Challenging the de-industrialisation narrative: East Midlands textile workers 1980-2005

The second half of the 20th Century saw large scale changes in the East Midlands textile
industry, as the mergers and takeovers of the 1960s were unravelling. The proposed
research will make a strong contribution to a currently under-developed body of work on
the textile workers of this era. The work of historians such as Stanley Chapman and
Bramwell Rudd concentrate mainly on the business strategies and economics of the
mergers and takeovers within the industry. Historians such as Tomlinson (2016), have
written about the process of de-industrialisation, but largely in terms of male loss. The
predominance of female workers in the textile industry complicates this view. This study of
the East Midlands textile workers in the period 1980-2005 will use principles from the fields
of material culture and memory studies to examine textile workers' testimonies. It will ask
if there is such a thing as collective identity, and if so, which narratives might have informed
this for the textile workers?
Material culture, and its influence on memory is not an approach commonly taken by
historians, therefore, by combining disciplines, the work will be methodologically
innovative. Adopting the strategy used by Layman (2009) and Arnold (2018), I will explore
how material culture (including photographs, film) might influence interviewees' practices
of remembrance, and assess how media representations of the textile industry from the
period might play a part in the stories that are being told. I will examine the 55 oral history
recordings collected as part of the 2019 Textile Tales project (held at NTU), and conduct
further in-depth interviews as follow-ups to existing recordings.

Recorded in 2019/20, the Textile Tales oral histories give a unique, contemporary
perspective on the past, which cannot be gained from older recordings. The data was
collected from workers at all levels, on all aspects of their lives at work, and therefore
provides a more personal insight than economic histories, asking questions that only the
workers' themselves can answer, such as where do they place the blame for the industry's
rapid contraction? How did they view the industrial changes, and have they retained that
view? What did they do after working in the industry?

I anticipate that the work will draw extensively on local archives, including the collections of
older oral histories at East Midlands Oral History Archive and Nottingham Local Studies
Library, however, I intend to conduct a brief overview of other relevant archival collections
within the UK. The Media Archive Central England, Lincoln will be essential, as holders of the
Clothing The Nation collection and regional news archive footage (as used by Murray, 2013).
There is also an opportunity to examine relevant recordings from the Courtauld Memory
Project, collected during a similar time period. During the 1960s, Courtaulds Textiles plc
were one of the main players in creating a textiles empire in the UK. In their acquisition of
some of the famous hosiery and knitwear brands, many of the textile companies in the East
Midlands were brought under their control, until Courtaulds Textiles plc itself was taken
over by the global Sara Lee Corporation in the early 2000s. The inclusion of these new
recordings in this research will address some of the gaps in the Textile Tales material (for
instance the presence of ethnic diversity), and provide a significant UK-wide comparison.
The Courtauld project is still ongoing and some recordings are already accessible and have
been transcribed.