Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR)

The Royal Dockyard Worker in Edwardian England: Leisure, Culture and Empire.

AHRC Collaborative PhD Award

In 2009 Mel Bassett was appointed to study for a PhD in social and cultural history and undertake a key role in researching, cataloguing and exhibiting a relevant section of the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Trust’s substantial archive related to Portsmouth dockyard workers. 

The PhD will focus on the leisure activities of Portsmouth dockyard workers during the Edwardian period.  The historiography of dockyard towns has tended to describe dockyard workers as deferential, subservient and politically conservative due to the peculiar industrial relations structures that existed in the dockyard.  While existing historiography has focused on industrial relations, the successful candidate will explore whether the dockyard workers’ leisure, recreational spaces and residential patterns reinforced sectionalism and conservatism in the workplace.  Through investigating consumption patterns, leisure activities and societies patronized, the study would assess the dockyard workers’ attitudes to the key issue of empire and their own role in the imperial project.  The Edwardian period is a particularly fruitful era to investigate as contemporary debates on the empire and naval strength dominated national political discourse at this time. 

Apprentice Exhibition

The Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Trust currently holds a large archive on various aspects of the dockyard from the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries.  At present, this archive is neither fully catalogued nor open to the general public.  The Trust is currently laying plans to provide an archive that is catalogued and available to researchers.  The studentship provides much needed assistance in realising this long-term aim.  In addition, the Trust approached the University for help in enhancing the ‘Dockyard Apprentice’ Exhibition to include a more social and cultural dimension to the present interpretation that focuses on workplace skills and technology in the dockyard.  The archive itself has, hitherto, largely been unexplored, particularly with regards the dockyard workers’ leisure time – the key theme that Mel Bassett will pursue in her PhD and the dockyard apprentice exhibition.  Mel Bassett’s principal work in the dockyard will comprise selecting relevant archive material, cataloguing the archives and help advise on the enhancement of the ‘Apprentice Exhibition’ in the Dockyard Museum.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Brad Beaven

Second Supervisor: Dr Karl Bell

School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth