IV. THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF BULWELL
by KENNETH V. BAILEY
In this, the fourth and concluding paper of the present series, I intend both to utilise the picture which has been built up in the course of the preceding lectures as a setting to the drama of recent history, and to attempt to show how various lines of development described in the making of this picture converge to create the community as we know it today.
It has, I think, become evident that Bulwell is historically a microcosm of those parts of the English Midlands which have been subjected to the hardest stresses of the industrial and social revolution of the past two hundred years. Such a generalisation needs and will receive modification, but that is the general import of our picture. This makes my task both easier and harder; easier because I am able to draw material from the history of towns which have undergone a similar development, and, again modifying conclusions drawn from such material in the light of known local facts, view the history of Bulwell as a part of the history of its proper economic area. The task is made harder because to present a study of social and economic history even in a microcosmic setting lies beyond the possible scope of a single paper.
I shall, then, confine myself to the transition of Bulwell from an agricultural community to a village of skilled workmen and from such a community to a mining and factory town and finally to a fully urbanised and pardy suburban area. I shall try to show how these changes in economic activity have forced upon the workers a paroxysm of social re-adjustment, and how the effects of that paroxysm, similarly, and on a larger scale, taking place in Nottingham have wrought a second and equally far-reaching change in the life of the Leen Valley communities.
The first lecture in this series made it plain how great a role the Leen and the geological structure of its valley have played in the shaping of Bulwell.
The rocks had for many centuries given Bulwell district economic activities supplementary to agriculture: the quarrying of building stone; lime-burning; and the smelting of iron stone. The river was harnessed to give power to its first industry. The forge mill, described in the late 17th century, housed ''weighty hammers, bigger than men can handle (which) knock or beat out long bars of iron when they are made red hot in that great forge or fire blown up by those mighty bellows". This forge appears, according to Deering, to have been operating as late as 1751, when "the iron manufacture is shifted from hence". But the innovations of the great textile machinery inventors of the mid-18th century were, through the instrumentality of Arkwright's genius, adaptable to water power. By 1794, there were six cotton mills working along the Leen between Papplewick and the Nither Forge. Some 70 acres were occupied as reservoirs and water courses. This activity was directed to preparing cotton thread for the weavers of Lancashire.
Meanwhile the exposed coal field to the west of the Leen, in the Erewash Valley, was the scene of the application of a new kind of power. The shortage of coal throughout Britain was necessitating deeper mining. Deeper mining demanded improved methods of shifting water. Watt's first steam engine had only a vertical motion and was used chiefly for drawing up water, but in the Leen Valley at the Papplewick Mill, the union of steam power and the spinning mule was first applied. James Watt, acting on an idea put forward by Robinson, the owner of the Leen Mills, had produced the vertical engine.
With the use of water and steam power, the factory system did not spring into being fully fledged. In the stocking industry, steam power was not utilised for another 60 years, but the cottage, from having a single stocking frame, often became a small scale factory in which the craftsman worked several frames, hired or his own, and in which his wife and children prepared the thread that he used. The knitting industry had grown up in Bulwell during the 18th century as a domestic activity of this kind. By the end of that century the prosperity of a considerable part of its 1,500 inhabitants was bound up with the manufacture of gloves and stockings. Wages were fairly high. The frame operatives were not particularly thrifty. A succeeding decade brought tragedy. Napoleon, triumphant on land, but defeated at sea, set out to crush Britain by economic sanctions. The Berlin decrees of 1806 he framed with the object that British trade might be "repelled by all Europe from the Sound to the Hellespont".
The effect was to accentuate wartime slumps and to disrupt British industry to such an extent that Napoleon came perilously near to succeeding in his aim. With export markets greatly curtailed, over-production and decreased wages were inevitable. Wartime change in fashions played its part in aggravating the difficulty, and there was no longer a market for such goods as the fashionable pantaloon made on the wide frames for export to France. The manufacturers thereupon adapted their machines to producing inferior goods for the home and American market. Material that could be produced on wide frames with a minimum of manual labour could be sold to master hosiers—the hated bagmen, who would cut up the material and make it up into stockings. This undercut the price of fully fashioned work and damaged the reputation that the stockinger had for fine craftsmanship. Such considerations as these were at the actual root of the Luddite operations locally. It is true that machine wrecking did take place in the lace trade, at Loughborough for example, because the workers believed the machines themselves to be displacing labour and causing unemployment. But to generalise this idea to cover the whole movement is to ignore the particular factors which were at work in the hosiery industry. Another very specific grievance of the stockingers was payment in "truck", i.e. in goods—which might even be a stocking-frame which the stockinger did not want. The hosiers of reputation were in agreement with the knitters. This is well evidenced in the press notices of the period. The Nottingham Review constantly published agreements to give the 1803 price, but putters-out of work always managed to circumvent the resolutions of the master middlemen. That is why we find that notices were put on machines. A typical one was, "This frame is making full fashioned hose at the full price—the old Derbyshire Price". A notice like this was a mark as effective, where the Luddites were at work, as was the Blood of the Lamb in averting from the Hebrews the wrath of the final plague.
For the rest, items such as this from the Nottingham Review were a common enough occurrence: "Four frames broken at Basford last night and their woodwork burnt. Five frames also destroyed the same evening at Bobbers Mill". Resistance was organised by some owners of frames. Hollingworth of Bulwell put on an armed guard and, in an attack, an Arnold frame-breaker named Westley was shot and killed. At his funeral, at Arnold, the Military, the Special Constabulary and the Riot Act between them barely served to keep the peace. There was no civil police force. The Berkshire Regiment and later the West Kent militia were quartered in Nottingham. Luddite feeling pervaded the food riots. Napoleon was getting his thrust well in.
Before turning our attention to the critical decades following the Napolonic Wars, let us see what repercussions these local disturbances were having in the national legislature. A Bill which attempted to prohibit "truck payment" and the production of cut-ups was thrown out of the Lords in 1812. What Parliament did do was to prosecute associations of workmen under the Combination Acts, to use Government spies to counteract secrecy, and to impose the death penalty for machine wrecking. It was during a debate on this last measure in 1812 that Byron made his famous maiden speech: "Such marchings and counter marchings! From Nottingham to Bulwell, from Bulwell to Basford, from Basford to Mansfield! And when at length the detachments arrived at their destination in all 'the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war', they came just in time to witness the mischief which had been done and ascertain the escape of the perpetrators, to collect the spolia opima in the fragments of broken frames, and return to their quarters amidst the derision of old women and the hooting of children". Byron inveighed tellingly against tyrannical government. The frame-breakers, he said, were guilty of the capital crime of poverty. With the end of the war and the disbandment of Militia regiments, thousands more came into the cheap labour market. Those men who had often halfheartedly quelled the hunger riots went to swell the ranks of the rioters. This influx counteracted the effect of the increase in the output of hand-made goods which took place after 1815. The Corn Laws were another depressing factor. While keeping food dear to starvation point, they stifled the revival of continental markets. In 1819, the year of the tragedy of St. Peter's Fields, men were parading the streets of Nottingham carrying boards, "Pity our distresses. We ask for bread. Pity our children". The machinery for dealing with poverty of such huge and hopeless dimensions was entirely inadequate. The parish was the unit for the administering of relief. There had been no radical change in administration since 1601. The only major adjustment had been the application of the Speenhamland System which led, in rural England, to a complete confusion between wages and relief. In an industrial district such as Bulwell, what happened was that the overseers of the poor set themselves up as hosiers, which only added to the difficulty of the master hosiers in finding a market and paying prices that constituted a living wage. The Act of 1834 organised the country into Poor Law Unions and established the Board of Guardians. The grim lack of imagination and psychological intuition with which the Commissioners went to work counteracted the efficiency of many of their measures, in that the workers were solidly resistant. This Benthamite efficiency was aimed at preventing the exploitation of pauperism by local vested interests; but the abolition of outdoor relief, which was a reform in rural districts, meant to the unavoidably unemployed of the industrial districts either starvation or incarceration in a degrading prison designed on more or less intentionally penal lines. The mood which gripped the distressed workers was that voiced by the mob of the Reform Bill riots at Nottingham in 1831, who, when advised to disperse, said "What's the use of dispersing, we may as well die where we are as go home and be starved".
I have outlined at some length the English tragedy in the years following Waterloo because it is only in relation to that background that the local situation can be understood. In 1851, the population of Bulwell had risen by some 75% since the beginning of the century. Arnold was slightly larger. Throughout this phase of tile history of these two towns the interest of the frameworkers is practically identical. This is shown by their combination in many of the popular demonstrations of the period. The contemporary record of the plight of the Arnold frameworkers quoted by Dr. J. D. Chambers is well applicable to Bulwell. "The poor stocking maker", writes a correspondent of the Nottingham Mercury, "may possibly, by practising much forbearance during the prime of his life, be enabled to provide funds against the calamity of his own sickness, as numbers of them have done in this village; but since it is not possible that he can by the most unwearied industry accomplish the same benefit for his wife and family, he is continually exposed to the painful mortifications of being branded as a pauper and subjected to the workhouse test of destitution, notwithstanding he may be doing all that in him lies to keep himself, in his individual character, free from a dependency on the stinted bounty of a parish officer. The net average earnings of a sober, industrious, and good workman after toiling for 70 hours will not exceed 8s."
Now the figure quoted by this correspondent will not mean much to us unless we can compare it with the earnings of the stockinger in his happier days. An apologist of the master hosiers writing in the Nottingham Review for 1811 quotes the average weekly earnings of the knitters over a period of years from 1782 to 1803 as 12s. 01/2d. When the universal rise in prices is taken into consideration this contrast is most revealing.
Bulwell, however, even with her depressed glovers, had not been confounded so deeply in the industrial predicament as had Arnold. White's Directory for 1832 tells us that "There were three bleach mills, a lace thread mill, three corn mills, several extensive lime stone quarries and kilns and a number of stocking frames and bobbin net machines". The bobbin net industry centred in Nottingham, though itself subject to periodic depression, had caught Bulwell within its orbit, and the river, both at Bulwell and at Basford, had its bleach works. But within the next decade, events did greatly increase pauperism in Bulwell. Lancashire competition had proved too much for Mr. Robinson's enterprises. By 1840, ten years after the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, all the Leen Mills were closed. White's Directory for 1844 tells us of Papplewick, that "the extensive cotton mills here are not now worked, and the framework knitters are prohibited the village, the old mills having left such a number of paupers that the present owner here, as well as Linby, has prohibited all manufacture". What happened was that they went to live at Hucknall and Bulwell. By 1841, the population of Bulwell had risen to 3,157. It is not to be wondered at that a large part of the forces taking part in the riotous Chartist Demonstrations of 1842 consisted of framework knitters from Hucknall, Arnold, Bulwell and Basford. Seventy hours a week in close confinement with hard labour and a reward of eight shillings were not conducive to keeping the peace. These demonstrations were, as J. L. and Barbara Hammond have put it, "the resentment of men convinced that there is something false and degrading in the arrangement and justice of their world".
The sorry picture is most perfectly painted in the evidence given in 1845 before the Commissioners appointed by Peel's government to enquire into conditions in the industry. I quote Mellors' account: "William Deverill, John Alvey, John Pinkett, George Chandler and Frances Syson of Bulwell gave evidence to the following effect:—there were 581 frames in Bulwell: they complained not only of low wages but of high standing charges, in cases amounting to three shillings per week. The wages were often not paid till from nine to twelve o'clock on Saturday nights. They worked long but irregular hours, sometimes 14 hours a day and other days not at all. Their net earnings, they said, were not more than six shillings a week. Gardens were few and were rented at the rate of ten pounds an acre". It is interesting here to note that wages were still falling, and that the frame rent was not now the focus of discontent. Wide frame work and the bag hosier were coming to be accepted and in the next decade were operative in a slight revival in the industry; but not in Bulwell, for there the glove industry was practically killed by the strike of 1850 and 1851. Frame rents were not abolished until 1872. With the introduction of steam driven machinery in 1845, first to straight down work, and later, by 1860, to fully fashioned work, the factory took over the hosiery industry.
But here I shall close the history of that early phase of acutest industrial crisis, and proceed to examine the local origins of the dominating industry which succeeded stocking knitting; that is, the mining industry. The life and condition of the miners at the time of the 1842 Commission is a subject as full of sombre interest as is the phase of the Industrial Revolution we have just surveyed. It falls outside the scope of this lecture. All that space will permit is tolist certain facts and dates which we shall perceive eventually to take their place in this composite picture.
It has been pointed out that coal in Nottinghamshire was mined at a negligible depth along the Erewash. Steam power fed on coal, and so the exploitation of the earth moved westwards to deeper seams, and with it the railways which were the necessary conveyors to the mouths of industry. The date of the Midland line from Mansfield was 1848. This is a central date in the opening up of collieries at Bulwell, Nuthall, Cinderhill, Babbington and Strelley. In 1844, according to Mellors, the Cinderhill Colliery employed 200 men, or, as Mellors more accurately says, people, for although this was two years after the Shaftesbury Mines Act prohibiting the underground employment of women and of children under ten, they were still used in surface work. In fact, one effect of Althorp's Factory Act of 1833, which regulated working hours for children in factories, and set up an Inspectorate, was to cause parents to put children to colliery work sometimes at the age of three or four.
Mining operations in Hucknall started in 1861 and work on the Bestwood shaft in 1872. These workings went over 1,200 feet to reach the Top Hard. Later the iron smelting works were opened at Bestwood. Between the sinking of the Bestwood shafts and the end of the century, the total output of Coal in the county of Nottingham had increased by approximately 300 per cent. Between 1862-7 alone, the opening up of collieries, mostly in the Leen Valley area, sent up the Nottinghamshire output from 732,666 tons to 1,575,000 tons. This meant a great concentration of manpower in and around the pits. The story of that concentration in Bulwell is told in its population figures.
The population of Bulwell between 1801 and 1851 almost exactly doubled itself. Between 1851 and 1861, the years of the last decline of the framework industry, the population actually decreased. And then, suddenly, the steady progression of the first fifty years breaks into a startlingly steep upward curve. The forty years of the opening up of the Hucknall and district collieries shows an increase in Bulwell's population of almost exactly 400 per cent. Nottingham increased in similar proportion over the same period, but in doing so it had included the population of Bulwell and other parishes in the 50,000 additional population given to it at the extension of the borough in 1877, so that the increase in the Bulwell figure is actually steeper than that of Nottingham. Certainly the increase from 3,660 in 1861 to 14,481 in 1891 is most phenomenal. This is a rate of increase in 30 years equal to the rate of increase for England and Wales over the whole of the century. During these years, the death rate was falling and the birth rate for Bulwell was comparatively high, but the increase is none the less indicative of a vast intake from other areas. Similar figures to those of Bulwell indicate the growth of other Leen Valley towns which had passed through the transition from framework knitting communities to colliery centres. Hucknall's growth is equally as startling as Bulwell's. It grew from 2,680 in 1841 to 15,250 in 1901. On the other hand, Arnold, a framework knitting village, with, until 1861, a population curve almost identical with that of Bulwell, shows a slight decrease in the sixties and only a very steady rise from 1870. Arnold lay well to the east and away from the coalfield that was being opened up during this period.
Midland railway station, Bulwell, c.1910.
The correlation between mining, railway transport and population growth is evidenced by setting dates side by side. First railways: 1848, 1878 and 1895; collieries from the 1840's onwards and more intensively after 1860; match factory, 1863; Sankey's potteries, 1855.
A further factor in growth was the overflow of industrial population from Nottingham. After the enclosure act of 1845, the Burgess Lands were enclosed, and after the extension of the borough in 1877, when building was going on rapidly, new industries were springing up in the suburbs. Gregory and Radford Boulevards were built during the 80's, and workers' tenements were built by the corporation at Basford, though this last was an unsuccessful enterprise. The growth and administration of the City of Nottingham is a subject outside our scope. Dr. J. D. Chambers has recently given us an authoritative account of how burgess and property interests hemmed in the swelling population behind the barrier of unenclosed lammas lands. The conditions of slumdom which had led to the cholera epidemic of 1832 were not dissimilar to those of Bulwell in the late mid-century. Writing in 1914, Robert Mellors says, "walking up the street: called Bulwell Buildings resembles a walk in a decayed Eastern city—a street of the dead. Fifty years ago it was a street of awful neglect, unpaved, with an open sewer down the middle, a rabbit warren literally and figuratively, for who had more right than they to the rabbits of Bestwood; and the windings and hiding places were marvellous. It was afterwards sewered, paved and lighted, but now the occupants have departed and the houses are closed. Around, however, a multitude of new and sanitary buildings are to be found".
It is to understand why and how these conditions came that we must examine a phase of the history of Nottingham's development and consider what: local government legislation was doing in the latter half of the 19th century. The Public Health Act was passed in 1848. The struggle for enclosure, which, was a condition of any real improvement in the health of Nottingham's overcrowded population, had been going on for ten years previous to that. The new buildings that went up over the enclosed commons did so after a time lag between Act and award of twenty years. During this time, the Local Sanitary Boards had been given wide powers to act without a local Act and, by the legislation which followed the report of the Royal Commission in 1871, the local Board, or in the case of a borough such as Nottingham, the Borough Council, became the sole authority for all purposes other than Poor Law purposes. The Local Government Act of 1871 transferred various powers, including the power of the Poor Law Board, of the Local Taxation Returns Act, and of the Public Health Aet, to a central Local Government Board. In the following year, 1872, the country was divided into sanitary districts, and various extensions of the power given to these Boards were made in the next few years. The whole body of legislation was comprehensively set out in the Public Health Act of 1875.
How is this body of reform related to our subject? The regional character of the new legislation affected many kinds of services; area rather than purely local planning was being forced upon the now vast urban communities by the very nature of their problems. For example, Nottingham had, since 1819, been supplied with gas by theNottingham Gas Light and Coke Company. In 1842, by Act of Parliament, the same company obtained the right to supply Lenton, Basford, Radford and Sneinton, and in 1858 a similar Act enabled it to extend its mains to Bulwell. In 1843, a Town Lighting Committee had been appointed in Nottingham. This was for rating purposes, but the supply still lay with the private company. In 1874, when the Borough Council was gathering all strings into its hands, an Act was passed transferring the properties of the Nottingham Gas Light and Coke Company to the borough of Nottingham and giving it powers of purchase of various lands in Basford and Lenton. The next and obvious; step to an extension of the borough boundaries took place three years later. The gasworks in the Leen Valley can now be seen to have played their role in that line of development. The. same decisive geographic factor played an even more important role in the main sequence of events which brought Bulwell into the borough. I have mentioned the area Sanitary Boards. These were planned on a geological basis. It was obvious that sewage reforms affecting the Trent and South Nottingham would be useless if the Leen, which had become horribly polluted from the industries and sewers of Bulwell and other towns in the valley, was adding a continual stream of cess. The only remedy was to lay down sewers with intersecting drains in Bulwell, Basford, Lenton and Radford: such a scheme was expensive and lay far beyond the capabilities of the Sanitary Authorities of these districts. The only alternative would have been to make a great conduit of the Leen, which would have been the least satisfactory solution. In either case the borrowing of large sums of money was necessary, and the local Sanitary Boards were not in a position to do this.
The Act was passed in 1872, and stated that, "for the purposes of this; Act, the district comprising the several districts described in the first column of the Second Schedule to this Act, and therein designated as the constituent districts, shall be the Nottingham and Leen district". Of the six parishes (Brewhouse Yard and Standard Hill were the others) most were to levy through the General District Rate (Radford had a separate rate). Bulwell appointed one member. Of the local Bulwell Board, Mellors writes, "There had been a Local Board—a Board of Health it was called—but that was on paper. They, however, erected the Public Offices on land costing 7/6 per yard and they held one meetings in the room when they were superseded". To quote that invaluable moralist once again, "The owners of small houses were especially strong against it", (referring, of course, to the annexation) "for the absence of the essentials of dwellings and the presence of crowding of big families into houses with one or two bedrooms, were too shocking to be recorded here". But the Borough Extension Act, of course, went through. Its title gives the reason—the only possible means, to quote the Act, "for providing for the execution of the Nottingham and Leen District Sewerage Act, 1872".
The coming into force of the Act in the middle of that crucial decade was of vital benefit to Bulwell. We have seen that it was in the full upswing of a phenomenal population curve. This curve had run a parallel course in the inner districts of Sneinton and Radford twenty years earlier, and in Nottingham twenty years before that. These districts had then suffered the full horrors of overcrowding and lack of amenities. Nottingham had eventually, by enlightened legislation, set aside parts of her 1845 enclosures as parks. To this Nottingham owes today the Forest, the Arboretum, and the Queen's Walk Playing Field. Her housing and sanitary programme was relatively enlightened. The annexation of Bulwell came at a time when Bulwell's need for a powerful executor of the Public Health Act was greatest and in time for the Nottingham Borough Council to apply the powers of the 1871 Local Government Act with a firm hand.
It was only in this condition of unprecedentedly increased population that Bulwell was faced with the need for open spaces, an urgency which had weighed heavily on the unhappy people of the congested areas of industrial towns, and which had played its part in producing the revolt against the "Bleak Age". Bulwell had never suffered Parliamentary enclosure as had Basford. Its cottagers had rights of common. As land nose in value, the temptation was for the Lord of the Manor to enclose, sell or rent the land. This Mr. S. T. Cooper had done in 1868 in the case of the remnants of the riverside waste, renting it to Mr. George Wilkinson. The people continued to regard it as a playground. Mr. S. T. Cooper was apparently tolerant of this, but after his death in 1871, his heir Mr. Percy Cooper took a different view and an action was brought for trespass. The case was dismissed by the magistrates, evidence of ancient usage being accepted. This went to the heads of the inhabitants—it is symptomatic of their feeling for the preciousness of their threatened open spaces—and they entered into their inheritance quite literally with bugles blaring and flags flying. Costs were given against the defendants in the ensuing action, and that was the end of the matter until a new power appeared, the Nottingham Corporation. This was where the difference made by the annexation began to show itself. Thomas Holmes, who had given evidence in the first case of trespass and had been one of the defendants in the second, was now a Town Councillor in the Borough of Nottingham. At a meeting of over 2,000 people in Bulwell Market Place, in the May of 1879, two years after the Borough extension, a resolution was unanimously passed and was presented to the Council at its next meeting.
The wording is interesting: "That this meeting of inhabitants of Bulwell protests against the unjustifiable conduct of the steward of Mr. Percy Cooper, the alleged lord of the manor, in interfering with the Bogs, thus insulting and defying the Corporation; and this meeting desires to impress upon the Town Council the desirability of enforcing and maintaining the possession of the Bogs, and furthermore the meeting urges the Council within 21 days to open the Bogs to the people and place seats on the ground, thus carrying out the desires of the late Mr. Cooper".
The Council referred this memorandum to the Public Rights and Boundaries Preservation Committee. In the interim, this became merged into the Parks Committee, and at its next meeting this committee was urged by Holmes to assert the rights of the Council on behalf of the people of Bulwell. Acton, however, carried an amendment calling for investigation of the case. The outcome of this was that the Bogs were purchased by the Nottingham Corporation and Bulwell's legal right to its first playground was assured. Now this was a valuable precedent. In 1881 we find the same Committee warning landowners against encroachment on land set aside for the enjoyment of the public in the newly annexed suburbs of Radford and Lenton, and the same Committee took very prompt action to prevent any further attempts at enclosure in Bulwell on the part of Mr. Percy Cooper. Holmes and Wilkinson sold to the Borough of Nottingham their copyhold property which gave them rights of common in Bulwell Forest. The Corporation then obtained Parliamentary power of purchase over the whole of the Forest. The amount to be paid to the lord of the manor was determined by arbitration. Thus Bulwell, during the period of its factory and mining growth, was able to avail itself of machinery which assured it playgrounds and lungs. Albert Ball's purchase and transfer to the Corporation of the Bulwell Hall Estate added a further 250 acres of park land for public use. By 1908, some 25 per cent, of the total acreage of the parish had been set aside for public recreation. Compare this, not with the case of Nottingham, which, though it had during its 1800-1830 phase of growth, no playgrounds, had at least its Lammas fields, but with Basford, whose 1,200 acres of forest and common land had been lost for ever in 1793 by Parliamentary enclosure. This was a tragic circumstance when the great rise of population came to Basford at the peak of its industrialisation. Or, compare it with Oldham in Lancashire, whose population doubled between 1802, when her moors and commons were enclosed, and 1826, when the sole sixteen acres left from the previous enclosure were let for building land.
Over £16,000 was spent by Nottingham on ensuring its right to the Forest and in road and bridge building. Part of the Forest was sold to the railways, but not enough to affect its value as a lung and as a recreational area, and, what was equally important, as a 'preserve' of the old Nottinghamshire type of common land. As the discussions which have followed these lectures have proved, the right to play and freedom in the use of this preserved countryside are issues which are still alive, and even the echo of the Battle of the Bogs, now practically beyond living memory, can provoke quite passionate feeling.
Water supply, education, library facilities, housing, the part played by Nonconformist opinion throughout the period: these are all topics which provide sufficient material for separate lectures. I have had, necessarily, to be selective, and my selection has been made of the material which I considered best to exemplify a continuity of theme. The most significant feature of Bulwell's recent social history has been the growth, during the inter wars period, of vast housing estates around its periphery—Bestwood, Highbury Vale, and Bulwell Hall, with added prefabricated areas since the last war. These housing estates have grown somewhat soullessly, without planned cultural nuclei of their own. Their economic focus is Nottingham, but their distance from the city makes Bulwell their natural centre for recreational and cultural purposes. Is it possible for Bulwell to play this role? Here I should like to quote extensively from an article by Mr. K. C. Edwards which appeared in a symposium on the re-planning of Nottingham published by the Nottingham Journal in 1943.
"According to the tenets of good planning, the identity of satellites should be preserved. Unhappily the past growth of the city has long since destroyed the identity of Arnold, Carlton, Bulwell, and even Kimberley, though in each of these some local interests, including social activities, remain, and all but Bulwell are administratively separate from Nottingham. Hucknall, the best surviving example of a satellite, was, before the war, fast becoming the prey of a ribbon tentacle reaching out from the city through Bulwell. But if no further developments take place, Hucknall can be saved. This township has its own industries, shops and social and recreational interests. It used to enjoy a vigorous community life of its own, and was well-known for its strongly democratic element in politics. Would this interest in local affairs continue to flourish if Hucknall were to be absorbed by Nottingham? In addition to losing the precious right to govern itself, Hucknall would lose heavily in other directions to compensate for doubtful gains".
There is a great deal of truth and common sense in this summary of the suburban predicament, but I feel that Bulwell has perhaps too readily been written off as "dead and damned and done for". Bulwell has never, while she has had councillors on the City Council, relinquished her hold on the right to govern herself. The evidence I have already submitted has, I think, been relevant and eloquent in that respect. That the phrase, "some local interests", errs on the mild side when applied to Bulwell, the spirit shown in discussions following these lectures, I believe, affirms. Bulwell has been weakened, but is far from being destroyed as a cultural unit. But it may be fairly asked, how far this independence lives only in residents of some long standing whose roots go back to the pre-ribbon building, pre-housing estate era. The new housing estate dwellers have not the same social tradition. Is the new world which is being born going to see locally an amorphous dormitory taking the place of the old, persistent, but greatly weakened social unit? I do not intend to dogmatise on the future, but if I were asked to give an answer I should turn to the past for clues. What pressures has history, particularly that of the Industrial Revolution, brought to bear on the shaping of the character of the people who have streamed into this area? The answer is, I believe, that they have been tempered. To borrow from, without applying piece-meal, Professor Toynbee's philosophy, I would say that the penalties they have suffered had stimulated rather than crushed. The local character has a hard core of democratic common sense, historically produced. Where there has been a danger of the penalties becoming intolerably great, the response of the whole economic area of which Bulwell is a part has brought relief. I cite the development of the coal industry and the introduction of factory industries at a time when the stocking-frame industry had become hopelessly moribund. I cite also the development of the Leen Valley Sewerage scheme and the intervention of the Nottingham Borough Council when Bulwell's industrial development was getting beyond the capacity of her local government machinery.
In all these phases of development, her geographic and geological environment, and particularly the factor of the River Leen, I have tried to show, have played a highly important role. I would suggest that they will continue to do so. A report which may have great significance for the future of Bulwell was made by the Nottingham, Derby and Lincoln Architectural Society to the Nottingham City Council Reconstruction Committee. In an abstract of that report, published in the symposium already referred to, the following paragraph occurs: "Thriving industry is essential to a successful city. Such industry requires for efficient working, adequate sites with space for extension, adequate fuel and power supplies, access to road, rail and canals for goods delivery and despatch, proximity to adequate labour resources. There would seem to be advantage in the grouping of the main trades with ancillary trades in close proximity. The joint provision of welfare centres, fire station, telephone exchange, information bureaux, Union, and Federation Offices, etc., would appear to relieve managements of the considerable burden when borne individually". Among the areas to be considered for such development is that natural economic area, the Leen Valley, in the history of which Bulwell has, in the past, played so important a part.
Again I say I will not dogmatise on the future, but it seems impossible that Bulwell will continue to be formed by the stimuli and challenges of economic factors having a geographic basis common to those that she has successfully met in the past. It is possible to foresee that, far from being socially moribund, Bulwell may yet carry her integrity through the coming phases of change and make in the new world her own contribution to the ever changing life of city and county.