Made in Swindon: a social history 1840s -1940s was published in May this year by Hobnob Press. It is edited by Philip Garrahan, Emeritus Professor at Sheffield Hallam University, and has six contributing authors.
It also can be ordered from local bookshops or online from, for example, Waterstones:- https://www.waterstones.com/book/made-in-swindon/philip-garrahan/9781914407888
Royalties from the book are going to a charity, the Swindon Heritage Preservation Trust.
Made in Swindon is a contribution to the social history of company towns in the age of steam railways. It explains how a small settlement in rural Wiltshire became an industrial boom town, with the social and cultural effects this entailed. The Great Western Railway (GWR) made Swindon its own and the town principally became known for the manufacture of the company’s trains. The outside observer could have been forgiven for thinking that Swindon and the GWR were one and the same thing.
The six contributors to this book have drawn upon original research with vivid histories of social and cultural life in Swindon. The town’s transformation depended on recruiting an entirely new workforce, which had to be educated and housed. This experience both conformed to a broader national pattern of company towns and at the same time defined Swindon’s case as compellingly different. The GWR’s dominance over employment was mirrored in its influence over every aspect of life and work in the town. Almost every worker in Swindon was directly, and to an extent indirectly, employed by the company. In the 1930s, some 14,000 of Swindon’s 40,000 population entered the GWR’s locomotive engineering factory (the Works) every day.
Of course, other places shared the transformational changes of rapid urbanisation and the making of a new industrial workforce. But Swindon’s growth as the apotheosis of the company town is unparalleled elsewhere in the railway industry. In this sense, it is more comparable with colliery and other towns which had their industrial origins in the countryside.
Newly created industrial developments like Swindon were proletarian communities geographically separated from major urban centres. They were constructed around an economic monoculture characterised by reliance on a single industry, basic educational provision and limited social mobility. Their schools functioned to prepare boys for manual jobs and girls mostly for domestic work. These industrial settlements were close-knit occupational places, with strong group norms in the face of demanding manual labour. And of course, existing in such spatially defined settings led to substantial social cohesion from shared community values and cooperation.
By the 1930s the whole GWR Works site covered over 300 acres, extraordinarily manufacturing three locomotives a week together with goods and passenger carriages. A century after the railway line came to Swindon, the town had a global reputation for its manufacturing excellence and skills. However, there is a deficit in the literature about the social engineering that matched this.
The book argues that Swindon is exceptional not for the range of community bodies and interventions it developed, since these often existed elsewhere as industrialisation progressed. Rather, it often led the way in areas such as housing, workers’ health insurance schemes and public health. Many of its innovations proved more durable than elsewhere, especially those with evidence of pronounced working class agency. Together these were the scaffold on which the town’s modern education, health, leisure and welfare services were built. At the point of designing the NHS, Bevan declared that Swindon’s integrated health and social services provided a local blueprint for national change.
There were different forms of collectivism and mutual aid in Swindon that inspired and sustained worker initiatives over many decades. These are documented in chapters about the history of the Railway Village, the Mechanic’s Institute and the Medical Fund Society. Insights into industrial work are drawn from a 1915 account by Alfred Williams called Life in A Railway Factory. Other chapters in the book address the crucial role played by the Swindon School of Art which was led for thirty years by its first principal, Harold Dearden; and, the growing recognition of local artists whose creativity was born from the experience of living and working in a company town. The management of a railway heritage and its authorised discourse are assessed in a concluding chapter.
Made in Swindon acknowledges previous studies about the GWR in Swindon, but these largely treat broader phenomena as peripheral to the practical business of manufacturing and running steam trains. With its particular focus, Made in Swindon is the first collection of its kind to reset the balance in the social history of the town.