Hello, I’m Martin Minogue, and though I have a considerable number of publications to my name in the form of academic books and articles, this is my first ever blog post at the ripe old age of 83. I’m doing this to comment on and expand the family memoir that I have now published (for details click here). This memoir covers only the first three decades of my life, from 1937 to 1965. But at its centre is a working class family whose roots reach well back into the nineteenth century, which lived lives of hardship and poverty, yet saw their three children succeed and prosper in ways denied to their own generation. It’s both a grim story and a heart-warming one, and a slice of social history that deserves to be recorded. My parents were unsung heroes, like so many of the ordinary working people of this country. A historian myself, I’m all too well aware that the voices and experiences of these ordinary families are rarely heard. My motive in writing the memoir was that my family’s story, specifically my parents’ stories, should be told, their heroic qualities recognised. Their own voices are heard in this account too, for I rely in part on a very detailed handwritten account my father left of his life as a farm labourer, itself a rarity, and the less organised but more creative reminiscences of my mother, including her poems.
A second motive was to tell this story to the family generation that succeeds me and my two sisters, (Maureen and Sally). Because of our (and their) educational and career successes, our children (and their children) are firmly and inescapably middle class. They know that their origins are in part in the working classes, but have had no experience themselves of what this meant, of what struggles this hard and impoverished background consisted. How could they, enjoying as they did comfortable homes and jobs and incomes well beyond the reach of their grandparents, and earlier generations of their family? So a big motivation for me was to let my own children (Nick and Ben, to whom the book is dedicated), my nephews and nieces, my grandchildren, my great nieces and nephews, know what their own social roots were, to understand where they come from.
A final motivation for me was to set this personal and family story in a wider context, both historical and contemporary. This story runs over almost two centuries in these terms and examines deep changes in rural social life and labour over that time. My parents and their forebears combined several significant strands in British social, economic and political history, my mother’s family drawn from the mining communities in Geordieland, my father’s family bringing together histories both of Irish immigrant labour and English agricultural labour. Part of their family history was rooted in a Catholic aristocratic estate in Yorkshire, on which my Irish grandfather worked for 28 years as a gardener and farm labourer, and my mother as a domestic servant for almost six years. My own career would lead to interaction with leading members of the aristocracy in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the 1960s. Prior to that, Cambridge University provided a context of quite sharp social differences. I am at pains to show in this memoir how significant social class relations continued to be in British life in the first half of the twentieth century.
But I also go on to argue, in a final chapter, that class structures and inequalities have continued to be crucial in dictating life opportunities right up to the present day. While the clear social changes in the post 1945 period have made class relations and identities more fluid, this still leaves us with a twenty-first century Britain in which at least a third of its people live in conditions of poverty relative to the other two thirds, so that as I write, we can see some purchase in the words of the traditional old song:
It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame,
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure
Isn’t it a blooming shame?
I think it is a blooming shame, and recent social statistics appear to justify another old chestnut:
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But I don’t want my potential readers to think that this is going to be just another miserabilist, doom and gloom-laden analysis of our modern times. In my childhood and teenage years I lived in five different villages and went to five different schools. These years were full of hardship and poverty for my parents, and often enough for me and my sisters. But they were full of warmth and laughter too, as some of the comic anecdotes I tell about Yorkshire village life will demonstrate. (This version of village life has now disappeared, so if you want to know what it used to be like, I describe it in the earlier chapters of the memoir.) We lived another commonplace label, ‘poor but happy’, though this is one my mother would have scornfully rejected during many of the grim years, when there was nothing funny about some of their living conditions. In this blog, I’ll attempt to describe both sides of the coin.
www.martinminogue.co.uk
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