The autumn and winter periods has seen a continuance of the good flow of articles that characterised early 2011, though we still have a dearth of submissions on anything prior to 1700. The strange absence of submissions dealing with census material in its different forms also continues. As ever I stand ready to read material prior to submission and to discuss with potential authors broad ideas for articles or indeed whole issues of Family & Community History. Recognising the pressure on space, the publishers of our Journal – Maney Publishing – have mooted the launch of a third issue every year, something that would certainly be welcome given the backlog of excellent work waiting to be published. Such a development would also allow space for new feature issues. It would also facilitate innovations such as reviews of work in progress, something that Michael Drake and I have wanted to introduce for some time now. These are welcome developments and a vote of confidence both in Family & Community History and the Society more generally.
Since the last issue, the Coalition has finished its consultation on the final rules of the REF (Research Excellence Framework). In rather typical fashion the government soon found itself deep in the mire over whether women who have had children in the period January 2008 and December 2013 should be eligible to submit fewer than the requisite 4 items and if so how many. Having beat a hasty retreat over a formula little short of blindingly stupid, we now await the final rules of the game as this issue of the Journal goes to press. I look forward to reporting more foot-in-mouth events in the second edition of 2012. The rules, though, will offer no more clarity on what makes a 1*, 2*, 3* or 4* either in terms of the individual outputs that colleagues must submit, the research environment that they must report on and the Impact that they must claim for their work. Moreover, since they come at the very end of the process of producing the work that will be judged, the whole exercise stands as eloquent testimony to what happens when the inertia of a system run by those not subject to it is allowed to override basic common sense and the blindingly obvious. Combined with government reforms to student financing, the allocation of student numbers and the complete removal of public funding for the humanities and social sciences, we must expect English universities to experience a rotten 2012 and 2013. A great experiment – one based upon the utter ignorance of all political parties rather than simply ideology – has begun and it is young people who will ultimately pay the price.
On more hopeful matters, this has been an excellent issue to put together. It has a particular focus on urban institutions and their communities between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lynsey Cullen provides an intriguing discussion of the content and potential uses of patient case records by medical and family historians. Drawing on her work at the Royal Free Hospital in London she shows that patient case records exist in very considerable numbers and that on their own, and in conjunction with other records, they provide an important window onto the lives of patients and their families and onto the everyday interaction between institutions and their communities. Steven Taylor continues this theme, shifting our attention from the hospital to the asylum and using two intriguing case studies from Northamptonshire to highlight the tensions between communities and institutions when faced by children deemed unfit for ‘normal’ society. Alysa Levene, Jonathan Reinarz and Andrew Williams in their joint article keep the focus on children, this time for the eighteenth century. Using the records of five voluntary general hospitals, they show the complex ways and multiple institutional settings in which the treatment of child sickness was managed. David Palmer close the issue with a rich oral history study detailing the reception and experiences of immigrants who came to live in Bexley from the 1950s.