A broken silence? Mass Observation, Armistice Day and ‘everyday life’ in Britain 1937–1941

Between 1937 and 1941 the social survey organization Mass Observation collected material on the ways that the British people experienced and thought about the commemorative practices that marked the anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. What they found was that while people were largely united in their observation of the rituals of remembrance, their thoughts and feelings about these practices were diverse. For some, the acts of commemoration were a fitting way to pay tribute to both the dead and the bereaved. For others, these acts were hypocritical in a nation preparing for war. This article draws on the Mass Observation material to trace some of the diverse ways that remembrance was embodied in everyday life, practised, experienced and understood by the British people as the nation moved once again from peace to war, arguing that studies of the practices of remembrance alone tell us little about how they have been understood by participants

'Hail England old England my country & home': Englishness and the Local in John Clare’s Writings

This article rethinks John Clare's connection to place, as well as the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘the local’ themselves. It argues that the localism of his work was enabled by potential alienation and displacement and was connected to a sense of wider national community. Clare's writings attempt to think of England in two related ways: as a political community brought together at times of threat, and as a community of taste brought together by a way of apprehending the natural world. His early patriotic verse is often strained and unconvincing, but poems such as ‘The Flitting’ present an idea of ‘native poesy’ that embodies the local and the national through careful description of the natural world. However, this idea was itself mediated through metropolitan attempts to reclaim the customs and literature of ‘merry England’. Thus Clare's localism and nationalism are shown to be ambivalent and uncanny

Landscapes of Internment: British Prisoner of War Camps and the Memory of the First World War

This article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by Cambridge University Press, in Journal of British Studies published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Cambridge University Press.During the First World War, all the belligerent powers interned both civilian and military prisoners. In Britain alone, over 100,000 people were held behind barbed wire. Despite the scale of this enterprise, interment barely features in Britain's First World War memory culture. By exploring the place of prisoner of war camps within the "militarized environment" of the home front, this article demonstrates the centrality of internment to local wartime experiences. Being forced to share the same environment meant that both British civilians and German prisoners clashed over access to resources, roads and the surrounding landscape. As the article contends, it was only when the British started to employ the prisoners on environmental improvement measures, such as land drainage or river clearance projects, that relations gradually improved. With the end of the war and closure of the camps, however, these deep entanglements were quickly forgotten. Instead of commemorating the complexities of the conflict, Britain's memory culture focused on more comfortable narratives; British military "sacrifice" on the Western Front quickly replaced any discussion of the internment of the "enemy" at home

Popular sanctions in the rural community 1700-1880 with special reference to folk community practices and responses

This thesis aims to examine popular sanctions in English rural society during the period 1700 to 1880, against the background of social and economic change, and to consider how the framework of customary folk practice was maintained and what forms it took. In particular, it is apparent that custom linked together the components of the local community calendar and reflected, on the one hand, the symbolism of social cohesion in which the rural labourer was able to defend popular rights, and, on the other, provided opportunities for socially disruptive behaviour and established a cultural environment for more orthodox movements of social protest. This customary framework, in part transmitted forward from the later Middle Ages and early modern period, provided an essential context which informed the lives and experiences of both the labouring poor and the rural elite alike. The changing social position of one section of rural society - farmers, landowners, proprietors - affected this framework and conflict over the maintenance of popular customs occurred. Popular customary collective behaviour sought to preserve such rights as gleaning, fuel gathering, access to recreational venues, and non-institutionalised largess collections, by binding them in ceremony and ritual often adapted from older forms or other festivals. New statute laws and legal judgements were used to extinguish such rights and the ceremonies concerned were opposed, destroyed or remodelled to conform with Victorian middle class moral attitudes and values.</p

Popular sanctions in the rural community 1700-1880 with special reference to folk community practices and responses

LD:D50289/84 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Modelling Groundwater Returns to Streams From Irrigation Areas with Perched Water Tables

Quantifying the magnitude and timing of groundwater returns to streams from irrigation is important for the management of natural resources in irrigation districts where the quantity or quality of surface water can be affected. Deep vadose zones and perched water tables can complicate the modelling of these fluxes, and model outputs may be biased if these factors are misrepresented or ignored. This study was undertaken in the Murray Basin in southern Australia to develop and test an integrated modelling method that links irrigation activity to surface water impacts by accounting for all key hydrological processes, including perching and vadose zone transmission. The method incorporates an agronomic water balance to simulate root zone processes, semi-analytical transfer functions to simulate the deeper vadose zone, and an existing numerical groundwater model to simulate irrigation returns to the Murray River and inform the management of river salinity. The integrated modelling can be calibrated by various means, depending on context, and has been shown to be beneficial for management purposes without introducing an unnecessary level of complexity to traditional modelling workflows. Its applicability to other irrigation settings is discussed