stinking rich': a response

'Stinking Rich': A ResponseAuthor(s): W. D. RubinsteinSource: Social History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct., 1991), pp. 359-365Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4285961 .

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REPLY

W. D. Rubinstein

'Stinking rich': a response

Some years ago Christopher Hill termed a review of his works by J. Hexter an 'intellectual mugging', and this is surely appropriate to R. Pahl's'New rich, old rich, stinking rich?', a review essay of two of my books. Responding rationally to an 'intellectual mugging' is surely as pointless as responding rationally to its violent equivalent in Central Park, and my purpose here is chiefly to correct some egregious errors of fact in Pahl's review which, I fear, will gain a measure of unwanted currency because of their dissemination by Pahl.

Before doing so, however, a number of preliminary comments are relevant and germane. First of all, why did Pahl bother? If my books are as bad as he states, why a review essay of, roughly, six times the length of a normal review in Social History? The answer, I think it fair to say, is because Pahl's view is rather a minority one, as he himself, malgre' lui, hints at by terming these essays 'standard', 'well-known', 'will figure in undergraduates' essays and in citation indexes for many years to come', and so on.

There is also another relevant matter which - needless to say - Pahl never comes out and actually lets us know, namely that I am a historian and the essays in Elites and the Wealthy are historical essays, but Pahl is not a historian. As a sociologist, Pahl is known; as a historian he is unknown. There is no trace of any work by Pahl, even the most abbreviated supplementary note, in the standard indexes of published books and articles in British history published by, for example, the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research going back for the past quarter-century. He is thus as qualified to review these essays as I would be to review a monograph on the sociology of labour of banana plantation workers in northern Queensland. He is thus oblivious, I would suggest, to the problematic of discourse among those who engage in this type of history.' As a sociologist who is, I would suggest, antipathetic if not ignorant of historical methodology and discourse, at least of the kind I would recognize, the central burden of Pahl's argument is that I 'set out what [I] see as the structure and then largely assume the processes'.2 Leaving aside whether this is true - which I would deny - Pahl seems oblivious to the fact

' It is notable that when Pahl moves from reviewing my book of historical essays to a more sociologically-oriented survey of Wealth and Inequality in Britain he becomes markedly more positive. Pahl's failure to understand the histori-

cal problematic, since he is not a historian, is one of the root causes, in my view, of his misrepresentations in this review.

2 Pahl, 'New rich, old rich, stinking rich?', Social History, xv, 2 (May 1990), 233.



360 Social History VOL. i6: NO. 3

that he urges the exact opposite - to ignore the infinitely painstaking task of acquiring relevant historical evidence by comprehensive and objective means (something which is ipso facto impossible if one relies, as Pahl seems to suggest, on interviewing and oral research), while assuming, without compelling evidence (or none at all) that he accurately understands the structure (I say nothing here about the accuracy of his understanding of the 'processes' which I would be likely to regard as tendentious).

Let me take one example of where his descriptions of my work are misleading.3 Pahl presents the following account of one essay in this collection, originally published in Past and Present, entitled 'Education and the social origins of British elites, I880-1970', reprinted on pp. I72-221 of my collection:

Furthermore, he argues, public school education does not necessarily imply privileged backgrounds: various members of the elites investigated by Rubinstein were sons of fathers who left very little money.4

This, I suggest, is a gross distortion through unfair compression. My essay is an attack on the view cited over and over again in sociological and historical works, that public school education is, in itself, evidence of a privileged background. This view is false because its argument is circular: education at a public school is, again and again, regarded as evidence of a privileged background, while a privileged background is demonstrated by education at a public school. In innumerable sociological studies of Britain's elites which make this assumption, no actual evidence is offered about the wealth, occupation or status of the parents of the elite position-holder. In fact, a detailed examination of the status and wealth of the fathers of many elite groups in Britain from i88o clearly demonstrates that the majority came from what might be termed the lower part of the middle class, while a very large fraction were actually poor in childhood. Pahl may disagree with these conclusions - in which case he might be good enough to present relevant evidence to the contrary - but as a sociologist he has, assuredly, encountered this circular argument innumerable times and I would have thought that in simple fairness he ought to regard an attack on this ubiquitous argument as worthy of explication on its own terms. But why argue rationally when one can distort?

So, why has Pahl done it? I do not have the slightest idea; as far as I am aware I have met Mr Pahl only once, some eighteen years ago, at an academic conference. We have never crossed swords before for the simple reason that there is nothing to cross swords over - Pahl has never written or published anything, so far as I am aware, of the slightest relevance to historians researching into this subject. We are left with the admittedly unsatisfactory explanation that Pahl doesn't like my politics, or what he perceives them to be. Hard cheese, Mr Pahl; more to the point, it was a mistake, in my view, for a journal of the standing of Social History to commission or publish such an irrationally destructive review by someone who is simply unqualified to voice a critique at all.

This is by way of preface; my central concern in writing this reply is that Pahl repeats a

3 If Pahl were merely arguing in his essay that structure was more important than process, and my work suffers from a lack of the former, it would be fair criticism, although begging

innumerable questions. Alas, instead of con- structive criticism Pahl presents a widely abus- ive ad hominem review.

4 Pahl, 235.



October X 199 'Stinking rich': a response 36I

number of factual criticisms of my research which, most regrettably, have been given a rather wide currency but which are simply false.

Pahl bases much of his criticism on an essay by Simon Gunn.5 The points made in criticism of my work by Gunn and cited by Pahl are factually incorrect, and I would like to set the record straight. Unfortunately, the criticisms made in Gunn's essay - which is interesting and stimulating in other respects - have been taken up and repeated; as Gunn's essay appears in a collection of essays on culture and capitalism, rather than in a journal, there has been no opportunity to respond to them.6

First Pahl, citing Gunn, states: 'Probate was intended to record unsettled personal wealth so that property like land and buildings - like mills, workshops, and warehouses - was not evaluated.'7 The absence from the probate valuation figures until I 898 (in the case of unsettled land) and I926 (in the case of settled land) is certainly true, but both Gunn and, of course, Pahl ignore the fact that all of the owners of land in Britain (apart from owners of London land), their income and acreage, are known without exception from the Return of Owners of Land of I872-5 and John Bateman's Great Landowners. These sources are, in fact, virtually the basis of all research by historians into nineteenth-century landowning, and have been used extensively by me (and many others) to compensate for the absence of realty from the probate records.8

The second point here is very problematical indeed. There is no reason to suppose that the value of business premises, factories, warehouses, etc. was not construed as a component of the total assets of a partnership or firm, and therefore included in the value of the business partnership or the shares in that firm, and hence regarded as personalty. (The absence of inventories of the assets of deceased persons in England and Wales - as opposed to a global valuation figure - makes this point uncertain; Gunn provides no evidence for his claim that they were construed as realty.) Even if they were construed as realty, it is well known from the research of Stanley Chapman that the value of factory buildings was astonishingly small.9 More importantly, all business premises would be regarded as realty impartially - Rothschild's bank, Barclay's bank, Morrison's Fore Street warehouse, Liverpool's docks - not merely factory buildings in the north of England. Even if business premises were assumed to be realty for probate purposes, to affect the argument about the greater importance of London and commercial wealth vis-a-vis northern and manufacturing wealth one would have to show that this invidiously diminished the latter

5 Simon Gunn, 'The "failure" of the Victorian middle class: a critique', in Janet Wolff and John Seed (eds), The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth Century Middle Class (Manchester, I988). See especially p. 232 of Pahl's review.

6 Unlike the situation of a number of other recent journal essays which also make factually incorrect or misleading claims against the probate and allied records, to which I have tried to respond quickly: Martin Daunton, "'Gentle- manly Capitalism" and British industry, i8zo- 1914', Past and Present, cxxii (February 1989) and F. M. L. Thompson, 'Life after death: how successful nineteenth-century businessmen dis-

posed of their fortunes', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XLIII (I990), on which see my "'Gentlemanly Capitalism", British finance and industry, 1820-19I4: a response', Past and Present, forthcoming, and 'Cutting up rich: a response to F. M. L. Thompson, Economic History Review, forthcoming.

7 Pahl, 232.

8 See, e.g., Men of Property. 9 Stanley Chapman, 'Fixed capital formation

in the British cotton industry, 1770-1815', Economic History Review, 2nd ser., xxiii (1970); The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (I972), 28-36.




type. Given the high value of London land and buildings, and high street land and buildings everywhere, the opposite was in fact more likely to be true, and the inclusion of this type of asset (if indeed it be excluded from the valuation figure) might well add still further to the lead of London and commercial wealth. Gunn might well be getting, literally, more than he bargained for in advancing this argument.

Pahl next cites Gunn as claiming that 'wealth was recorded at the place of death, not necessarily where the wealth was made'. This is flatly and totally wrong, and probably the most egregious claim made by Gunn. It is wrong on three levels. First and on the most literal level, until the abolition of the old Ecclesiastical Court system in i858 probate could be registered in any one of dozens of ecclesiastical probate courts, with the proviso that any testator leaving ?5 or more of property in two or more bishoprics had to have his estate probated in either of the Prerogative Courts, the Canterbury Court (physically located in the City of London) or the York Court, while any estate comprising government securities ('consols') had to be proven in the Canterbury (i.e. London) Court. In reality, about 8o per cent of all estates worth ?ioo,ooo or more in the nineteenth century till I858 were probated in the Canterbury Court. From January I858 there was a single unified civil national system of probate, located since I874 at Somerset House. 1

Second, the index entry of all estates without exception included the address of the deceased; normally this included a business address and often an occupation. Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, the assignment by me, in anything ever written by me on this subject, of any wealth-holder to a particular occupation or business venue is not derived from the probate records at all, but from a myriad of sources at the Institute of Historical Research, the Society of Genealogists, local libraries and the like. It is not uncommon for me to trace a figure in one of my studies in, literally, thirty different sources, including of course relevant local directories and the like. Thus if someone in one of my studies is described as a Leeds woollen manufacturer or a London merchant banker, one may rest entirely assured that this was so, according to all surviving biographical evidence. In no case has anything at all about the persons in my studies been inferred from the place where his estate may have been probated.

Pahl's next point in his resume of Gunn is that:

Wealth was estimated at death by which time a greater portion of business assets would have already been handed on to other members of the family. As Gunn concludes, 'Probate estimated the wealth of the individual; the characteristic form of nineteenth-century business was familial and dynastic.'l I

Once again, these points are both irrelevant and systematically misleading. Neither Gunn nor Pahl has provided any evidence that, at a time when death duties were virtually non-existent, 'a greater portion of business assets would have already been handed on to other members of the family' (my italics). The incentive to do this would have been absolutely equal among all wealthy men and all families, representing all occupations, types of wealth (except landowning, where different settlement procedures were well established), and geographical venues, and if large-scale inter vivos giving of this type was

"' This is explained at length in Men of Property and indeed in several of the essays in my collection. Incidentally, Pahl does not

appear to have seen Men of Property, my considered work on this subject.

" Pahl, 231.



October ig9 'Stinking rich': a response 363

common - which no one has demonstrated - it was randomly distributed, leaving my conclusions unaffected.'2 The statement of Gunn's cited by Pahl is a non sequitur: the 'characteristic form of nineteenth-century business' may have been 'familial and dynastic', but the only form of ownership of property was individual ownership: there is no such thing as collective or family ownership of a business apart from the assets owned by individual persons. Since the probate process sooner or later catches literally everybody, one of the great merits of its use in historical studies of this kind is that it allows us to build up far-reaching historical pictures of dynastic wealth-holding and of local and regional wealth-holding precisely of the sort which Gunn admires in the case of a study of Newcastle-upon-Tyne industrialists.13

Pahl is hopeful that 'the death duty registers to I902, which became available in I982,

will be used by other researchers to confirm or refute Rubinstein's data'.'4 One does not have to be a detective to infer which option Pahl regards more sanguinely; alas for the exercise, the death duty registers contain little or no relevant information not already found in the probate valuation figure as such. They include instead very detailed, and for the most part quite unusable information about the eventual heirs, down to I So years after the death of any testator, of every estate. There are inordinate difficulties entailed in their use which have been discussed in the relevant literature.'5

Pahl now rounds upon my use of the income tax data (an entirely different source) to support my conclusions. In a pattern which is by now well established, his scatter-gun holds only blanks, for the critique is wrong. My research on the income tax - assessed in the nineteenth century on persons with a minimum income generally ranging between

i oo and ?i6o - shows that London was invariably far more important than the north as a venue for business incomes, although in the mid-nineteenth century Lancashire and the West Riding, as it were, nearly caught up and overtook London, a 'challenge' which was reversed by the Edwardian period, when London's lead over the north was as great as it had been in the Napoleonic era, before massive industrialization.'6 The income tax schedules do certainly make it impossible to distinguish between the incomes of individual persons and business units, although I can see no reason why this should affect the conclusions about geographical venue; nevertheless, there is one unique previously unnoted return in the nineteenth-century Parliamentary Papers which allows us to ascertain the geographical distribution of all male income tax payers in i86o in all parliamentary boroughs in England and Wales, and which does not combine personal and business tax. In a I988 article in Historical Research the implications of this return were drawn out by me; Pahl does not refer to this. 17

12 Morgan and Moss ('Listing the wealthy in Scotland', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LIX (I986)) have attempted to demonstrate that Scottish industrialists gave away disproportionately more of the wealth by inter vivo gifts to relatives compared with other wealthy Scotsmen. Their attempts are misleading and unsuccessful.

'3 Benwell Community Project, The Making of a Ruling Class (Newcastle, I975), cited by Gunn in 'Failure', n. 17 (41). See Men of Property, 75-100 for a not dissimilar analysis for

a variety of industries. 14 Pahl, 232. 15 See J. M. Collinge, 'Probate valuations and

the death duty registers: some comments', Historical Review, LX ( 987) .

16 'The geographical distribution of middle- class income in Britain I800-i914' in Elites and the Wealthy, 83-I 1 8.

1 W. D. Rubinstein, 'The size and distribution of the English middle classes in i86o', Historical Research, LXI (February I988).




Briefly to summarize the most important findings of this article, the number of male persons with an income from business or professional sources of ?ioo or more in i86o in the most significant of these parliamentary boroughs was as follows:

London Number Percentage of adult males

City of London 29,403 94.42 Finsbury 30,703 30.27

Marylebone 31,170 28.22 Tower Hamlets 27,449 34.17 Westminster 75,I15 113.99 (sic)'8 Lambeth 20,036 27.72

Southwark 8,782 i 6.8 i Greenwich 4,848 12.09

Lancashire Blackburn 1,230 7.83 Bolton 1,379 7.82

Bury 65I 6.6o Liverpool 20,606 I7.33

Manchester 14,031 15.32 Oldham 2,122 8.47 Rochdale 1,590 14.08 Salford I 1413 10.19

Wigan 882 8.98

West Riding Bradford 2,949 11.10

Halifax I,257 13.10 Huddersfield 1I,292 I4.47

Leeds 5,615 IO.33

Sheffield 4,613 9.44 Other industrial boroughs Durham 641 17.42

Leicester 1,035 6.07 Newcastle-upon-Tyne 3,670 12.34

Nottingham 2,083 11.22

Stoke-on-Trent 2,503 9.69 Wolverhampton 3,4I8 9.37 Birmingham 10,792 I4.22

Coventry 1,571 14.54

Swansea 1,69I 14.99

18 The Westminster figure included all Sched- ule E taxpayers employed by the national government, although many were obviously physically situated elsewhere, especially mili-

tary officers and overseas administrators. More likely figures for Westminster are about 50,I15 and 46.05 per cent.



Octoberigg9 'Stinking rich': a response 365

The conclusions here are so striking that they require, I think, little comment. The combined taxpaying - and, hence, middle-class-male populations of Manchester, Oldham, Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Birmingham and Coventry totalled only about four-fifths of the taxpaying male populations in the two London boroughs of Marylebone and Lambeth.19

This exhausts the responses I would like to make to that portion of Pahl's farrago which derives specifically from Gunn's factual criticism of my work. As to the rest, we shall have to agree to differ, although there is little to argue about with someone who distorts or ignores the facts.

Deakin University

19 Incidentally, the London returns here exclude such areas as Chelsea, Clapham and

Dulwich which were still parts of parliamentary county constituencies until I867.



stinking rich': a response

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