ABSTRACT
This chapter arises from particular personal-political associations relevant to the topic and composition of this volume, which in turn are shown to recapitulate methodological, including reflexive and ethical, questions posed by the study of childhood generally and British childhoods in particular. Based on an autobiographical account and supplemented by analysis of interviews from friends and colleagues, I retrace and reflect on the life and contributions of someone who encountered, and then lived, a particular British childhood. A German Jewish refugee from Bielefeld, Marion Daltrop devoted her working life to engaging with difficult and disadvantaged children in Manchester, as well as being an activist and artist. She was ‘saved’ because she was a child, coming to Britain on the Kindertransport. Her engagements and activism and the affection she continues to inspire, testify to the possibilities as well as complexities of cross-generational and transnational solidarities. These also fruitfully demonstrate the arbitrary conditions for access to and, notwithstanding these, transformations of, British childhood, alongside how specific personal-political investments are always at play in the study of, and responses to, children and childhoods.
