker relates a story
that particularly highlights the image of the volunteer as a fool for patriotism, one
who could never hope to achieve the cleverness of the workers. According to this tale,
a group of strikers were caught in the rain on their return to London from South
Wales. They stopped for shelter in an inn and met up with "an elderly lady of severe
and haughty aspect. With her was a young man, evidently her son.… [He] wore a pair
of the plusiest plus fours I have ever seen." After several minutes of listening to the
woman's lamenting the strike and trying to figure out what her son could do, since he
couldn't drive, one of the strikers asked Lady Camelia Fotheringham, "a Primrose
dame, a member of the Women's Imperial anti-Socialist Club, and the vice chair-
woman of the Anti-Vegetarian League," if she could help with "a matter of high
political importance." She agreed and he asked her to deliver some important papers
"'to Jones of High Pringleby.… The utmost secrecy is needed. It is for the cause of
England,' I added in thrilling tones."

After explanations--somewhat prolonged, owing to [her son's] rather atenuated [sic]

power of understanding, a bulky package … was transferred … to the care of Lady
Fotheringham.… They set forth, on their thirty-mile ride on one of the worst roads in
England. There was a look of patriotic consecration on Lady Fotheringham's face.
And that's how we got our stock of revolutionary pamphlets to Comrade Jones
("England Expects…" 1926: 4).

15
Besides such anecdotal critique, the Labour press also indulged in short quips that
more directly impugned the manliness as well as the patriotism of the volunteers.
Some of the inventive names the British Worker gave the volunteer Organization for
Maintenance of Supplies, known as the O.M.S., were the "Order of Mugs and Saps,"
the "Order of Mugs and Scabs," and the "O'Messers" (Everard 1926a: 4; Gadfly 1926:
5; Everard 1926b: 4). Members of this organization and those in the special
constabulary were given "typically" upper-class names, such as D'Arcy, Egbert,
Clarence, or Aloysius in workers' publications (Everard 1926c: 4).

Commentary in the media, especially in society and working-class papers, was

particularly nasty when it targeted upper-class women volunteers: not only had they
taken jobs from men, they had forsaken their "proper" female role, which precluded
approval for participation in public affairs beyond charity work.( n28) The Evening
Standard, for instance, rather cattily reported that "many ladies, royal and otherwise,
who having discovered the satisfaction of doing real work during the war, have since
been loath to leave their 'jobs'" ("A Modern Princess" 1926: 6). More direct in its
attack than the more middle-of-the-road media could afford to be,( n29) the Labour-
oriented Sunday Worker published a photograph of two well-dressed women
presiding over the frying pans; the caption explained that they were "Lady members
of the idle class 'caught' doing something useful in Hyde Park" (1926: 8). Regardless
of the explicitness of the commentary, the message was clear from all sides: women,
especially upper-class women, had no business departing from their designated social
roles--no matter how much observers might approve or disapprove of those roles.

Another form of humor especially popular in the press were comments of a

Rabelaisian nature, which referenced food or sex. Such quips, often taken from the
placards attached to buses and trains, also functioned to emphasize an atmosphere of
festival license. One, entitled "Cannibalism?" observes, "One of the sights of London
yesterday [11 May 1926] was an exquisite limousine labeled 'For food,' and bearing a
cargo of substantial men and women" (1926: 4). Yet behind the humorous
commentary was an awareness that the world had been turned upside down.
According to the Lock-Out Strike-Time Sentinel, "Men in overalls were described
riding in limousines along with the top-hatted--who wears top hats now?--to show the
praiseworthy abolition of class distinction. We had some of this in the other war. How
long will it last again? Just till the trouble is over" ("What We Have Seen and Heard"
1926: 1). As a British Worker headline proclaimed, pointing out the wage differences
between miners and the special constables: "Topsy-Turvy Wages--Welsh Pit Labourer
Offered 31s. 7 1/2d.: Constable's 46s. 3d., Plus Housing" (1926: 3).

Beyond categorizing the volunteers as foolish and inept, the British Worker also
reported events that indicated the real dangers of volunteer ignorance. An article
under the headline, "Why They Had to Walk, Volunteer-Driver Who Touched the
Wrong Handle" explained how the volunteer driver managed to lose the brakes on his
locomotive but, through no fault of his own, did not injure anyone in the process
(1926: 2). The previous day, 11 May, front-page headlines had reported that the
results of "Blackleg and 'Voluntary' Labour" were "Four Dead" ("Five Railway
Crashes…" 1926: 1).

Despite the force of such stories, the Labour papers had a much smaller readership
than the national papers; not many people, therefore, ever heard about these incidents.

16
Rather, they read accounts in the more mainstream press, which printed stories
implying that the volunteers were not responsible for accidents caused by their
ignorance and merely noting the damage done. For example, the Times reported that
three passengers were killed on one volunteer run and that two cars and an engine
were derailed, a platform damaged, a passenger's leg broken, and a man killed on
another ("Railway Collision at Edinburgh" 1926: 3). Not surprisingly, given that
drivers had volunteered to do their duty for their country, no punishment for their
carelessness was ever mentioned--or apparently expected. For example, the Star noted
that "a motorist, summoned at Highgate today for exceeding the speed limit, said that
he had been a volunteer, and understood that as such he was entitled to leniency"
("The Volunteer's Plea" 1926: 1). Whether he received it or not is unknown. Yet the
blatant nature of such unfair treatment becomes apparent when compared to the
publicity given to any incidents for which the strikers could be blamed and
categorized as a mob, hooligans, or otherwise un-British and probably un-human
creatures who dwelt in the geographical fringes of the United Kingdom. An article in
The Bystander, for instance, proceeded to express pity for the "gentle, kindly …
brave, honest" printing man, who was "brought to sow discord and destruction among
his fellows … by Mob Rule" (Old Guard 1926: 428). The Manchester Guardian
reported that "hooligans" were responsible for stopping motor buses in the Glasgow
area ("A Glasgow Incident" 1926: 2 and see "Hooligans Busy in Glasgow" 1926: 3),
while the Daily Mail produced headlines and stories about "rowdy mobs" wrecking
trams and buses, causing "disorderly scenes … in the East End of London" ("Mobs
Wreck Tramcars and Omnibuses in London" 1926: 1), an area known for its high
percentage of foreigners and particularly Eastern European Jews.

Unlike the volunteers, striking workers were permitted no license. Fines for "seditious
activities" frequently came to twenty times an average working-man's weekly wage.
The Daily Graphic, for instance, printed in a column headed "Prison for Hooligans--
Peace Breaking Roughs Sentenced" that men in Scotland and England charged with
rioting were sentenced to between one and three months hard labor (1926: 2; "False
News of Police Strike" 1926: 4).

Englishness

In the nineteenth century traditional protests by members of the working classes

focused the debate over which classes had a greater stake in defining what it meant to
be British. In 1926, however, it was the tradition-based activities of the upper classes
that fueled the dialectic and made explicit the contest over the criteria for Englishness.
While the popular mind had come to embrace an increasingly broad definition for
national identity after the Great War, organized labor's defeat in the General Strike
enabled the Establishment to revive a more exclusive notion of that status.

Conclusion

During the General Strike millions of workers risked their livelihoods for the coal
miners in order to demonstrate the interconnectedness of humanistic responsibilities
and industrial reform. Strikers pointed to the record of the workers in World War I
and the Government's promises to make Great Britain "a land fit for heroes to live in."
Yet the logic of the strikers' methods worked against them. People responded as if the
General Strike were an indexical sign for revolution, rather than a more complex

17
metaphor that attempted to define the nation as a community--one that included
workers as well as rulers.

Because of who they were and what they did, the volunteers' message was better
received than that of the strikers--a point that the working-class press and individual
members of the working class recognized. Representatives of the upper and upper-
middle classes defended their right not to do manual labor by doing it--temporarily.
They countered the accusations of the socialist labor movement that they were the
idle, incompetent rich by demonstrating their ability to "come through" in a crisis.
They worked as a temporary community to "keep the nation going." They fought a
limited, safe war against an enemy called disorder, an enemy that not only attacked
the Constitution but also challenged the social hierarchy. It was their
recontextualization of traditional culture, however, that intensified and revivified its
political meaning. Yet because the forms the volunteers chose were derived explicitly
from the customary forms of dramatic play and unpaid service, which were the
preserve of the upper and middle classes, no one besides the striking workers was
obliged to take them too seriously.

Members of the working classes in 1926 and afterwards have made distinct their
belief that the volunteers were misappropriating traditional expressive culture to make
war on the working classes. Although the effect of such behavior was more symbolic
than actual, the result was just as devastating. As Rose Kerrigan put it, "you couldn't
forgive them for what they'd done during the strike. They were your enemy--they
were no longer a part of you" (Interview, 1985).

NOTES

Acknowledgments Diane Bennett deserves my enormous appreciation for her careful

and insightful critique of previous drafts of this article, as well as for her heroic efforts
in offering to edit this collection of essays. Jill Dubisch has given invaluable assitance
in the production of this collection. As chair for the original session she noted the
coherence of the themes and encouraged us to publish the papers. Special thanks are
also due to the generous men and women of Great Britain who responded to my
letters and allowed me to interview them. Funding for this research was provided by a
dissertation Grant-in-Aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research. I would also like to acknowledge my employer, Linda Norris, Director of
the Delaware County Historical Association in Delhi, NY, for providing me with the
time to complete this article.

( n1) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries certain forms of deference and
patronage behaviors existed between classes in Great Britain. Yet during seasonal
holidays, such as Christmas, May Day, and Guy Fawkes Day, and certain rites of
passage, such as births, coming of age parties, or weddings, the lower classes were
permitted to step outside their usually limited realm of power, disguise themselves in
various ways, and demand tribute in the forms of food, drink, and money from their
employers or landlords, who generally went along with these traditions to prevent
riots during other times (Gluckman 1964; Simms 1978).

( n2) The more dramatic structures and guises of these "old-fashioned," folk methods
(Thompson 1971; Hay et al. 1979) resembled Christmas mumming and other holiday

18
house visiting customs. This particular kind of social protest tradition has been
documented at least as far back as the seventeenth century and as recently as the late
twentieth century (Williams 1971; Thompson 1971, 1974; Burke 1978; Simms 1978;
Hay et al. 1979; Hebdige 1979; Bushaway 1982; Pearson 1983).

( n3) Scholars in the British Marxist tradition maintain that the reversible and inverted
worlds of holiday or festival forms, which include mummers' plays, quotes, and rough
musicking or charivari, as well as various festivals, provided the potential forms for
the Swing, Luddite, and Rebecca uprisings. In the early part of the nineteenth century
agricultural workers and small holders in Great Britain, led by men dressed up as the
mythical General Ned Ludd, Captain Swing, and even the biblical Rebecca, blacked
their faces, dressed as women, or otherwise disguised themselves to make midnight
calls at the homes of those believed to be responsible for the loss of jobs or income.
Unlike Christmas house visits, these were neither expected nor condoned. The
fearsome and disguised marauders shouted threatening verses, left anonymous letters,
and in other ways terrorized the elite others. And when threats didn't work, the
Luddites set hayricks, weaving frames, and farm buildings on fire, thus fulfilling the
implied threat carried at the end of all mummers' plays to invoke the ludic and juridic
power that reigns during times of seasonal rituals and celebrations (Williams 1971;
Hay et al. 1975; Hobsbawm and Rudé 1975; Simms 1978).

( n4) I am defining play as actions designated and bounded by a frame of "not real" in
time and intention (Huizinga 1955; Caillois 1961; Bateson 1972; Goffman 1975).

( n5) The convention in anthropological scholarship is for middle and upper-class

scholars to analyze the cultures of indigenous and often non-western peoples from
lower socio-economic backgrounds. During the past twenty years, European social
historians such as Edward Thompson (1971,1974), LeRoy Ladurie (1979), Robert
Darnton (1984), Peter Burke (1983), Eric Hobsbawm (1985), Terry Castle (1986),
Joanna Hubbs (1988), and others have employed anthropological theories to re-
examine the symbolic actions of upper-class European societies in times of political
upheaval. Yet few scholars have noted the existence of upper-class folklore or paid
heed to working-class commentary on such traditional forms of expression. Even
those (for example, Hay et al. 1975; Hill 1978; Bushaway 1982; Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1985; Cannadine 1985; Wright 1985) who have studied upper-class culture
have tended to dismiss instances of traditional expressive culture among the elite as
invented and thus inauthentic (Hobsbawm 1985: 3-4). Except for two articles by E.P.
Thompson (1971,1974) and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Carnival in Romans (1979),
there is virtually nothing written about upper-class motivations for sanctioning
episodes of seasonal disorder.

( n6) In Great Britain quêtes are traditional house visits that occur at Christmas when
those of lower social status visit the homes of others, perform skits or songs, and
request food, drink, or money in return. In the United States, the children's custom of
trick or treating at Halloween or visiting friends and neighbors to sing carols at
Christmas also serves the functions of redistributing "wealth" and delineating the
physical boundaries of community obligation; the status distinctions in the latter
instances usually have more to do with age (children demanding treats from adults)
than social class, however.

19
( n7) In 1930, for example, when the Duke of Westminster married his third wife,
Loelia Ponsonby, he remitted a week's rent to all his tenants, while others in similar
situations invited "coach loads of tenants up to London for their weddings" (Pine
1956: 44). Rather than indulge in such grand and impersonal gestures, the mistresses
of large estates, unlike the masters, were much more likely to demonstrate good will
towards the lower classes in more personal and more traditionally maternal ways.
Esther Cohen, who grew up in London's East End, recalls annual invitations to the
home of Lady Rothschild. The neighborhood children would have tea in the pavilion,
where they were waited upon and served watercress sandwiches. Once, Mrs. Cohen
remembers, she got to walk around the gardens--and with Lady Rothschild herself
(Interview, 1985).

Although some members of the working classes who benefitted from such efforts
appreciated their glimpses of another world, there were others who took women's
charitable work for granted--and were not particularly impressed by it. Sid Rosenberg,
a retired trade unionist, told me,

Yeah, the [Society ladies] used to [run canteens] in the stations.… They were all very
rich women … titled women. They used to run like they do now for the down-and-
outs, but they … well they paid out of their own pocket. All right--what'd it cost in
those days: tea, sugar, milk? A penny a bottle of milk (Interview, 1985).

( n8) Parliament, spurred on by a Lloyd George and Asquith-dominated and reform-

oriented Liberal party and an increasingly large Labour party, enacted a series of
reforms between 1906 and 1911, including the 1908 Children's Act, the Old Age
Pensions Act of 1908, and the National Insurance Act of 1911. Although the Liberal
MPs were certainly men who felt a responsibility to those less privileged than they,
the continued activism and disruption of business by various sectors of the Labour
movement (the Independent Labour Party, the British Socialist Party, the Communist
Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and the South Wales Socialist Society, as well as
unions like those of the dockers, coal miners, transport workers, and so on) during the
previous fifteen to twenty years, no doubt had some effect on Parliamentary
consciences.

( n9) Although all men 21 years of age and older were given the right to vote, only
women 30 years of age and older who owned or occupied land or premises worth five
pounds a year (or whose husbands did) were able to vote. Not until 1928 did women
21 years of age and older win full voting rights.

( n10) In 1919 coal miners had their hours reduced (the Seven Hours Act), and in
1925 the industry received a nine-month subsidy in order to avoid lowered wages;
strikes by railway men and dockers in 1919 resulted in the Arbitration Act.

( n11) Plus fours are wide-legged knickers worn by golfers or stylish undergraduates;
fair isle sweaters are intricately patterned, brightly colored pullovers typically worn
by university students in the 1920s.

( n12) Notable exceptions include David Archard et al. (1972), David Vincent (1974),
and Chris Wrigley (1984) who do examine the volunteers and their actions as
symbolic and representative of a particular world view. Archard et al. present a survey

20
of Corpus Christi College, Oxford volunteer experiences; Vincent notes the
manipulation of mythologies that occurred during the strike; and Wrigley analyzes the
class status of volunteers.

( n13) For instance, Mrs. Richard Cavendish, whose grandfather was a multi-
millionaire tea planter in India, recalls when the words "Lady Bountiful" signified a
distinctive category for upper-class women and not a sarcastic reference:

In those days" [the words] were taken literally. My grandmother was amazing: it
didn't matter who wanted her--anybody in the village, anybody on the place who
needed help--she was always available.…

While I was living with my parents I once went off, as a teenager, to stay at Welbeck,
which was an incredibly grand house; the Lady Bountiful there was the Duchess of
Portland. On the night of an enormous party, an old man in the village, who was
dying, asked to see the Duchess. The moment all the other guests disappeared, off she
went down to the village. She sat with him all night, talking to him, looking after him,
until he died. Next morning, there she was at breakfast, beautifully dressed and not a
word said. (Waterson 1975: 37)

Besides helping out those in trouble who depended upon them, the upper classes also
provided special treats, usually at Christmas time, twenty-first birthday parties, or
weddings. The Duchess of Portland used to hire waiters to wait on her servants at the
annual Boxing Day ball; after she had danced with the steward, however, she and the
duke left, and the ball became more relaxed (Dawes 1974: 133-136).

( n14) For example, they formed new clubs, such as the University Pavement Club,

whose members united in agreeing that there was too much rush in modern life. On
Saturday at midday, members of the club sat for an hour on the pavements in King's
Parade, passing the time with tiddley-winks, noughts and crosses, marbles and nap,
reading and even knitting. While they were so engaged, a Proctor passed and they had
to break the rules of the club in order to stand in his presence while he took their
names; he was so sympathetic that after he had gone the club unanimously elected
him their president (Graves and Hodge 1941: 112).

( n15) In one well-known prank, Mr. George Edinger, an Oxford undergraduate

lectured as

the well known German psychologist, Dr. Emile Busch.… Many distinguished
professors and heads of colleges turned up to hear what the great thinker had to say.
The lecture was a tour de force: A brilliant parody of all the jargon that psychologists
use, but without one word of meaning (Balfour 1933: 169).

( n16) According to M.E. Massey, a Girton College, Cambridge University alumna, a

rag "was something a group of you might do, usually discomfitting someone else, or a
group of others. It would be somewhat at their expense, but not vindictively so"
(Letter, 1986).

21
( n17) Carl yon Sydow coined the term memorate to refer to a frequently told personal
experience narrative that follows a formulaic structure; like other forms of traditional
narrative, a memorate condenses specific details and emphasizes more generic themes
found in similar tales, for example, ghost stories, urban legends, war stories, or
immigration narratives.

( n18) The "It" girl was a reference to sex appeal in 1926.

( n19) Although they received very little media coverage, upper-class and unmarried
women in areas outside of London more often got a crack at jobs involving driving or
bus-conducting than their urban cohorts--largely because most male volunteers
wanted to go to London. Peggy Paten, from an upper-middle class family near
Peterborough, told me, "I was a bus conductress with another woman. I was given a
wallet purse with a band on my shoulder and across my chest, took money and gave
tickets. Oh, I enjoyed it, yes!" (Interview, 1985). And Marjorie Shipley Ellis, from
another prominent Peterborough family, related:

I must own to enjoying the General Strike enormously. We were all young in those
days and people hadn't got regular jobs as they all have now. The last issue of the
Times told us the strike was coming. And then we all charged down to the little Guild
Hall. There were streams of people waiting to be given a job! You went up and said,
"Please give me a job." And then they said would I like to take the newspaper run?
And I said, "Yes, very much my cup of tea.'"

I was positively upset when the thing ended, I'd enjoyed my newspaper route so
much! We young things didn't realize the seriousness of the situation. We all thought
it was a huge joke! You see every boy in those days wanted to drive a train or drive a
bus. That was the young people's idea of bliss you see (Interview, 1985).

( n20) Even upper-class women like the Countess of Crawford and Balcarres received
no official thanks for having "had two students billeted on us. As far as I remember
they went out on different shifts working in the docks and railway yards till one of
them developed pneumonia and had to be looked after till he recovered" (Letter,
1986).

( n21) These were not like American bibbed dungarees but rather similar to hospital
coats or dusters.

( n22) A particularly good photograph of this phenomenon appears in an article in Eve

entitled "Noblesse Oblige." Foregrounding the uniqueness of this situation, the
caption under the photo reads: "Strange happenings at Scotland Yard! The Hon. Mrs.
Lionel Tennyson, the Hon. Mrs. Fitzallan Howard, the Hon. Diana Skeffington, Miss
Cameron and Lady Sara Wilson busily engaged at the canteen in Scotland Yard"
(1926: 340).

( n23) There were several articles in mainstream and Society papers and magazines
about well-known members of Society who cooked, served food, hung out laundry,
peeled potatoes, swept up, ate, and took cigarettes breaks in the canteens and who
were photographed and mentioned by name ("Noblesse Oblige" 1926: 340; "How The
Flag Was Kept Flying" 1926: 251; "Over in Ireland, and the Strike from the Social

22
Point of View" 1926: 246; "How the British Empire Came On in Spite Of The Strike"
1926: 240-241; "Were we Downhearted? The Answer is in the Negative" 1926: 235).
These articles also detailed those who worked as drivers, for Queen Mary's Auxiliary
Service, and for the G.W.R. horses ("How Women Helped During the Great Strike"
1926: 159; "Were We Downhearted? The Answer is in the Negative" 1926: 235;
"Noblesse Oblige" 1926: 340; "Over in Ireland, and the Strike from the Social Point
of View" 1926: 246; "How the British Empire Came On In Spite Of The Strike" 1926:
240-241).

( n24) Lady Louis Mountbatten, better known for her shopping abilities than her
charity work, was mentioned by nearly all the newspapers. Note the following excerpt
from Punch:

A Versatile Volunteer Worker

"In this office Lady L.M. has been managing the telephone." Sunday Newspaper.

"Lady L.M. sold more than 1,000 copies [of the newspaper] in twenty minutes."
Another column, same paper, same day.

"Other well-known people who rose nobly to the occasions were Lady L.M., whom I
saw gaily wielding a frying-pan at Marble Arch …" Another paper, same day ("A
Versatile Volunteer Worker" 1926: 540).

( n25) Roger Abrahams notes in his paper "Can You Dig It? Aspects of the African
Esthetic in Afro-America," presented at the African Folklore Institute, Indiana
University, 1970, that a community celebrates

its sense of groupness by coordination of energies in the common creative enterprise,

and [does] so by taking binary oppositions, embodying them in a complexly
integrated traditional form which utilizes these oppositions in the form of
complementarities. This group focus is guaranteed through the practice of interlock,
in which the distinction between performer and audience is made meaningless, for all
perform to some degree. The good performers … gain status not because of their
virtuosity but for their ability to bring the community together in performance (as
cited by G. Davis 1987: 156).

( n26) A "U" accent is British terminology for upper-class accent, a very distinctive,
clipped style of speech with post-vocalic Rs eliminated and broad vowels employed.

( n27) Catch-jokes are similar to catch-riddles; both forms seem to presuppose a

certain answer but "catch" the audience unaware with an unexpected pun or ending.

( n28) Mysogynism was particularly rife at the universities and in their journals.
Because there was such a disproportionate number of undergraduate male volunteers,
one would have expected there to be an equally high number of student women
volunteers. But, as one of my male informants explained, "there were quite enough of
us" (Jones, Interview, 1987). Undergraduate females had already strayed dangerously
close to the male establishment's preserve of power just by going to university. To
permit them such license in this sort of crisis could set even greater precedents.

23
( n29) For example, one letter in the Evening News expressed grudging approval if
the office flappers expressed their thanks and grateful admiration for their gallant
knights of the road, but not if they "stole" rides from male workers, or worse,
expressed a preference for one driver or vehicle over another (indicating an unseemly
knowledge of a male domain). Like recipients of charity, the "girls" were expected to
offer up their unqualified thanks or to "suffer and be still." Wrote one "owner-driver":

The Girl in the Mauve Hat was duplicated many times over. She had the whole
language of motordom at the tip of her tongue--"I prefer an open car" (my car is a
saloon); "Give me a six-cylinder" (mine, of course, is a four); … She and her kind
made me hate the car--and her--very thoroughly.

How much nicer the Girl with the Umbrella: "How clever of you to drive through all
this traffic … And so quickly … I don't know how you do it … I'm sure I couldn't.…"
She made me love the car--and myself--very thoroughly (Owner-Driver 1926: 2).

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29
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~~~~~~~~

By Rachelle H. Saltzman, Delaware County Historical Association, New York

30