Labour's Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England.

Young people (of both sexes) were an obtrusively numerous and visible component of English society in this era, and the 'lads' of Childs' account achieved further prominence as a social problem. At work, their ready assimilation into relatively well paid semi-skilled jobs denied them a traditional craft vocation dumping them as adult unemployables who compromised the drive for national efficiency; at the same time, their brief but heady taste of economic independence was said to make them socially feckless and defiant of family discipline. The first generation to undergo the new extended authority of the state in public education, they were also the first to buy their way into the new freedoms of modern leisure. Now scientifically problematised as 'adolescents', young males were the object of intense scrutiny and various programs of rescue and restraint.

There has been growing if still relatively modest attention to this phenomenon from social historians. Childs' claim to advance the field lies in his reconstruction of the experience of the lads themselves, set in context with th evidence of contemporary commentary and current historiography. A worthy exercise, this nonetheless follows the familiar imperative of 'history from below', realised here through an intensive working of established oral history holdings at the universities of Essex and Lancaster (plus, in splendid isolation, the testimony of the author's paternal grandfather). What gives the book its interpretive originality is the contention that we can read from these young voices a prefiguration of massive changes in working-class political allegiance. Thus Childs' main title--Labour's Apprentices--takes on ironic significance: his subjects are denied historic rights of apprenticeship in the workforce, yet cast as political apprentices who take their instruction from th Labour party, constituting the new class-based solidarity that brings them and the party to eventual maturity in the early twentieth century. The collapsing o craft distinctions in the younger generation combined with its enthusiastic embrace of mass culture produces a more uniform class experience that simplifie Labour's mobilisation of popular support. Young males are the pilot group for the remaking of their class as more homogenised and defensively class conscious the thesis argued by Hobsbawm and Stedman Jones.

Childs works outwards from home and family life, finding less intergenerational conflict here than some historians and less general unruliness than alarmist contemporaries. At school he confirms the unifying bond of pupil alienation. In particularly valuable chapters on the youth labour market and work place experience, Childs relates the general depression in vocational standards while noting the incidental freedoms of the semi-skilled trades--job and geographical mobility--that enhanced their appeal. He finds too examples of tenacious youngsters picking up a trade piecemeal despite structural obstacles and a resistant artisanat, modifying the terminal scenario of boy labour as 'blind alley' work. In leisure, the book reaffirms the centrality of the street as a continuing site of fraternity, courting and fighting (the latter much diminished, though where are the original 'hooligans'?), before examining the appeal of the music hall and cinema, bewitching new engines of cultural standardisation. On the organised youth movements characteristic of the era, Childs argues that hegemony was offset by the instrumentalism of his subjects, as in the boy who put down four breakfasts in one morning's tour of Sunday schools.

This is a useful book, meticulous in construction and judicious in tone. In giving direct voice to his subjects, Childs achieves a fuller social texture than accounts that focus exclusively on the discourse of middle-class observers.(1) Yet further attention to discourse and representation might modif his rather benign readings of the young underclass. While his subjects are said to retain an edge over the system, theirs is the essentially limited role of th 'adaptive consumer', whose agency needs evaluation within a fuller appreciation of the positions the dominant culture constructed for them. What were the image of popular literature and the press that interpellated the young and contained their social energies?--the Balls Pond Road banditti of the comic papers, for example, whose delinquency was neutralised as fun. The thesis of rising generational determinacy also sits uneasily with later evidence.(2) Youth enjoyed the first cresting of the poverty cycle; subsequent adulthood meant descent into its troughs and the meagrest of pleasures, most often for working-class males the unreconstructed resort of the pub. It is arguable that the recurrent fillip of the youth market did not translate into a wholesale transformation of the class culture until the 1950s. Moreover, in the inter-war years it was the young women not the men who seemed to force the pace of change.(3) The homogenisation thesis is also more open to debate, particularly in McKibbin's series of articles on working-class culture which go unacknowledged here; his work suggests too that the class appetite for modern pleasures may have hindered the growth of Labour by offending its more austere party leadership.(4) Given his considerable proficiency in the field, Michael Childs' engagement with such issues would be most welcome.

Peter Bailey University of Manitoba 

ENDNOTES

1. Cf. Harry Hendrick, Images of youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880-1920 (Oxford, 1990).

2. See Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900-1939 (Buckingham & Philadelphia, 1992).

3. Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk Between the War (London, 1986).

4. Collected in Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1990).