The Car and British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896-1939 (review)

The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896-1939. By Sean O'Connell (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999) 240 pp. $79.95 cloth $29.95 paper

This study makes good use of the sociological and social-historical literature that has grown up abundantly around the automobile in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. The author also adds sample interviewing of people whose experience of motoring stretches back into the interwar years to the more usual evidence available in print. Yet, the deductions and conclusions that he is able to draw from this accumulation of ideas and information, though amplifying the literature by extension to Britain, do not generate new theses about the United States or anywhere else in the industrial world.

O'Connell deals perceptively with both sides of the interaction between car and consumer. He explores the impact that the automobile had on its surrounding society and, conversely, the ways in which that society, particularly through the influences of class and gender, shaped the design and marketing of the car and regulated its use. His treatment of the impact of gender is unoriginal. Perhaps women in Britain reacted to the advent of the automobile and shaped its development no differently from those in the United States.

The most interesting, original chapter in his study reveals how the National Safety First Association (nsfa), with funding from the motoring lobby and industry, deflected responsibility for the rising death toll caused by motoring accidents away from motorists toward the pedestrians and cyclists who were their victims. Pedestrians made up 45 percent of those fatalities in the interwar years. When cyclists were included, the figure rose to between 60 and 70 percent. Drivers constituted less than 5 percent. Yet, pressure from organizations such as the nsfa induced public authorities to pursue policies that focused mainly on the education of the nonmotoring population, including school children, and on the planning of roads and motorways to speed the traffic on its way. O'Connell exposes the class dynamics of this process at a time when car ownership was confined largely to the middle classes. Working-class access to the car depended on the second-hand market, arrangements for shared ownership, and joyriding other people's vehicles. But O'Connell does not remark on the fact that the greatest success of the motoring lobby occurred in 1930 when the speed limit was abolished by Herbert Morrison, minister of transport in a Labour government. This study pays too little attention to the 1,385,000 people who, by 1939, owed their jobs directly or indirectly to the automobile industry.

O'Connell's sensitivity to the middle-class reverberations of the motorcar, particularly during the interwar years, is revealing nonetheless. Car ownership did not extend much beyond the affluent before World War I, but by the outbreak of World War II, there were two million cars on the road. The attempt to enforce a speed limit threw many of their startled middle-class owners upon the mercy of courts that hitherto had upheld all the rights and perquisites of property. Yet, the automobile provoked divided reactions among the middle class. Culturally, the car pitted the middle-brow middle class, who valued it as the ultimate symbol of modernity, against their equally middle-class high-brow critics, who despised the car for pervading society with the values of industrialism.

Economically, as well as culturally, the middle classes in the countryside responded to the incursions of the automobile with similar ambivalence. In another fine chapter, O'Connell points out how those who deplored the automobile's invasion of the countryside were offset by those for whom the automobile created opportunities of "providing fuel, food and drink, accommodation, land for development, and advertising" (174). These opportunities generated "a precious new source of income to a rural economy which had witnessed the death...