BOOKREVIEWBOOKREVIEW
Toffs and toughs
BY KENNETH MORGAN
CLASSES AND CULTURES: England 1918-1951 by Ross McKibbin 562pp., Oxford, 25 pounds.
Ο ver 30 years ago, Alan Taylor wrote a memo-rable work on English history, 1914-45. He wrote of July 1945: “Few even sang England Arise. England had risen all the same.” Ross McKibbin’s fascinating new survey of these years belongs to a different era. It is not a chronicle but an analysis of mentalities. It avoids covering “abroad” other than American cultural penetration. Nor (while basically a book with a profound.political message) does it cover politics directly. Instead we get a study of continuities rather than of brutal ruptures, a brilliantly written, deeply subtle critique of social classes and cul-tural attitudes from the Armistice to the Festival of Britain.
The book’s framework is the social structure that emerged from the first world war. it begins with a bang, a wonderfully entertaining account of the upper class, their riches and their social networks. In England, high society remained publicly enmeshed with the political and industrial elites. Central to its power was the monarchy (as, indeed, it still is), work-ing-class culture was many-layered, less crushed by depression and dole than is often thought but still defensive and fatalistic in work and social life, until the remarkable resurgence of working people in the second world war. Most pivotal to McKibbin’s theme is
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DAWN MAGAZINE Sunday, October 18, 1998
the emergence of a broader, more politically aggres sive middle class.
The second half of the book offers a selection of cul tural and social themes education, the decline of religion, the mysteries of sexual behaviour, leisure interests such as sport, popular music and dancing, the cinema and radio, and the languages of communica tion. The plurality of overlapping cultures, from Leavisite elitism to Mills and Boon, is superbly recon-structed. The major conclusion is that England in this period offered a hymn to inequality, ineradicable and all-pervasive. The polarisation between middle and working class that emerged in 1918-26 and ended in the overwhelming victory of the former, dominated English life for decades thereafter. It affected every-thing attitudes to work and home, birth control and reading habits, music and dance, failures in interna tional sport.
McKibbin underlines one major cause of this the English education system. The 1944 Butler Act in effect underwrote a divisive world in which working-class children had limited prospects of free places for good secondary education and even fewer of university education. Education was, McKibbin writes fiercely, “a history of failure”. Interwoven subtly with this was a gender divide. Women made limited progress either in professional advance or personal satisfaction. Their domain was the home. The second world war made lit tle difference here. Dawn/The Guardian Service
Karachi around 1857
BY SABIH MOHSIN
JOHN BRUNTON’S BOOK by John Brunton, published by City Press, A-16, Safari Heights, Block 15, Gulistan-e-Jauhar, Karachi-75290, 140pp, price Rs 150.
J ohn Brunton, born in 1812 in Birmingham, was a railway engineer who came to India twice between 1857 and 1865 and spent nearly 6 years in the Sindh and Punjab regions, planning and supervising the construction of a railway line connect-ing Karachi to Punjab. The book under review is a brief account of his life written by himself in old age for his grandchildren. Naturally, the style is plain and simple.
Brunton started his career as a railway engineer with the Stephensons and worked on the London to Birmingham and tife Manchester to Leeds lines. Subsequently, he was employed by the British War Office during the Crimean War, for the construction of temporary hospitals on the Turkish territory. He nar-rates his experiences during all these assignments but for the Pakistani readers, the last half of his book is more interesting as it describes his years in India, mostly in Karachi.
He landed in Bombay alongwith his wife during the troubled days of 1857. However, soonafter Delhi, the main bastion of the freedom fighters, fell into the hands of the British and they were greatly relieved. He proceeded to Karachi by steamer and arrived there after a tediously long passage. Only a formight earli er, 27men of 21st Bengal Regiment stationed at Karachi had been blown away from guns’ on charges of
rebellion.
The first railway track that he got laid down, was from Kiamari to Karachi City Subsequently, the line was extended to Kotri and, later, upto Multan. Describing the reaction of the local population, he writes: “The native of Scind had never seen a locomo-tive engine. They had heard of them as dragging great loads on the lines by some hidden power they could not understand, therefore they feared them supposing that they were moved by some diabolical agency. They called them Shaitan.
Brunton also describes his visit to Muggur Pir (Manghopir) where he saw alligators inhabiting a small pool. He narrates how goats brought there alive, were killed near the pool, cut into pieces and thrown into the wide open mouths of those animals as offerings. He also became associated with the construction of the Frere Hall. Brunton paid a visit to the court of the Nawab of Bahawalpur but his experiences with the Nawab were not pleasant.
Brunton’s book ws first published in 1939 by the Cambridge University Press. The edition under review was brought out in 1997 by the City Press, Karachi. A note preceding the text says that the spellings of the names of places have not been modernised.
Accordingly, Kotri is Kotru, Sindh is Scind and Multan is Mooltan. But curiously, Karachi remains Karachi throughout the book although to other English writers of that period, it has usually been Kurrachee. Besides this, the proof reading too is not up to the mark.