Austerity Britain, 1945–51

Austerity Britain, 1945–51 by David Kynaston Page A

Book: Austerity Britain, 1945–51 by David Kynaston Read Free Book Online
Authors: David Kynaston
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job’, ‘politics are a pain in the neck, I’ve not the education to understand them’, and ‘me being an ordinary working-class man, politics is nothing to do with me; we’re too busy with our families and jobs’. Politicians themselves, moreover, were generally seen in a dim light – ‘all politicians are rogues’, ‘I’m against political parties, they’re only out for their own gain,’ ‘no government is any good’.
     
    The wives, meanwhile, were not sufficiently engaged with politics even to be cynical, with ‘a serious and intelligent interest’ being taken by only seven out of 200. ‘The remainder showed an extreme apathy and lack of interest. Politics are felt to be remote from real everyday life, as incomprehensible as mathematics, the business of men. Preoccupation with personal concerns, the affairs of the home, children, leave little room.’ Slater and Woodside quoted some of them: ‘I married young, and had no time, with the children’, ‘I don’t read papers much about the Government’, ‘After being on your feet all day, you just want to sit down and have somebody bring you a nice cup of tea.’ With a note of palpable disappointment, the authors concluded about the wives that ‘their effect as a whole is negative, conservative, a brake on any change from the established order’. 38
     
    It hardly took a Nostradamus to see that the outriders for a New Jerusalem – a vision predicated on an active, informed, classless, progressively minded citizenship – were going to have their work cut out.
     

    Britain in 1945. A land of orderly queues, hat-doffing men walking on the outside, seats given up to the elderly, no swearing in front of women and children, censored books, censored films, censored plays, infinite repression of desires. Divorce for most an unthinkable social disgrace, marriage too often a lifetime sentence. (‘I didn’t want it,’ my own grandmother would say to me in the 1970s when, making small talk soon after my grandfather’s death, I said that at least he had lived long enough for them to have their Golden Wedding party. ‘All I could think about was the misery.’) Even the happier marriages seldom companionable, with husbands and wives living in separate, self-contained spheres, the husband often not telling the wife how much he had earned. And despite women working in wartime jobs, few quarrelling with the assumption that the two sexes were fundamentally different from each other. Children in the street ticked off by strangers, children in the street kept an eye on by strangers, children at home rarely consulted, children stopping being children when they left school at 14 and got a job. A land of hierarchical social assumptions, of accent and dress as giveaways to class, of Irish jokes and casually derogatory references to Jews and niggers. Expectations low and limited but anyone in or on the fringes of the middle class hoping for ‘a job for life’ and comforted by the myth that the working class kept their coal in the bath. A pride in Britain, which had stood alone, a pride even in ‘Made in Britain’. A deep satisfaction with our own idiosyncratic, non-metric units of distance, weight, temperature, money: the bob, the tanner, the threepenny Joey. A sense of history, however nugatory the knowledge of that history. A land in which authority was respected? Or rather, accepted? Yes, perhaps the latter, co-existing with the necessary safety valve of copious everyday grumbling. A land of domestic hobbies and domestic pets. The story of Churchill in the Blitz driving through a London slum on a Friday evening – seeing a long queue outside a shop – stopping the car – sending his detective to find out what this shortage was – the answer: birdseed. Turning the cuffs, elbow patches on jackets, sheets sides to middle. A deeply conservative land.
     

3
     
    Oh Wonderful People of Britain!
     
    ‘Seventeen days since V.E. Day, and never have I seen a

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