Synthetic nostalgia

Go to any country in the world, and you will find folk museums. These aim to show how people lived their daily lives in the reasonably recent past, at least within the memory of the oldest inhabitant in the land. Folk museums differ from historical reconstructions, like the Plymouth Plantation and Williamsburg in the USA, which show a much earlier time, close to the origins of their societies. In most countries, folk museums show rural life, but not in England. In the world’s first industrialised and urbanised country, there is no popular memory of rural life: instead, our folk museums contain facsimiles of coal mines, factories, canals, and terrace houses. These evoke strong feelings of nostalgia and personal identification. My wife, who was born in the Black Country, can visit the Black Country Museum and recognise the type of house her grandmother lived in when she visited her as a child. I too experience nostalgia when I visit this Museum. Yet none of my parents or grandparents, as far as I know, lived in back-to-back houses in the Black Country or elsewhere. My nostalgia is therefore synthetic. Where does it come from?

The origin lies with my parents, particularly my father. He was born in 1914 in what seems to have been a reasonably prosperous family which lived in villages and suburbs on the outskirts of Birmingham. He told me that, when he was a child, the family had a domestic servant. Yet his parents were defrauded of their business, and he came home from school one day to find the family’s furniture and other possessions on the street following eviction. He passed the exams for the local grammar school, but failed the interview. In the absence of a secondary education, he did a variety of poorly-paid jobs, including truck driver (at the age of 14!), chauffeur, workhouse clerk, and even coalman. Eventually, he became a welder on the Land Rover track in Solihull and then in Birmingham. I remember him cycling to work in the rain, and the burn marks down his chest from welding sparks. I am not sure how these experiences shaped him, but my father always had a strong sense of social justice and a commitment to trade unions and the Labour Party.

I spent the early years of my life following these footsteps and inheriting his ambitions. I was active in Labour Party politics and imagined myself as a future MP. I felt part of a working-class movement that would make society more just and treat all people with respect. So when I first visited the Black Country Museum, I identified with the past lives of the working-class, and adopted this synthetic nostalgia. I do not believe my experience is unusual: the difference between us all is the nostalgia we adopt. I have a genial colleague at work who has adopted the mannerisms of an Oxbridge scholar even though he comes from near Bolton. I know of people of marginal religious faith who have adopted the lifestyle and clothing of the committed believer to assert their membership of a lost identity.

My father, Dad, died in 2000. He spent the last 15 years of life unable to speak following an operation for cancer of the throat. As a man who enjoyed talk and argument, this must have been a great loss, but he managed his life with day-to-day stoic courage. I do not pass a day without thinking of him. From both parents, I learnt the importance of education as a means of advancing from dreary low-income work, and have spent my working life in fulfilling occupations with few money worries. I still retain my father’s political convictions, though, unlike him, I feel unrepresented. The political party that he and I worked for year after year has all but disappeared. Its successor, which calls itself the ‘New Labour Party’, has betrayed almost all the hopes of those who voted it into office. After the Iraq War began, I tore up my party card. I am no longer nostalgic for an imagined working-class past, but my anger and sense of betrayal remains strong.