Sheila Rowbotham: Your new book, Outsiders, suggests to me a general feature of your work—an awareness of class as a general feature of society but also of the cultural nuances which bind or separate people into or between classes. Was there something in your family background which encouraged this approach?
Dorothy Thompson: I suppose anyone growing up in England starts asking questions about class almost as soon as they can speak and I suppose the milieu that I grew up in—a South London theatrical and craft background—cut across traditional working-class areas. Nobody in my family ever worked for anyone else, except in the short term, but on the other hand nobody ever employed more than a few people. We were the artisanal layer, I suppose, and we had a very strong tradition of independence and self-education. My paternal grandfather, a shoemaker by trade, worked part time on the music halls. Two of my uncles were full-time dance band musicians. Others were tumblers and that kind of thing. My father and mother were both professional musicians, although my father set up a business running music shops and my mother mostly spent her life teaching, but also did some performing.
You lived in south London for most of your childhood?
Yes, I’m quite proud of being a third-generation Londoner. We are rather a rare species; people usually move out of London by the time they earn enough money to be able to afford it. I had a lot of relatives in places like Forest Gate, Woolwich and Greenwich. I was born in Greenwich and so I knew a lot of London families, mainly connected with the river or with the theatre—at the lower levels not the top theatre people. And there was also a branch of the family who were descended from Huguenot weavers in Bethnal Green. They still had their own memories of the weaving community.
What is your first memory of a political event?
It’s difficult to date this kind of thing but I do remember the General Strike in 1926. I remember my father bringing some people home—he had a little motorcar—and these people were stranded because of the strike, we were told. My brother sent the contents of his money box to the miners. I remember an item in the newspaper, in the Daily Herald, which said that Tommy Towers had sent the contents of his money box to the miners. So I can date that clearly in 1926. I don’t know how far it influenced me but certainly it’s an early memory.