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Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern pp 203–229Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Mass Dread of Quietude and the British Anti-Noise Crusade 1919–1939

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

Abstract

This essay explores anti-noise discourse in interwar Britain, examining the contemporaneous cultural meanings of ‘modern’ noise and quietness. More specifically, it argues that anti-noise abatement driven by a small elite enclave represented a fear-ridden response to the emergence of mass, standardized culture. Yes, modern noise was alarming but anti-noise reformers detected an altogether more alarming, underlying problem: an increasing disenchantment with quietness. As I will argue, this rhetorical power and appeal of anti-noise discourse lay in its capacity for opening a cultural space for a patrician re-articulation of the peculiarities of English identity, values and traditions, which was conceived as a resource of quietude and stability with which to counteract the stresses of the machine age.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The Torment of Noise: A New Society Formed,” The Times, September 30, 1933, 11.

  2. 2.

    Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2008); James G. Mansell, The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017) Mansell’s book was published after the manucript had gone to the press and could not therefore be properly considered; John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–33 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

  3. 3.

    John M. Picker, “The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Spaces, and Urban Noise,” Victorian Studies 42, no. 3 (1999–2000): 431.

  4. 4.

    Frank Raymond Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), 87.

  5. 5.

    Frank Raymond Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (Cambridge: Minority Press, 1920), 20–21.

  6. 6.

    Steve Sturdy, “The Industrial Body,” in Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (London: Routledge, 2003), 224–25.

  7. 7.

    Hubert Llewellyn Smith, ed., The New Survey of London Life and Labour: Life and Leisure IX (London: P. S. King and Son, 1935), 42.

  8. 8.

    Henry Durant, The Problem of Leisure (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1938), 29.

  9. 9.

    J. B. Priestly, “The Beauty of Britain,” in Introduction to The Beauty of Britain: A Pictorial Survey, ed. Charles Bradley Ford (London: Batsford, 1935), 7.

  10. 10.

    Aldous Huxley, “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age,” Harper’s Magazine, August, 1927, 265–71.

  11. 11.

    Aldous Huxley, Preface to A Realist Looks at Democracy by M. Alderton Pink (London: Ernst Benn, 1930), vii.

  12. 12.

    Huxley, Preface, vii.

  13. 13.

    Anon, “The Age of Noise,” British Medical Journal 10 (November 1928): 855–56.

  14. 14.

    Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2000).

  15. 15.

    Harold Begbie, “Speed and Noise: Sufferings of Country Towns,” The Times, August 6, 1938, 6.

  16. 16.

    James Moir, “Speed and Noise: Damage to Health and Property,” The Times, August 25, 1928, 11.

  17. 17.

    C. E. M. Joad, A Charter for Ramblers (London: Hutchinson, 1934), 55.

  18. 18.

    Margaret Bondfield, “The Ogre of Modern Noises: Miss Bondfield Questions,” Manchester Guardian, July 29, 1930, 5.

  19. 19.

    Bondfield, “The Ogre of Modern Noises,” 5.

  20. 20.

    Anti-Noise League, Silencing a Noisy World: Being a Brief Report of the Conference on the Abatement of Noise (London: Anti-Noise Publication, 1935), 20.

  21. 21.

    “Noise,” Oxford Times, June 13, 1930, 8.

  22. 22.

    “Noise,” 8.

  23. 23.

    Stanley Baldwin, On England and Other Addresses (London: Philip Allan, 1926), 1–9.

  24. 24.

    George Macaulay Trevelyan, Must England’s Beauty Perish? A Plea on Behalf of the National Trust (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1929).

  25. 25.

    Trevelyan, The Call and Claims of Natural Beauty. The Third Rickman Godlee Lecture (London: Hazel, Watson and Viney, 1931), 171.

  26. 26.

    “The Age of Noise,” British Medical Journal, 855.

  27. 27.

    Only very rarely do we find defenders of noise in the media: ‘We cannot do without it, peace is, to us, like the end of the world.’ “We are Servants of Noise,” Derby Daily Telegraph, August 18, 1930, 7.

  28. 28.

    For a discussion of railway medicine and shock see: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Perception and Time (Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1987), 124–70.

  29. 29.

    On neurasthenia see: C. E. Rosenberg, “The Place of George M. Beard in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1962): 245–59.

  30. 30.

    Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 57–60.

  31. 31.

    Dan McKenzie, “The Crusade Against Noise,” English Review 21 (1928): 691–96.

  32. 32.

    “Street Noise,” Daily Telegraph, June 5, 1928, 12.

  33. 33.

    “Devastating Noise,” Tamworth Herald, November 17, 1918, 8.

  34. 34.

    Lord Horder, “Toward National Health ,” The Listener, April 7, 1937.

  35. 35.

    In the early 1920s, Professor John J. B. Morgan had used electrical charges on the surface of the body in the presence and absence of noise to show that, although subjects varied in their responses, noise did affect the actions of the heart John J. B. Morgan, “The Overcoming of Distraction and Other Resistances,” Archives of Psychology 5 (1916): 84.

  36. 36.

    “The Age of Noise,” 855.

  37. 37.

    Donald A. Laird, “Experiments on the Physiological Cost of Noise,” Journal of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology 4 (1929): 251–58.

  38. 38.

    Wellcome Archives, Lord Horder Papers, GP/31/B.4/4. Untitled memoranda (speech on Anti-Noise League and health ).

  39. 39.

    Lord Horder Papers.

  40. 40.

    Lord Horder Papers.

  41. 41.

    Christopher Lawrence, “Incommunicable Knowledge: Science, Technology and the Clinical Art in Britain 1850–1914,” Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (1985): 503–20.

  42. 42.

    Thomas J. Horder, ‘“Health and Noise’ in Anti-Noise League,” in Silencing a Noisy World: Being a Brief Report of the Conference on the Abatement of Noise, ed. Anti-Noise League (London: Anti-Noise League, 1935), 46.

  43. 43.

    In his writing on the future of medicine as a discipline and practice, Horder called for clinical autonomy but also emphasised the necessity of embracing but controlling science. For a discussion of Horder and his medicine contexts see: Christopher Lawrence, “A Tale of Two Sciences: Bedside and Bench in Twentieth Century Britain,” Medical History 43, no. 4 (1999): 421–49.

  44. 44.

    Thomas J. Horder, Health and a Day: Addresses by Lord Horder (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1937), 51.

  45. 45.

    Horder, Health and a Day, 53.

  46. 46.

    Horder, Health and a Day, 68.

  47. 47.

    Thomas J. Horder, “The Hygiene of a Quiet Mind,” The Lancet (April 1938): 766.

  48. 48.

    Horder, “The Hygiene of a Quiet Mind,” 766.

  49. 49.

    “Lord Horder Indicts Dictatorships: Barbarian Hordes of Europe,” Dundee Courier and Advertiser, September 16, 1936, 5.

  50. 50.

    Henry Richards, “Noise and Education,” in Silencing a Noisy World: Being a Brief Report of the Conference on the Abatement of Noise, ed. Anti-Noise League (London: Anti-Noise League, 1935), 34.

  51. 51.

    “Noise in the Summer,” Quiet, July, 1937, 36.

  52. 52.

    The Times, October 21, 183, 8.

  53. 53.

    “Unawareness of Noise,” Quiet, January, 1938, 41.

  54. 54.

    “The Neighbour’s Loud Speaker,” Quiet 2, 1938, 31.

  55. 55.

    E. Bloomfield, “Letter-to-the-Editor: The Worst Torture of All,” Quiet, October, 1937, 31.

  56. 56.

    Constant Lambert, “Music Hot,” Quiet, Spring, 1937, 14.

  57. 57.

    Aldus Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2004), 18.

  58. 58.

    Huxley, Brave New World, 18.

  59. 59.

    Huxley, Brave New World, 22.

  60. 60.

    Huxley, Brave New World, 80.

  61. 61.

    A. P. Hebert, “We Just Don’t Like Noise,” Quiet, December, 1938, 11.

  62. 62.

    A. Ruth Fry, “Letter to the Editor: Fear of Invasion,” Quiet, October, 1937, 36.

  63. 63.

    A. Ruth Fry, “Fear of Invasion,” 36.

  64. 64.

    Dr. William Moodie, “Noise,” Quiet, March, 1937, 10.

  65. 65.

    “Sky-Writing and ‘Shouting’,” The Times, April 29, 1932, 9.

  66. 66.

    Repetatur, “Letter to the Editor of Quiet: Sky-Shouting,” Quiet, January, 1936, 38.

  67. 67.

    “Sky-Shouting,” Manchester Guardian, February 23, 1932, 8.

  68. 68.

    “Sky-Shouting,” 8.

  69. 69.

    Thomas Horder, “Towards National Health ,” The Listener, April 7, 1937.

  70. 70.

    Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1869–1930 (Manchester: The University of Manchester, 1988).

  71. 71.

    “This Age of Noise,”Dundee Courier and Advertiser, August 23, 1928, 4.

  72. 72.

    “This Age of Noise,” 4.

  73. 73.

    “The Age of Noise,” Dundee Courier and Advertiser, October 2, 1933, 4.

  74. 74.

    “The Language of Horns,” The Times, May 22, 1933, 15.

  75. 75.

    “The City of Noise,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, August 1925, 156.

  76. 76.

    “City Noises: The Roar of London,” Manchester Guardian, September 25, 1933, 7.

  77. 77.

    Thomas Horder, “Science,” The Listener, April 7, 1938, 360.

  78. 78.

    Thomas Horder, “Science.”

  79. 79.

    Thomas Horder, “Forward,” Quiet 1, 1936, 5.

  80. 80.

    Horder, Health and a Day, 80.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Neil Pemberton

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  1. Neil Pemberton
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Correspondence to Neil Pemberton .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lincoln College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Daniel McCann

  2. Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Glasgow, UK

    Claire McKechnie-Mason

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Pemberton, N. (2018). The Mass Dread of Quietude and the British Anti-Noise Crusade 1919–1939. In: McCann, D., McKechnie-Mason, C. (eds) Fear in the Medical and Literary Imagination, Medieval to Modern. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55948-7_10

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