This is the second part of the second volume of David Kynaston’s social history of post-war Britain. As usual, it is a dense collage of quotes from the diaries, letters, interviews, surveys and speeches of an enormous range of people from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to vox pops of shoppers in the street via civil servants, actors, coal miners, housewives, writers who were kids at the time recalling their early memories (John Fowles, David Hare, Alan Bennett, Hunter Davies) – all combining to give you a really deeply felt sense of what it was like to live through these years.
Chronological events part one
Thus, without any preliminary introduction the book opens straight into a cabinet meeting discussing the problem of coloured workers, held on Wednesday 3 February 1954: ‘Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the UK?’ Winston Churchill asked, a sentiment which is echoed half a dozen times as the race problem and the ‘colour bar’ are revisited throughout the book, reflecting the rising rate of immigration from the Commonwealth.
This very long book then touches on:
1954
- the housing problem, the debate about whether to build flats or houses, and whether to shunt people out to the periphery (as believed by ‘dispersionists’) or keep them in high rise inner cities (‘urbanists’)
- whether to decriminalise homosexuality, specifically in light of the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood, which began in 15 March
- Billy Graham’s Greater London Crusade starting 1 March
- the campaign to set up a commercial TV channel to rival the BBC’s monopoly; the canny entrepreneurs lobbying for commercial TV choose Sir Kenneth Clarke as their ultra-respectable front man and he gives a speech supporting it; next time he enters his club, he is roundly booed
- 5 April Commons debate about the H-bomb, necessary if Britain is to remain ‘a world power’
- repeated crashes of the British-built Comet airliner result in it being grounded and overtaken by the American Boeing
- newspapers report on fighting at youth clubs and dance halls involving teenagers with a new look, the Teddy Boys: ‘The effect of the whole décor is thin, mean and sinister, and is obviously meant to be’ (Cyril Dunn in his diary)
- Doctor in the House starring Dirk Bogarde is the box office smash of 1954
- 6 May 1954 at Iffley Road track in Oxford, Roger Bannister breaks the four-minute mile
- on 27 May, Hungary beat England 7-1 (West Germany go on to beat Hungary in the World Cup Final in July)
- Iris Murdoch publishes her first novel, Under the Net. She is a committed communist
- butter comes off the ration
- June, Benny Hill shoots to TV stardom doing impersonations on Showcase
- the myxomatosis epidemic among wild rabbits continued, eventually 99% of the population is wiped out
- refrigerators are beginning to be a sign of status, notes sociologist Phyllis Willmott (p.399); restrictions on hire-purchase are removed for a wide range of consumer goods such as fridges, hoovers, radios, TVs, motorbikes and cars, setting in train the consumer society
- August – Salad Days is a surprise hit in the theatre, starting a run which continues till 1960
- Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring published, followed in November by the Two Towers
- September – the Third Programme’s live broadcast of Benjamin Britten’s new opera, A Turn of the Screw
- Kidbrook school opens, London’s first purpose-built comprehensive
- October – an exhibition of paintings by John Bratby leads critic David Sylvester to coin the term ‘kitchen sink’ school, which goes on to be widely applied to theatre and film
- 2 November – début of Hancock’s Half Hour on BBC radio
- by the end of the year there are nearly 4 million TV licences
1955
- January – BBC documentary Has Britain a Colour Bar? to which the answer was emphatically yes
- February: road traffic has almost doubled since 1938 and so the government publishes a major road expansion plan including the building of two motorways, M1 and M6
- government also announces plans to build 12 nuclear power stations, the most advanced scheme of nuclear power anywhere in the world
- January – debut on TV of The Sooty Show and The Benny Hill Show
- February – debut of Kitchen Magic, presented by Fanny Cradock, first of the celebrity chefs, coinciding with the era of rationing passing into memory i.e. the start of conspicuous consumption
- March – national newspaper strike
- 5 April Winston Churchill (aged 80) steps down as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister
- 6 April replaced by Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford) who announces a snap general election for 26 May (the voting age was still 21, as it continued to be until 1969)
- May General Election: Conservatives 321 seats, Labour 277, Liberals 6, the 17 communist candidates polled 33,000 votes between them. Turnout was down from 82 to 76% amid what Kynaston portrays as widespread apathy, the general interpretation being that the economy was booming, rationing was over, consumer goods were becoming widely available, who cares about politics? Hugh Gaitskell, and Kynaston, attribute it to Tory success with housewives.
- May Day – Stirling Moss became the first British driver to win the Mille Miglia in Italy
- May – The Dam Busters released, the outstanding British film of the year ‘maybe of the decade’
- Miners strike, train drivers strike, dockers’ strike
- 13 July Ruth Ellis hanged for murder, last woman hanged (the last men hanged were executed in August 1964)
- August – Kingsley Amis’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling, and publication of the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records
- September – Henry Fairlie writes an article in the Spectator describing the ‘Establishment’ that runs Britain
- 22 September – commercial television (ITV) starts broadcasting in the London area
- October was dominated by controversy among politicians, press and people on the long-running saga about whether young Princess Margaret Rose (25) should or should not marry divorced father-of-two Group-Captain Peter Townsend (30) with whom she was clearly in love. After dividing the nation, she decided not to.
Sociological studies
About two-thirds of the way through the text it abruptly stops giving a month-by-month overview of political and popular events and turns into an extended consideration of various sociological issues, moving seamlessly through religious belief, attitudes to marriage, sex, homosexuality, unmarried mothers, abortion, prostitution, the role of women, women in the home, women in the workplace and so on.
As usual Kynaston draws evidence from a wide range of sources: from social historians, from the surprising number of surveys and sociological studies carried out at the time, from the diaries or letters of ordinary people and politicians or the autobiographies of writers, from questionnaires carried out by contemporary magazines, from government-sponsored reports, and so on.
Inevitably, in the longish sequence about the social expectations on women in the 1950s, the white, private-school-educated man Kynaston bends over backwards to emphasise his feminist credentials and bring out how lazy and selfish 1950s men were, and the pressure of social expectations on women. There’s a lot less about the social expectations on men – to be financial provider, role model, father, and good companion in marriage.
In fact, although a huge amount of the content is informative and illuminating, not much is very surprising: the four books I’ve read so far tend to confirm everything you already suspected, but just with an awesome range of witnesses and voices adding texture and lived experience to the statistics and stereotypes, making the era really come to life.
Some of the sociological findings do raise a smile for confirming sociology’s tendency to state the bleeding obvious. For example, on pages 576-77 Kynaston quotes several surveys which, after hundreds of interviews and hard work compiling the data, present the dazzling conclusion that, for lots of working women, the main motivation for going out to work was — to earn money! 73% of married women gave ‘financial reasons’ as their main motive for going to work. Not, maybe, earth-shattering news.
This list gives you a sense of the scope and number of surveys Kynaston refers to, as well as indicating the subject matter they address:
- Brian Abel-Smith and Richard Titmuss study of NHS services underpinned the 1956 Guillebaud Committee report on the NHS which recommended no major changes
- BBC survey 1955-6 about Britain’s decline (28% thought there’d been a decline in Britain’s economic ranking, blaming the trade unions and strikes)
- White and Coloured by Michael Banton (p.451) recorded how cities across the UK recruited west Indian bus drivers and conductors through the first half of the 1950s
- 1956 survey of racial attitudes in Birmingham (two thirds thought coloured people were intrinsically less intelligent than white people)
- Family and Social Network by Elizabeth Bott (1957), including the Bott hypothesis that the connectedness or the density of a husband’s and wife’s separate social networks is positively associated with marital role segregation
- Tom Brennan, author of a 1956 study of occupants of the Gorbals and attitudes to redevelopment
- The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman (1956) by Eustace Chesser (women look for physical strength in man more than looks; the higher up the social scale the more likely a woman was to experience sexual satisfaction; husband doesn’t pet enough [foreplay]; ‘overwhelmingly it was felt by wives that men wanted sex more frequently than women did’, p.592)
- Citizens of Tomorrow by a working party of educationalists and sociologists
- Peter Collison – study of the Cutteslowe Wall in Oxford
- Professor Kate Fisher, pioneering historian of sex e.g. , Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918-1960 (2007)
- February 1957 Gallup survey about church going
- 1954 BBC-commissioned Gallup survey into church attendance
- anthropologist Frank Girling spent 18 months on a Scottish housing estate studying the unskilled workers and their families (women had a dominant position in the social life of the area and their homes)
- Social Mobility in Britain by David Glass finding a generally low level of social mobility (p.410)
- 1951 survey of British life by Geoffrey Gorer
- Ken Grainger did a study of Herbert’s the machine tool firm in Coventry
- Natalie Higgins, author of a study of marriage in mid-twentieth century England (women looked for a man who was clean, decent and hard working)
- Margot Jefferys author of a study of married women working in the civil service
- Pearl Jephcott investigated youth clubs in London and Nottingham
- 1956 survey by Joyce Joseph of 600 adolescent girls attending school in the Home Counties and the West Country
- 1949 Mass-Observation on household income
- 1951 Mass-Observation survey of 700 working class housewives
- 1955 Mass-Observation survey into capital punishment
- 1956 Mass-Observation study of the housewife’s day
- 1957 Mass-Observation survey on women in work
- John Barron May’s study of a police division in inner-city Liverpool
- John Barron May’s 1956 study of Liverpool’s Crown Street area
- John Mogey’s study of working class life in Oxford
- 1954 NHS survey of services for the elderly
- Anthony Richmond author of The Colour Problem
- Elizabeth Roberts, author of a 1990s oral history of Barrow, Lancaster and Preston – parents became closer to their children, than their own parents had been
- Women of the Streets (1955) edited by C.H. Rolph
- English Life and Leisure (1951) by Rowntree and Lavers
- Lulie Shaw, author of a study of a working class suburb in the 1950s
- John Smith in 1955 conducted field work at the Peak Freen biscuit factory in Bermondsey
- Steven Tolliday’s study of Coventry engineering workers
- The Family Life of Old People (1957) by Peter Townsend
- Margaret Williamson – interviews in the ironstone region of Cleveland: post-war fathers more involved and willing to play with their children than pre-war fathers
- Family and Kinship in East London (1957) by Michael Young and Peter Willmott
- More About the Sex Factor by Dr Helena Wright (1947)
The single finding I found most interesting was the notion that the extended kinship system Young and Willmott found in the East End (grandparents and siblings living nearby and able to babysit and do errands) disappeared as young couples moved out to housing estates on the edge of town, and to new towns. Being isolated and thrown back on their own resources coincided or led to a) families being smaller (two children) and b) a greater sharing of household work and parenting, more involvement by dads i.e. the loss of an extended family network was compensated by more ‘modern’ gender roles. Although it did also just lead to lots of lonely, isolated mums.
Chronological events part two
1955
- October 15 Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets enters the Billboard Top 20
- November: Cabinet decided not to support the Home Secretary’s plan for legislation to limit immigration from the Commonwealth
- books of the year: The Cruel Sea, Reach for the Sky, HMS Ulysses
- Christmas Day: Somerset Maugham published an attack on Kingsley Amis’s characters, calling them ‘scum’
- December Clement Attlee stands down as leader of the Labour Party, replaced by Hugh Gaitskell (aged 49, educated at Winchester Public School and New College, Oxford)
1956
- January – a concert by young turks Harrison Birtwhistle and Peter Maxwell Davies
- February – London Transport starts to recruit staff from Barbados, followed by Trinidad and Jamaica
- high prices bring discontent, complaints about Eden’s premiership, and worries about growing manufacturing competition from Germany and Japan
- March – politicians and commentators react to news of Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin and his crimes – a number of intellectuals quit the communist party and were to form the nucleus of the New Left which flourished in the 1960s
- April – release of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier amid an orgy of merchandising
- April – Khrushchev and Soviet premier Bulganin visit Britain, attending a race meeting, tea with the Queen, lunch at the House of Commons, and questions at the Oxford Union
- 8 May – first night of Look Back In Anger by John Osborne divides the critics
- 19 May – Elvis Presley entered the British charts for the first time with Heartbreak Hotel
- May – opening of the This is Tomorrow art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, including Richard Hamilton’s iconic collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing, the earliest example of Pop Art
Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing (1956) by Richard Hamilton
- 12 June – bulldozers start clearing hedgerows for the building of the M6, Britain’s first motorway (opened in 1958, the M1 was opened in 1959)
- winter, spring and summer dominated by strikes, strident speeches by trade union leaders and complaints from the media about their selfishness
- October – Tommy Steele enters the top 20 with Rock with the Caveman becoming Britain’s first rock’n’roll star
- 17 October Windscale nuclear power station became the first nuclear power plant to feed electricity into a national grid anywhere in the world
- November – Post Office Premium Bonds launched
1957
- Wednesday 9 January – Sir Anthony Eden resigns as Tory leader and Prime Minister on grounds of ill health
- Thursday 10 January – replaced by Harold Macmillan (Eton and Balliol College, Oxford)
Suez and Hungary
Traditional history of the 1950s focus on the Suez Crisis as a symptom of the end of Britain’s role as a genuine global power. Characteristically Kynaston reserves it for almost an afterthought in the last fifteen or so pages of the book, and even then his account is interspersed with references to Elvis Presley, Fanny Cradock and petrol prices, and he doesn’t concern himself with the military or geopolitical issues, but focuses on how the unfolding crisis was received by his usual cast of diarists – Nella Last, Anthony Heap and so on – as well as the diary entries of Prime Minister Eden’s wife and the private thoughts of other politicians. Two things come over:
- I hadn’t realised that the Anglo-French invasion of Suez and the Soviet tanks rukbling in to suppress the Hungarian Uprising were so closely synchronised – the first shots fired by the Hungarian security forces on protesters were on 23 October, the next day Soviet tanks occupied Budapest. On 29 October Israeli jets attacked Egyptian positions and on 31 October the British and French began bombing Egyptian positions on 31 October. Part of what made liberals so angry about Suez was that it was an illegal unilateral action not sanctioned by the UN. At a stroke this removed the moral superiority or ability of the West to criticise the Soviets. If there had been no Suez the West would have been infinitely better placed to protest the Soviet invasion and sanction the USSR.
- I knew that Suez divided the nation but Kynaston’s strength, here as everywhere else in the book, is to use diaries, letters, speeches, memoirs to really bring home the virulent anger on both sides. As families and husbands and wives and generations bitterly fell out over the best course of action, it’s impossible not to see the parallels with Brexit.
Class
Of the Conservative Party’s 600 candidates in the 1955 general election, 80% went to private school, and 80 had gone to Eton. Ten of Anthony Eden’s 18-strong cabinet went to Eton, five of whom also went on to Christ Church, Oxford (‘the House’, as it is known). Small world, the ruling class.
The education dilemma
Nearly seventy years after the debates about education which Kynaston quotes so extensively in his book, we:
- still have an extensive network of private schools, whose alumni continue to dominate all aspects of public and economic life
- are still agonising and hand-wringing about whether selection at age 11, the 11-plus, and grammar schools are a good or a bad thing
Examples of such agonising and debating:
- Grammar schools do not help children achieve academic success, study claims
- Rob Newman radio show about education
- Intelligence: Born smart, born equal, born different
Why are the basic facts about education i.e. what works best for individuals and for society as a whole, still not definitely known? What have all those educationalists and university departments of education and educational psychologists and all the rest of them been doing for the past 65 years?
Consumer society
My impression of British history over the past 70 years is that people wanted more stuff.
Governments came and went, politicians agonised over the precise wording of manifestos and speeches, clever Oxbridge graduates devised wizard wheezes (the poll tax, universal credit) but Kynaston’s approach to history makes it crystal clear that most people don’t give a stuff about politics – again and again disillusioned politicians find themselves speaking to tiny audiences in the rain, or surveys show that half the people surveyed have never even heard the phrase ‘welfare state’, let alone have sophisticated ideas about how to fund it.
What comes over strongly – especially in the recurrent thread about housing, slum clearance, the creation of flats and so on – is that people want to be left alone to get on with their lives. Again and again we read that people want to live in houses because of the privacy and don’t want to live in flats because of the lack of privacy.
And all through the book there is a massive disconnect between the university-educated politicians and theorists and writers and planners and activators and sociologists and anthropologists who agonise about definitions of ‘community’ and the ‘working class’ and the ‘proletariat’ — and the people living in Coventry or Birmingham or Glasgow (the most rundown city in Britain) who want: a clean home, hot water, a sink, a bathroom, an inside toilet.
And once they’ve got that, they want one of those TV sets that everyone is talking about, and one of the new line of fridges in which they can put the new range of frozen foods which were just being launched in the mid-1950s, led by Birds Eye fish fingers, they want instant coffee and tinned beer they can bring home to sup as they watch Fabian of the Yard or Variety Hour..
An indication of how things were changing was Elizabeth David’s comment in the preface to the 1956 edition of A Book of Mediterranean Food that the food situation was ‘startlingly different’ to how it had been just two years before. Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, fridge freezers, convenience foods, formica table and work tops, affordable eating out (Berni Inns opened in 1954 with their trademark meal of rump steak, chips and peas, a roll and butter and pudding for just 7/6d). Local traders were closing down while Marks and Spencer opened stores throughout the country. Tesco opened its first true supermarket (entirely self-service) in Maldon in 1956.
And the age of DIY was dawning, with cheap and effective Dulux paint going on sale in 1953 while Black and Decker decided to enter the domestic market in 1954, selling drills and lathes and saws, and the first DIY magazine, Practical Householder, was launched in October 1955.
While Doris Lessing was writing articles in praise of Stalin and E.P. Thompson was agonising about whether to leave the communist party over Hungary – precisely the type of upper-middle-class university-educated people and highfalutin’ issues that upper-middle-class university-educated historians usually focus on in their highfalutin’ histories – the people, the ‘masses’ who they so fatuously claimed to be speaking for – were going shopping, collecting the new green shield stamps and buying a new Morris Minor on the never-never.
They knew who the future belonged to – and it wasn’t Comrade Khrushchev.
Related links
Related reviews
- Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2007) comprising:
- Family Britain, 1951–57 (2009) comprising:
- Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (2014) comprising:
- Opening the Box, 1957–59
- A Shake of the Dice, 1959–62
Books & Boots 