The Class of '37

VOICES FROM WORKING-CLASS CHILDHOOD

In 1937, Bolton schoolteacher Miss Kemp joined an experiment. Over the next few months, she asked the girls in Senior II at Pikes Lane Elementary School, who were aged 12 and 13, to write a series of essays reflecting on their lives.

The project, which was instigated by the wider Mass Observation social-research organisation, set out to record the lives of ordinary people (“an anthropology of ourselves”).

Plenty of national importance was going on in the town in 1937: celebrations for the coronation of George VI, and the welcoming of Spanish schoolchildren who had been evacuated from Guernica. But the essays of Mavis, Jessie, Alice and the rest, brought together in this new book, also pored over more mundane details: dealings with local churches, chapels, hospitals and mills; and trips to shops, cinemas, dance halls, ‘milk bars’ and the seaside.

Voices of children writing as children are rare in the annals of history, and sometimes difficult to interpret. Here, however, they hold forth in their glorious combination of naivety and wisdom. And we learn a great deal from them, because Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer so cleverly fill out their stories using the 1939 Register, records from local archives, and interviews with relatives and descendants who tell us – for better or for worse – how their lives panned out.