Community and municipalism: collective identity in late-victorian and edwardian mining towns

Journal of Histor'ical Geography, 17, 3 (1991) 257-270

Community and municipalism: collective identity in late-Victorian and Edwardian mining towns David Gilbert

Most studies of the municipal movement in late nineteenth-century Britain have necessarily concentrated on the great cities. However, ideas about the nature of the city, urban politics and citizenship formed in the large metropolises had influence outside of them. This paper assesses the influence of municipalism on mining towns in South Wales and Nottinghamshire, particularly in the towns of Ynysybwl and Hucknall. Differences in the acceptance and adoption of municipalism between the two coalfields are related to the relationship between employers and miners, to the character and importance of local intermediate social groups, and to the structure of local institutions. David Smith's idea of the "definition of community" is used to argue that the sense of collective identity was a social construction, and the result of a process of social struggle. In South Wales, this process of "definition of community" resulted in local collective identities which largely excluded the ideas of urbanism which were associated with the muncipal movement. In Nottinghamshire, municipal ideas were more successful. Involvement in local government became an alternative strategy to paternalism and close control of company villages for coalowners in the county. Liberal coalowners such as John Ellis of Hucknall supported, promoted and sponsored local municipalism. The evidence of these contrasting cases calls into question common stereotypes of mining villages found in sociological and historical literature, and points to the contingent ideological influence of municipalism beyond the great cities.

"It was the great cities that Victorians contemplated when they weighed the urbanization of their society, because these were assumed to exhibit all the main features of urban living in its fullest development." One of the most important responses to this changing geography was the reformation of local government. The 1835 Municipal Corporations Reform Act, if not in and of itself a "municipal revolution", certainly opened the way to a wholesale re-organization of English urban government. Much academic attention has been given to the rise of municipal government in the great cities; understandably and justifiably so, for it was in these cities that most innovations in local government took place. The final form of Victorian local government, established in the late 1880s and 1890s was, to a great extent, a post-hoc rationalization and generalization of earlier local reforms and initiatives in the great metropolitan cities. :q While the great cities took the lead in this process, their approaches to the problems of urbanization were influential in the rest of the country, even outside of the incorporated towns. Although the development of municipal government took place on a pragmatic and piecemeal basis, a clear and reasonably coherent view of its proper form had emerged by the closing decades of the century, most explicitly and famously in Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham. The concern here 0305-7488/91/030257 + 14 $03.00/0

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is with the influence which this model and ethos of municipalism had in mining towns--superficially not the most receptive of sites. Attention is restricted to two coalfields--South Wales and Nottinghamshire--concentrating on two particular communities: Ynysybwl in Wales and Hucknall in Nottinghamshire. Differences in the acceptance and adoption of what might be called the municipal ethos are related to the different character of these coalfield settlements, particularly in the relationships between employers and miners, the importance of intermediate groups, and the nature of local institutions. The strength of municipal ideals in mining towns reflected the local sense of identity--the extent to which there were shared or contested understandings of the nature of local society, or to use David Smith's terminology, the "definition of community", f21 There is, perhaps, some danger of presenting a too coherent and explicitly ideological view of the municipal movement. This is certainly the case if "Chamberlainism" is taken as the archetype of late Victorian urban politics. In Birmingham the municipal reform movement was accompanied by a specific philosophy and theology of urban welfare, most notably the "civic gospel" of George Dawson and Robert Dale. E31This way of thinking reached its fullest expression in the writings of the pioneer social reformer Canon Barnett, particularly his vision of The Ideal City (1893), and in T.H. Green's closely related ideas of social citizenship. These moves towards a doctrine of municipal collectivism, inspiring as they were, (especially when given the full charismatic preacher treatment by Dawson or Dale) lagged behind practical changes. The civic gospel was essentially a particular interpretation and codification of developments underway in municipal practice. In the context of this paper there is little point in considering those aspects of municipalism which were necessarily limited to the great cities because of their size and particular problems. The argument being made here is that there was a certain late-Victorian style or ethos of municipalism, which applied to many small towns as well as to the large cities and incorporated boroughs. This municipal ethos was not a clear coherent ideological position, but a set of attitudes concerning the nature of urbanism and the proper role of urban government. Certain important aspects of this ethos concerned the social character of urban leadership, the scope and the nature of urban services, and promotion of the city or town (the municipal city-state) as the proper form or definition of community. Of course, particular councils and cities often fell well short of these standards; what is of importance is that these were the unwritten standards on which they were judged. By the closing decades of the nineteenthcentury the main elements of the municipal ethos could be said to form a reasonably established consensus. The ethos of public service which emerged in the late-Victorian city was a curious mixture of collectivist and individualist doctrines. It is worth repeating Sydney Webb's famous polemical description of an individualist town councillor who while surrounded by a vast landscape of municipal edifices, and while using an enormous range of municipal public services, all of which he has wholeheartedly voted for, nonetheless declares "Socialism, Sir, don't waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that's what made our city what it i s " . [41 One of the ways in which this apparent contradiction was resolved was through the identification of the efforts of individual men, usually powerful local businessmen, with the municipalization of the city. In the extreme case of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain came close

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to personifying the whole process of municipal reform. It was an important feature of the expansion of the local state in Victorian Britain that, aside from the civic gospel, and certain radical municipal thinkers, it took place in an ideological context that was often confused, and which encompassed elements superficially hostile to increased collectivism. The expansion of municipal services was, in any individual city, a matter of the take-over or establishment of particular institutions providing particular services; from a local perspective, therefore, the process appeared to be a pragmatic response to particular situations and opportunities, an impression reinforced by the piecemeal legal basis of the process. However, taking a national perspective, Helen Meller argues that a first phase of "sanitation" in the 1860s and 1870s was followed by a second phase in which the "civilising mission" characterised new municipal services. ESIConcert halls, free libraries and swimming baths replaced slum clearance, reservoirs and sewers as the prestige projects of town and city councils. This can be understood as a "gradually widening definition of the purposes of municipal reform", ~61 or, put in the terminology used here, an extension of the scope of the municipal ethos. By the end of the century, a positive social role was an accepted and expected part of municipal government. Civic pride was another important element of the municipal ethos. Chamberlain both said and demonstrated that urban and imperial politics had much in common. Local patriotism became a powerful force, carefully fostered by those running the cities. The great buildings of the period, like Leeds Town Hall, the Bradford Wool Exchange, or the great assemblage of buildings in Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, were far more than simple amenities. They were intended to shape popular consciousness, transforming parochial loyalties into pride in the great city, and moving the sense of geographic identity away from local townships and districts. The provision of municipal services often displaced or supplanted smaller scale more populist initiatives. This was not accidental; the Liberal capitalists who had gained control of the urban boroughs, and who found independent working-class action threatening, created forms of community which includedand privilegedthemselves.They developeda strategy of counter-provisionwhich involvedsupplyingrival cultural institutions in more imposing buildings, creating a new zone of "public territory" and appropriating key words like "community", "common", "cooperation" for the new c i v i t a s . I7~ The Yeos' comments point to the way in which those running the cities sought to establish "the city" as the most meaningful geographic expression of collective identity. However, it is important not to over-simp!if) the political sociology of Victorian cities. The relationships between urban capital and labour clearly influenced the nature of Liberal municipal reform, but of at least equal importance was the relationship between the predominantly bourgeois leadr of the cities and the aristocratic landed interests. Writing from this perspective Asa Briggs was able to 'suggest that the "flavour" of the cities "was essentialb radical". N Although, as David Cannadine and others have shown, the retreat of aristocratic influence was hesitating and marked by periods of accommodatio~ this very real urban class struggle left its mark on the dominant urban ideolog~ of the late-Victorian period. N The definition of community implicit in the new municipal ethos was as much a reaction to an older model of social organization

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based on traditional authority and deference, as it was an attempt to co-opt and defuse nascent independent working-class definitions. In the context of the political sociology of the late Victorian period, this meant that the municipal ethos was quite clearly associated with religious nonconformity and political Liberalism.

The sociology of mining settlements Most studies of mining communities have concentrated on their distinctiveness, stressing the special characteristics which made them unlike "ordinary" towns and villages. Kerr and Siegal's sociological theory of the isolated mass has remained a reference point for writers about mining communities (even if the references made have usually been very critical), fl~ The isolated mass theory, a crude attempt to explain political and social behaviour in terms of one variable, social isolation, has been superseded by a more sophisticated sociological approach. In this approach, the distinctiveness of mining communities results from a combination of social and socio-geographic characteristics, primarily occupational and social homogeneity, social closure, a high density of social networks, and relative physical delimitation and isolation. Illl Historical studies have usually concentrated on places having these characteristics, and have usually examined one or other of two types of mining community. A first set of studies searches for the social origins of communities marked by strong independent working-class institutions. These were places where, in Eric Hobsbawm's phrase, "the habit of solidarity" suggested "itself quite naturally". I121This type of study has often bordered on the heroic, perhaps unsurprisingly so, given the turbulent history of British mining in the twentieth century. Much attention has been given to the "Little Moscows"--villages like Chopwell in Durham, and Mardy in South Wales--where Marxism achieved its greatest popular success in Britain. I131Popular control of local institutions was not usually so ideologically clear-cut, but it is fair to suggest that there were a large number of mining villages (and nowhere more than South Wales) where the dominant social institutions were locally created and locally controlled. In South Wales it was firstly the nonconformist chapels, and then the local union branch, or "lodge", which were the dominant forces in local society, forming an alternative local government to the official authorities. A second set of studies has also emphasized the importance of homogeneity, closure, isolation and the numerical dominance of miners, but with a markedly different pattern of control of local institutions, and a different form of authority. Studies such as Wallet's of the development of the Dukeries coalfield in Nottinghamshire, and Moore's of the Deerness Valley in Durham, stress the dominance that colliery companies held over certain small communities. M The sociological and geographic characteristics which in slightly different circumstances favoured popular local control, were also critical to the success of the combination of paternalism and economic force found in company villages. Patrick Joyce has commented that the D u r h a m coalfield of the late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century contained "both the 'red village' and the dutiful miner". Elsl He suggests that residence and involvement of employers or managers in communities was critical. Lcoal institutions, particularly nonconformist chapels, could reinforce paternalistic authority, or could strengthen radical independence and solidarity in villages a few miles apart.

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Municipalism and mining in South Wales Both these models of mining communities place them well outside of the scope o f the ideas about municipalism discussed earlier. But this does not mean that the municipal ethos was irrelevant to late-Victorian and early twentieth-century mining towns. In the first place the emphasis given to radical independent communities and to paternalistic c o m p a n y villages has obscured the fact that m a n y miners did not live in such communities, particularly in the coalfields of the Midlands. By the turn of the century one fifth o f all miners employed in the Nottinghamshire coalfield lived in the city itself, IT61and others lived in smaller towns like Mansfield or Hucknall, where municipal ideas contributed to the strategies of the local leadership. The other reason why the municipal ethos has significance in understanding mining towns and villages is that their nature was assessed by contemporaries in terms o f municipal ideals. This was particularly clear in the official response to the social unrest and industrial disputes in South Wales in the period 1909-1916. The comments concerning the physical limits to municipality and their social consequences made by the 1917 Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest are worth quoting at some length: With the dwellingsand other buildings ranged in streets that run along the length of the valleys, instead of approximately radiating from a common centre as would be possible on a fairly level site, the civic and corporate life of the community has sufferedowing to the absence of "town centres" and of any conveniently centralised institutions. For instance, dignified municipal buildings are extremely rare; not a single municipally maintained public library is to be found in the central Glamorgan block of the coalfield--it is only on the sea-board and in the older towns of Merthyr, Aberdare and Pontypridd, that any exist. There are, it is true, many working men's institutes, most of them with collectionsof books, attached to differentcollieries; there are also many clubs, but we believe not a single trade union or co-operative hall for large gatherings and with offices for various labour organizations. Finally, the Rhondda has an abundance of cinemas and music halls, but not a single theatre. Owing to this absence of municipal centres and centralised institutions, the development of the civic spirit and the sense of social solidarity--what we may in short call the community sense is seriously retarded.LlTj The irony is that in searching for their idea of c o m m u n i t y - - o n e based on municipal ideals--the Commissioners missed the existence of a multitude of vibrant small-scale communities. Their comments demonstrate vividly the importance o f different definitions of community, and the sense in which such definitions are historical constructions, reflecting the balance o f social power in particular localities. The Commissioners feared that an urban area so different from the typical British metropolis of the period, would lack the usual structures of social order and control. Seventy years before, albeit with markedly different emphasis, Engels had analysed Manchester in similar terms. Manchester's urban geography of a symbolic and commercial centre surrounded by class segregated suburbs, was a part of a system of social control. The Commissioners' views have rightly been described as a fear of popular control, I~S1but it is significant that this fear was expressed in an assumed relationship between urban lbrm and expected social behaviour. In the perceptive essay where he introduces the idea of "definitions ol" c o m m u n i t y " , David Smith rejects easy characterization of the T o n y p a n d y riots of 1910 as either the irrational chaos of an angry mob, or as a heroic act of

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proletarian resistance. I~91Smith sees in the precise chronology and microgeography of the riots indications of a struggle on the part of the Tonypandy workingclass to rid themselves of an imposed "definition of community". The precise pattern of looting indicated not only detailed knowledge of local personalities and politics, but also a singular rejection of a particular view of local society. Over a period of years the tradesmen of the township, aided by other members of the local middle-class, such as the colliery managements and newspaper proprietors, had attempted to cultivate a local community of the style and social ordering of an English municipality, complete with civic pride and deferential social relationships. Overt attempts at social control were made, to create at least the visible aspects of a respectable society. The patterning of looting a n d violence against property in 1910 described a clear challenge to the hegemonic "consensus" which the local middle-class had attempted to build. The rewards of the systematic ransacking of the township's high street were not food or other basic essentials, but the gaudy epiphenomena of conspicuous consumption. These stolen goods were openly flaunted in the main streets, a double rejection of social respectability, It was unsurprising that such collective action, in part "modern" industrial dispute, and in part a reactive response to the nature of the community and social control, should have taken place in Tonypandy. The township was a halfway house between the more physically compact and socially dense villages of its region, and the industrial cities of the rest of Britain. Although unlike the archetypal Welsh mining village, Tonypandy was yet still of Valley society. Elsewhere in the coalfield the struggle over the "definition of community" could be internalized within the local institutional structure. In Tonypandy the struggle was more likely to take on a disjunctive, even violent form, because of differences in scale, particularly the size and organization of the middle class, and their ability to separate themselves ideologically from the majority of the population. Elsewhere, in villages like Ynysybwl or Mardy, emergent class consciousness converged with community consciousness; awareness of class was able to draw upon feelings of "ownership" of local communities and popular control. Class consciousness was a consciousness of class in place, in distinctive communities.

The exclusion of municipalism in Ynysybwl The story of Ynysybwl, a village some four miles north of Pontypridd, illustrates well the processes and conditions by which community came to be defined in South Wales in terms which largely excluded the municipal ethos. After the Ocean Company opened the Lady Windsor Colliery in 1884, the population of Ynysybwl grew to around 4000 in 1891 ,[20] the majority of the new immigrants coming from other parts of Wales. There was little further growth until the inter-war years. Izq Mining was the overwhelmingly dominant occupation among males in the village. By 1911 in Mountain Ash Urban District, of which Ynysybwl was a part, 64% of males over 10 were employed in mining, t221 In Ynysybwl, the proportion was probably closer to three-quarters. Physically, Ynysybwl was relatively isolated, set in its own small valley. The first local social institutions to hold influence over the population were the nonconformist chapels; although the company attempted a paternalistic strategy towards the workforce, the chapels were the true focus of local life. In

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the first twenty years of the industrial village the chapels and their vestry halls were the only public buildings of any size; their dispersal through the village reinforced their impact on local life. Apart from two hotels, the chapels monopolized social life until the opening of the Miners' Institute in 1904. [23]The chapels not only organized spiritual events throughout the week, but they also organized secular and semi-secular events like concerts and eisteddfodau; there was even a Zion football team in the village. Ministers like the formidable Theophilus Jones of the Noddfa chapel were true village elders, highly influential men who were called u p o n to mediate in disputes, f241Although members of the colliery management were chapel elders--Edward Jones, the manager, was a leading member of the Welsh Methodist Church--the chapels were relatively autonomous of the company. Unlike mining communities in some other parts of Britain (as those of Durham's Deerness Valley or some of the smaller villages in the East Midlands), the nonconformist churches were not formally or financially supported by the mining company. This had long-term consequences for the social and political character of Ynysybwl. In the years from the founding of the lodge in 1898 to the end of the First World War, the old order in which the chapels were the integrative and controlling institutions, and in which the company had an influential place, was replaced by a new order, with the lodge the dominant institution. This transformation was not a complete rupture with the past. Older patterns of behaviour remained in existence, influencing the new social order of the village. The new "community consensus" which grew around the lodge depended for its form on the earlier consensus established around the chapels. [251In replacing the chapels as the focus to local society the lodge drew u p o n established traditions of popular control and local organization. New developments, such as the popularization of sport and the coming of cinema were used to the lodge's advantage. This was particularly so after it was able to take control of the committee which ran the Miners' Institute, the largest building in the village, and the venue for almost all secular activity. I261 In this new local social order the formal concerns of local government played a minor role. Although administratively a part of Mountain Ash Urban District, Mountain Ash was six or seven miles away, and separated from Ynysybwl by a ridge of open hill. Day-to-day issues in the village were dealt with by the various committees of the lodge. For example, in 1905, the lodge organized a local meeting to press the Taft Vale Company to put on more coaches and reduce fares for journeys to Pontypridd. [271The housing committee expanded its work from dealing with the rents paid to the company; by the 1920s it was acting as an uno."icial small claims court, intervening in disputes between landlo,~ and tenants. [281 The councillors for Ynysybwi were exclusively nominated by the lodge, and there was little difierence between the roles played by councillors and by lodge officials. As Wilt Paynter commented of the coalfield generally, tile branch chairman and secretaries were much more than the miners' unioi~ representatives: "They were village elders to whom the people went with their worries and woes. They were the guides, philosophers and friends to a community as welt as the trade-union leaders dealing with the pit boss. "I2~j

Munieipalism and mining in Nottinghamshire The strength of the Welsh lodges depended on the structure of local society; m

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Nottinghamshire a very different form of local society precluded the identification of the locality with the organized interests of the miners. In Wales the incongruence of local government units and the geographically and socially delimited pit communities helped to foster an informal local leadership in the "elders" of the lodge; the Urban District Councils of Nottinghamshire corresponded more closely to the physical reality of the coalfield, and became the primary arenas of local politics and decision-making. The Welsh sense of community was popular and rooted in close-knit social worlds; in Nottinghamshire it was more concerned with a constructed sense of civic or municipal pride, and actively encouraged by those in powerful positions in local society. By the beginning of the twentieth-century, there were several collective understandings of community in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, reflecting its complicated history and sociology. Framework knitting and the continued influence of the gentry were the chief influences on the social environment in which coal mining took place in Nottinghamshire. Even where there was large population growth, mining did not obliterate these sociological patterns. By the middle of the nineteenth-century towns and villages already had a quite complicated sociology, with two distinctive and competing orderings, one based upon the relationship of landlord and estate worker, tending to create a polarized, deferential local society, the other upon the capitalistic division of labour in the domestic hosiery industry, which tended to produce a small independent local middle class. Religious divisions between Anglicanism and nonconformity strengthened the tensions between these competing social orderings, leaving local society in Nottinghamshire strongly differentiated and lacking an integrating institutional focus. The development of mining increased this fragmentation. Most Nottinghamshire mining settlements had existed before the coming of the mines. Until the early nineteenth-century mining enterprises remained under the direct control of landed proprietors. The squirearchy tended to treat mining "as a rather specialised form of farming", I3~ switching workers and equipment between the fields and the mines. Relations with their workers were a continuation of the relationship between the lord and his tenants. Increasingly, the industry came to be run by capitalist companies, like the Barber-Walker company, or the Butterley company. However, these companies took up the legacy of the squirearchy by taking a controlling position in local society. Their relations with the workforce drew simultaneously upon established patterns of deference and paternalism, and upon the disciplinary structures of a capitalist enterprise, as in Eastwood, where the Barbers bought the local estate and manor from the Duke of Newcastle. At the same time as the colliery owners were developing this "new feudalism", the predominant system of labour organization in the Nottinghamshire pits, the butty system, was having further effects on local society. Until the midnineteenth-century, the butties were true sub-contractors, tendering for particular projects, then employing and controlling the workforce. I311 The hosiery industry had created men with entrepreneurial talents and capital to use on other projects, a recognized, even institutionalized, place for the independent middleman in the local social order, and a value system of individualism and independence. From about 1840 onwards the full butty system declined as collieries introduced paid officials. It was gradually replaced by the little butty system of collective piecework, in which the scope of the butties' powers was

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greatly reduced. Changes in social order lagged behind and were more complicated. A distinctive tradition had been established in which the butty had a certain place in local society. The end of the butty's capitalistic role meant that they were no longer potentially among the richest members of towns and villages or true members of a local bourgeoisie. However the little butty system did maintain a clear differential in income between the butties and other miners, and under the new system there were more butties, forming an important intermediate stratum in local society. The local sociology of Nottinghamshire mining towns was profoundly affected by what might be described as the development of a regional society. Between the middle of the nineteenth-century and the first decades of the twentieth-century, changes in the organization of both male and female work, transport and leisure had effected a fundamental change in Nottinghamshire society. Nottingham's transformation from a town limited geographically and industrially, to a modern metropolis affected all the settlements of the area. In the coalfield districts of the county, a secondary urbanization had taken place, as the majority of the population became concentrated in the larger townships and medium-sized towns. These processes altered the coalfield inhabitants' understandings of the places in which they lived; to use the terminology adopted earlier, their definitions of community altered. This was clearest in the newly suburbanised places closest to Nottingham. But elsewhere, in places which retained some physical integrity and distinctiveness, similar processes were taking place. The mining towns of the county were the places most integrated into the developing regional society, t32j The urbanization of the secondary towns of the area--Mansfield, Sutton-inAshfield, Kirkby-in-Ashfield--concentrated miners and their families into places with preexisting characteristics, social orderings and elites. These towns were considerably different from the archetypal models of mining settlements. They were too large, too complicated and too integrated into the regional society to allow either the close paternalism which was later attempted in the company villages of the Dukeries, or the development of popular working-class institutions capable of playing a directive role in local society. In these circumstances the sphere of local and municipal government became central to collective identity. The question of the local definition of community was fused with questions of the nature of the town, of the "proper" local leadership, and of the correct form and scope of municipal services. These were the issues of the larger cities in microcosm.

The adoption and adaptation of municipaiism in HucknaIi In Hucknall, a small town about ten miles north of Nottingham, there were similar divisions in local society. When mining came to Hucknall in the 1860s the town already had a long history of control and influence by the gentry and aristocracy in the shape of the Torkard and Byron families, and the Dukes of Portland, and a rather shorter history of hosiery manufacture. As the hosiery industry moved from the domestic putting-out system to workshops and small factories, the firms of Calladine, Rhodes, Wollatt, and Buck came to dominate. These families formed the Hucknall bourgeoisie, and the nucleus of an emergent political elite in the town. By the 1860s, when the pits were sunk the fundamental division in local political power was between this rising middle class, who were

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predominantly nonconformist, and the Portland Estate, which was closely associated with the Anglican church in the town. The first elections to local Board of Health in 1868 strengthened the position of the middle class. Thirteen men were elected to the Board. Of these five were engaged in the manufacturer or tailoring of textiles, three were farmers (illustrative of continuities with an earlier Hucknall), two were maltsters (ever influential men in small communities), one a miller, and one a "Gentleman". f331Significantly, the remaining place was taken by John Edward Ellis, the colliery proprietor. Ellis, in the estimation of one local historian, achieved "more for Hucknall in 50 years than the Byrons had in 300 years", t341His role in local history was more than that of benefactor and instigator of public works. In all his influences on the development of Hucknall, Ellis held to a particular model of the proper form of a local community. He entered a local society with pre-existing power relationships and alignments formed on grounds of religion and class. As the town's major employer he had a decisive impact on the struggles between the local nonconformist middle class and the local Tory establishment of Church, the Portland Estate and the other local landowners. Of equal significance was the effect of Ellis's municipal enterprises and his vision of community on the incorporation of the mining working class into the full social and political life of the town. The town grew rapidly after the opening of the mines, and the great majority of the new arrivals were miners. By 1911 over 60% of adult males over 10 were employed in the minesJ 351Hucknall grew from 2836 in 1861, to 4257 in 1871, and to 10023 by 1881. Thereafter growth was rather slower; Hucknall's population was about 15 000 at the turn of the century, and did not increase greatly before the First World War. However, unlike Ynysybwl, Hucknall's pre-existing social structure and social geography placed constraints on the development of independent miners' institutions. ~361 Collective services came to be a matter for municipal provision rather than independent self-help. It was also important for the development of workingclass institutions in the town, that certain bodies, notably the local co-operative society, had been formed prior to the arrival of miners in the town and continued to be organized by established local families. This left the new miners' union with a narrowly-defined sphere of activity, concerning workplace issues. On his arrival in the town, Ellis rapidly recognized that his interests lay with the nascent municipal government, and were opposed to those of the Estate. He was quite open about the need to wrest power away from the old post-feudal establishment, and that this was best achieved through the extension of local government, f371 Ellis is best remembered in Hucknall for the programme of public works which were undertaken while he was the leading light in the local government of Hucknall. For most of the period before his election to Parliament in 1884, Ellis was on the School Board and chairman of the local Board of Health, the forerunner of the Urban District Council. _His main achievement was to bring independent water supplies to the town. After several epidemics of typhoid in the 1870s the Nottingham Waterworks Company made representations to bring Hucknall into their area of supply, while Ellis put forward a rival scheme for an independent waterworks. E381After several years of petitioning Ellis obtained assent in Parliament for the independent scheme. The scheme was a substantive expression of local pride and independence in the face of expansion by Hucknall's metropolitan neighbour. Ellis founded the Public Hall Company, which built the Hall in 1875, and in

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1887, he and his partner, Herbert Byng Paget gave the Free Library to the town at a cost of s The library, "a handsome structure of Queen Anne style of Architecture", E391was a miniature community centre, with rooms for meetings and games. In a speech in 1909, marking the presentation of a swimming bath to the town, Ellis congratulated the town on being in no ways a "one man town, but free and self-governing in thought and word and deed. Hucknall is always near to my heart, and to my dying day my highest ambition will be to serve its people".140l Ellis's emphasis on service to the people of Hucknall is significant. The Yeos have commented that municipal Liberal leaders transformed the idea of community from one of mutuality and co-operation to one of service to a "constructed public entity". L411Ellis's achievement was to enmesh the company in the network of institutions in the town, in a way which made the company seem less a coercive vested interest, than a benevolent influence, underwriting the community resources of Hucknall. He had succeeded in creating a majority understanding of the nature of the local community wherein the definition of community was his and that of his Liberal allies rather than the deferential version promoted by the Portland Estate and the Anglican church. Through his double role as employer and local politician he had also helped to form a community in which more popular local institutions of the kind run by the lodge in Ynysybwl were largely absent. This process was aided by divisions in the mining population which were a social legacy of the butty system. One modern Hucknall resident looked back on the town at the beginning of this century with these words: " M y town, Hucknall Torkard as we knew it years ago, was governed by men who were business men, God fearing, and the ones who had the brains and the love of their fellow men. They became councillors for the only reward to serve their town, to them it was a great honour. 'E42J Words which would have delighted both Ellis himself, and the apostles of the municipal gospel. However, competition between different ideas of the nature of local society did remain, despite the efforts of Ellis and his Liberal allies. In 1889 the celebrations of the marriage of the Duke of Portland seemed to go on all summer, much to the disgust of the local Liberal paper, The Hucknall Morning Star. E431J. H. Beardsmore's history of the town, written in 1909, was, for the most part, a hagiographic account of the town's association with long-dead nobles and poets. The Byron connection exerted considerable fascination among some sections of the population. Others celebrated an idyllic rural pastJ 441 During the twentieth century the increasing regionalization of work and leisure, particularly the growth of Nottingham, weakened the force of municipal ideas in Hucknall, although attempts to incorporate the town into the City of Nottingham in the early twenties were resisted fierceiy.

Conclusion Municipalism, as a set of ideas about the character of the city, of urban politics and of citizenship, was influential in places quite unlike the great cities o~ the age, at least judging from the evidence of the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Its success there, and conversely its failure to exert influence on the character of South Walian townships tells much about the traditions of local collective identity established in the two regions. Although clearly a simplification, it is not

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unreasonable to suggest that South Wales mining settlements were miners' towns, while those in Nottinghamshire were mining towns. David Smith's idea that the "definition of community" should be seen as a process in particular places rather than a fixed term of social scientific analysis has much to be said for it. Of course, political organization, institutional structure and collective action are conditioned and constrained by what might be described as structural measures of community--characteristics such as physical scale, social and physical isolation, and the density and nature of social bonding. E451But one of the strengths of a concentration on the processes creating different "definitions of community", or on the social struggle over local identification is to show how places of similar scale and occupational structure could behave in very different ways. In Smith's case of Tonypandy, this social struggle was manifest in violent rioting; in other places it was less dramatic, being more a matter of the piecemeal change of local institutions and the practices of everyday life. In this process general developments in British society, such as secularization, changing leisure patterns, and the development of municipalism, were translated into local issues and were used by particular people and particular groups in attempts to gain control of and to shape local societies. In the sense used here, municipalism was an important ideological element in this process of collective identification. The nature of group identification, and particularly of class consciousness, was bound up with ideas about the character of local society. In Nottinghamshire this was clearly a part of the strategy of local elites, particularly the coalowners. As in the case o f Hucknall, the mobilization of municipalism represented a clear advance over more simple paternalistic strategies. In small towns with quite complicated political sociologies, where individuals were able to identify themselves socially on a variety of bases, such as religion, deferential relations to company or to local gentry, or as part of an organized labour movement, a sense of specifically local identity offered the tempting prospect of a unifying focus to local society and a new source of legitimacy to those with economic power in the area. Department o f Geography, Queen Mary and Westfield College, Mile End Road, London E1 4 N S

Notes [1] See D. Fraser, Power and authority in the Victorian city (Oxford 1979) 157-167 [2] D. Smith, Tonypandy 1910" definitions of community Past and Present 87 (1980) 158-184 [3] See E.P. Hennock, Fit and proper persons. Ideal and reality in nineteenth-century urban government (London 1973) 61-79 & 154-169 [4] S. Webb, Socialism in England (London 1989) [5] H.E. Meller, Leisure and the changing city, 1870-1914 (London 1976) [6] D. Raser, Municipal reform and the industrial city (Leicester 1982) 8 [7] E. Yeo and S. Yeo, On the uses of "Community": from Owenism to the present, in S. Yeo (Ed.), New views of co-operation (London 1988) 236 [8] A. Briggs, Victorian cities (London 1958) 38 [9] See D. Cannadine, Lords and landlords: the aristocracy and the towns 1774-1967 (Leicester 1982) [10] C. Kerr and A. Siegal, The interindustry propensity to strike an international comparison, in A. Kornhauser, R. Dubin and A. M. Ross (Eds), Industrial conflict (New York 1954) 189-

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212. For criticisms see, for example, M. Bulmer, Sociological models of the mining industry The Sociological Review 23 (1975) 61-92, and R. Harrison, introduction to Independent collier." the coal miner as archetypal proletarian reconsidered (Hassocks 1978) [11] Bulmer, op. cit. 69 [12] Quoted in Kerr and Siegal op. tit. 191 [13] See S. MacIntyre, Little Moscows. Communism and working-class militancy in Inter-war Britain (London 1980), and A proletarian science. Marxism in Britain 1917-1933 (London 1980). See also H. Francis and D. Smith, The Fed. A History o f the South Wales miners in the twentieth century (London 1980) [14] R. Moore, Pitmen, preaehers and politics. The effects o f Methodism in a Durham mining community (Cambridge 1974); R. J. Waller, The Dukeries transformed. The social and political development o f a twentieth century coalfield (Oxford 1983) [15] P. Joyce, Work, society and politics: the culture o f the factory in later Victorian England (London 1980) 228 [16] 1901 Census [17] Commission o f Enquiry into Industrial Unrest in No. 7 Division (Cmd. 8668, 1917) [18] Smith and Francis, op. cit. 49 [19] Smith, op. cit. [20] 1891 Census [21] In 1911 there were 5149 people living in Ynysybwl parish which included a sizeable rural areas in the Clydach Vale. 1911 Census [22] 1911 Census [23] Sixtieth Birthday o f The Lady Windsor Workmen's Library & Institute, souvenir programme (1964) in the Abel Morgan Papers, South Wales Coalfield Archive, University College Swansea [24] See untitled pamphlet on the history of the Noddfa Chapel in the Abel Morgan Papers [25] The use of the term "community consensus" to describe a particular form of local leadership in South Wales comes from Peter Stead, Working class leadership in South Wales, 1900-1920 Welsh History Review VI, 3 (1973) 329-353 [26] Although the lodge gained a majority of places on the Institute committee before the First World War, it was not until 1919 that the Company relinquished its formal legal control over the building. See Sixtieth Birthday . . . op. cit. [27] South Wales Coalfield Archive, Lady Windsor Lodge Minutes, 1st February 1905 [28] See the case of Mrs Sherman (landlady) and Mr Bennet (tenant), Lady Windsor Lodge Minutes, 30th May 1918 [29] T.W. Paynter, The Fed, in G. A. Hughes (Ed.), Men of no property (Caerwys 1971) 69 [30] A.R. Griffin, Mining in the East Midlands 1550-1947 (London 1971) 23 [31] See A. J. Taylor, The sub-contract system in the British coal industry, in A. J. Pressnell (Ed.), Studies in the Industrial Revolution (London 1960) [32] By 1921 Mansfield and Sutton-in-Ashfield had aggregate daily rates of commuting which were as high as Wimbledon, and higher than those of Mitcham and Barnes. 1921 Census [33] Nottinghamshire County Record Office (hereafter Notts. R O) file DC/HT/1/I/1 (Hucknall District Council records) [34] E. Horriben, Hucknall "'Of Lowly Birth and Iron Fortune" (Nottingham 1974) [35] 1911 Census [36] See David Gilbert, Class, community and collective action: the social developmcnt of minillg villages in South Wales and Nottinghamshire before 1926 (unpubl. D. Phil. thesis, University of OxfOrd 1989) 273-286 for details of the social geographic developmcnt of the town. [37] See Ellis' report of a confrontation with the Duke of Portland's steward in A. T. Bassett, The life o f John Edward Ellis (London 1914) 34 [38] Nottinghamshire-County Record Office DC/HT/i/1/1 i0th March i873, report of Medical Officer to Board of Health [39] J.H. Beardsmore, History o f Hucknall (Mansfield 1909) 121 [40] Quoted in Bassett, op. cit. 122 [41] Yeo and Yeo, or. cit. 234 [42] Entry in Nottinghamshire County Libraries, Hucknall Library history competition (1985) [43] See the edition for 14th June 1889 [44] See, for example, C. Critchly, Memories of a villager Nottinghamshire Countryside XXI, 3 (1960) Mrs Critchly's recollections portrayed the town at the turn of the century as if it had been a small agricultural and framework-knitting village. No mention of the mines was made

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whatsoever which by then were employing around 60% of the adult male workforce in a town of about 15 000 people [45] See C.J. Calhoun, Community: towards a variable conceptualization for comparative research Social History V, 1 (1980) 105 129

N o t e s on contributors

Malcolm L. Comeaux is professor of geography at Arizona State University. His major research interests lie in cultural and historical geography, with regi~'nal interests in Arizona and the Southwest, French Louisiana, and the Missis~l~. : River system. Ghazi Falah is executive director of the Galilee Centre for Social Research, qn Nazareth. His principal interests are political geography in relation to the Israeli-Arab conflict and the historical geography of Palestine before 1948. David Gilbert is a research fellow in geography at Queen M a r y and Westfield College, University o f London. He is working on a Leverhulme-funded project on local labour markets and regional economies in pre-First World W a r Britain, and on a b o o k on the social development of mining communities. Susan Parnell is a lecturer in geography at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her current research interests include the contemporary and historical housing problems of South African cities.