Lancashire Life magazine, 1947-1973: a middle-class sense of place

Lancashire Life magazine, 1947-1973: a middle-class sense of place Andrew Hobbs, University of Central Lancashire [pre-print version of paper accepted for publication in Twentieth Century British History] Abstract This article is the first academic study of a significant twentieth-century periodical genre, the county magazine. Through a content analysis of a successful example, Lancashire Life magazine, it introduces regional differentiation into current scholarship on the middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis, from the magazine’s launch in 1947 to the end of the post-war boom in 1973, identifies changes over time in editorial attitudes to class, the South of England, modernity and the past. These changes correlate closely with wider national images of northern England, with the most confident self-images – of Lancastrians as wealthy, cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and proud of their history and traditions coinciding with the popularity of northern culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These distinctive regional self-images add to the work of Russell in challenging over-simplified conceptions of twentieth-century middle-class culture as homogenous and ‘national’. Keywords County magazines; Lancashire Life magazine; middle class; county identity; northern identity; modernity. 1 Fig. 1. Front covers of Lancashire Life magazine This article introduces regional differentiation into current scholarship on the middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century, through a content analysis of a successful county magazine, Lancashire Life, from its launch in 1947 to the end of the post-war boom in 1973. Lancashire Life, part of a developing publishing genre, the county magazine, offers valuable evidence of the self-image of middle-class Lancashire and the North more generally.1 Its pages present the Lancashire middle classes as wealthy and sophisticated, modern, not deferential to metropolitan culture, and proud of their county’s natural beauty. Furthermore, changes in the magazine’s representations of one of the largest and most populous counties in the British Isles are closely correlated with wider national images of northern England during the period, with the most confident self-images coinciding with the popularity of northern culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This ‘northern 1 Here ‘the North’ is taken to mean the pre-1974 counties of Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland and County Durham. 2 moment’ was part of a wider post-war embrace of modernity and increased consumption, and this article offers a discussion of class and culture to a historiography that has been criticised for its separation of the political, economic, social and cultural.2 A serious study of county magazines is long overdue. This publishing genre is particularly telling about the intersection of place and class, and has much else to say about the town and the country, about territorial identities not only at county but also local and regional levels, tourism literature, leisure, consumer culture and many other themes. It provides unwitting testimony, produced chiefly to appeal to readers and therefore to attract advertising. In the twenty-first century, the 280 county and regional magazines across Britain represent a multi-million-pound publishing genre, with a monthly readership in the order of ten million.3 For this reason alone, their origins are worthy of study. This article begins with a brief survey of the relevant literature, followed by an outline of the 1947-73 period, a discussion of images of the North and conceptions of Englishness. The genre, publishing context and readership of 2 Becky E. Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters, 'Introduction', in Becky E. Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (ed), Moments of modernity: reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964 (London, 1999), pp.7-8. 3 Sales and free distribution figures range from 8,000 to 26,000 per title (Willing’s Press Guide, vol.1 UK, 2011); Cheshire Life currently claims 7-8 readers per copy: ‘Louise Taylor to take over from O’Neill as editor of Cheshire Life’, How-Do: News, opinion and resources for the North West media industry: https://www.how-do.co.uk/north-west-media-news/north-westpublishing/louise-taylor-to-take-over-from-o%92neill-as-editor-of-cheshire-life-200802221971/, 1 April 2008. 3 county magazines are described, before a content analysis of Lancashire Life is used to discuss representations of the Lancashire middle class, and to identify changes over time in editorial attitudes to class, the South of England, and the past. 'A great deal has been written about the working class and the aristocracy but those between them have often been left out of British history.'4 Most scholarship on the middle classes concerns the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with regional analyses focused on cities such as Manchester and Leeds.5 The few studies of the twentieth century tend to assume the existence of a homogenous national middle-class culture, and base their evidence on London and the South-East of England. Jackson, for example, claims that there is ‘little if any evidence that middle-class life and ways were greatly different elsewhere in Britain, only that change occurred somewhat later and more slowly, reflecting the distance from metropolitan influence.'6 This article builds on the pioneering work of Russell in challenging 4 James Thompson, 'After the Fall: Class and Political Language in Britain, 1780-1900', Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 800. 5 Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City, 1840-1914 (Manchester, 2000)Simon Gunn, 'Class, identity and the urban: the middle class in England, c.1790-1950', Urban History, 31 (2004); Donald Read, The English Provinces, 1760-1960: a Study in Influence (London, 1964). 6 Alan Arthur Jackson, The Middle Classes, 1900-1950 (Nairn, 1991), 6-7. See also Richard Trainor, 'Neither metropolitan nor provincial: The interwar middle class', in Alan J. Kidd and David Nicholls (ed), The Making of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1998), 206, 208, and Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951: a Study of a Democratic Society (New York, 1998), 102. 4 such assumptions and discussing local and regional identities within middleclass culture.7 It does not attempt a tight definition of the twentieth-century middle classes, accepting that they are an ‘amorphous’ group, encompassing stockbrokers, school teachers and shopkeepers, who are most easily identified by their distinctive patterns of culture and consumption rather than by income or occupation.8 At the time Lancashire Life launched, the middle classes were outnumbered by more than two to one, but a 1948 Gallup poll found that equal numbers described themselves as middle-class and workingclass, revealing aspirations and self-images that are well captured by sources such as consumer magazines.9 The period 1947-73 was chosen to encompass three points: the launch of Lancashire Life, the ‘northern moment’ from the late 1950s to the early 1960s when the region was in vogue nationally, and the subsequent dip in interest in the 1970s. Russell believes that the ‘Angry Young Men’ who gave the North its cachet in the middle of this period were linked to ‘economic buoyancy and expanding consumer power’, so a consumer product such as Discussions of middle-class reading habits in Jackson and McKibbin omit regional magazines (Jackson, 279-83; McKibbin, 503-08). 7 Dave Russell, 'The Heaton Review, 1927-1934: culture, class and a sense of place in inter- war Yorkshire', Twentieth Century British History, 17 (2006) 8 Gunn, Simon, 'Class, identity and the urban: the middle class in England, c.1790-1950', 22, 24; Deborah Cohen, 'Buying and becoming: New work on the British middle classes', Historical Journal, 46 (2003), 999. 9 Roy Lewis and Angus Maude, The English Middle Classes (London, 1949), 17; Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester, 2004), 32. 5 Lancashire Life, plump with advertisements and shopping features, is a useful source for the examination of this period of northern cultural prominence. 10 The years 1947-73 were a time of great cultural and economic dynamism. The first issue of Lancashire Life (LL) went on sale in December 1946, during one of the coldest winters of the century, with rationing more severe than during the war. 11 In January 1947 the coal mines were nationalised by the most socialist government Britain has ever seen, followed two months later by power cuts and shortages of all kinds, including paper for newspapers and magazines. An ‘urban’ Labour government legislated copiously for the countryside, enacting the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and Agriculture Act and the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, and establishing the Nature Conservancy in 1948. For the titled readers of a very different magazine, Country Life, decline was setting in – the supply of servants disappeared, country houses were demolished, taxes and death duties hit new heights, and many aristocrats sold their land.12 By contrast, 10 Russell, Looking North, 81. 11 The first issue, with its features on Christmas carols and Christmas fashions, was probably published in December 1946, although its cover date is January-March 1947. It gives its publication dates as 1st April, July, October and 20th December. The long production processes of magazines mean that articles may have been written three months before publication. 12 Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (London, 1992), 273-4; David Matless, ‘Visual culture and geographical citizenship: England in the 1940s’, Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996), 429; David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns 1774-1967 (Leicester, 1980), 425. 6 there was renewed economic confidence in Lancashire as cotton output and employment increased between 1945 and 1950.13 In the 1940s, when Lancashire Life was launched, northernness was at a discount. Memories of the Depression of the Thirties were still strong, when writers such as Orwell had convinced southern readers that it was grim up North. By the late 1950s the North had become fashionable again, thanks mainly to northern writers such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and Sid Chaplin who were added to the other ‘angry young men’ of the time. If nostalgia is about loss, then the launch of Coronation Street in 1960 -- with its cosy vision of a stable community in the kind of street then being bulldozed, and in which women dominate – confirmed that the old ways of life were dying, to be replaced by the boldness and iconoclasm of the new, young North.14 Coronation Street’s broadcaster, Granada TV, launched in 1956, added to a newly confident regional identity, set against a wider embrace of modernity. In music, pop groups from the North West were starting to dominate the charts, including the Beatles, who made a feature of their regional accents. This cultural confidence was also present in Lancashire’s 13 This confidence was not shared by those outside the county: John Singleton, Lancashire on the Scrapheap: The Cotton Industry 1945-70 (Oxford, 1991) 36-37, 28. 14 See Graham Turner, The North Country (London, 1967). Turner believes the North became attractive at this time partly because it had not kept up with the rest of post-war Britain: ‘The North had become a sort of keeper of the national memory, a museum in which an older and happier society had become embalmed’ (400); this may have been its attraction for the photographer John Bulmer, whose images for About Town magazine in 1960 (Nelson) and the Sunday Times magazine in 1965 (‘The North’) featured cobbled streets, terraced houses, flat caps and clogs. 7 economy. There was optimism (unjustified) that amalgamations and modernisation had secured the future of the textile industry, and 1963 was the year in which Harold Wilson, the bright young northern Labour leader representing a Lancashire constituency, made his ‘white heat of technology’ speech.15 By 1973, the faith in modernity and progress expressed by Wilson had gone and unemployment was at its highest since the war. The cotton industry which had been so central to the county’s identity had all but disappeared, to be replaced by jobs in light industry and services in the more fortunate towns.16 The images of Lancashire and of the North in Lancashire Life cannot be separated from representations produced elsewhere, nor from contemporary ideas of Englishness extrapolated from the South of the country and thereby excluding and ‘othering’ the North. The contents of Lancashire Life are internal representations, produced from within the county and the region (the editors were based in Lancashire, although two of them during the period were from the South of England, and the magazine was printed and published from Derby in the Midlands for its first six years). But northerners’ selfdefinitions are only part of how they are perceived outside their region: 15 A cotton mill manager interviewed by Turner cited the confidence shown in Lancashire by Courtaulds and ICI (Turner, North Country, 120). David Hunt, A History of Preston (Preston, 1992), 250. 16 The proportion of textile workers fell from 9.3 per cent of the Lancashire workforce in 1951 to 5.5 per cent in 1971: 1951 Census, Industry Tables, Table 1 and Table 2; 1971 Census, Economic Activity County Leaflet: Lancashire; Table 1 and Table 3. 8 the ‘national culture’, in terms of both the mentalities and the institutions that forms it, has always been largely constructed from within London and its immediate environs and … the ‘north’ has therefore been defined in that culture as ‘other’ and ultimately, as inferior.17 The perception of a North-South dichotomy has changed surprisingly little since its expression in influential mid-nineteenth-century novels responding to the rapid industrialisation of the North, such as Dickens’s Hard Times and Gaskell’s North and South (both inspired by the Preston Lock-Out).18 Many of these images were shared by the ‘darkest London’ created by novelists and journalists throughout the nineteenth century. While that idea of the East End has been superseded, a similar, older image of northern England remains. The keywords of grime, industry, urban and working class still do their work.19 This view of the North provides the defining ‘other’ for certain definitions of Englishness based on the countryside of the South-East, as seen in travel books and magazines like Country Life and its imitators: ‘this rural idyll has a specific regional setting: the thatched cottages and village greens are most 17 Russell: Looking North, 8, 64. See also Stephan Kohl, ‘The “North” of “England”: A paradox?’ in Christoph Ehland (ed), Ehland, Christoph, Thinking Northern: Textures of Identity in the North of England (New York, 2007), 93. 18 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin : Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London, 1992), 207-8. 19 ‘“Darkshire” was the name Mrs Gaskell gave to the part of the North about which she wrote in North and South, which was published in 1855, and we have been hearing about Darkshire ever since. But there are, and always have been, other Norths …’(Turner, North Country). 9 definitely not in the north of England.’20 ‘The “real” English, the “authentic” English, “true” England is to be found in the south of the country’.21 While Matless has established that Englishness was defined more broadly than this throughout the twentieth century, the ‘place myth’ of the North as urban, industrial and other is central to external representations of the region, and provides a useful starting point for this study of internal representations.22 County magazines County magazines such as Lancashire Life flourished all over Britain in the twentieth century, and their neglect by historians and geographers is surprising. Besides their value for the study of regional and local identities and 20 Only three out of 17 English volumes of Batsford’s mid-twentieth-century ‘Faces of Britain’ series dealt with the North, and only three of the 104 illustrations in the national buildings record, by W.H. Godfrey, Our Building Inheritance (London, 1944) were North of Shropshire or the Cotswolds (and two of those were of Durham College Green). See Malcolm Chase, ‘This is no claptrap: This is our heritage’ in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (eds), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989), 143. Peter J Taylor, 'Which Britain? Which England? Which North? State, Nations, Regions, Cities ... and Globalization', in David Morley and Kevin Robins (ed), British Cultural Studies (Oxford, 2001), 127-44. 21 Peter J Taylor, ‘The meaning of the North: Britain’s “foreign country” within?’ Political Geography 12 (1993), 137. Also Donald Horne, God is an Englishman (Sydney, Australia, 1969), 22-3, quoted and elaborated on in Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (London, 1981), 41-2; Kohl, ‘”North” of “England”’, 99, 112. 22 David Matless, 'Doing the English village, 1945-90: An essay in imaginative geography', in Paul J Cloke, Marcus Doel, David Matless, Martin Phillips, and Nigel Thrift (ed), London, 1994). 10 of Englishness, they also have much to say to the growing body of literature on the countryside. Catherine Brace has begun to map the ‘largely unexplored geography of publishers outside London’ to shed light on the history of countryside writing, but her focus is on books rather than periodicals. 23 Fussell, Gruffud and a few other historians of the representation of place have studied travel writing in books and national publications, but not in county magazines, even though many writers straddled all three genres.24 Studies of twentieth-century print culture have tended to favour books and newspapers over magazines, perhaps because of the higher cultural status of books and the overt political content of newspapers.25 Yet, ‘if culture is the stories we tell about ourselves then magazines are prime examples of cultural resource. They are full of stories which we tell about ourselves …’26 Magazines can also go into more depth, have more specialised content and therefore more narrowly defined readerships.27 Holmes believes the ‘relative paucity of works about this significantly under-examined branch of the print media’ is due to the terrifying number of titles and their complexity as texts, in 23 Catherine Brace, ‘Publishing and publishers: Towards a historical geography of countryside writing, c1930-1950’, Area 33 (2001), 288. 24 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars (New York, 1980); P Gruffudd, DT Herbert and A Piccini, ‘In search of Wales: travel writing and narratives of difference 1918-50’, Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000), 589-604. 25 Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde, 'Introduction', in Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde (ed), Design and the modern magazine (Manchester, 2007), 2. 26 Tim Holmes, 'Mapping the magazine: An introduction', Journalism Studies, 8 (2007), 515, 517. 27 Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel, The Magazine From Cover to Cover (2007), 5. 11 which meaning is conveyed visually as well as verbally. There are official histories of the longer established national and regional magazines such as Country Life (established 1897) and Dalesman (established 1939), and a memoir by the retired editor of Yorkshire Life (established 1946), sister publication to Lancashire Life, but little academic study of countryside magazines, particularly regional ones.28 The county magazine has a lineage stretching back to the early nineteenth century at least, but the form we know today developed from the 1920s, with a boom in new launches in the Midlands and the South of England in the early 1930s, and a second boom in the late 1940s, when Lancashire Life was one of 16 new titles established. This latter explosion in countryside magazine publishing is partly explained by the paper rationing regulations, which encouraged the launch of new publications while forbidding increases in circulation and pagination of established titles, and by an increase in paper supply from the autumn of 1946; the county magazine was a successful formula and Lancashire Life’s publisher was keen to replicate previous successes in new territories.29 However, Lancashire Life was also 28 B. Darwin, Fifty years of ‘Country Life’ (London, 1947); Roy Strong, Country Life 1897- 1997, the English Arcadia (London, 1996); David Joy (ed.), The Dalesman: A Celebration of 50 years (London, 1989); Maurice Colbeck, My Yorkshire Life (1993). 29 Launch dates from Willing’s Press Guide (1946). This annual press directory did not report circulation figures for most publications during the period. Such figures would anyway be misleading at a time of paper rationing, when many magazines had waiting lists for subscriptions. See Valerie Holman, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in Britain 1939-1945 (London, 2008); ‘Periodicals and Trade Journals: Increase in Paper Quota’, Times, 5 12 launched at the peak of national interest in rural matters, fed by a ‘huge quantity of writing on the countryside’ and natural history.30 Lancashire Life: Background and personnel Lancashire Life’s publisher, the English Life group in Derby, was the leading producer of county magazines in the 1930s and 1940s. The company launched Yorkshire Life a few months before its Lancashire counterpart and the Lancashire Life editor was told that ‘the new venture must not be permitted to lag too far behind’, with a nod to cross-Pennine rivalry.31 English Life Publications continued to publish Lancashire Life and Yorkshire Life until mid-1953, when they were bought by the owners of Cheshire Life, C Nicholls & Co at the Whitethorn Press, Trafford Park, Manchester.32 In 1956 LL switched from quarterly to monthly publication, and in 1963 the company was taken over by the Thomson group, then publishers of the Illustrated London September 1946; interview with Barrie Wood, son of Charles Wood, the founder of English Life Publications, 7 and 8 March 2008. 30 Brace, ‘Publishing’, 288; Matless, ‘Visual culture’ 433; Alun Howkins, 'Rurality and English Identity', in Morley and Robins, 152. 31 Quoted in an article by launch editor Garry Hogg on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the magazine, Lancashire Life (hereafter LL) January 1972, 40. 32 Information from Willing’s Press Guides; differing accounts were provided by former group editor Leslie Radcliffe (interviewed 18 November 2002), LL editor Bill Amos (19 November 2002) and by Barrie Wood (interview), son of Charles Wood, the founder of English Life Publications, (interviewed 7 and 8 March 2008). 13 News and other consumer magazines, besides a growing number of newspapers, including The Times from 1966.33 Lancashire Life was ‘run to make a profit, that was the primary thing,’ according to Leslie Radcliffe, group editor from 1953. Bill Amos (LL editor 1970-85) also stresses the commercial imperative: There was no burning desire to teach Lancashire about itself or whatever, as with most magazines the revenue was advertising and to get the advertising you had to print the sort of thing that would draw in readers, to satisfy the advertisers.34 Lancashire Life’s launch editor was Garry Hogg, a freelance contributor to the Manchester Guardian, Country Life and Picture Post who wrote more than 70 books, including travel guides for countryside and motoring publishers Batsford and Shell. He commissioned some LL articles from contributors to the Manchester Guardian and BBC North Region, and found others by contacting Lancastrian letter writers to Country Life.35 The writing styles and world-views of Country Life, Picture Post and domestic travel books are detectable in Lancashire Life. Table 1 lists the editors during the magazine’s first 26 years. 33 ‘Magazine changes’, Times 8 August 1963, 6. 34 Leslie Radcliffe interview; Bill Amos interview. 35 Lancashire Life January 1972, 40-41. 14 Table 1: Editors of Lancashire Life 1947-73* Editor Period of editorship Background Garry Hogg 1947-1951 Southerner, author of more than 70 books, wrote freelance for Manchester Guardian, Country Life and Picture Post and did radio documentaries for BBC North Region George Eglin 1951-1956 Born Bolton, northern editor of Picture Post; chief feature writer, Liverpool Daily Post Victor Zorian 1956-1970 Born Manchester; former Belfast correspondent of Sunday Chronicle and northern editor of Daily Graphic; sister Olive a prominent violinist and associate of ** composers Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett Bill Amos 1970-85 Southerner, Liverpool Daily Post columnist and author of several books * Collated from LL August 1997, p63 and Amos interview. ** Raymond Leppard and Thomas P. Lewis, Raymond Leppard on Music (White Plains, N.Y., 1993), 331-32; obituary, Guardian 17 August 1971. In tracing the changing content of the magazine across four decades, from highbrow, literary and antiquarian to middlebrow, ‘modern’ and more consumerist, this study sees individual editors as influencing but not determining the content of Lancashire Life, despite what the editors themselves believed.36 For example the first editor, Garry Hogg, was interested in wildlife and the countryside, and as a Southerner may have worked from national stereotypes; so he portrayed Lancashire as a place of untamed natural beauty and its people as gritty, rugged, down-to-earth and proud of their past. Yet editors are not autonomous, they are usually appointed in the belief that they will carry out the publisher’s wishes, and they 36 ‘Some 25 Anniversary reflections by the editor,’ LL January 1972, 40. Amos says in a th caption to the same article that Eglin was ‘the editor primarily responsible for Lancashire Life’s present form’ – yet the content analysis suggests otherwise. 15 work within cultural inheritances and technical boundaries.37 Particularly for an advertising-led genre such as the county magazine, an ‘emphasis on commerce ... acts as a corrective to the overly literary or personalised approach to magazine history.’38 The readers Without circulation records, it is hard to know who read Lancashire Life.39 The content analysis below suggests that the magazine’s readers were mainly middle-class and urban, but the extrapolation of ‘implied readers’ from content takes no account of how historical readers read, nor of the processes involved in producing that content.40 Indeed, readership evidence confirms the illusory 37 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Oxford, 1992), 186; Jeremy Aynsley and Kate Forde, ‘Introduction’ in Aynsley and Forde (eds), Design and the Modern Magazine (Manchester, 2007), 8; see also Andrew Marr, My Trade: a Short History of British Journalism (London, 2004), 209, 235, and for examples of editor-publisher negotiations on sister title Yorkshire Life, see Colbeck, My Yorkshire Life, 127-28. 38 N, David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880-1960 (London, 1997), 16. 39 Hulton readership surveys did not measure the readership of regional magazines: J. W. Hobson and H. Henry, The Hulton Readership Survey, 1953 (London, 1953); British Market Research Bureau, The Hulton Readership Survey 1955 (London, 1956). 40 Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein, ‘Introduction’ in Brake, Bell and Finkelstein (eds), Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (Basingstoke, 2000), 4; Margaret Beetham, 'Towards a theory of the periodical as a publishing genre', in L Brake, A Jones, and L Madden (ed), Investigating Victorian Journalism (1990), 25. For a recent 16 nature of implied readers. The fiftieth anniversary issue features a retired teacher from the industrial town of Leigh, who bought the magazine from its inception, as a treat when she was a young mother. She may well be a typical reader – there were not enough squires and Jaguar drivers in Lancashire to support a magazine all by themselves. The 1970-85 editor Bill Amos says: ‘We had a much wider readership than you would think, a lot of people in twoup, two-downs. … It wasn’t all ABs by any means, although there was a preponderance.’41 Whoever they were, the readers seem to have welcomed the magazine. It sold out its early print runs (not unusual in a time of print rationing), and advertising increased from small beginnings. Clues to the attraction of county magazines come from market research conducted for the magazine’s publishers in 1988: It [LL] reminds me how right we were to come here. It makes one feel rather pleased with oneself for what otherwise might seem a scruffy existence on a small-holding. Lancashire Life magazine is about what I want to learn about... people, villages I know. Finding out about your neighbours, hobbies, old crafts, village buildings, projects that defence of the implied reader, see Susan J Douglas, 'Does textual analysis tell us anything about past audiences?', in Barbie Zelizer (ed), Explorations in communication and history (London, 2008). 41 Interview. 17 groups of people get together and work on themselves. It’s like going to the parish church.42 The first comment suggests the imaginative, aspirational function of the magazine, while the second is very different, illustrating how readers co-opt the content of a publication into their own systems of interests and values. Other clues left by readers can be found in their addresses, in wedding captions and letters pages, all of which suggest that most readers lived in central Lancashire, stretching from the wealthy northern edge of Manchester to the fringes of the Lake District, with a preference for the suburbs. Manchester and Liverpool addresses were scarce. The dearth of reader evidence means that we can only speculate on the magazine’s influence. Today, it is one of the most successful of a booming stable of 31 magazines published by Archant Life. But during the period under review, a magazine promoting Lancashire, particularly its wealthier residents, its history, present-day achievements and beauty, may have provided reassurance and solace in the face of more negative external representations. Some readers’ letters claimed that it encouraged local and county pride and a sense of identity; it seems plausible that simply by combining under the heading of ‘Lancashire’ a collection of miscellaneous places, people and objects (as in the reviews of Lancashire-related books), the magazine supported a county identity. It probably encouraged many Sunday drivers to 42 ‘Unpublished reports by Behavioural Studies Ltd, Plastow Research and Communications Research Ltd for International Thomson Publishing Ltd, cited in “Readership Research & the Planning of Press Schedules”, Guy Consterdine, Gower Publishing Company Ltd, 1988’ quoted in Guy Consterdine, How Magazine Advertising Works (Fourth Edition) 2002. 18 visit Lancashire beauty spots and, as shown by its pride in dialect, it is an ‘internal’ publication, designed to make Lancastrians feel proud in their uniqueness. To an outsider, reading the magazine might feel like eavesdropping on someone chanting self-affirmations in the bathroom mirror. Content and comparisons The introduction to the launch issue, entitled ‘The Spirit of Lancashire’ lays out the magazine’s editorial aim, ‘… to reveal the county to its natives as well as to those less fortunate in their county of origin.’43 The editor begins by extolling the natural beauty of the north of the county, then acknowledges the jokes about Bootle, Warrington and Wigan. But ‘they rise above such trivialities just as effortlessly as Hail Storm Hill overtops the mill chimneys and dark greasy smoke of Rochdale and Rawtenstall’. The article also boasts of Lancashire’s two great cities, and makes mention of cotton, the industrial revolution, rain and comedians – a whirlwind tour of the county’s contemporary image. Lancashire Life’s debt to Country Life (and, in its early days, to Picture Post’s photo-reportage) in terms of design and content is obvious at its launch. But LL was more than a regional hybrid of those two national publications, as a comparison with a neighbouring county magazine, Cheshire Life, shows. Cheshire Life was more rural and upper class, featuring local ‘girls in pearls’ such as the Hon Elizabeth Cholmondeley, daughter of Lord 43 The launch issue of stablemate Yorkshire Life six months earlier featured a similar article, ‘Spirit of Yorkshire’, by novelist Phyllis Bentley. 19 Delamere, for its full-page frontispiece photographs in 1947, while the same page in the launch edition of LL featured a photo of Blackpool Tower. Pictures of hunt balls and regimental dinners were already a fixture in Cheshire Life in 1947 (these began to appear in LL in the late Fifties), and rural pursuits such as a ploughing and hedge-cutting competition are featured. Industrial towns such as Crewe, Runcorn or Ellesmere Port are absent from Cheshire Life. The following sections analyse the content of Lancashire Life for what it reveals about internal views of the county over time, particularly in relation to class, the South of England and the past. The magazine was sampled roughly every five years between 1947 and 1973, analysing at least a quarter of each year’s output by noting every article, a total of 656 items from 20 issues.44 Visual images, including advertising, were not analysed. Although magazines are a highly visual form in which placement of content on the page and within the magazine carries meaning, and in which adverts are an integral element, a focus on the editorial text can still give a fair summary of the magazine’s content. There were few free-standing pictures of subjects not covered in the text, and the significance of advertising is harder to interpret, especially when making inferences about readers. Each editorial item was classified, where 44 The following issues of Lancashire Life were analysed: 1947: January-March (19 items); April-June (20 items); July-September (22 items) 1953: April-June (29 items); autumn (28 items) 1958: January (37 items), July (33 items), October (42 items) 1963: January (14 items), June (14 items), July (38 items), October (40 items) 1968: January (38 items), July (43 items), October (44 items) 1973: January (54 items), February (27 items), June (28 items), July (48 items), October (38 items). 20 possible, by the gender, age, race and class of any people mentioned, by references to the South of England; by whether places mentioned were urban or rural, and whether the topic was contemporary or historical. This quantitative analysis was combined with qualitative examination of representative examples.45 The aim was to expose some ‘rules’ of the magazine’s discourses, perhaps the implicit kind that an editor might use in accepting or rejecting an article for publication. Conceptually, one can challenge the treatment of a run of magazines as a unitary historical text, across 26 years, under four editors, and a broad and possibly changing readership.46 In the case of Lancashire Life, all we can safely say is that a magazine of that title appeared to fill a consistent niche in the publishing market between 1947 and 1973, and that some ways of writing about Lancashire, some discourses, remained constant through the period. Two characteristics of the county and its people stand head and shoulders above the rest when they are grouped and ranked: wealth, and a love of tradition or pride in the past (Table 2 below). The image of Lancastrians as wealthy is perhaps the biggest contradiction of the national image of the North, but there is no poverty in the pages of Lancashire Life (poverty appeared only five times out of 899 characteristics noted). This wealth is portrayed in items such as travel features about cruises (for example 45 For a more systematic approach to quantitative analysis of magazines, see Reed, Popular Magazine, 11-12. 46 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London, 1972), 23; L Pykett, 'Reading the periodical press: Text and context' in Brake, Jones and Madden (eds), Investigating. 21 October 1958, 55) and photographs of dinner dances and charity balls. The 1963 issues include full-page adverts for Boucheron watches, Martini, holidays in Monte Carlo and Aston Martin cars. Examples of nostalgia and pride in the past include articles about the traditions of hunting on the Furness fells (April 1953, 288) or Hall-i’-th’-Wood near Bolton, the home of Samuel Crompton, a catalyst of the industrial revolution (July 1953, 12). After wealth and pride in the past come representations of Lancashire and Lancastrians as grand, cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and as bold and progressive (this ‘balancing act between innovation and tradition’ has been identified as integral to British post-war ‘modernity’). 47 The sophistication is typified by recipes for cassoulet and devilled crab and a 1963 travel article about flying to New York for the weekend; the modernity by an article from the same year which describes a new garage in Preston featuring a 'smart men's hairdressing saloon ... an attractive waiting room -- and a self-service coffee bar' (July 1963). The next most frequent characteristics concern Lancashire’s natural beauty, the people’s practical, no-nonsense approach to life, sport, their literary and musical bent, their elegant fashion sense, and the county’s ancient traditions. 47 Conekin et al, ‘Introduction’, 2-3, 20. 22 Table 2: Most common Lancashire characteristics as portrayed in Lancashire Life n=899 1 Wealthy 2 Traditional, proud of past, nostalgic 3 Go-ahead, progressive, modern, ambitious, bold, pioneering 4 Grand, international, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, discerning 5 Place of beauty, nature 6 Practical, pragmatic, down to earth, no-nonsense, unpretentious, commonsense 7 Sporting 8 Cultured 9 Fashionable, stylish, elegant 10 Ancient, historic 11 Gritty, grim, salty, rugged, tough 12 Fun-loving, sociable, hedonistic 13 Privileged, aristocratic, hierarchical, paternalistic 14 Successful, established 15 Artistic, creative, musical 16 Humorous 17 Socially responsible, public-spirited, civic 18 Industrial 19 Deferential, royalist 20 Glamorous, sexy % of all characteristics for each year 1947 1953 1958 1963 1968 0 6 11 18 23 1973 15 % all years 12.2 9 14 10 5 14 18 11.7 7 9 9 5 6 6 7.0 2 14 5 4 8 1 12 2 6 1 9 3 6.9 4.2 9 0 0 1 2 9 5 7 5 2 8 5 3 6 2 4 1 1 4.0 4.0 3.8 4 5 3 6 3 5 4 1 5 1 2 2 3.4 3.4 14 0 1 0 1 2 3.0 2 1 2 4 5 4 2.9 0 0 0 7 5 5 2 3 3 2 1 1 6 5 3 0 1 1 5 1 2 1 4 2 2.9 2.6 2.5 2.3 0 4 2 0 4 3 4 0 5 2 2 1 3 1 1 3 0 1 1 3 1 1 0 1 2.2 1.8 1.5 1.5 N.B. Some articles discuss more than one characteristic. Only the 20 most common are shown here. The frequency of these characteristics in the magazine changes over time. In the first few issues of the magazine, as noted above, Lancashire is seen as a place of natural beauty and its people as gritty and rugged, downto-earth and proud of their past. Only the latter image, of pride in the past and nostalgia, recurs to any extent in later years. The images of Lancastrians as 23 wealthy and sophisticated are almost absent from these early issues, but increase in frequency throughout the 1950s, peaking in the 1960s before relative decline in the early 1970s, while more familiar stereotypes, such as ruggedness (De Quincey was a 'most inapt son of early industrial Lancashire' because he was far from rugged, for example), pragmatism and humour, become less frequent. The magazine may have set out to contradict such stereotypes, both as an editorial project and as a way of attracting advertisers. It is instructive to compare Lancashire Life’s portrait of the county and its inhabitants with another set of internal representations from an earlier era, those produced by local writers in late Victorian periodicals.48 Dellheim believes that ‘Lancashire literature depicted Lancashire people as industrious, frugal, sincere, practical, persevering ... self-reliant. They possessed strength of character, natural insight, shrewdness ... energy ... restlessness ... determination ... inflexibility ... natural kindliness.’ They were plainspeaking,clean, truthful, chaste, humorous, patient and home-loving. Only three of these tropes appear with any frequency in Lancashire Life – Lancastrians as practical, determined (gritty and tough) and humorous. The attributes of the twentieth-century Lancashire middle class, a mixture of comfortable old rural Tory values and nouveau-riche consumerism, are a far cry from the Victorian Nonconformist values promoted by Dellheim’s selection of writers. 48 Charles Dellheim, 'Imagining England: Victorian Views of the North', Northern History, 22 (1986), 221. 24 Class One of the most common perceptions of the North is that it is the ‘Land of the Working Class’ – an image which receives no support from Lancashire Life after the first few issues.49 Here the target audience and main subject matter become clear; the magazine would be more accurately titled Middle Class Lancashire Life. The Census tells us that the county’s middle classes (Registrar General social classes 1 and 2 combined) were only fifteen per cent of the population in 1951, rising to nineteen per cent in 1971, but they dominate Lancashire Life.50 Fig 2 below shows that the people and topics featured in the magazine were overwhelmingly middle-class, such as Wigan Golf Club in 1958, or Raymond Postgate’s 1968 sherry supplement.51 Sixtyfour per cent of classified items during the period concerned this class, while the working-class majority of the population were significantly under- 49 Shields, Places, 230. 50 For England as a whole, classes one and two grew from eighteen per cent to twenty-three per cent of the population between 1951 and 1971: A Vision of Britain Through Time: Lancashire Administrative County: Social Class https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data_cube_table_page.jsp?data_theme=T_SOC&data_cube =N_SOC_redist&u_id=10041831&c_id=10001043&add=Y, 9 April 2008; A Vision of Britain Through Time: England: Social Class https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data_cube_table_page.jsp?data_theme=T_SOC&data_cube =N_SOC_redist&u_id=10061325&c_id=10001043&add=Y, 9 April 2008. 51 Wigan Golf Club ‘is not blessed with many golfers who have reached a stage of high ability ... [but] they do pride themselves on a complete absence of cliques ...’:LL October 1958, 49; Sherry supplement, January 1968. 25 represented, accounting for around twenty per cent of relevant items (examples include two pages of photographs from the English Electric Sports and Social Club annual sports day in Accrington, and a feature on how lost children are reunited with their parents in Blackpool).52 However, there is no sign of the anti-working-class sentiment identified by McKibbin as central to middle-class identity at mid-century.53 Upper-class subjects such as Lady Pilkington opening a flower-arranging event in Southport, or the Earl of Derby becoming patron of the Federation of Agricultural Societies, were overrepresented, making up around ten per cent of the subject matter. Fig 2: Lancashire Life: Who are the articles about? – social class NB: Items about more than one class have been omitted, so some columns add up to less than 100%. 52 ‘Ohm and dry!’ July 1963; ‘Little boy lost,’ October 1968, 51, in the style of Picture Post. 53 McKibbin, Classes, 67. 26 The 1947 issues differ from the magazines of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Fifty per cent of subjects in 1947 are working-class, for example a piece on mill women and romance; forty per cent are middle-class, for example the regular leisure motoring feature, and ten per cent are about the gentry and aristocracy, such as the Hoghton family of Hoghton Tower near Blackburn. Thereafter, the middle classes are always in the majority, ranging from fifty-eight per cent in 1953 to eighty-five per cent in 1968. Interest in working-class subjects declines in inverse proportion, reaching a low point of ten per cent in 1963 before climbing to twenty per cent in 1973 – still a surprisingly low proportion for a publication from the Land of the Working Class. Treatment of the upper classes follows a different trajectory, remaining roughly steady from 1947 to 1963, before this class almost disappears from the magazine in 1968 and 1973. Attitudes to the South One might expect a county magazine to establish a county identity by setting up oppositions to one or more ‘others’. Obvious candidates against which Lancastrians might define themselves would be Yorkshire, or the South. Yet the magazine’s voice is more confident than that, choosing not to dignify other places with such comparisons. On the rare occasions when Yorkshire is mentioned, it is more likely to be subsumed under a wider North. Lancashire Life’s attitude to the South is more complex. In its early years it set out to show how Lancashire could compete with the South, as a place with natural beauty, wealth, sophistication and power, but acknowledgement of the South 27 changed over time as the magazine became more confident and less defensive. A recipe column in the third issue is typical of the magazine’s early defensive attitude: People in Lancashire do not, as many Southerners appear to believe, walk through the streets eating black puddings or sucking tripe from a skewer. Nor do they exist solely on a diet of trotters and hot-pot, but – it is true – we do like what we refer to as a gradely meal! 54 Also typical here is the subsequent confirmation of the stereotype, as the writer explains how to prepare tripe and hot-pot. She wants to have her tripe and eat it. In the 1970s the awareness of the South returned, perhaps less defensively. But Amos, editor at the time, still had a point to make: Any visiting Southerner would have perhaps thought, ‘I thought it was all mills and clogs and sweatshops and fish and chips, there’s obviously more to it than that,’ after reading Lancashire Life.55 Similar sentiments appeared issue after issue in Anthony Beverley’s motoring series ‘Lancashire has lovely ways’. 56 In the 1960s the tone changes; although negative Southern attitudes to Lancashire are still acknowledged, the South is used in a new way, to confer status on Lancashire subjects, as in a report of Bolton Museum retaining an industrial relic despite London’s Science Museum wanting it (1963), or Wigan artist 54 LL July-September 1947. 55 Interview. 56 See, for example, April 1953, 290; July 1953 14. 28 Theodore Major’s successful London exhibition (1968). However, LL is not trying to mimic the South, but wants Lancashire to compete on its own terms. An article about the village of Yealand Conyers in June 1973 draws a contrast with the falseness of the South, describing how Yealand Conyers ‘has about it a touch of the Cotswolds, mellow, quiet and unassuming. Happily, it has so far escaped that self-conscious tarting-up affected by many a picturesque village … you take Yealand Conyers as you find it.' The comparison with the Cotswolds, ‘an ideal version of England’, could be seen as claiming a right to Englishness.57 The combination of characteristics - rural beauty and ruggedness - is typical, as is the personifying of landscape and architecture to draw parallels with the ‘Lancashire character’. Modernity and the past Articles were also classified according to whether they were about contemporary subjects, or nostalgic/historical ones (see Fig 3 below). More than forty per cent of articles in 1947 were historical or nostalgic, such as features on Lancashire and the Brontes and ‘Lancashire, cradle of Christianity’. Straw and Chase argue that nostalgia tells us about the present through its falsification of the past and reveals a sense of decline, a theory which receives some support from the magazine’s defensiveness towards the 57 Catherine Brace, 'Gardenesque imagery in the representation of regional and national identity: the Cotswold garden of stone', Journal of Rural Studies, 15 (1999), 366. 29 South in 1947, suggesting a lack of confidence. 58 Interest in the past declines steeply in subsequent years to its low point in 1963 (less than ten per cent of content), when northern confidence and a broader faith in modernity is high, but the nostalgia returns in 1973 (thirty per cent of content), when the North was culturally less visible. However, the magazine’s attitude to the past is complex. There is a notable lack of nostalgia for poverty-stricken, close-knit communities, and instead historical articles concentrate on great Lancastrians such as Arkwright, Crompton or times when Lancashire featured on the national stage. This lack of interest in Lancashire’s ‘hard times’ is typified by a 1958 piece claiming that clogs are not dying out: ‘if clogs are to depend for their survival on the poverty of their wearers, then the sooner they are gone the better’.59 Generally, pride in the past is combined with a vigorous embrace of the modern present, a seemingly paradoxical view which gains coherence when focused on a particular place. 58 Straw and Chase define a sense of decline or loss of class confidence as one of the conditions for nostalgia: Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, ‘The dimensions of nostalgia’ in Shaw and Chase (eds), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989), 1-3. 59 LL January 1958, 5. 30 Fig 3: What are Lancashire Life articles about – the past or the present? Fig 4: A confident North: senior executives at HW Bannister, Trawden, 1963. In 1963, during the period’s ‘northern moment’, ninety per cent of LL articles are about the present. The mood of the magazine is captured in a 31 photograph in the June issue, spread across two pages, representing the sense of power, wealth and confidence of the North at that time (Fig 4 above).60 Captioned ‘The young executive look’, it features Mr Harry Bannister, chairman and managing director of HW Bannister, a 90-year-old Trawden family firm, sitting at his desk, clasping his fist in his hand like a victorious boxer. He is flanked by six of his young executives, in dark suits, white shirts and dark ties, some with handkerchieves in their breast pockets, in the style of Sean Connery-era James Bond. The story is about the firm winning European business in the high fashion market. Mr Bannister stares sourly at the reader and only one of the seven men, the youngest, shows the merest hint of a smile, the rest wearing expressions ranging from sullen to inscrutable. They exude power and arrogance, reminiscent of the Hollywood rat pack. There is no defensiveness or ‘positional inferiority’ here: this is a selfconfident North, living on a supra-national, European map, and playing to win. The photograph shows the boldness that laid waste to the Victorian slums and medieval street plans of northern towns in the late Fifties and early Sixties, replacing them with high-rise flats and brutalist Arndale shopping centres.61 The Bannister family business was established in the mid-nineteenth century, and after the demise of the Lancashire cotton industry, it was a Bannister who set up Boundary Mill, a chain of clearance clothing stores with their headquarters in Colne. This figure, the go-ahead traditionalist, combining two 60 LL June 1963, 38-39. 61 See also Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998), 165; Peter Mandler, 'New towns for old: the fate of the town centre', in Conekin et al, Moments of modernity. 32 seemingly contradictory characteristics and not unique to Lancashire, is seen most often in articles about respectful renovations and conversions of ancient buildings, as in this 1958 account of a house outside Burnley: The paved floor and walls of this garden, seemingly ages old, came from one of the many cotton mills pulled down during the depression of the early nineteen thirties ... Combining the beauties of the past and the present, Woodgrove shows what an important part an old house can play in the life of to-day.62 County magazines’ popular expression of modernity through consumption was identified by media commentators in the early 1960s. The combined circulation of Lancashire Life, Cheshire Life and Yorkshire Life rose from 31,000 in 1958 to 45,111 in 1962, and new publishers launched new titles to take advantage of increased consumption.63 The Guardian newspaper noted that In spite of excellent regional articles used by these stylish magazines, their obvious strength is as a mirror of a Britain which is going to more parties, annual dinners and balls, and which wants the fact to be noted.64 In the dominant, metropolitan-centred discourse, the North is not only working class, it is also urban, lacking unspoilt countryside (and thereby excluded from some versions of Englishness).65 Lancashire Life began by 62 ‘Fortune and beauty have come to Woodgrove,’ LL January 1958 31. 63 Peter Eckersley, ‘County Glossary’, Guardian 2 August 1962. 64 Eckersley. 65 Taylor, ‘Which Britain?’ 137. 33 confounding such ideas with its focus on the rural (see Fig 5), but for most of the period it confirms the image of the North as urban, adapting the county magazine genre to Lancashire’s geography of small-town conurbations and industrial villages. As Fig 6 shows, Lancashire Life’s content in its first year was overwhelmingly rural (more than eighty per cent) and more than half was rural in 1953, possibly because of the launch editor’s outdoor interests, and the publisher’s template from established magazines in less urbanised counties. But thereafter, topics were predominantly urban, reaching a peak of seventy-one per cent in 1968 before falling back slightly in 1973, to about sixty per cent. Fig 5. A rare image of rural working-class figures in this full-page study. Caption: ‘The old church at Mitton, in the Ribble Valley, provides a very beautiful background to this conversation piece between the Vicar, Canon J. Calderbank, and the scytheman in the meadow’ (Lancashire Life, autumn 1953). 34 Fig 6: What are Lancashire Life articles about? – Urban v Rural Why did Lancashire Life move away from its rural roots, from the late 1950s onwards? One factor may be the rise in northern cultural confidence, when external representations of the region as fashionably urban may have given permission for more content about the county’s towns and cities. A more pragmatic reason is given by Colbeck, editor of sister title Yorkshire Life from 1956 to 1989: Our monthly ‘town features’ [from the late 1950s onwards] so revived the flagging circulation of Yorkshire Life that they were quickly copied by other regional magazines both inside and outside our own group …towns were where people lived; towns had character and characters, folk and folklore …66 66 35 Colbeck, My Yorkshire Life, 109. News is people, as Harold Evans said; people like to read about themselves, and most people live in towns, demonstrating the hard-headed journalistic and commercial factors involved in the production of this text. Further analysis of county magazines may require subtler distinctions among the middle classes, to test the claims of those such as Gunn who have argued for ‘the gradual unravelling of the close identity between middle class and town … one of the major themes of English urban history of the first half of the twentieth century.’67 The evidence from Lancashire Life suggests that, whether the county’s middle classes lived in Georgian townhouses,semidetached suburbia or rural villas, they still liked to read about their towns and cities. The magazine’s focus on the urban middle class left little room for the rural working class, with Fig 5 a rare exception. In this regard, LL mimics the Southern-based, dominant genre of pastoral and rural writing since the Renaissance which, according to Raymond Williams, invented a ‘natural order’ of rural society, in which the labourers who created the wealth became invisible, and they remain virtually invisible in twentieth-century countryside magazines.68 There are other striking absences from Lancashire Life, such as the lack of urban or industrial images (as opposed to text), and the absence of children, non-white faces and working-class sports such as football and rugby league. The photography of Lancashire Life is generally conventional in its subjects, eschewing ‘Lowryscapes’ and Raphael Samuel’s ‘urban pastoral’, 67 Gunn, ‘Class, identity’, 40. 68 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), 18, 30. The Dalesman is atypical in its focus on the working countryside. 36 often seen in northern-set ‘new wave’ films and typified by the wide shot from the hill looking down on the industrial town.69 The ‘industrial sublime’ is absent from the text, too.70 Conclusions This quantitative analysis of a middle-class northern magazine, a county magazine about towns, has much to say about the self-image of the Lancashire middle classes, expresses a modern post-war North and provides many awkward qualifications to spoil any sweeping generalisations about the region. It shows that any discussion of a ‘national’ middle-class culture must acknowledge regional differentiation,71 and it adds a Lancashire case study to Russell’s analysis of a middle-class Yorkshire publication, offering further evidence that ‘loyalty to locality and the far less often considered region continued to be vital ingredients in the middle-class worldview’.72 Comparison 69 Philip Dodd, 'Lowryscapes: recent writings about 'the North'', Critical Quarterly, 32 (1990), 17, 27; Samuel, Island Stories, 165; Shields, Places, 217. 70 Cyril Fox, Memorandum on Policy , CPRW95, Council for the Preservation of Rural Wales Papers (1930), National Library of Wales; H.V.Morton, In Search of England (London, 1931), both cited in P Gruffudd, ‘Selling the countryside: Representations of rural Britain’ in JR Gold and SV Ward (eds), Place Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions (Chichester, 1994); Margaret Drabble, A Writer's Britain : Landscape in Literature (London, 1979), 195-204. 71 Russell, Heaton Review, 335. 72 Russell, Heaton Review 338. 37 with another county magazine, Cheshire Life, shows that Lancashire Life’s topics were distinctively less rural and upper-class. Lancashire Life’s internal representations of Lancashire contradict external ones produced in the metropolis. The magazine is full of well-off, middle-class northerners who helped to create and enjoy the post-war boom. Of course, it would be dangerous to construct a middle-class way of life from these magazines. They offer only glimpses (carefully chosen by editors to make interesting reading, with no claim to be representative) of many different lives, and do not pretend to describe a coherent culture.73 It is safer to use them as clues to how some middle-class Lancastrians liked to be portrayed. The quantitative content analysis has shown how Lancashire Life changed its personality significantly between 1947 and 1973. At its launch, it was interested in rural subjects such as natural history, it focused on the past as much as the present, had a preference for stories involving working-class people and showed a defensive inferiority towards the South. It went through a transitional phase during the early 1950s, before it developed a distinctive personality from the late 1950s to the late 1960s: confidently urban, middleclass and contemporary, occasionally feeling superior to the South (but, unexpectedly, only rarely using the South as an ‘other’ against which to identify, and never ‘othering’ the working class, contrary to McKibbin).74 This 73 Beetham warns of ‘the heterogeneity of the magazine formula which allowed different models of the self to sit side by side on the page without interrogating each other’: Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Women's Magazine, 18001914 (London, 1996), 183. 74 McKibbin, Classes, 67. 38 confidence continued to the end of the decade, even after national fascination with the North had gone. By the early 1970s this confidence was ebbing. It is intriguing that some of the changes in Lancashire Life’s content moved in parallel with changes in the status of the North in national culture. However, the content of Lancashire Life is so different from that of the novels and films that caught the national imagination, that any connection between a wider regional confidence and the magazine’s consumerism and display of wealth is probably related more broadly to the post-war boom and atmosphere of modernity. The magazine was riding on the coat-tails of the northern moment, rather than helping to create that moment. This first academic study of county magazines has only scraped the surface of a publishing genre which offers a great deal to the historian. Such magazines have much to say about class, the countryside, territorial identities at county, local and regional level, tourism literature, leisure, consumer culture and many other themes. Few other genres address the county as a geographical category, and county magazines contain useful information of a kind not found in newspapers. More sophisticated content analysis, encompassing images and advertising, and a more determined trawl for evidence of readership, would be fruitful. Future work could look at representations of the expert, class conflict or consensus, the modern and the future, America and Americanisation, private and public The timing of the boom in county magazines at mid-century deserves further investigation: it may be that the rise of the London-based BBC, the deeper penetration of ‘national’ newspapers into the North and the consequent decline of the regional daily papers (although not the weeklies), left a gap in the market. 39 Lancashire Life is particularly interesting for what it reveals about class and sense of place. The identity promoted in LL claims to be a Lancashire one, yet its loudly unspoken espousal of a particular set of middle-class values would probably exclude many working-class readers, and perhaps the traditional Nonconformist members of the middle class. But for other middleclass readers (and probably for some working-class readers), place trumps class. The magazine is thoroughly middle-class yet rooted to place. This intersection of place and class is only now being addressed in the historiography of the twentieth-century middle classes, which has overemphasised members of the upper strata who operated at national level and were somehow free-floating, above place, not rooted or trammelled like working class people.75 But the Lancashire Life of the late 1950s and the 1960s had no truck with northernness as ‘a spoiled version of a generally accepted unitary national ideal’.76 Indeed, the magazine’s loss of interest in working-class subjects in the 1960s might suggest that the North’s increased confidence at that time was based on region rather than class. While some historians have struggled to combine the discourses of class on the one hand and region or locality on the other, ordinary individuals did not. Writing of the nineteenth century, Joyce argues that: 75 For example McKibbin, Classes, 102; Trainor, ‘Neither’, 204, 212. See also Turner, North Country, 87-88; Russell, Heaton Review 348-49. 76 Stephen Caunce, ‘British, English or what? A Northern English perspective on Britishness as a new Millennium starts', unpublished conference paper delivered at 'Relocating Britain' conference, University of Central Lancashire (unpublished manuscript, 2000). 40 People … saw little contradiction between these different elements, say of class, nation, people or region. They seem to have made up a coherent popular outlook, with the regional as a very strong element, often framing the other aspects.77 For the readers of Lancashire Life, this was still true a century later. If nothing else, this study of county magazines affirms the importance of place as a category in history, and the need to acknowledge sense of place in any study of class identities. 77 Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848- 1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 292. 41