ABSTRACT
This is a study of what happens when new industry moves into an old country town and requires it to absorb thousands of immigrants. Banbury, a market center in the heart of England with some small industries, increased in size at about the same rate as the rest of the country for the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. It then dropped rapidly behind until by 1931 the population was not much larger than it had been in 1891. In 1933, however, an aluminum factory started production in the town, a corset factory was established, and the cattle, sheep, and horse markets were moved from the main streets. Over the next twenty years the population of Banbury increased by 35 percent, from about 13,000 inhabitants to about 19,000. Many of the immigrants came from great industrial cities in the Midlands and the North, with the result that a new way of life was superimposed on the deep-rooted traditionalism of the original inhabitants. The following pages, taken from a chapter on the social class and social status characteristics of the population, demonstrate how this produced a town divided vertically between traditionalists and nontraditionalists and horizontally between the middle and the working classes.
Mrs. Stacey and her colleagues spent three years in Banbury, 8 participating in the life of the town, analyzing its public records, and talking to the leading members of the community and of the organizations centered there. They also carried out a questionnaire inquiry, interviewing a sample of households to determine the composition of the family and the religious and political affiliations of its members. This sample was obtained by selecting every fifth address on the register of electors, and information was collected about all the individuals living at each address. Homes rather than individuals were chosen because the research team wanted information about households and families, as well as about individuals. Altogether 935 homes, covering 1,015 households and 3,387 individuals, representing about 18 percent of the total population, participated in the inquiry.
Tradition and Change may be criticized for not making as much use of the opportunity of a schedule inquiry as might have been expected. When it was conducted in July, 1950, there had been no official census in Britain for nearly twenty years, and because it was designed to fill in that gap in information, it therefore concentrated on the kind of objective data such a census would normally have provided; and the research team relied, for its analysis of social class and traditionalism, upon observations made by its members over the whole period of time that they lived in Banbury and upon many other minor inquiries they conducted in the town. The strength of the study, in any case, rests upon a feature of the town which has been widely recognized since it was published, namely that it is a meeting point of at least two cultures, the local and the national. It is for this that it has been praised as a sensitive appraisal of a phenomenon characteristic of much of Britain at this time. In this sense, Banbury approximates a microcosm of urban life in a changing community where traditional values are still very strong, a feature of Britain which has so often been remarked upon by visitors to this country since the end of the Second World War.
Keeping in mind that the research findings have been derived from the accumulation of data through the employment of a number 9 of techniques, one can read Mrs. Stacey’s study for both its descriptive and its analytical content.
