This book conceptualizes children as historical actors who were at the heart of welfare provision in modern Britain. We argue that the young were integral to the making, interpretation, delivery and impact of welfare services, and that their involvement has left a distinctive imprint on the shape of welfare in modern Britain.

Historians of modern childhood have suggested that the process of ‘transforming children into investments’ has been one of the central stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹ These global changes occurred not only in modern Britain, but also – at different points over the last two centuries – in many European nations, their empires and post-colonial nation-states.² Thirty-five years ago, the pioneering sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer charted how new social norms in early twentieth-century USA invented the ‘economically worthless but emotionally priceless child’ who required specialized and distinctive investments.³ Zelizer later acknowledged that ‘partly because of the absence of historical sources, I could not reach far into how children’s own experiences and interactions changed’.⁴ Twenty years ago, Lynn Abrams argued that in studies of modern Britain ‘the history of child welfare … has taken little notice of children’s views and their responses to policies enacted on their behalf’.⁵ This book seeks to rectify this omission. The ten chapters use young people’s own experiences and understandings of child welfare to reassess the impact of public and private investments in children’s lives.

This volume examines the process of investing in the lives of children from the perspectives of the young. Instead of assuming that adult ideologies, professional affiliations or legislative programmes determined children’s experiences, we begin by listening to what young people said or did about their welfare. Children were not merely the passive subjects of adult programmes of socialization. Rather, as William Corsaro pointed out from research in contemporary childhood studies, ‘children create and participate in their own unique peer cultures by creatively taking or appropriating information from the adult world to address their own peer concerns’.⁶ Definitions of childhood were always contested, contradictory and changing, so we do not impose a uniform age-related boundary. As Anna Davin noted, ‘there is no absolute definition of childhood … because it is always lived and defined in cultural and economic contexts’. As a result, ‘the question “What is a child?” must be followed by further questions – in whose eyes? When? Where?’.⁷ The sources used in each of the book’s chapters reveal how individuals – from toddlers to those in their thirties – interacted with people, spaces and services that sought to meet the distinctive welfare needs of the young.

Three conceptual foundations shape this volume. First, most studies of welfare focus on a single service or provider in isolation, defined implicitly through its adult-created professional institution. The history of medicine, of education, of philanthropy, of the family and of the welfare state rightly form distinct historiographical fields.⁸ Yet, as the image of a school ‘tooth-brush drill’ on the front cover of this volume indicates, professional divides that loom large in the archives and scholarship often had little significance for the young. In the modern period in particular, children interacted simultaneously with multiple providers, including through hybrid spaces such as schools or clinics that sought to bring complementary expertise under a single roof. At other points, young people moved, sometimes tactically, sometimes involuntarily, between services underpinned by contradictory ideologies, practices and funding. Drawing upon insights from global history, we explore the intricate – always contested, contingent and unequal – webs of contact and exchange in which children’s welfare was embedded.⁹ Rather than telling the story of a single institution or policy, this volume seeks to understand the experience of mobility, instability, uncertainty – and sometimes power – that emerged from being the nexus of multiple inconsistent investments.

Second, by attending to children’s experiences, this book enables a greater appreciation of the ways in which human relationships have been essential to welfare. Children’s lives of course relied upon the institutions, services and transfers of resources that dominate historical scholarship on welfare. Yet, as one of the most structurally disempowered groups in society, children’s access to provision was mediated to an unusual degree by social relationships.¹⁰ Evidence produced by children reveals how their well-being was underpinned by contingent opportunities to form supportive and sustained relationships with peers and adults. Inequalities in investments of money, time, expertise and power were often the products of relationships, both within the family and beyond, as well as of welfare policies.¹¹ This attention to social relationships is informed by the ‘capability approach’ to a ‘“thriving” human life’, pioneered by economist Amartya Sen.¹² Sen conceptualized ‘well-being’ holistically, defined as ‘a person’s ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being’. His framework left unspecified what might be considered ‘valuable’, but made a person’s ‘agency’ to choose from a range of feasible possibilities (conceptualized as ‘capabilities’) integral to their well-being.¹³ Recent scholarship on contemporary children’s lives built upon this framework by examining ‘children as active agents and co-producers of their capabilities’.¹⁴ This volume draws on Sen’s conceptualization to enable a holistic analysis of welfare, always centred upon children’s own perspectives, and charting the varying and unequal degrees of ‘freedom’ offered in precise historical contexts in modern Britain.

Third, this volume takes seriously the subjective, qualitative and life-long impacts of unequal investments in childhood. Most historical scholarship on children’s welfare has focused on the intentions of policymakers and the practices of adult providers.¹⁵ When historians have sought to assess the impact of policies on young recipients, they have turned to quantitative measures, by noting, for instance, statistical relationships between the introduction of child welfare measures and patterns of mortality or stature.¹⁶ This volume complements these studies by examining qualitative evidence for the impact of welfare. Descriptive statistics are used, where possible, to understand patterns within this evidence, but we do not seek to tell an aggregate story of an imagined statistically ‘average’ child. Instead, we explore the personal meanings and diverse experiences revealed by these sources. Additionally, more than half of the chapters consider how provision for children’s welfare shaped people, not merely while still young, but also across the course of their lives. Longitudinal evidence from birth cohorts has offered unique insights into the impact of welfare initiatives, but short-term evaluations remain dominant in research on contemporary and historical social policy.¹⁷ Yet, as Nicholas Stargardt’s research on twentieth-century Germany revealed, childhood experiences ‘often had profound effects on the cultural visions and politics embraced in their teens and twenties’.¹⁸ The volume thus builds upon work in history and anthropology that has examined the complex ‘palimpsest’ of meanings that people layered upon childhood experience, particularly when seeking to make sense of the most intimate relationships.¹⁹ We know that policymakers thought of children as investments for the future, but we also need to consider the more contingent, non-linear and subjective ways in which people repeatedly sought to make sense of their lives.²⁰

In the rest of this introduction, we set out how the chapters in this volume together offer new insights into the history of welfare. We then explain how this scholarship develops our understanding of sources for, and approaches to, the study of children in the past. Finally, we introduce the precise contributions that the chapters in this volume make to histories of modern Britain.

Rethinking the history of welfare

This volume forms part of a long historiographical tradition that seeks to take the recipients of welfare seriously. Since the early 1980s, historians of medicine have responded enthusiastically to Roy Porter’s call to write ‘a people’s history of health’.²¹ Early modern and modern sources alike have allowed historians to uncover what Porter described as ‘the patient’s point of view’ of their medical ‘encounters’.²² This approach has also shaped how researchers explain reforms to welfare provision. Correspondence, pressure groups, media coverage and social surveys have revealed recipients’ ‘attitudes to state welfare’, whether provided through the Poor Law, pensions, NHS, or public health initiatives.²³ Other historians have built upon Porter’s proposal that we understand the ‘medical market-place’ best by also examining everyday practices beyond the clinic.²⁴ These studies have revealed that the power of ‘experts’ was always contested, not merely between conflicting areas of professional expertise, but also by knowledge derived from what Jennifer Crane called the ‘expertise of experience’.²⁵ As a result, the ‘patient’s point of view’ has transformed our understanding of state institutions and organized services. These studies have challenged teleological narratives of ever-improving services and have deconstructed homogenizing categories such as the mythic ‘public’ or ‘citizens’. Indeed, by attending to recipients’ experiences, scholars have revealed that apathetic or hostile responses to extra-familial welfare provision were at least as common as popular pressure for investments.²⁶ We can only understand accurately the causation, significance and impact of welfare when we place the experiences and perspectives of those who received it at its heart.

Yet, this thirty-five-year historiographical inheritance has imprinted itself lightly and late on histories specifically of child welfare. In 1994, Harry Hendrick’s survey of child welfare – which remains the principal study of changing child welfare provision – argued that ‘Much of the history of social policy … is in fact the history of imposition of the adult will upon children’s bodies.’²⁷ Hendrick suggested that ‘children themselves had remained virtually silent during the making of this history’.²⁸ In 2001, Jon Lawrence and Pat Starkey’s edited volume challenged this assumed silence by examining the gap between adults’ representations of childhood and children’s ‘experiences at the sharp end of state and philanthropic “intervention” ’.²⁹ This volume included Lynn Abrams’ pioneering research that analysed the testimonies of adults who grew up in care in Scotland to reveal ‘a more nuanced and child-centred understanding of the impact of the child welfare system’. This methodology revealed that, although adult policymakers had assumed that family foster care was preferable to residential institutions, childhood memories of isolation and discipline were remarkably similar, irrespective of care provider.³⁰

In spite of the insights provided by scholarship published two decades ago, historians have continued to write about children principally as objects of welfare provision – an assumption that would be unthinkable in recent scholarship on female or colonial ‘subjects’ who were likewise considered in need of special ‘protection’. Hendrick’s revised 2003 edition of Child Welfare reaffirmed the irrelevance of children’s own voices and suggested that the modern child remained a ‘passive object of socialisation – a “becoming” without any real identity of “being” ’.³¹ Mathew Thomson’s thought-provoking 2013 study of post-war childhood acknowledged that ‘this is a study that casts more light on the landscape of the child, rather than … the narratives of children themselves’. The ‘perspective of the individual children’ remains absent from his analysis of how adults imagined a novel ‘landscape of the child’ within post-war social democracy.³² Even in Alex Mold et al.’s research into public health, which argues that after 1945 ‘most people, most of the time, accepted an on-going duty to safeguard their own health and that of others’, children feature principally as objects of adults’ concern.³³ Recent historical studies have not considered whether the young were also active creators of the newly important ‘public’, capable of ‘imagining’ the public as well as ‘speaking back’ to the state’s efforts.³⁴ As a result, these studies continue to be histories solely of how adults have constructed child welfare.

Yet, for more than twenty years, historians have shown that the past looks different if children’s experiences are placed at the heart of research.³⁵ By directing a spotlight on children’s experiences, this volume seeks to reveal new scholarly directions in the history of welfare. The chapters together contribute new perspectives to four key debates in modern British history.

First, children’s experiences change how we think about the expansion of the state. The incremental growth of state financial investment, the increasingly universal and national reach of state provision and the rising authority of state-legitimated adult experts are significant shifts over the last 200 years.³⁶ For instance, the national state employed no one with specialist responsibility for any aspect of children’s welfare until the 1833 Factory Act required inspectors of child labour to be appointed.³⁷ In early twenty-first-century England, there were 946,000 employees of state-funded schools, 46,000 NHS staff specializing in paediatric care and more than 30,000 children and family social workers.³⁸ It is clear that a transformation in children’s services had taken place. Yet, when we focus on how children experienced expanding welfare provision, the national government fades into the background. Chapters in this volume reveal the locally embedded nature of state provision across Britain and its empire. Even when national legislation and funding underpinned investments, the central state remained largely invisible to young recipients. Research by Lamb, Pooley and Taylor reveals how agencies with local authority superseded Westminster and Whitehall in the eyes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century children. Indeed, Taylor and Wright’s chapters on post-war London and Glasgow respectively indicate that these perceptions were underpinned by the significant autonomy enjoyed by local authorities into the later twentieth century. Additionally, an enduring and unpredictable gulf separated the aims of the state and its implementation in practice. These disparities did not always narrow over time. The chapters by Swartz and Lynch reveal that the UK government was, if anything, more willing to react rapidly to concerns about the welfare of child migrants in South Africa in the 1830s than it was to respond to similar reports from 1950s Australia. Advances in communication, an expanded state bureaucracy and new models of children’s psychological needs made little difference if adults were not willing to listen to children’s experiences and to question authoritative institutions’ practices. Historians have recently sought to take the ‘everyday politics’ practised by adults in particular municipalities seriously; this volume argues that children’s lives were shaped, above all, by the ‘affective ecology’ of children’s welfare in local communities in modern Britain.³⁹

Children’s experiences of welfare were shaped by ‘local worlds and small communities’, partly because of the vitality of the ‘mixed economy’ of welfare.⁴⁰ A great deal of scholarship has revealed that British state action was characterized by distinctive and permissive collaborations with philanthropic, mutual, commercial and family provision.⁴¹ Within this mixed economy, this book suggests that charities were peculiarly significant providers of children’s services across the last two centuries. Charitable independence could enable pioneering and experimental initiatives, as shown by Lamb’s analysis of reformatory and industrial schools, Pooley’s research into civic children’s hospitals, or Rusterholz’s work on the Brook Advisory Centres. In other cases, the autonomy of longstanding and uncoordinated charities hindered the implementation of new standards of care, as Marven’s research on convalescent homes and Lynch’s study of child emigration indicate. What is clear from all of the chapters is that state provision for the young imitated and cooperated with – but seldom transformed – the work of children’s charities. In particular, the national state enabled charities to dominate the provision of children’s services that were most controversial in challenging the authority of parents, whether through residential care, emigration or sexual health services.

This volume argues that historians have been too willing to accept uncritically the significance of interventions by the UK government. Reforms initiated by the Edwardian New Liberals, including free school meals from 1906, the school medical service from 1907 and the Children Act from 1908, crystallized and disseminated earlier local and voluntary initiatives, but did not transform most children’s lives. William Beveridge’s post-war welfare state introduced truly revolutionary universal services for children living in private families, including family allowances, free healthcare and free secondary education. Yet, these changes did not transform the experiences of children who relied most heavily on extra-familial welfare provision: those in state-funded residential care. Thus, a chronology emerges that reveals both significant continuity and greater inequality in children’s experiences of welfare across the century from the 1870–80s to the 1970–80s. If we attend to children’s experiences, we need to rethink the classic historiographical narrative of the ‘road to 1945’.⁴² This framework may offer insights when analysing aggregate evidence for the welfare of families supported by a male breadwinner, but children’s experiences suggest a more uneven chronology of innovation and stagnation.

Second, this volume builds on important scholarly debates about expert categorization to ask how children experienced the expert-led process that Ian Hacking terms ‘making up people’.⁴³ According to Hacking, the application of labels transformed how those who were subject to labelling lived and were understood.⁴⁴ While Sen has suggested that a person’s ‘agency’ to choose from a range of feasible possibilities is integral to their well-being, Hacking has argued that ‘making up people changes the space of possibilities for personhood’.⁴⁵ Scholars have proposed that the ‘possibilities for personhood’ offered to children were constrained by newly prominent binary categories. In the 2003 edition of Harry Hendrick’s monograph Child Welfare, Hendrick suggested that three binaries – mind/body; victim/threat; normal/abnormal – can help to explain social policy’s changing goals, practices and perceptions of childhood. Hendrick contended, for example, that policymakers’ primary concern for children’s bodies was replaced from 1914 by a greater interest in their minds, as children’s ‘mental welfare’ began to attract the attention of organizations such as the British Paediatric Association and the National Institute of Clinical Psychology.⁴⁶ Although Hendrick emphasized that he was not ‘suggesting that the entire range of social policies for children’ could be fitted into this schema, many historians have adopted this model.⁴⁷ John Stewart’s study of child guidance explored the ways in which the binary of normal and abnormal informed the delivery of new forms of mid-twentieth-century expertise.⁴⁸ Though drawing upon different forms of authoritative knowledge, Louise Jackson argued that Hendrick’s dualism of victim and threat ‘can be used to explain the problematic position of the sexually abused girl child in Victorian and Edwardian society’.⁴⁹

There is nothing wrong with using binaries as analytical categories. Evidence for social experience in this volume reveals, however, that children more often lived between or outside categories constructed by adult experts. These insights require historians to rethink existing chronologies. Pooley’s chapter, for example, shows that children were sensitive to the ways in which bodily impairment marked them out from peers, long before the Board of Education categorized them as ‘abnormal’ through investment in special schools from 1893. Soares’ research reveals how some children in institutional care sustained affective bonds with birth families in the decades after charities aimed to have replaced these ‘degraded’ relationships with a ‘normal’ institutional family. Children’s actions imply that, in determining what they felt to be ‘normal’, the judgements of face-to-face peers and family were at least as significant as categorizations made by distant adults with professional authority.⁵⁰ This evidence suggests that we have over-emphasized the impact of expert-led turning points that dominate histories of welfare. Body and mind also emerge as inseparable concerns when we place children’s experiences at the centre of analyses. Chapters by both Marven and Lynch reveal the profound, and often life-long, psychological effects of physical practices enacted within welfare institutions. The third binary of children as ‘victims’ or ‘threats’ was widespread rhetorically, but all of the chapters on institutional care, which traverse the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reveal that these categorizations were twinned and interchangeable. Importantly, each of these binaries overlooks the enduring significance of children as providers of welfare, whether through fund-raising or the unpaid labour of childcare. The volume thus suggests that while binaries mattered to adult-authored ideologies and rhetoric, this model of thinking has little explanatory power, and can indeed be misleading, when seeking to understand how welfare shaped people’s lives.

Third, this volume contributes to recent research into children’s political and intellectual agency and challenges Sarah Maza’s assertion that ‘Children’s political activities nearly always amount to instances of mimicking parents in the case of the very young … or acting out family or community beliefs in the case of older kids’.⁵¹ Scholars have long approached the collective action of the structurally disempowered through resistance. As the anthropologist James Scott pointed out in his study of Southeast Asian peasants, even when ‘neither outright collective defiance nor rebellion [was] likely or possible’, people were still able to express what Scott terms ‘everyday resistance’.⁵² Historians have interpreted welfare recipients’ refusal to comply with institutional rules as a powerful form of everyday resistance.⁵³ Gillian Lamb, however, argues in this volume that historians need to rethink interpretations of children’s desertion within nineteenth-century residential institutions. While running away has traditionally been read as a straightforward demonstration of defiance, Lamb’s study of Surrey industrial and reformatory schools highlights the multiple and transitory stimuli that prompted children to abscond. This builds on Lynn Thomas’s proposal that historians must attend to ‘the multiple motivations that undergird meaningful action’, motivations that may ‘exceed rational calculation’.⁵⁴ A century later, Laura Tisdall’s chapter argues that sustained school refusal offers an insight into children’s awareness of the harmful impact of schooling on their welfare. Tisdall’s analysis of truancy demonstrates that experts’ desire to defend their professional territory meant that they ignored children’s explanations for their ‘everyday resistance’ in favour of theories of familial or psychological deficits. By questioning conventional and ahistorical interpretations of ‘weapons of the weak’, contributors to this volume instead highlight the diverse and contextually specific motivations that underpinned actions that appear superficially similar. These new interpretations rely on sensitive engagement with multiple forms of evidence, including sources authored by children themselves.

The volume further develops historians’ engagement with agency by illuminating the spectrum of everyday responses to welfare provision, most of which were not the exceptional moments of resistance that are prominent in adult-curated disciplinary archives. This draws on Susan A. Miller’s proposal that we should attend to ‘the ways in which children willingly conform to adult agendas, not necessarily because youth acquiesce to power, but because their interests often align with those promoted by adults’.⁵⁵ Taylor shows how children growing up in post-war London often shared their parents’ desire for residential redevelopment despite being unaware of the housing problems that predated the Second World War. Lamb reveals that not all disadvantaged children resisted entry to institutional care; some explicitly sought an institutional home through collaborating with influential adults, while others contributed to their admission through their behaviour. Additionally, attention to ‘tactical’ and ‘collaborative’, not merely strategic and individualist, agency allows us to identify children’s agency even in contexts where historians have previously noticed oppression and silence.⁵⁶ Marven’s chapter reveals that children admitted to convalescent homes developed important peer cultures that sought to enhance individuals’ autonomy by taking collective action to subvert institutional regulations. For instance, children’s desire for bodily privacy led to collective forms of agentic behaviour that undermined the enforcement of distressing rules and helped to preserve girls’ and boys’ expectations of age-related dignity. As Lynch points out through his study of Australia’s child migrants, agency itself also needs to be historicized. Children learnt their worth and gave meaning to their own capacity in specific historical environments. The specific understandings of diminished agency that were fostered, for instance, in isolated and oppressive post-war institutions run by religious orders, could have lasting and distinctive impacts on people’s lives. As Gleadle and Hanley concluded in their study of children’s abolitionist sugar boycotts, juvenile political ‘agency manifested most often as a result of recursive negotiation with adults’ expectations and demands’.⁵⁷ Children thus need to be understood as informed actors who shaped – as well as were shaped by – the politics and meaning of welfare.

Finally, this volume innovatively reveals children’s contributions to the construction of childhood. Age-specific provision was one of the defining features of modernity. Corinne Field and Nicholas Syrett have argued that the significance of chronological age ‘intensified in the modern period with the rise of democratic forms of government’ and rights-bearing citizenship.⁵⁸ Legislation undermined the public and political power of those categorized as children. In Britain, the introduction of the equal adult franchise from 1928 was a crucial milestone in solidifying ‘age-related political structures’, resulting in the distancing of those not qualified as ‘adults’ from political power.⁵⁹ The evidence in this volume rejects progressive narratives of ever-expanding children’s rights across the last 200 years. Not only were children’s experiences diverse, but, more innovatively, this volume suggests a new chronology of children’s ability to influence the public sphere. In mid-twentieth-century Britain, children were disempowered by a combination of a more distant centralized state with an age-specific franchise and the hegemony of developmental models of universal age-defined needs, both of which constrained children’s abilities to make their experiences and views heard.

The newly authoritative divide between adulthood and childhood constructed by twentieth-century adults most notably neglected the distinct needs of older children. Chapters by Marven, Tisdall, Wright and Rusterholz – on very different forms of welfare – each suggest that children aged around ten to sixteen increasingly articulated the inadequacy of services in meeting their needs. Rusterholz’s study of Brook Advisory Centre, for example, shows that at a time when an increasing proportion of under-sixteens were becoming sexually experienced, these younger teenagers were denied access to confidential sexual health services. Wright’s study of children who grew up in Glasgow’s high-rise flats during the 1960s also reveals policymakers’ and planners’ neglect of older children, especially teenage girls. Historians have rightly emphasized the universalist aims of post-war welfare. Yet, the mid-twentieth-century obsession with maternal care-giving and the welfare of the youngest children forced older children to seek alternative routes through which to meet their own welfare needs.

Thus, this volume offers new avenues for attending to the complex power dynamics that were essential to the negotiation of welfare and its impact on children’s lives. This allows chapters to tease out children’s changing ‘multidimensional’ experiences of oppression and marginalization – not merely through age, but also through poverty, gender, geography, disability and race – so as to reveal how children’s experiences of welfare both reflected and constructed cumulative and intersectional inequalities.⁶⁰ If, as Jon Lawrence has suggested, we can ‘write a new type of social history: one in which ordinary people’s thoughts and feelings at the time take centre stage – where they become experts on their own lives’, we need to include children’s voices in this project of understanding the ‘vernacular’ everyday meanings of welfare.⁶¹

Approaches and sources

Historians of childhood have often argued that in order to understand the lives of children researchers need to adopt new approaches. Writing in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Joseph Haws and Ray Hiner suggested in 2008 that historians wanting to write about ‘children themselves – as opposed to what adults thought about children – needed to change their methods and their thinking’.⁶² This volume takes a different perspective and starts from the understanding that we do not need specialist tools as historians of childhood. Children’s lives can be understood with the same diverse range of sources and approaches that are used to understand the lives of marginalized adults. This is partly because, as Christina Benninghaus et al. have noted, the methodological problems confronting historians of childhood are ‘just a special case of a far larger problem of understanding history through … records created for other purposes than the historian’s’.⁶³ Likewise, Sarah Maza has argued that ‘the perspective of children in history is no less accessible than that of any other subaltern group’.⁶⁴ All historians have to contend with the challenges that emerge from the fact that ‘our image of the past is driven by the agendas and perspectives of the record keepers in the past’, agendas which very often do not align with our own, nor those of the ‘historical actors about whom they speak’.⁶⁵ In an effort to understand the lives of children better, historians have used four principal types of sources, all of which are represented in this volume: memory-based materials, sources produced by children themselves, adult descriptions of children’s behaviours and, finally, silences within the historical record.

Social historians from the late 1960s turned to oral history to obtain first-hand accounts of subjects and perspectives that were otherwise ‘hidden from history’. Writing in 1975, Paul Thompson reflected that ‘social welfare is studied as a problem of politics and bureaucratic organization; we do not learn how the poor hear the voice of the relieving officer or how they survive his refusals’. Faced with the need to ‘counterbalance this perspective’, Thompson analysed the oral testimonies of 500 men and women who were chosen to broadly represent the social class and geographical differences of Edwardian Britain.⁶⁶ From the 1980s, oral historians increasingly used memory-based sources to shed light on the subjective meaning and longer-term impact of welfare interventions. For example, Angela Turner conducted oral history interviews with adults who attended segregated schools for the ‘educationally handicapped’ in post-war Glasgow. Turner’s work revealed the extent to which children were aware of attending ‘special schools’ and how this label continued to shape their experiences as adults.⁶⁷ Chapters by Marven, Lynch, Wright and Rusterholz draw extensively on older adults’ oral history testimonies to reveal the life-long impact of welfare interventions experienced in childhood. Writing more than forty years ago, Thompson suggested that ‘retrospective evidence – whether from newspapers, court hearings, published biographies or recorded interviews – does not present any intrinsically different problems’.⁶⁸ Rather, this volume underlines how the interpretative insights pioneered by oral historians have enhanced the practice of all historians, including those relying on written evidence.

For the last twenty years, historians have begun to draw upon sources created by children themselves. As Stargardt noted, ‘records produced at the time when the future really was unknown to their authors disclose a particular quality of experience’ which is unlikely to be found within retrospective testimonies.⁶⁹ Matthew Watson and Linda Withey suggested that material collected as part of Mass Observation’s study of children in Worktown provides a ‘glimpse into the interior lives of children in depression-era Bolton, their dreams, hopes, fears and beliefs’.⁷⁰ Likewise, Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer have argued that child-authored sources reveal a very different narrative to the themes of ‘poverty and unemployment’ most commonly associated with the 1930s.⁷¹ This approach remains controversial, however; in 2020, Sarah Maza claimed that historians had not yet ‘produced studies that explicitly and rigorously use the child’s perspective to challenge or recast dominant histories centered on adults’.⁷² Seven of the chapters in this volume draw upon children’s writing: in newspapers (Pooley); essays (Taylor and Tisdall); social surveys (Wright); and correspondence (Swartz, Lamb and Soares). In all of the chapters, the writers’ original grammar and spelling are used. This volume thus provides a unique opportunity to show how child-authored sources do allow historians to ‘challenge or recast dominant histories’.

Sources produced about, rather than by, the young can also provide valuable insights into children’s experiences. The argument that historians need to ‘change their methods and their thinking’ to study children’s experiences overlooks the insights that emerge from approaches used by historians who seek to understand the perspectives of other structurally disempowered groups. Shani D’Cruze observed in her history of sexual violence from criminal court testimonies that: ‘methodologies that read the fragmentary, partial and highly mediated sources against the grain of the overbearing power relations and seek women as actors and speakers as well as silenced victims, are both enabling in the present and pay respect to the past’.⁷³

By reading adult-authored sources ‘against the grain’, historians have similarly uncovered glimpses of children’s lives.⁷⁴ As part of their introduction to an edited volume on the experiences of children in Britain between the seventeenth century and the 1960s, Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey demonstrated that a careful re-examination of sources produced by parents offers an ‘insight into the mental structure’ that shaped young people’s lives.⁷⁵ This volume builds upon these studies, and demonstrates the ways in which sources created by adults – from case files that monitored children in nineteenth-century residential institutions (Lamb and Soares) to mid-twentieth-century state regulatory frameworks (Lynch) or parental questionnaire responses (Wright) – enable the re-examination of children’s experiences.

Finally, silences within the historical record are also significant sources of evidence. Historians concerned with understanding children’s lives are likely to encounter two distinct kinds of silence. The first reflects an absence of material produced by, or about, young people, which historians often feel unable to circumvent.⁷⁶ Given archival absences, subaltern studies have emphasized the need to interrogate the methods and power structures by which certain voices have been silenced.⁷⁷ In the context of twentieth-century Britain, Lucy Delap has revealed the range of processes of silencing encountered by people when they sought to disclose childhood experiences of sexual abuse, including those ‘imposed by families, by the individuals themselves, or by other audiences’.⁷⁸ Thus, the absence of evidence can tell us a great deal about societal unwillingness to listen. Second, scholars have examined spaces in which children were encouraged to deploy silence as a distinctive childhood strategy. Josephine Hoegaerts’ study of nineteenth-century educational provision suggested that ‘temporary silences’ – which were ‘generally read as signs of intelligence’ – were encouraged within schools ‘in order to buttress the cultivation of proper speech’.⁷⁹ Private spaces also cultivated silences. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher’s oral history testimonies from early twentieth-century England found that many respondents recalled that ‘both parents and social institutions kept to a strict code of silence on sex’. Szreter and Fisher observed that this silence had led the men and women they interviewed to interpret their own youthful sexual behaviour as ‘entirely distinctive’.⁸⁰ Far from erecting an insurmountable barrier, chapters in this volume by Swartz, Pooley, Taylor and Tisdall show how silences can serve as a starting point from which to understand experience. Taylor, for example, argues that the absence of any developed discussion, among pupils, about health services, both during and after the Second World War, has important implications for our understanding of public enthusiasm for the National Health Service. While this silence was a sign of apathy, Tisdall’s study of post-war education reveals that some black and ethnic minority pupils sought actively to silence unwanted efforts by teachers to represent their culture within the school setting. Silences should not be understood as simply the absence of evidence and the point at which further analysis becomes impossible. In fact, the chapters in this book demonstrate that archival silences can be viewed as important opportunities for, rather than impediments to, historical research.

The process of trying to uncover the experiences of children raises important ethical considerations. Historians who wish to draw upon sensitive archival material, such as case files and social work records, need to be mindful that much of the most insightful material is likely to have been collected without the consent of children or even their parents or guardians. Historians are caught in the ethical dilemma between welfare providers’ historic failures to seek disempowered individuals’ consent and present historians’ desire to listen to people who were failed by past power structures. The law offers one solution. Under the Data Protection Act 2018, historians can apply to view documents containing personal and sensitive material, which UK archives would not ordinarily make available, provided that researchers guarantee that they will not use their research to influence decisions about the individual or cause distress to them while they are likely to be alive.⁸¹ In order to comply with this stipulation, researchers are generally required to replace all identifying data (real names, birth dates, places, occupational details) with pseudonyms and vaguer descriptors, in order to preserve the anonymity of the people studied.⁸² Yet, even with these legal protections, the process of reading sources against the grain, in an effort to tease out children’s experiences, can inadvertently draw attention to aspects of people’s lives that they sought to forget. As Delap has noted, ‘the survivors of abuse often have little agency in the brief accounts of their experiences that might emerge in the historical record’ and researchers’ interests may ‘focus on experiences that survivors do not want to place at the centre of their life narratives’.⁸³

Oral historians gain their interviewees’ explicit consent, but the resulting testimonies raise additional questions of anonymization. Pat Thane has pointed out that ‘oral historians encounter problems of ethics as well as of method in probing painful and possibly damaging past experiences’.⁸⁴ Unsurprisingly, given that relationships were integral to children’s experiences of welfare, when recalling childhood experiences, interviewees frequently name third parties who had not consented to the sharing of their information. A recent project to create an archive of the testimonies of former residents and staff in children’s homes illustrates these practical dilemmas. Almost all of the interviews contained sensitive information, ranging from the names of other residents to descriptions of misconduct by named staff. While all of the interviewees consented to be identifiable, the archive responsible for holding the information decided to restrict access to the original interview transcripts in order ‘to prevent identification of people other than the interviewee who were residents of children’s homes or in the care of the council’.⁸⁵ Chapters in this volume have developed a range of innovative approaches to enable the study of children’s experiences, but it is important to recognize that the authors’ findings have been shaped by the diverse access arrangements developed by different archives. Three of the chapters in this book have been subject to ethical review, and each researcher has followed the anonymization procedures approved by their review board or archive. This volume hopes to demonstrate the new insights that emerge when archives do enable historians’ regulated access to sensitive sources.

While the law requires historians to be especially careful when working with sensitive information relating to people who may still be alive, historians also have an ethical imperative when representing the experiences of those who we know cannot question our interpretations. Although all of the chapters use evidence that children chose to communicate with someone, they never consented to academic study. As adults with resources and education, we seek to use our own power and skills to listen to past children as sensitively and truthfully as we can.

This volume does not seek to offer comprehensive textbook coverage of children’s welfare; rather, chapters offer a series of case studies that suggest directions for future scholarship. Poverty emerges as a central experience of working-class childhood, but in our sources children seldom engaged with the impact of monetary benefits on their lives, whether in the form of relief provided by the Poor Law or through the family allowances from 1945 that later became child benefit. This absence perhaps indicates the emotional labour of parents and carers who sought to hide financial worries, but historians need to know more about children’s engagement with money. By relying on children’s abilities to express their views in a form that survives either in the archives or in adult memories, chapters in this volume are seldom able to illuminate the experiences of the youngest children for whom care was most likely to be provided by the family, especially mothers. Contributors to this volume do, however, suggest the value of drawing upon evidence from older siblings as well as from adults’ records of the actions of children who were most dependent and least verbally articulate. This research is not straightforward, but we believe that this volume suggests that it is worthwhile.

Rethinking histories of modern Britain

The central goal of this volume is to show how we think differently about the history of modern Britain when we place children at the centre of our narratives. Historians have long challenged Whig accounts of welfare history, which present the expansion of state intervention as a linear story of progress.⁸⁶ This volume goes a step further and argues that children became less able to shape the expanded mid-twentieth-century welfare services from which they were assumed to benefit. In order to make this argument, the chapters in this volume are organized chronologically. Children’s experiences were as diverse as those of adults, and each of the authors analyses this variability. Chapters ask which disparities mattered in shaping children’s lives and how these experiences of welfare in turn forged sustained societal inequalities.

The first four chapters begin in the nineteenth century. Rebecca Swartz opens the volume with her chapter on the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, which arranged for the emigration of around 1,000 children to southern Africa, Canada, Australia and Mauritius between 1833 and 1841. Swartz makes skilful use of evidence gleaned from children’s letters, press reports and a British parliamentary enquiry into the activities of the Society in 1840 to highlight children’s diverse responses to the scheme. The chapter presents a compelling case for the inclusion of the colonial emigration of children in British welfare history and highlights the multiple ways in which child subjects were able to shape welfare provision.

Gillian Lamb’s chapter also includes the lives of colonial emigrants, but focuses on their experiences prior to and during their time in two Surrey industrial and reformatory schools. Lamb’s chapter innovatively deploys whole life tracing methods in order to capture the life-long experiences of people who spent part of their childhood in voluntary-run welfare institutions. By foregrounding children, the chapter demonstrates the limitations of familial affection and reveals a broad spectrum of family experiences that resulted in a child’s admission to care. This work challenges the dominant assumption that institutional provision comprised a poor second to family life. Despite the well-documented rigidity and discipline of institutional life, Lamb shows that a substantial proportion of nineteenth-century children considered institutional welfare to be better than the family life from which they were removed.

Claudia Soares’s chapter presents a contrasting perspective on children’s homes. Soares draws upon sources produced by two large voluntary children’s welfare institutions, Dr Barnardo’s Homes and The Waifs and Strays Society, to explore the dual models of family that shaped the experiences of children in residential care. To date, histories of children’s emotional well-being have predominately focused on affective familial dynamics in nuclear household settings. Soares offers an alternative perspective from which to consider the impact of growing up with multiple forms of family. In doing so, her chapter explores how organizations’ efforts to create institutional forms of family shaped the social and emotional worlds of poor children growing up in residential welfare settings. This work reveals that far from preventing contact between children in care and their relatives, residential institutions accommodated child–family contact in many cases. At the same time, children often maintained relationships with staff and peers when they returned ‘home’ to their relatives. These friendships provided new avenues of support that could be leveraged when difficulties were encountered in later life.

We know less about children whose lives were not regulated through institutional record-keeping. Siân Pooley’s chapter addresses this omission through the study of working-class children’s letters to columns published in local newspapers across northern England. The philanthropic actions of children challenge the longstanding assumption that the charitable ‘child-saving’ movement represented a site of class distinction. Pooley demonstrates that most young philanthropists viewed charitable donations not as a form of class-based largesse, but as a form of mutual aid that was motivated by their collective identity as children. Working-class children simultaneously recognized the economic and demographic precariousness of their own households. The poverty and instability that Lamb shows to have precipitated children’s admission to institutional care also shaped the emotional well-being of children living with family. A minority of children who experienced bodily impairment, however, constructed an increasingly distinct identity, less from adult discourses of disability than from comparison with peers’ newly age-specific trajectories. By paying attention to children’s experiences, Pooley concludes that working-class households, kinship networks and civic institutions were more significant and innovative providers of child welfare before the First World War than the national state. Elite adults thought they were the sole authors of modern understandings of, and investments in, child welfare; working-class families and their children knew that they were not.

Turning to the twentieth century, contributors reveal important continuities, most notably through the continued placement of children in residential institutions alongside the persistent use of emigration schemes. Maria Marven’s chapter investigates the experiences of children who were admitted to one of the many convalescent homes that sought to combine the specialized, technical and regulated environment of the hospital with the domestic environment of the familial home. Marven’s work, which draws upon more than fifty oral history interviews with individuals who were admitted to convalescent homes between 1932 and 1961, engages critically with definitions of agency by exploring what qualified as an expression of agentic behaviour. By studying how children sought to preserve their privacy and respond to discipline within convalescent homes, Marven draws attention to the pernicious effect of isolation within institutions. Marven demonstrates that children exerted agency in a myriad of ways, including through negotiation, resistance, compliance, peer group activity and play. Age emerges as the key to understanding children’s ability to influence their treatment and Marven concludes by demonstrating the need for historians to show a deeper engagement with age-related power differentials.

While Marven’s work reveals the often-covert ways in which children expressed their agency in long-lasting charitable institutions, Jonathan Taylor’s chapter, which draws upon essays written by school pupils aged between seven and sixteen, argues that the Second World War represented an important moment in which older children were viewed as protagonists with valid voices. During the war, children were actively encouraged to contribute their opinions to a wider national conversation about welfare reform. Taylor argues that the post-war welfare state should be viewed as the result of intergenerational calls for change, rooted in part in a shared desire to overcome problems associated with the inter-war period. Histories of post-war welfare reform have often focused on the actions of the central state. Essays written by children in the mid-1950s, however, demonstrate that in order to capture accurately the experiences of young recipients of state welfare, historians need to be attentive to services run by local government. Taylor’s work reveals that not only do historians need to pay closer attention to devolved welfare services, but that the welfare state was conceptualized as comprising a series of separate, but related, strands of support.

The ability of the welfare state to limit children’s capacity for agency emerges as a central component of Gordon Lynch’s chapter. Through a detailed case study of the experiences of post-war British child migrants to Australia, Lynch examines how contingent factors constrained the agency of post-war child migrants in specific welfare settings. Lynch considers three factors: macro-level governmental policies; meso-level organizational cultures and practices; and micro-level interactions between children and those charged with their care. Theoretical understandings of children’s agency have traditionally located the agency of young people within social networks. This chapter provides an alternative perspective by demonstrating the value of adopting a psycho-social approach. Such an approach not only attends to the social structures and processes through which children’s agency was constrained in certain settings, but also acknowledges the long-term impact of internalizing these feelings of constraint.

Laura Tisdall’s chapter develops the attention to children’s writing through an exploration of pupils’ attitudes to post-war schooling. To date, histories of post-war education have predominately focused on changes to national policy while overlooking the voices of contemporary pupils. As Tisdall’s research shows, however, writing students’ voices back into histories of education compels us to write different histories. The decision to organize post-war education hierarchically, by chronological age, and to enforce compulsory attendance policies meant that schools became the location where dominant conceptions of childhood and adolescence were most clearly established and enacted. Tisdall’s meticulous examination of children’s essays, submitted to four different studies in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals that students were acutely aware of their lack of power in their relationships with adults. Children’s capacity for agency was limited as a result of intersectional oppression that particularly disempowered black and ethnic minority pupils. These power imbalances were evident not only through teachers’ control over the curriculum, but via the physical spaces students occupied within schools. Tisdall’s chapter presents a compelling case for the inclusion of education as a key strand of the welfare state, revealing important contradictions that only become visible through the analysis of pupils’ perspectives.

Adults’ assumptions about children’s agency also influenced the design of late twentieth-century social housing. Valerie Wright’s chapter reveals that Glasgow government officials and academic researchers were concerned in the 1960s and 1970s that high-rise flats unduly restricted the freedom, and thus the welfare, of children. Recent histories of childhood have revealed that play was increasingly viewed as an important component of a child’s development. Wright’s chapter examines how children responded to newly built high-rise estates by uncovering a multitude of ways in which children navigated these spaces. Wright’s use of archival sources reveals that adult residents were concerned that children did not have anywhere to play locally, and many called on the Glasgow Corporation to provide more playgrounds. These anxieties stood in sharp contrast to children’s contemporary experiences and subsequent memories of growing up in Glasgow’s high-rise flats. Children were resourceful and many described constructing innovative play spaces. Wright’s chapter reveals that age was an important factor in determining children’s agency, with older children frustrating the attempts of the Corporation to provide facilities that would serve children of all ages.

The final chapter underlines the significance of age as a category of analysis in modern British history. Caroline Rusterholz’s contribution uses the case study of the Brook Advisory Centre (BAC) to explore young people’s relationship with voluntary sexual health services between 1964 and 1985. Drawing on BAC’s annual reports, teenage magazines and oral histories conducted with former clients, Rusterholz argues that young people’s experiences and needs proved crucial in the shaping of BAC services. Young people were proactive in seeking out providers of sexual health services. The BAC’s ability to earn the trust of its clients was essential to the development of its pioneering clinics. A close focus on age shows that the sexual experiences of the under-sixteens triggered vocal resistance. Longer counselling sessions were provided for this age group, but services for under-sixteens also provoked opposition. In the view of BAC opponents, ‘children’ needed to be protected from sexual activity and the confidentiality of the service became controversial. Rusterholz’s work nuances the historiographical tendency to present the period from the late 1950s to the late 1960s as one of greater sexual permissiveness, and shows that age, at times, functioned as a barrier to young people’s access to sexual health services.

In 2020, Sarah Maza argued that historians should study ‘not the history of children but history through children’ because ‘children have so frequently been pressed into service by social leaders and engineers as the building blocks for various agendas’.⁸⁷ The study of children as adult investments for the future has indeed been at the heart of research into children’s welfare for the last 150 years. In the conclusion to Harry Hendrick’s book on children and welfare, he noted in 1994 that ‘It should now be clear that the relationship has been sometimes indicative of, and very often central to, debates about the role of the State, the family, education, citizenship and social stability, not to mention more grandiose themes concerning national culture and morality’.⁸⁸ The ten chapters in this volume do illuminate these adult agendas. However, this volume principally shows that we understand a great deal more about modern Britain when we, much more innovatively, also write the lived experiences and perspectives of children themselves back into the history of children’s welfare.