Writing the history of homelessness in Britain in the age of the ‘welfare state’

Event details

The homeless were rendered utterly marginal in the postwar ‘welfare state’. In fact, the very concept of homelessness as we know it today – in brief, the idea that some individuals and families are homeless because state and market have failed to produce housing adequate to their needs at a cost they can bear – hardly existed, and legislation to deal with the problem of homelessness was, therefore, completely inadequate. One strand of historiography has focused on the invention of our contemporary category of homelessness, and in my larger project on homelessness in London since the late 19^th century, I build on this, to examine policies, institutions, experiences and ideologies on the ground.

In this paper I’ll outline my approach to the project, conceptually and empirically. I’ll discuss a pair of case studies I’ve focused on: two families, the ‘Stevens’ and the ‘Smiths’, who became homeless and sought the help of the Citizens’ Advice Bureaux in London in 1958. The Stevens’ story was written up as a morality tale of respectable working-class people who got unlucky and deserved more help than they got from the state, by the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ campaigner Audrey Harvey. The Smiths were aided by Marjorie Watkins, who presented them, in an internal memo, as undeserving. My first contention is that both CAB workers reinforced the categories of deserving/undeserving and respectable/unrespectable. It would be possible for me to rewrite the Smiths’ story to make them into ‘good victims’, but my second argument is that such a project is ultimately counterproductive: its very possibility shows us that any attempt along these lines to make welfare recipients sympathetic relies on the power of the narrator to take the listener inside the minds of the needy. As this is only really possible in narrative form, it is inadequate as a basis for popular support for welfare measures in real life. Finally, I will switch from examining the ideologies of the CAB workers to asking what their accounts can tell us about popular ideas about rights to welfare. Here, I will suggest that that ‘ordinary’ working-class men and women in the 1950s had a powerful sense that the ‘welfare state’ should be providing them with more than it was in the crucial area of housing. The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ campaigners argued that the welfare state was falling short of the promises of its founders. This was not always accurate – in the field of homelessness it was functioning just as the drafters of legislation intended! – but the movement drew some of its power from tapping a reservoir of popular belief in welfare rights that went much further than Beveridge and his generation envisaged.

About the speaker

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is Associate Professor of 20th-Century British history at University College London, Florence has written on social class, neoliberalism, women in the 1984-5 miner's strike and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. She was a Philip Leverhulme Prize winner and is a co-editor of Renewal.