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By John Welshman

The latest news for period drama fans is that Julian Fellowes, creator and writer of Downton Abbey, has created a four-part ITV mini-series commemorating the centenary of the Titanic sinking. Publicity indicates that ‘Titanic’ will feature a mix of real and fictional characters.  However, what many viewers may not realise is that there was a real Fellowes on board the ship in 1912.  But rather than being an ancestor of the popular writer, Alfred J. Fellowes was a humble crew member and one of the estimated 1,514 people to perish in the maritime disaster.

Copyright ITV. Source: metro.co.uk

Alfred Fellowes was part of the ‘victualing crew’: his official position was Assistant Boots Steward in First Class, and he received monthly wages of only £3 15s.  Born in Liverpool, Fellowes was 29 years old, single, and he joined the Titanic at Belfast on 1 April 1912.  Signing on again, at Southampton, on 4 April, he gave his address as 51 Bridge Road.  His previous ship had been the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic.

Like many other crew members, Alfred Fellowes died in the sinking, and his body was retrieved by the steamer the Mackay-Bennett.  The body (number 138) was described as being ‘male, estimated age 30, hair and moustache, black’.  Fellowes was found wearing a green overcoat, blue trousers, grey coat, his Steward’s white jacket, black boots, and socks.  He wore a gold ring, and had keys and scissors in his pockets.  Fellowes was buried at Fairview Lawn Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 6 May 1912.

There were eight other Boots Stewards on the Titanic — Sydney Stebbings, William Rattenbury, Cecil Jackson, and John Scott in First Class, and Henry Bulley, Joseph Chapman, Edward Guy, and William Perrin in Second.  Like Fellowes, many had worked previously on the Olympic, and like him, they typically gave addresses in Southampton when they signed on.  Of these eight, only two survived – John Scott and Joseph Chapman, and of those who died Fellowes was the only one whose body was recovered.  In fact, very little is known about any of them, usually only their name, where they were from, the address that they gave when they signed on at Southampton, and the level of wages that they received.

The Boots Stewards offer an entrée into the world of the Titanic’s large ‘Victualing Department’.  It numbered 421 people in all, of whom 322 were Stewards.  Perhaps slightly surprisingly, there were only 23 women — 20 Stewardesses, 2 cashiers, and 1 matron.  But what is amazing is the number and diversity of the different occupations — scullions, lift boys, clerks, vegetable cooks, bakers, bell boys, kitchen porters, chefs, cooks, Turkish Bath Attendants, postal clerks, pantrymen, butchers, storekeepers, confectioners, stenographers, barbers and so on.  The two telegraphists, or wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, employed by Marconi, were officially part of the victualing department.  And apparent too is the diversity of occupations even within a single occupation such as Steward.

by John Welshman

Downton Abbey opens with the telegram announcing that the Earl of Grantham’s heir, James Crawley, and his son Patrick, have perished in the sinking of the Titanic. Since Lady Mary was supposed to marry Patrick, the succession plans go awry, and this sets off a chain of events.

But how likely is it that an English aristocrat would have perished in the disaster? The British Inquiry (1912) found that those saved represented 203 out of 325 passengers in First Class (62.46%); 118 of 285 in Second (41.40%); 499 of 1,316 in Third (37.94%); and 212 of 885 members of the crew (23.95%). Overall, 711 passengers and crew were saved of the 2,201 on board (32.30%).

Not surprisingly, with the emphasis on ‘women and children first’, the proportion of women passengers saved in First Class (140 out of 144, or 97.22%) was higher than that for men. But 57 of the 175 men were saved, or 32.57%. In fact if you were a male passenger in Second Class your chances of survival were very slim indeed – only 14 of 168 were saved, or 8.33%. And in Third Class your chances were only slightly better – 75 of the 462 were saved, or 16.23%. It was these figures which reduced the overall odds for men, since for men overall – both passengers and crew – only 338 of a total of 1,667 were saved, or 20.27%.

The opening of Downton Abbey suggests that the Titanic was a potent symbol of luxury and privilege. To be sure, there were English aristocrats in First Class, figures such as Lucy Noel Martha Dyer-Edwards, born Kensington on 25 December 1878, who had married Norman Evelyn Leslie, the 19th Earl of Rothes in April 1900. The Eton-educated Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, fifth baron, was travelling with his wife Lucy, the well-known fashion designer. He was a talented fencer, and had represented Great Britain at the 1908 Olympics. This was a world where wealth was derived from land, and where deference was the norm. But their fellow travellers in First Class were more likely to be American or Canadian. Among them were the property developer John Jacob Astor; the businessman Benjamin Guggenheim; John Borland Thayer, Second Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad; George Widener, son of P. A. B. Widener, a member of the board of the Fidelity Trust Company of Philadelphia; Charles Hays, General Manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway; and Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s Department Store in New York.

Much of the fascination of the Titanic is that the personal narratives of individual passengers and crew provide insights into the worlds they came from. In First Class, we can find businessmen, their families, and the maids and governesses who travelled with them, privileged certainly, but predominantly men whose wealth was based on the new commercial opportunities offered in the United States and elsewhere. In Second Class, there were the teachers, clerks, minor businessmen, clergymen, small time inventors and others who represented the trades and the growing middle class that relied on them. In Third Class, we see the poor and under-privileged, the ironworkers, bricklayers, farmers, labourers, bakers, gardeners, fitters, butchers, carpenters, grocers, butlers, shop assistants, toolmakers, valets, and blacksmiths. Many of them were migrants, not only from Britain, and especially Ireland, but from Belgium, Finland, Sweden, the Lebanon, and a host of other countries, leaving poverty or oppression for a better life in the United States. And among the crew, the Captain, ship’s officers, surgeons, stewards, stewardesses, waiters, engineers, lookouts, firemen, cooks, and plate washers. This then, is the real world of 1912: one of class conflict, religious sectarianism, mistrust and suspicion, leisure for some but grinding poverty for others, racism and prejudice, faith in technology tempered with scepticism, and optimism mixed with anxiety about the future.

In fact,

John Welshman is the author of Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (forthcoming, 2012). Below he talks about Walter Lord, who wrote the acclaimed book A Night to Remember about the Titantic. You can read his previous OUPblog posts here.

It was Walter Lord, in A Night to Remember (1955) who described the sinking of the Titanic as ‘the last night of a small town’. Lord had been born on 8 October 1917, in Baltimore, the only son of a prominent lawyer. As a boy, he had enjoyed a transatlantic cruise on the Olympic, during which he had fantasised about what it must have been like to have been aboard the Titanic. He attended private schools in Baltimore, and then read History at Princeton, graduating in 1939. Lord was at the Yale Law School at the outbreak of the Second World War. He then went to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, first as a code clerk in Washington, and later as an intelligence analyst in London. In 1945, he returned to Yale and completed his law degree. However he decided that he did not want to practise, and instead wrote business newsletters and books.

Shortly after going to work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York, Lord published The Freemantle Diary. It was reasonably successful on its publication in 1954. But it was A Night to Remember for which Lord was best known. Published in November 1955, the book had sold 60,000 copies by January 1956, and it stayed on the best seller list for six months. Condensed versions appeared in the Ladies Home Journal and Reader’s Digest, and it was the first of Lord’s several ‘Book of the Month Club’ selections, in June 1956. A successful television adaptation directed by George Roy Hill and narrated by Claude Rains was broadcast on 28 March 1956; it attracted 28m viewers. The British-made film of the same name, directed by Roy Baker, and starring Kenneth More and David McCallum, came out in 1958. The book has never been out of print.

On its publication, the New York Times said that the book was ‘stunning … one of the most exciting books of this or any other year’, while the Atlantic Monthly declared ‘a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last’. The magazine USA Today said that the book was ‘the most riveting narrative of the disaster’, and Entertainment Weekly declared it ‘seamless and skilful … it’s clear why this is many a researcher’s Titanic bible’. In the New York Herald Tribune, reviewer Stanley Walker drew attention to Lord’s technique as being ‘a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader’.

No books on the Titanic had been published between 1913 and 1955. Cultural historian Steven Biel has noted that the book was well marketed, but also explains its resonance through the highly visual and aural nature of the narrative. Lord blurred history into news and drama, collapsing ‘historical duration into intense moments of lived experience’. The book

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. His book, Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain, tells the moving real-life stories of British schoolchildren evacuated out of major cities during the Second World War. In the below post, he gives us a bird’s-eye view from the fringes of the first day of the new UK coalition government while in London for a radio interview. You can read his previous OUPblog posts here.

It’s the morning of Wednesday 12 May, and I’m in London to be interviewed by Laurie Taylor on the Radio 4 programme ‘Thinking Allowed’.  Selina Todd, from Manchester University, has been asked to contribute her assessment of my book, and so will also be on the show.  I know of her work, but haven’t met her previously.  The researchers have assured me that Selina likes the book, but she has a formidable reputation, and I worry what she might say.

I’m not due at Broadcasting House until 4pm, so head for WH Smith, and after a quick glance through Time Out, decide to go to the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain.  The exhibition has been critically received, but Moore’s work is interesting, especially the early wood and stone carvings of the 1920s and 1930s, and the wartime underground shelter drawings.  He made a point of using native materials, such as elm and Hornton stone; elm has a very big and broad grain which makes it suitable for large sculptures.  But the later work is less interesting, reclining forms being repeated endlessly, familiar from every New Town park or university campus.

By 1pm, I have had enough, and walk up Millbank towards the London Eye.  Maybe the media will still be camped outside the Labour Party headquarters?  There is a van with a satellite dish on top, but not a single journalist.  Better luck as I round the corner into Parliament Square.  Simon Hughes is high up on a gantry being interviewed, and next minute Malcolm Rifkind is walking straight towards me.  The mood is infectious; perhaps if I hang around long enough someone will interview me?  But perhaps what I could offer is not quite what they’re looking for.  I double back and spot a large crowd, so large that I can’t see who’s being interviewed.  Soon the reason for the crowd is clear: it’s Ken Clarke.  They seem to have a special aura around them, these people familiar from television.

Further up Whitehall there is a large crowd outside Downing Street, spilling over the pavements on to the road itself – policemen, tourists, protesters, schoolchildren, bystanders.  Most people’s attention is focused on the main gates, which the police open from time to time to let cars through.  But most have no passengers, or the windows are blacked out.  The pedestrian entrance to the left seems more promising, and I am rewarded – a constant stream of politicians, photographers, politicians, advisors.  If you are quick enough, you can spot them as they go in.  BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson arrives, and jokes with a crowd of schoolchildren.  ‘Who am I?’  ‘You’re Nick’.  Then, ‘are you Nick Clegg’?

I spot the MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, Eric Ollerenshaw – what can he be doing here?  He’s newly elected, so perhaps he’s simply enjoying

The phrase ‘Broken Britain’ is well known to British newspaper readers; it’s a phrase commonly used across the media to describe society’s problems. In the blog post below historian John Welshman, author of Churchill’s Children, traces this identification of a broken society back to around the time of the Second World War, and argues that the real answer is – and was then – to address society’s inequalities rather than ‘Big Society’ and a retreat from state involvement.

You can read John Welshman’s previous posts here. A longer version of this post will appear on the History & Policy website at a later date.

The mantra of ‘Broken Britain’ has been a potent theme for the Conservative Party, its definition effortlessly broadening to encompass whatever appears to be the anxiety of the moment.  Iain Duncan Smith has produced an analysis of social breakdown that has five main strands: first, anxiety that a ‘problem’ exists; second, a focus on ‘pathways’ to poverty, covering family breakdown, economic dependency, educational failure, addiction, and personal indebtedness; third, an emphasis that this is ‘lifestyle’ poverty, and not just about money; fourth, a belief in the responsibilities of parents and on the family as the foundation of policy; and fifth, the claim that people themselves, and the voluntary sector, hold the solution.  Similarly, the Party’s manifesto argues that a new approach is needed to tackle the causes of poverty and inequality, focusing on social responsibility rather than state control, and on the ‘Big Society’ rather than big government.  Only in this way, it is claimed, can ‘shattered communities’ be rebuilt, and the ‘torn fabric’ of society be repaired.

But the identification of a broken society, and these solutions, while current, are nothing new.  For exactly the same themes were the subject of debate during the Second World War.  In September 1939, carefully-laid plans were put into action, and 1.5m adults and children were evacuated from Britain’s cities to the countryside.  If those mothers and children evacuated privately are added to the total numbers, some 3.5 to 3.75m people moved altogether.  Those evacuated from England in September 1939 comprised 764,900 unaccompanied schoolchildren; 426,500 mothers and accompanied children; 12,300 expectant mothers; and 5,270 blind people, people with disabilities and other ‘special classes’.  The largest Evacuation Areas for unaccompanied schoolchildren (apart from London) were Manchester (84,343); Liverpool (60,795); Newcastle (28,300); Birmingham (25,241); Salford (18,043); Leeds (18,935); Portsmouth (11,970); Southampton (11,175); Gateshead (10,598); Birkenhead (9,350); Sunderland (8,289); Bradford (7,484); and Sheffield (5,338).  In Scotland, the largest Evacuation Areas, in terms of accompanied children, were Glasgow (71,393); Edinburgh (18,451); Dundee (10,260); Clydebank (2,993); and Rosyth (540).  Given this emphasis upon place, unsurprisingly the evacuation was followed by an outpouring of debate about the state of urban Britain.

It is true that the revolution that took places in English fields and villages seventy years ago was a quiet one.  There were much continuity, for instance, in policy between the 1930s and 1940s.  Even after the evacuation, civil servants still clung to entrenched attitudes, and continued to put their faith in education, so that  Government circulars still tended to emphasise the responsibilities of parents, and to rely on the resources of voluntary organisations.  Moreover the pathologising of families remained part of the discour

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

John Welshman, author of Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain, blogs about how everyday items like children’s plimsolls can actually say a great deal about the wider issues of poverty and policy during World War II.

You can read John Welshman’s previous OUPblog post here.

Getting friends to read a book manuscript is an interesting process, for often they highlight themes that you are only subconsciously aware of yourself. One who read mine commented that he was struck how much there was about the everyday, including shoes.

And it is true that one of the interesting aspects of the evacuation of September 1939 is the way that it shone a light on aspects of people’s lifestyles that had been ignored in the 1930s. Occasionally commentators such as the Labour MP, Fenner Brockway, in the book Hungry England, had noted that poor children wore the plimsolls that were sold in street markets. But more often this was ignored. But the theme of footwear cropped up right at the start of the evacuation process. In May 1939, for example, civil servants realised that the clothing and footwear of some children would pose problems. It was thought that while there were unlikely to be problems in London, or in towns in Kent and Hampshire, there would be in cities in the Midlands and the North. A circular issued that month informed parents about the amount and type of luggage to be taken. Each child was to carry a gas mask, change of underclothing, night clothes, slippers or plimsolls, spare socks or stockings, toothbrush, comb, towel and handkerchief, warm coat or mackintosh, rucksack, and food for the day. Parents were told the children were to be sent in their thickest clothing and warmest footwear. Moreover the evacuation practices held in the summer of 1939 confirmed that many children had neither warm clothing nor strong footwear. In Leeds, for instance, while the equipment brought was generally good, and all the children had come with gas masks, ‘the greatest weakness is in the supply of footwear’.

The civil servants realised that the success of evacuation would depend on the weather, since many parents waited for the winter before buying their children new shoes. And footwear was certainly a problem in some of the Reception Areas. In Lancaster in the North West, for example, the Billeting Officer advised parents that the money spent on their frequent visits would be better spent on footwear and clothing for their children. He wrote that:

It is very desirable to give the children every opportunity to settle down happily in their new surroundings; and for this reason parents will be wise not to visit their children too frequently. The money spent in such visits would be better spent on thick country footwear, raincoats, overcoats, or warm underclothing for the children.

The Ministry of Health responded on 2 October 1939 with a circular on footwear and clothing. This announced that £7,500 was to be distributed in the Evacuation Areas as contributions to boot and clothing funds. Moreover while the circular continued to encourage voluntary effort, there were some important shifts as time went

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Oxford University Press author John Welshman went to his first literary festival last week, and has kindly written a post about the experience for OUPblog. Below he talks about some of the most interesting questions the audience asked him, and reflects on the differences between academic historian and popular historians, inspired by some of the fellow writers he met there.

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. His book, Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain, tells the moving real-life stories of British schoolchildren evacuated out of major cities during the Second World War.

Last Wednesday afternoon found me at the Words by the Water Literary Festival in Keswick.  It was a fascinating experience, not least because it was not only the first time that I had been to a literary festival as a speaker, but it was also the first time that I had been to one in any capacity.  My Chairman had been an evacuee, and at the start we established that there were at least half a dozen evacuees in the audience.  There was a lively question-and-answer session afterwards:

Did parents have to send their children away?  No, evacuation was voluntary, and indeed registrations remained surprisingly low in the Autumn of 1939.  In fact fewer evacuees turned up at the railway stations than had been expected, and it was partly because of this that the operation was telescoped, leading to confusion in the Reception Areas, where the numbers of the parties arriving, and their composition, was different to what had been expected.  This also meant that the proportion of the child population sent away varied between the main cities.  In terms of the families who took evacuees in, on the other hand, this was compulsory, unless householders could justify their refusal in some way.  Again, there were striking variations between the Counties, in the late 1930s, in the amount of accommodation that had been ‘privately reserved’.

How important was social class?  A difficult question to answer in that working-class children went to middle-class homes, and middle-class children went to working-class homes.  Revisionist historians have argued that rather than evacuation bringing the social classes closer together, it drove them further apart.  My own view is that evacuation did reveal the poverty of people in the cities to people living in the countryside, and that this did feed into debates about postwar reconstruction.  The bulk of the people evacuated in the ‘official’ Government scheme, in contrast to those evacuated ‘privately’, were working-class children and their mothers.

What part does Churchill play in the book?  Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister in September 1939, at the time of the first wave of the evacuation, and Churchill only became Prime Minister in May 1940.  Churchill did feature in House of Commons debates from the mid-1930s which reveal the anxiety about aerial bombing that itself was a key influence on planning for evacuation.  But the metaphor of ’Churchill’s Children’ is more a device to convey the book’s attempt to focus on the wartime period as a whole, the way I follow the ch