Hooligan: A history of respectable fears

by Geoffrey Pearson

Clears up misconceptions about British crime, looks at public opinion concerning street crime since Victorian times, and discusses the use of crime statistics

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, History, Crime

294 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 1983

About the author

Geoffrey Pearson, academic and writer.

Among the cacophony of cant and ignorance masquerading as social commentary that followed Britain’s 2011 riots, there were few credible voices of understanding, let alone attempts to place the youthful violence, nihilism, and looting within anything approaching a historical perspective. Yet as clichés were rolled out about the riots being without precedent, a sure sign of a radical and dangerous departure from the subservience of the past, the carefully modulated tones of Geoffrey Pearson, author of the ever-pertinent study Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, came once again to the fore

He was born in Manchester, the only son of a Co-op worker and a Labour activist. At Peterhouse College, Cambridge, he studied moral sciences (philosophy and psychology) then carried out postgraduate studies before working with people with disabilities in Sheffield, and later trained as a psychiatric social worker at the LSE before returning to Sheffield to practise. .

Much of Pearson’s early career was in social-work education and training, first as a lecturer at Sheffield Polytechnic, then at University College, Cardiff. While at Cardiff he published his first major work, The Deviant Imagination (1974), which explored the assumptions and ideological foundations of a wide range of theories of deviance. It was critical of the burgeoning subjective politics of identity that was a direct threat to the traditional socialism that had nurtured his boyhood and youth. Most importantly in terms of his subsequent career, it established historical precedents for many contemporary policies and social attitudes, particularly those relating to youthful hedonism.

In 1976 Pearson joined the University of Bradford, where he published Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1980) the study for which he was best known. Hooligan is concerned with the recurrence of a form of cultural pessimism that regards youth crime as a threatening departure from the stable traditions of a “golden age”. Whether the triggers for youth deviance were regarded as music hall, gangster movies or rock’n’roll, he identified a connected vocabulary of respectable fears stretching back to Victorian times and beyond. Hooligan will remain relevant for as long as the default reaction to youth violence continues to disinter such notions.

Yet his work does not deny that youth and the communities that spawn them have undergone huge changes. As he noted in the wake of the 2011 riots: “How do you reintegrate people who were not integrated in the first place?”

Pearson was always careful not to glamorise deviance, and in The New Heroin Users (1987) he gave a voice to users and addicts, confounding many stereotypes concerning this demonised group, who were concentrated in areas already suffering unemployment, poor housing and poverty.

In 1985 he became Professor of Social Work at Middlesex Polytechnic, during which time he was a member of the Council for Education and Training in Social Work, and worked on projects including a critical study of multi-agency policing, written in the wake of the Scarman Report.

In 1989 he moved to Goldsmiths as Professor of Social Work, and later of Criminology. For eight years he was editor-in-chief of the British Journal of Criminology, and was a member of the Runciman inquiry into drugs and the law and vice-chair of the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependency. He carried out studies of drug use among young people in care, of drug markets, and the policing of drugs.

Although he retired in 2008, his inquisitiveness and natural affinity with blighted communities led him to chair the Independent Commission on Social Services in Wales that produced a highly critical report in 2010.

A talented jazz pianist, and lifelong Manchester United fan, he was the most sociable of men who always had a story to tell but who knew when to listen. When nurturing and inspiring younger ethnographe

Reviews

[Tom Ewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Oh, oh! What a burden hath the Lord laid upon his ministers, to stand amidst the wreck of a dissolving society, and, like Canute, to preach unto the surging waves!”

So spake one Reverend Irving in 1829, in a sermon on the state of the nation entitled - perhaps giving the thrust of his argument away - The Last Days. The causes of the dissolution were as plain to him as the fact of it - a collapse in order and surge in crime among the young, caused mostly by excess liberalism, with a nudge from external influences, notably 'that servant of the beast from the bottomless pit' Rousseau.

Irving's is one of many voices captured in Geoffrey Pearson's entertaining historical survey of the "law and order question". Pearson wrote Hooligan in 1983, when the context of the law-and-order debate was the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981, and the causes were equally plain to bilious old racists like Peregrine Worsthorne: young people, liberals, and 'alien' influence (in this case Black people).

This is Pearson's point, of course. The law-and-order debate is always the same, and always entirely ahistorical. The nation is always under threat from youth gone wild. The liberals are always mollycoddling them. The root is always foreign influence, judicial softness, and undeserved luxury. The solution is as obvious as the cause: as one Tory MP confidently asserts, “If birching and short sentences will not stop it, then more birching and longer sentences will have to be tried”

And equally consistent is the proof these firebrands give. Merely cast your mind back a generation or two and you'll recall that Britain was more peaceful, more respectful of authority, more stable, and so on. This constant desire for happier and simpler times gives Pearson the structure for his book, which is unusual - a history told in reverse chronological order. For each generation he humours the reactionaries and jumps back twenty or thirty years, as instructed, starting with the 1950s. Lo and behold, we meet again and again youthful crime sprees, horrified conservatives, gangs on the rampage, soft-hearted philanthropists, and the same instruction: just look back a generation, to when things were fine.

Any kind of historical perspective, though, makes one thing obvious - England has never been Merrie, and the claim it was is deliberately anachronistic. There may well be fluctuations in crime, but their relationship to the discourse around it is largely coincidental. And that discourse exists in a kind of stasis, ‘Each succeeding generation remembering the illusive harmony of the past while foreseeing imminent social ruin in the future’

The reverse chronology works a treat in letting us see reactionaries frothing over more and more innocuous things - there's a marvellous section on the horror of the bicycle and its ability to let working-class people loose across the British countryside. We see how disgust at 80s football fans is contrasted with rosy memories of sporting tradition, then when we reach the origins of that tradition - oh what a surprise, the same newspapers hated that too. We see shifting definitions of the Others corrupting English life - immigrants, Americans, the Irish, the continentals ("a state of affairs intolerable even in Naples!") and a constant depressing drumbeat of complaints that the working classes turn to crime because they have it TOO good. Even Pearson's sardonic demeanour is shaken when he finds Victorians denouncing the workhouses and slums as plagued by excess luxury.

Pearson's concluding chapter tries to make some sense of this, and it's difficult, because the conservatives making these arguments are so often just plain acting in bad faith. The ahistorical claims are the point - the arguments aren't meant to be a proper explanation of the situation, and the people they're aimed at believe them already. This is why "Respectable Fears" can never be assuaged, and always recur - a Pearson of today would wearily roll his eyes at talk of 'New Elites', cultural Marxism, the panic over trans people or small boats, and the barbarising effects of social media. The rhetoric and tactics never vary. Even if it peters out near the end, Hooligan's historical journey through what we now call "normal island" is worth taking.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very fine history of juvenile delinquence, written in response to the Brixton riots. Pearson's argument is that such crime has always been with us, and those critics that hark back to a golden era free of youthful violence are wearing rose-tinted spectacles, because the same violence and the same comments have been made every generation. The analysis of sources goes right back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and then further still to the garotting panics of the mid-19th century, and beyond those too. The wealth of sources is invaluable, and the style highly readable, although the last chapter is more difficult by necessity of the author trying to tie everything together at the end.

[Miriam Bibby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose my review might be a spoiler, so spoiler alert. Do you believe that everything was so much better 25 years ago and that crime has got out of hand since you were growing up? Join the club - that's what every successive generation believes. A fascinating study of what we believe and why we believe it. Entertaining, readable, enlightening and well-illustrated documentary-style research. Highly recommended.

[Albion]

Very fine. Not mind blowing or anything, but a good, solid and interesting refutation of the idea that crime is constantly getting worse, starting with the Hooligan and going backwards to pre-industrial Britain. Well worth the read.

[Uri · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*