Co-existence in Banbury
Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury. By Margaret Stacey. (O.U.P., 35s.) THE well-wishers of sociology in Great Britain would have it become the portraitist and instruc- tor of the age and a strenuously scientific discip- line as well. Miss Margaret Stacey's study of Banbury yields a faint glimpse of these possibili- ties, but it also discloses the piffling inheritance which inhibits the growth of its powers. Miss Stacey is obviously an intelligent, if not very learned, person, and in the course of six years of worrying data collected over three years, she made a valiant effort to transcend the triviality of the data which the original scheme of inquiry led her to assemble. But the point of departure of a sociological investigation, like a misspent youth or a carelessly written first draft, can very seldom be undone.
The social survey, the creation of British pioneers. most notably Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree, was a valuable device for discerning and reporting on housing conditions, family composition, age of marriage, poverty and unemployment, residential distribution, church affiliation and attendance, membership in voluntary associations and so on. Miss Stacey and her collaborators began their work under the direction of this tradition, without question- ing the indispensability of such information to any inquiry in a small locality. On this assump- tion, she then superimposed an interest in the extent of conflict between native Banburians and the newcomers drawn to Banbury by the estab- lishment thirty years ago of a large aluminium factory. It was only after the major part of the inquiry was completed that her own perceptive- ness and the entelechy inherent in sociological analysis enabled her to see something far more interesting and important than what she had originally set out to study.
The result is a book which contains an assort- ment of conventional information about housing conditions, family composition, age of marriage, knowledge of the names of kinsmen and similar topics, very few of which are articulated with the interest which Miss Stacey generated after the data had been collected. Preceding and following this rather boring stuff, which fills up two chap- ters and a dense appendix, is a thoughtful, sugges- tive, sometimes naive, sometimes penetrating study of one local manifestation of the major transformation of the established order of British society into the 'mass society' which is emerging today. It is a picture of a mutually uncompre- hending, somewhat resentful co-existence of the two orders of society. The provincial variant of the establishment is parochial, deferentially and snobbishly hierarchical, piously laid over with the cast of Anglicanism—the Free Churches are held at a distance. It is centred on the Conservative and Liberal Parties. It is dominated by aristo- cracy, gentry and respectable tradesmen, and rests on a stratum of 'decent, respectable' work- ingmen—the 'deference voter,' so recently re- discovered by the New Left. The other order, which Miss Stacey calls simply the 'non- traditional,' is national in its horizon, egalitarian, devoid of ritual and pomp, religiously muted or indifferent, and centred on the Conservative and Labour Parties. The two orders have not fused; they exist alongside each other, with little mixing and little mutual regard. Their outlooks are different; they have practically no common values to give them a sense of belonging to a common whole. The managers of industry, the technologi- cally and scientifically educated from State schools and the modern universities, the semi- skilled workers in the new industrial ent the executives and clerical civil servants new large retail shops, have not been ass into established Banbury society, which IO 3 extent goes its own diminishing way. The —and still persisting—segregation of cla now accompanied by the segregation of the' of the establishment from that bit of mass which has settled in Banbury. The social is of the elites of the Labour Party and trade from the Conservative-Liberal-Angliea Church elites of Banbury is impressively strated by Miss- Stacey and her collabon, Other and equally important aspects 01 isolation of the new order, at which Miss hints, are not so well documented becant austerity of the social survey technique mat' provision for the observation of friendshlr conviviality. Miss Stacey's observation of 11 hedged with surly unforthcomingness, the 'traditional' and the 'non-traditional' 1 tants of Banbury is unnecessarily vague.., abstract. The asceticism of her method int. her documentation of the important in which her intelligence engendered but her ; tific' training could not acknowledge. The, sions are many. Political and religious bell' passed over either because they were too dl to elicit or because it seemed more imPorP a social survey to learn about affiliation attendance than about belief; aspirations for self and one's children are neglected, press „o for the same reason; beliefs and attachment national symbols, such as the Crown or the liamentary system, are likewise passed oyer' None the less, the crippled form of the b oyes two of the chapters, on 'Houses and Nei": and on `The Family,' which are based on work of Cyril Smith and Charles Kimber...2' as little to do with the rest of the book as the have and 'non-traditional' Banburians n.ve to do with each other—does not entirely ftseure the picture of Banbury as one sector of a nation-wide front. Sometimes, the relationship (4 the local part to the national whole is in- (1111ciently stressed. The aristocracy and gentry w'hich dominated Banbury did, after all, look lbil!iard the Court, London, Oxford and Cam- ridge, and the tradesMen who supported them ',°°ked outward through them. On the other hand, she does catch the essential transcendence °I locality in the outlook of the new technological and scientific intellectuals and the managerial and administrative elites. She sees that local pride and Identification in the mass of the population are diminishing, hand in hand with the declining ascendancy of the aristocracy and gentry. She is,. t r'ejhaPs, at her best when she attempts to explain the Peaceful nature of this society riven by the segregation of classes and cultures. She thinks that the peace is often kept by the sheer absence (.4 contact between groups which are antipathetic '0 each other. And yet, perhaps because she dis- Lcvered her true interest only when her resources 4(1 been committed elsewhere, she pays far too
lulls attention to the processes which make
Britain into the most peaceful of the large-scale moieties of the modern world. The problem on which Miss Stacey settled in the course of her analysis of the data is not the exclusive property of sociology. Nor is sociology Such an autonomous and advanced science that „' Can dispense with the thought and observations 1311ess specialised and technical students of 1 r.Itish society. Had Miss Stacey read with dis- :linination some of the journalistic and literary productions on contemporary Britain, with which 'Chard Hoggart, Anthony Hartley, Raymond Williams, Colin Maclnnes. William Cooper and others have indulged us in recent years, she would have been a better sociologist and given us a more realistic portrait of this age.
EDWARD SHILS
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