From the Margins – Ordinary, Respectable, Aspirational: the Shifting Social Identities of Clerks from the 1930s to the 1960s

Marriott, Teresa (2024) From the Margins – Ordinary, Respectable, Aspirational: the Shifting Social Identities of Clerks from the 1930s to the 1960s. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the social identities of clerks and considers how they changed between the 1930s and the 1960s. It examines the ways clerks were portrayed in contemporary fiction, film and television. Their perceptions of themselves and their social identities were drawn from an analysis of the responses of a sample of clerical workers to Mass Observation directives between 1939 and 1949 together with transcripts of interviews with clerks in Cambridge and Luton conducted by industrial sociologists, Goldthorpe et al. as part of a study into affluent workers between 1960 and 1963.

This study covers a period of unprecedented change for clerical workers; the relative prosperity and stability of the late 1930s, was broken by war, after which, followed reconstruction, austerity, educational reform and the introduction of the welfare state. Then, from 1951, there was a gradual return to prosperity culminating in Macmillan’s boast ‘you’ve never had it so good’.

The research examines the education reforms of the 1930s and the introduction of free universal secondary education following the 1944 Butler Act and their impact upon the individual clerks as a doorway into a new social, financial and cultural life and widening the social and gender composition of the clerical workforce.

It also investigates the feelings of the many clerical workers who moved into the suburbs as owner occupiers to enjoy privatised family lives, a marker of middle-class status. The importance of distancing themselves from the working classes from both council estates and the slums is also considered.

Overall, this explores how these fundamental changes around educational provision, suburbanisation and privatised lifestyles impacted on the social identities of a largely unstudied group, on the fringes of the middle classes, overlapping at one level with elements of the manual working classes and at the other with the professional and managerial middle classes.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	Kitty Laine
Date Deposited:	04 Nov 2025 12:30
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2025 12:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100889
DOI:

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