Hester Barron is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Sussex, and Co-Investigator on the Speaking Citizens project. Read more about here research here.

 I didn’t begin as a historian of schooling or education. My PhD was on the 1926 miners’ strike, and specifically on the Durham coalfield, one of the areas in which the strike was most solid. It was a very different topic to the history of childhood and education within which historical sub-field I now place myself, and, following the publication of the monograph, several colleagues and friends remarked that it seemed a big jump.

In some ways it was – I had to get to grips with a whole new historiography – but to me it made conceptual sense. Themes like identity, community and class have always run through my work, and education in its broadest sense, whether we’re looking at the influence of the smallest family unit or the concerns of national governments, is where that happens. In fact, I’d had a chapter in the mining book about education – about how the schools functioned during the strike, about the messages that miners’ children received there, about how that interacted with what they learnt at home and what they were seeing around them.

 Fast forward ten years and I’m halfway through the draft of a second monograph, contracted to MUP, to be entitled Classrooms and Communities: Elementary Schools in London between the Wars. In it I explore the relationship of schools to their communities. Most social and political histories of Britain pay scant attention to children’s experiences or the social history of schooling, despite an ongoing concern with issues of class and community. Most histories of schooling in Britain have either focused on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century or the post-1944 period. I want to ask what happens if we tell the history of interwar Britain through its classrooms?

 My interest in the Speaking Citizens project stems from the research done for this book, although I plan to expand research for it beyond London. My contribution will draw on hundreds of inspection reports, alongside contemporary school logbooks written by headteachers, to explore the obsession with ‘speech training’ by interwar educationalists and the way in which this played out in British schools. The problem, at least according the London inspectorate, was ‘not only that the children speak only in the London dialect…but they speak the dialect in a slovenly and inarticulate fashion.’

If such anxieties had obvious class overtones, they also highlighted questions of national identity: there were concerns about the effect of the cinema on the younger generation and the spread of Americanisms, for example. And citizenship was sometimes directly invoked, as when a 1936 inspection report of an elementary school in North London stressed the importance of good English teaching: ‘English is of all school subjects the one that comes home most closely to the business and the bosoms of the pupils,’ it commented. It went on to remind teachers of their duty to help children to become ‘clear-spoken, clear-thinking, clear-reading and, when necessary, clear-writing citizens of their world.’

 If most inspectors assumed that schools were a ‘civilising’ force upon working-class children, however, other sources contradict this.

In fact, in 1937, when a twelve-year-old girl in Bolton was asked by the research organisation Mass Observation to describe the different things that she learnt at home and school, the imparting of correct speech was a lesson she attributed squarely to her mother. ‘At home I am taught my manners,’ she wrote, ‘and not to use vulgar words. I have been told about interrupting when my mother or any relations or neighbours are speaking to my mother. Also I have to be lady-like and polite when I am asked a question, I have to look at the person who ask the question and answer properly.’

 My case study will therefore use the politics of speech education to reflect more broadly on the pedagogic aspirations of early twentieth century mass education, but also try to think beyond ‘official’ narratives. I can’t wait to get started!