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Tales of a New Jerusalem #2
Family Britain, 1951-1957
As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive this narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; and, the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, "Hancock's Half-Hour", Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's "Family Britain" offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.
784 pages, Paperback
First published November 2, 2009
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About the author
David Kynaston
44 books79 followersDavid Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written eighteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and W.G.'s Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman vs. the Players at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945-51, the first title in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title "Tales of a New Jerusalem".
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August 6, 2021
Following directly on from, 'Austerity Britain 1945-51,' this volume takes the reader through 1951 to 1957; from the Festival of Britain to the Suez Crisis. Describing this in such a way, though, denies the minutiae of detail and the myriad of cultural, political and social references, which make this series of books such a delight.
The 1950's begins with the grand gesture of the Festival of Britain, but it is a country still mired in rationing and shortages. After the immense political change of a Labour Government, Churchill is back as Prime Minister, and the decade will see the death of a King and a new, young, Queen.
Author David Kynaston leads the reader through the years which saw the death of Alan Turing and the active prosecution of homosexual men, the class system still very strong, and, despite the Cold War, more British people still identified more with the Russians than the Americans. Meanwhile, the British were about to discover the delights of Indian restaurants, in a country where food had been, for so long, bland and utilitarian, embraced ballroom dancing and hung on the press stories about Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend...
I have read true crime titles about some of the major cases that the author discusses in this book, but the attitudes of the time were often more shocking. This book sees Christie and Rillington Place, as well as the contentious death penalties of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis. Again, the Mass Observation studies lets us know that sympathy was not as widespread as I may have thought, with waspish remarks about Ruth Ellis's platinum blonde hair and even Bentley's own lawyer seeming to think he deserved to hang. Still, this was the beginning of the end for the death penalty, with opinions divided in public, but change coming.
Change was also in the air in the arts. Television becoming more pervasive, "Lucky Jim," by Kingsley Amis published in 1954, Angry Young Men, the coming of rock and roll, Teddy Boys, John Osborne's, "Look Back in Anger," and Colin Wilson's, "The Outsider." The Goons were still popular, Tony Hancock turned to television, the Woodentops joined children's television and the subtle change in people's viewing habits saw men more likely to stay home with wife and children, in front of a screen, rather than heading to the pub for desultory conversation. Weather forecasters appeared on television for the first time, meaning housewives did not have to resort to the farming or shipping forecasts. Commercial television breaks the BBC monopoly and, amongst new stars of the decade is The Benny Hill Show, Norman Wisdom, The Sooty Show, Fanny Cradock and the arrival of Elvis to bring an air of rebellion to the ears of John Lennon and John Peel, among others, while Lonnie Donegan created a musical revolution with skiffle, which would explode around the country.
After the success of Labour, sympathy with the Trade Unions was waning as strikes happened more often. When Wedgwood Benn described unions as, "the most warm-hearted movement in the whole of the country," he was met by laughter. It was less funny when the National Union of Railwaymen called a strike four days before Christmas, in December, 1953. Perhaps unwisely, Churchill gave in, telling his Chancellor (somewhat charmingly), "We cannot have a railway strike. You will never get home, nobody will be able to see their wives." Settling for their terms, though, set the tone for 25 years of industrial relations. Unions were very much traditionally male and did little for women workers, who were seen as working for 'pin money,' and women not given anything like the same wage as their male counterparts.
Meanwhile, by 1954, meat was finally off the ration and immigration and homosexuality were the hot, political topics. Britain was embracing modernisation of British Railways and building nuclear power stations, but the upkeep of Country Houses was proving difficult and many were being destroyed. "In 1953 along," according to architectural history, J. Mordaunt Crook, "Country Houses were coming down at the rate of one every two and a half days. There had been nothing quite like it since the Dissolution of the Monasteries." James Lees-Mile reported that, in another country, these houses would be classified as a monument and such a fate, "would not be tolerated," but the destruction went ahead.
Interestingly, the British had a complicated relationship with Europe even then. At the Messina Conference, a gathering of six member states, which later led to the European Economic Community, in 1958, the British observer left before the end, thoroughly unimpressed and voicing his opinions openly. Meanwhile, the secretary of the Football League, bullied Chelsea out of taking part in the European Cup.
Overall, this series is a delight. The next two books are, "Modernity Britain," taking the country from 1957 to 1962. I look forward to reading on.
The 1950's begins with the grand gesture of the Festival of Britain, but it is a country still mired in rationing and shortages. After the immense political change of a Labour Government, Churchill is back as Prime Minister, and the decade will see the death of a King and a new, young, Queen.
Author David Kynaston leads the reader through the years which saw the death of Alan Turing and the active prosecution of homosexual men, the class system still very strong, and, despite the Cold War, more British people still identified more with the Russians than the Americans. Meanwhile, the British were about to discover the delights of Indian restaurants, in a country where food had been, for so long, bland and utilitarian, embraced ballroom dancing and hung on the press stories about Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend...
I have read true crime titles about some of the major cases that the author discusses in this book, but the attitudes of the time were often more shocking. This book sees Christie and Rillington Place, as well as the contentious death penalties of Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis. Again, the Mass Observation studies lets us know that sympathy was not as widespread as I may have thought, with waspish remarks about Ruth Ellis's platinum blonde hair and even Bentley's own lawyer seeming to think he deserved to hang. Still, this was the beginning of the end for the death penalty, with opinions divided in public, but change coming.
Change was also in the air in the arts. Television becoming more pervasive, "Lucky Jim," by Kingsley Amis published in 1954, Angry Young Men, the coming of rock and roll, Teddy Boys, John Osborne's, "Look Back in Anger," and Colin Wilson's, "The Outsider." The Goons were still popular, Tony Hancock turned to television, the Woodentops joined children's television and the subtle change in people's viewing habits saw men more likely to stay home with wife and children, in front of a screen, rather than heading to the pub for desultory conversation. Weather forecasters appeared on television for the first time, meaning housewives did not have to resort to the farming or shipping forecasts. Commercial television breaks the BBC monopoly and, amongst new stars of the decade is The Benny Hill Show, Norman Wisdom, The Sooty Show, Fanny Cradock and the arrival of Elvis to bring an air of rebellion to the ears of John Lennon and John Peel, among others, while Lonnie Donegan created a musical revolution with skiffle, which would explode around the country.
After the success of Labour, sympathy with the Trade Unions was waning as strikes happened more often. When Wedgwood Benn described unions as, "the most warm-hearted movement in the whole of the country," he was met by laughter. It was less funny when the National Union of Railwaymen called a strike four days before Christmas, in December, 1953. Perhaps unwisely, Churchill gave in, telling his Chancellor (somewhat charmingly), "We cannot have a railway strike. You will never get home, nobody will be able to see their wives." Settling for their terms, though, set the tone for 25 years of industrial relations. Unions were very much traditionally male and did little for women workers, who were seen as working for 'pin money,' and women not given anything like the same wage as their male counterparts.
Meanwhile, by 1954, meat was finally off the ration and immigration and homosexuality were the hot, political topics. Britain was embracing modernisation of British Railways and building nuclear power stations, but the upkeep of Country Houses was proving difficult and many were being destroyed. "In 1953 along," according to architectural history, J. Mordaunt Crook, "Country Houses were coming down at the rate of one every two and a half days. There had been nothing quite like it since the Dissolution of the Monasteries." James Lees-Mile reported that, in another country, these houses would be classified as a monument and such a fate, "would not be tolerated," but the destruction went ahead.
Interestingly, the British had a complicated relationship with Europe even then. At the Messina Conference, a gathering of six member states, which later led to the European Economic Community, in 1958, the British observer left before the end, thoroughly unimpressed and voicing his opinions openly. Meanwhile, the secretary of the Football League, bullied Chelsea out of taking part in the European Cup.
Overall, this series is a delight. The next two books are, "Modernity Britain," taking the country from 1957 to 1962. I look forward to reading on.
November 16, 2015
Glossary here of obscure references in this book.
Few things generate a more powerful sentimental feeling in my otherwise black heart than a historian rescuing the voices of forgotten average people from oblivion. So this second volume in Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem cycle, intended to trace the course of everyday Britain from 1945 to 1978, often through the writings of the non-notable or the now-obscure, had a powerful effect. Nevertheless, it was also a sad book, because “[t]here seem to be, sad to record, conspicuously few authentic working-class diaries for these years.... They also, more disconcertingly, remind us through their very baldness of how little we really know about these distant lives and almost still voices.” (p.168 of Kindle edition)
When not allowing the primary sources (from all classes) to do the talking, Kynaston deploys an eccentric personal authorial voice, which was an enjoyable novelty in the first volume Austerity Britain but by now is something I am used to, perhaps subtracting from my pleasure. For example, I guess the assumption that we will understand low-frequency terms like “contra mundum” (p. 244),“valetudinarian” (p. 272), and “adamantine” (p. 573) can be taken as a complimentary one, because the author implicitly assumes that we are as well-educated as he is. (Full disclosure: I had to look these words up.) Still, I'd like to yellow-card the author for a violations of rule v of George Orwell's rules of good writing in “Politics and the English Language”: Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
I speculate that Kynaston's intent is to urge his fellow Britons to rescue this relatively little-known section of their history from the obscurity, and rethink its meaning. Whatever his intent, he seems to have written exclusively for Britons who share precisely the same mental cultural database as he does. This is a problem for us non-Britons. For example, when Kynaston mentions a name of teenaged diarist, if we know that the diarist goes on to become an alleged prostitute in the center of a spy scandal in later life (in the case of Christine Keeler, p. 28), it would certainly change the way you would look at the quoted material. Clearly Kynaston expects everyone to immediately recognize Keeler, but I think that the scandal with which she is associated is sufficiently far in the past so that even well-educated people might not know about it.
As a result, I continued the fussy little practice that I started when I was reading Austerity Britain of compiling a searchable glossary of terms and names that I considered obscure enough to warrant a brief explanation, meaning people and terms that I didn't know. As mentioned at the top, I have posted it on-line as a spreadsheet on Google Docs (link above and here). This document is MUCH longer for Family Britain than the similar document I compiled for Austerity Britain.
I enjoyed wasting hours searching for the obscure British personalities, but other people might not. I can't help wondering that, by his uncompromisingly refusal to clue us in on these references, whether Kynaston may be consigning his books to an earlier obscurity than they might otherwise have. Take, for example, the case of Cilla Black (p. 166). She is a singer and actress, most famous in the 1960's and 70's, but even now (2011), as a grandmother, attracting some attention in the UK through TV appearances and record reissuances. It seems reasonable to assume that, if her career follows the normal trajectory of stardom, in thirty years she will be forgotten by all but experts and aficionados, even in the UK. However, it is normal for both students and lay-people to read thirty-year-old histories with interest and enthusiasm. In 2041, will there be many people with the patience enough to root around dusty ancient web sites to figure out who these people were? Maybe the author is betting on a science-fiction future where we will all have implants in our brains to do our historical sleuthing for us.
I considered references to the following people and things too well-known (meaning, I had heard of them before reading this book) to need explaining in the glossary.
[in approximate order of appearance:] Michael Frayn, John Betjeman, Lewis Mumford, Joe Orton, John Profumo, Christine Keeler, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Wedgwood “Tony” Benn, Bruce Chatwin, Tony Hancock, the Kray twins, Nigel Lawson, Denis Healey, Sue Townsend, Cinema Paradiso, Eric Hobsbawm, Doris Lessing, Raymond Chandler, Terence Stamp, B. S. Johnson, Steven Berkoff, Coronation Street, Jean Genet, V. S. Pritchett, Michael Palin, Benjamin Britten, J. Fred Muggs, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Gina Lollobrigida, J. B. Priestley, John Gielgud, Prunella Scales, Michael Foot, Freddie Laker, red-in-tooth-and-claw (used as an adjective), Iris Murdoch, Petula Clark, Julie Andrews, Marks & Spencer, Piltdown man, Malcolm Bradbury, Spike Milligan, David Attenborough, Peter Cushing, Alistair Cooke, Dennis Potter, Peter Bull, 'The Whitsun Weddings', Dusty Springfield, Lady Bracknell, Michael Redgrave, Robert Shaw, Christopher Isherwood, Peter Cook, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Peter Maxwell Davies, Danny Kaye, skiffle, Twiggy, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Roger Daltrey, Cyril Connolly, Richard Harris, W. H. Auden, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Simon Callow, David Owen, Blackadder, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Ustinov
plus all of the names that appeared in a similar list and glossary I made as part of my review of Austerity Britain. Any name or reference that I felt was adequately identified in the book, and any word that was easily found in my Kindle's dictionary, was also not included in the glossary.
Finally, toward the end of the book (p. 529), Kynaston, apparently anticipating my desire to understand every reference in the book and evilly determined to drive me insane, started a chapter ('Family Favorites') with a free-standing list of about 150 mundane everyday items and activities associated with 1950s Britain, from popular cigarette brands to “eat up your greens”. Since it is possible to read the narrative without understanding every reference in this list, and also since there is a limit to my patience with this project, I left this list unresearched.
I am looking forward to the third volume in the series, reportedly to be titled Modernity Britain.
Few things generate a more powerful sentimental feeling in my otherwise black heart than a historian rescuing the voices of forgotten average people from oblivion. So this second volume in Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem cycle, intended to trace the course of everyday Britain from 1945 to 1978, often through the writings of the non-notable or the now-obscure, had a powerful effect. Nevertheless, it was also a sad book, because “[t]here seem to be, sad to record, conspicuously few authentic working-class diaries for these years.... They also, more disconcertingly, remind us through their very baldness of how little we really know about these distant lives and almost still voices.” (p.168 of Kindle edition)
When not allowing the primary sources (from all classes) to do the talking, Kynaston deploys an eccentric personal authorial voice, which was an enjoyable novelty in the first volume Austerity Britain but by now is something I am used to, perhaps subtracting from my pleasure. For example, I guess the assumption that we will understand low-frequency terms like “contra mundum” (p. 244),“valetudinarian” (p. 272), and “adamantine” (p. 573) can be taken as a complimentary one, because the author implicitly assumes that we are as well-educated as he is. (Full disclosure: I had to look these words up.) Still, I'd like to yellow-card the author for a violations of rule v of George Orwell's rules of good writing in “Politics and the English Language”: Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
I speculate that Kynaston's intent is to urge his fellow Britons to rescue this relatively little-known section of their history from the obscurity, and rethink its meaning. Whatever his intent, he seems to have written exclusively for Britons who share precisely the same mental cultural database as he does. This is a problem for us non-Britons. For example, when Kynaston mentions a name of teenaged diarist, if we know that the diarist goes on to become an alleged prostitute in the center of a spy scandal in later life (in the case of Christine Keeler, p. 28), it would certainly change the way you would look at the quoted material. Clearly Kynaston expects everyone to immediately recognize Keeler, but I think that the scandal with which she is associated is sufficiently far in the past so that even well-educated people might not know about it.
As a result, I continued the fussy little practice that I started when I was reading Austerity Britain of compiling a searchable glossary of terms and names that I considered obscure enough to warrant a brief explanation, meaning people and terms that I didn't know. As mentioned at the top, I have posted it on-line as a spreadsheet on Google Docs (link above and here). This document is MUCH longer for Family Britain than the similar document I compiled for Austerity Britain.
I enjoyed wasting hours searching for the obscure British personalities, but other people might not. I can't help wondering that, by his uncompromisingly refusal to clue us in on these references, whether Kynaston may be consigning his books to an earlier obscurity than they might otherwise have. Take, for example, the case of Cilla Black (p. 166). She is a singer and actress, most famous in the 1960's and 70's, but even now (2011), as a grandmother, attracting some attention in the UK through TV appearances and record reissuances. It seems reasonable to assume that, if her career follows the normal trajectory of stardom, in thirty years she will be forgotten by all but experts and aficionados, even in the UK. However, it is normal for both students and lay-people to read thirty-year-old histories with interest and enthusiasm. In 2041, will there be many people with the patience enough to root around dusty ancient web sites to figure out who these people were? Maybe the author is betting on a science-fiction future where we will all have implants in our brains to do our historical sleuthing for us.
I considered references to the following people and things too well-known (meaning, I had heard of them before reading this book) to need explaining in the glossary.
[in approximate order of appearance:] Michael Frayn, John Betjeman, Lewis Mumford, Joe Orton, John Profumo, Christine Keeler, Roy Jenkins, Anthony Wedgwood “Tony” Benn, Bruce Chatwin, Tony Hancock, the Kray twins, Nigel Lawson, Denis Healey, Sue Townsend, Cinema Paradiso, Eric Hobsbawm, Doris Lessing, Raymond Chandler, Terence Stamp, B. S. Johnson, Steven Berkoff, Coronation Street, Jean Genet, V. S. Pritchett, Michael Palin, Benjamin Britten, J. Fred Muggs, E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Gina Lollobrigida, J. B. Priestley, John Gielgud, Prunella Scales, Michael Foot, Freddie Laker, red-in-tooth-and-claw (used as an adjective), Iris Murdoch, Petula Clark, Julie Andrews, Marks & Spencer, Piltdown man, Malcolm Bradbury, Spike Milligan, David Attenborough, Peter Cushing, Alistair Cooke, Dennis Potter, Peter Bull, 'The Whitsun Weddings', Dusty Springfield, Lady Bracknell, Michael Redgrave, Robert Shaw, Christopher Isherwood, Peter Cook, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Peter Maxwell Davies, Danny Kaye, skiffle, Twiggy, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Roger Daltrey, Cyril Connolly, Richard Harris, W. H. Auden, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, Simon Callow, David Owen, Blackadder, Marianne Faithfull, Peter Ustinov
plus all of the names that appeared in a similar list and glossary I made as part of my review of Austerity Britain. Any name or reference that I felt was adequately identified in the book, and any word that was easily found in my Kindle's dictionary, was also not included in the glossary.
Finally, toward the end of the book (p. 529), Kynaston, apparently anticipating my desire to understand every reference in the book and evilly determined to drive me insane, started a chapter ('Family Favorites') with a free-standing list of about 150 mundane everyday items and activities associated with 1950s Britain, from popular cigarette brands to “eat up your greens”. Since it is possible to read the narrative without understanding every reference in this list, and also since there is a limit to my patience with this project, I left this list unresearched.
I am looking forward to the third volume in the series, reportedly to be titled Modernity Britain.
December 28, 2023
I’m continuing to read David Kynaston’s epic history of post-war Britain, but not in chronological order. Even though this covers a period in which I was a very young child, there’s still a lot here that brings back memories. What he’s really good at is giving us a sense of the everyday lives of ordinary people through copious diary extracts. As in the later volume I’ve read, he’s very good on the planning issues around the rehousing of the residents of inner city slums and bomb damaged areas, especially the question of ‘community’ and how much it was possible to recreate it in the new out of town housing developments.
My favourite piece of information from the book - Bird’s Eye deciding to change the name of their new product to‘Fish Fingers’ from its original name, ‘Cod Pieces’.
My favourite piece of information from the book - Bird’s Eye deciding to change the name of their new product to‘Fish Fingers’ from its original name, ‘Cod Pieces’.
April 21, 2011
'Family Britain 1951-1957' is history at eye-level;
700 pages covering 7 years, you get a lot of detail on the
thoughts and activities of everyday life.
Major events are covered, but through the eyes of
the public's perspective, the 1953 coronation of the Queen,
the first national implementation of Nuclear power plants,
national strikes, the Suez Canal crisis.
Though it's more the items that are closer to living
that fill the pages: new housing, the sporting events that
touch everyone, going to the movies, getting a car, the price
of groceries, the advent of rock n' roll, Television.
If you are English and grew up during this time
period, or perhaps heard about it from your relatives,
this book would be quite nostalgic, however from an American's
point of view, and I at least have an interest in things English,
still a lot of the references will be lost or vague to you,
for example, the author recalls a particular famous announcer
calling of football match, or royal event, we have no way of
getting that feeling, which i imagine to be something like
our hearing Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley.
This is also true with various Radio and TV shows that
I'm sure ring true to anyone who heard them growing up.
Some subjects get a bit long, for example the coverage
of housing developments, (though now when I watch
an English movie, I pay attention to the floor plan),
here are some of the range of subjects :
-- Britons went to the movies far more than any other country
(a statistic soon to be squashed by the coming of TV).
-- the pub as we fondly view in movies and stories was actually
on the decline during this time period, especially with Britons
drinking about half as much as they did in the 1920s (on average).
-- the 1953 coronation
-- designing neighborhoods, housing was at extreme shortage
due to the blitz and aging of Victorian slums
-- perceptions of the 'feeling of community' are well examined.
Many have their nostalgic fond recollections of the working poor
neighborhoods however, polls and various other stories don't bear
it out. Are the good ol' days always just a dream?
-- stop if you've heard this one before, the complexity of modern
society, 1953, seems to overwhelm those who need help, in that they
are not aware of the agencies that are designed to help them.
(makes one wonder if these things are solvable, or is it really
the complexity of society, one can only boogle or is that google
the mind comparing 1953 with 2011 )
-- literary world: Lord of the Rings is published, Kingsley Amis
first novel - Lucky Jim, JB Priestly, Iris Murdoch.
Guiness Book of World Records starts out as a bar bet settling
list by a pair of pub owning brothers.
-- many can afford to purchase a car and the British car maker
finds that people will pay a lot extra for things that
do not increase the efficiency of the car or the comfort
of the driving experience.
-- sports - roger banister 4 minute mile; though lost on an
American the big cricket, football & rugby matches of the day.
-- music - the bursting on the scene of American rocknroll,
the creating of the skiffle genre and the effect of both
on Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Dusty Springfield, John Lennon
and Roger Daltry who were growing up at the time.
-- the new king of the entertainment hill, TV TV TV.
Benny Hill's first TV show, (good Lord he was still on
TV in the 1980s!)
May 14, 2015
This is the second part of Kynaston's epic account of Britain from 1945 to 1979. It starts with the conservatives winning the general election of 1951 (despite getting many fewer votes than Labour, Britain was a much more working class country then) and it ends with Suez. But politics is in the back seat for most of this journey, which delves into culture, education, sport, music and film.
Two things are worth noting about Kynaston's technique. Firstly structure. Family Britain (like its predecessor Austerity Britain and the following 'volume' Modernity Britain') is in fact two books, each dealing with approximately half of the period. Each of these is in turn divided into three parts. Parts one and three are chronological, moving forward albeit slowly. But the middle parts are thematic - one deals with working class culture, and the other with issues of family, gender, and sexuality. And whilst overall the book is good these sections are simply majesterial. This is important because it really adds meat, and stops the volumes becoming a simple accumulation of detail.
Secondly, Kynaston spends a lot of time speaking in other people's voices. There is an immense amount in quotes culled from diaries and newspaper, local as well as national. There is great craft in how these are combined, and the authors voice very much comes through. But it also means the books get very detailed, very parochial, very quickly. If you can't place Coventry and Skegness on a map of the UK than this probably isn't a book for you.
Quite simply I've now read 1350 pages of this since the end of January, and I'm looking forward to more.
(PS Thankfully the author continues to give shout outs to Routledge authors, John Bowlby and R D Laing standing out this time round, as well as Bertrand Russell).
Two things are worth noting about Kynaston's technique. Firstly structure. Family Britain (like its predecessor Austerity Britain and the following 'volume' Modernity Britain') is in fact two books, each dealing with approximately half of the period. Each of these is in turn divided into three parts. Parts one and three are chronological, moving forward albeit slowly. But the middle parts are thematic - one deals with working class culture, and the other with issues of family, gender, and sexuality. And whilst overall the book is good these sections are simply majesterial. This is important because it really adds meat, and stops the volumes becoming a simple accumulation of detail.
Secondly, Kynaston spends a lot of time speaking in other people's voices. There is an immense amount in quotes culled from diaries and newspaper, local as well as national. There is great craft in how these are combined, and the authors voice very much comes through. But it also means the books get very detailed, very parochial, very quickly. If you can't place Coventry and Skegness on a map of the UK than this probably isn't a book for you.
Quite simply I've now read 1350 pages of this since the end of January, and I'm looking forward to more.
(PS Thankfully the author continues to give shout outs to Routledge authors, John Bowlby and R D Laing standing out this time round, as well as Bertrand Russell).
December 29, 2009
The second volume of David Kynaston’s social history of the “New Jerusalem” covers such areas as The Festival of Britain, end of rationing, emergence of new towns and the increasing importance of television. Before wrapping up with Suez and the resignation of Anthony Eden. Once again the lives of ‘normal’ people are paramount, with inclusion of diary entries from average members of the public giving a viewpoint not normally seen in history books. It’s a fascinating read with lots of interesting material, however a number of chapters in this volume seemed to lack cohesion, being just a series of events which the author does little to link. I enjoyed this book, but with a greater thematic focus I’d have enjoyed it more.
The next volume appears to be ‘Modernity Britain’ and I’ll definitely be reading it.
The next volume appears to be ‘Modernity Britain’ and I’ll definitely be reading it.
December 8, 2025
Another fantastic book from Mr Kynaston. It has many similarities to our present day.
May 18, 2025
The author circles around a few main ideas in all his volumes. Housing is one. Pay the slightest bit of attention to the news, pay attention to what obsesses Britons, and you will realise how central house building and property ownership is. It’s 80 years later and we still haven’t built enough houses in this country, which is why (a) they cost so much and why (b) that the rental market is soul destroyingly terrible. On the one hand, you’ve got columnists in The Times moaning about having to pay extra council tax on second homes; or moaning about not being able to sell their Isle of Wight lock-up-and-go holiday homes. On the other hand, there’s a vast silent army of suffering renters, many of whom are so frightened of debt collectors etc. that they won’t even register to vote. But all that is yet to come, in Family Britain, which is seeing (in those years) the end of the post-War Labour government’s dreams of planned new towns and the beginning of the Tory party’s ideologically driven hatred of anything resembling collective endeavour and their bizarre anti-pedestrian bent. In one episode Kynaston relates, the people of Stevenage have to go to great lengths to persuade the local government to fulfil its promise of a pedestrian zone in the town centre: a promise they were trying to renege upon, under pressure from their corporate masters.
So there’s discussion here of architecture and Le Corbusier, whose magnificent Notre-Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, but who is better known for his nightmare housing blocks, which were always being debated in the UK. Everybody hated them, and yet. And yet, the authorities decided that they were better than nothing, and better than the working classes were used to.
Another big theme here is the idea of community. What we’re heading towards, even in 1952, is an ideology of individualism driven by property ownership and privatisation. Yes, old Thatch is waiting in the wings, but it’s clear from reading this that she was pushing on an open door. It was already clear in Austerity Britain that the British people wanted nothing more than privacy – so private housing in the suburbs was infinitely preferable, in the end, to utopian dreams about dense, high-rise living. Oh, but the community, people cried, but Kynaston points out that when you go looking for it, it’s barely there. It was barely ever there.
He points out that a lot of our ideas about working class communities of the past come from rose-tinted celebrity memoirs; but beyond these, there are very few primary sources that record working class communities. For sure, people were happy to have a spare key kept by a neighbour (they trusted them that far). But they were less happy to have people coming into their houses and nosing around. People were either snobbishly looking down upon people they considered beneath them, or secretly ashamed of their own circumstances. Either way, they didn’t want people dropping round unannounced. One of his chapters is called “I’ve never asked her in”, which is something one woman says about her neighbour.
As to the sociological research, there’s a lot of weight given to Mass Observation (which is still brilliant at evoking ordinary people’s voices: No! – I can’t talk ducks – look! I’ve got no teeth.), but elsewhere you come across the platform problem of middle class university researchers trying to get a handle on a working class culture that is always somewhere else. Which is not to deny that the working class exists, but to point out that an awful lot of people were happier to self-identify as “lower middle class” than to admit to being working class. He should have called the volume Aspiration Britain (or Deluded Britain, perhaps). That famous sketch by Cleese and the Two Ronnies (“I know my place”) is inaccurate inasmuch as people were able to fit five classes on the head of a pin: working class, lower middle, middle, upper middle, and upper class. Phew! And it was a real discussion that people really had. I remember having it myself, when I was at middle school (I think). And I remember feeling faintly ashamed of the idea of being lower middle class. Imagine how people felt about being labelled working class.
Another theme Kynaston keeps returning to is television. It’s well known that the Queen’s coronation in 1953 drove adoption of the relatively new medium. Kynaston points out that it is not a myth: around a million extra sets were in use in the summer of 1953 than there had been a year before. And a year after that, nearly another million. So TV was growing and growing, and it becomes part of the wider theme of community and property. As soon as people could sit behind their closed curtains watching telly of an evening, that’s what they did. In the early 1950s, cinema was still far and away the number one leisure activity, with people often attending several times a week. I’d quite forgotten the days of different cinemas in a town (with single screens, natch) showing different films. What’s on at the Odeon? What about the ABC? But television was coming, and while Parliament debated whether commercial television should be allowed, it was already working its way into the nation’s hearts.
The number two leisure activity, by the way, was ballroom dancing. Or dancing, I suppose. So funny to think that by 1970, people would just be sitting around in baggy jumpers watching Led Zeppelin.
So: housing, television, the coronation, what else? The Festival of Britain, of course, and the many many sporting fixtures that obsessed the nation. Winning the Ashes back in 1953; that same year, losing 6-3 to Hungary at Wembley, an event people were still talking about in my 60s and 70s childhood. And then there was the very gradual coming of more leisure time, mass exoduses to the seaside, but not (yet) by motor car. Kynaston also keeps returning to the DeHavilland Comet, Britain’s pioneering jet airliner that had an unfortunate habit of falling out of the sky. Metal fatigue. Comes to us all.
Another thread, and another one that continues to vex the nation to this day, was education policy. One researcher showed evidence that boys who sat an entrance exam a year after failing the 11+ and got into grammar school late often did better than their peers who had got in the first time. This threw a spanner in the works, sure enough. The fucking 11+, though. Still exists where I live, still seething about it.
Talking of fucking: another Kynaston thread is the law concerning homosexuality. There were so many cases of really quite prominent people being ruined by arrest and trial for their sexual activites. Not just Alan Turing, but members of Parliament, actors (John Gielgud), and even Daily Mail journalists. Pour one out for that guy, who was definitely working for the wrong paper. The Times, at the time, was surprisingly liberal about it all, as they later were with rock star drug busts in the 60s. I miss that sense that respectable national newspapers had some kind of rational response to things. Should the government have a say on what people get up to in bed? Liberalisation of the law is definitely bubbling under in 1953, but it was a long way off.
Other national obsessions. Princess Margaret! Should she be allowed to marry a commoner!? A divorcee? Should Churchill (who had secretly had a stroke) retire?
Finally, there’s the rationing. Interesting to read how it was mostly over before it was officially over, with plentiful supply in the shops of things that were still rationed, but didn’t need to be. Ration books still existed, but a lot of places didn’t bother asking for them. Sugar, butter, bacon, all stayed on the ration for much longer than they ought to have. Interesting too to note that butchers began to have trouble shifting the shitty meat/offal that had been all some people could get a few years before. Goodbye to scrag end and tripe and rabbit; and HELLO AGAIN TO WHITE BREAD.
It’s easy to forget that the hardships of WW2 dragged on in Britain for nearly 10 years. It is surely one of the things that did for the post-war Labour government. In 1952, tea came off the ration (phew!); sweets came off in 1953. But even then: sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat, and eggs were all still rationed. Margarine was available more generously than butter, but people hated the taste of and complained that 2 ounces of butter wasn’t enough. So the end of rationing really signalled a sea change, which (in the words often said by people arriving at the cinema in the middle of the film and watching the whole programme in the wrong order) is where we came in.
Part 2 of this volume begins in 1954, and it finishes in early 1957 with the resignation of Anthony Eden, not (apparently) because of the fiasco of the Suez Crisis that ended 1956 but because he was genuinely ill. In fact, Eden still had public opinion in his favour when he resigned. He was far more popular than Kier Starmer is now. The general public either did not know or did not care that the Suez adventure had been a shitshow. You can always count on the general public to have basically racist opinions, and very few were in favour of the Egyptian government taking control of the canal zone.
The question of race and racism pervades this book. While there were still relatively few immigrants living in the UK in the mid-1950s, it was still a topic of conversation: whether people wanted a person of colour driving their bus, for example, or collecting their fares. Somehow it always comes down to jobs that people don’t want to do. You could hold a gun to my head, and I wouldn’t want to work in a care home. Or offer me £50k a year: no way. You do the maths, Mr Starmer.
The period following the end of rationing is really all about the growth of consumerism. Spend! Spend! Spend! People were out in the shops, supermarkets were becoming more common, and the old ways were going. Traditional shopkeepers complained that customers, now they weren’t relying on ration books, showed no loyalty. I’m sure the shopkeepers themselves did nothing to contribute to customer disenchantment during those austerity years. 🙄
For a while, I thought (given the dates in the title) that this volume might end with the Woolton Village Fete on July 6th 1957, but then it was the Suez Crisis at the close of 1956 and that seems to mark some kind of dividing line in history.
When I was first getting into music, 1956 was the magic year, broad-brushed as the “year rock ‘n’ roll began”. Of course, things weren’t really that neat and tidy, but it was the year when society began to change, young people started thinking differently about fashion, and the spending power of teenagers became a thing. Somewhere in there is the beginning of the end of deference (though there’s still too much of that around, imo). It was also the year when television definitively took over the nation’s brains.
While reading this, I was also reading Philip Norman’s absolutely awful biography of George Harrison, and the contrast couldn’t be more stark. Kynaston relies on a range of sources – as you might expect – and keeps returning to some, like the diaries of Nella Last and Anthony Heap, oe Kenneth Williams, and the records of Mass Observation. But, using these sources, Kynaston weaves a rich tapestry—whereas you might be better off just reading Patti Boyd’s autobiography rather than bothering with Norman, since he relies so heavily on it.
Politically, this book makes you yearn for the post-war consensus, when it really didn’t seem to matter who was in charge. The NHS was safe. The trade unions were a strong check on government power. All was (relatively) well, even with the Tories in charge.
As always, this is beautifully written, fantastically detailed, but sometimes a bit of a slog, simply because the paragraphs are really long and so much happens in them. I remain less interested in the poltical doings than I am in vast dancehalls, Butlins holiday camps and people complaining about the price of deckchair rental.
So there’s discussion here of architecture and Le Corbusier, whose magnificent Notre-Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, but who is better known for his nightmare housing blocks, which were always being debated in the UK. Everybody hated them, and yet. And yet, the authorities decided that they were better than nothing, and better than the working classes were used to.
Another big theme here is the idea of community. What we’re heading towards, even in 1952, is an ideology of individualism driven by property ownership and privatisation. Yes, old Thatch is waiting in the wings, but it’s clear from reading this that she was pushing on an open door. It was already clear in Austerity Britain that the British people wanted nothing more than privacy – so private housing in the suburbs was infinitely preferable, in the end, to utopian dreams about dense, high-rise living. Oh, but the community, people cried, but Kynaston points out that when you go looking for it, it’s barely there. It was barely ever there.
He points out that a lot of our ideas about working class communities of the past come from rose-tinted celebrity memoirs; but beyond these, there are very few primary sources that record working class communities. For sure, people were happy to have a spare key kept by a neighbour (they trusted them that far). But they were less happy to have people coming into their houses and nosing around. People were either snobbishly looking down upon people they considered beneath them, or secretly ashamed of their own circumstances. Either way, they didn’t want people dropping round unannounced. One of his chapters is called “I’ve never asked her in”, which is something one woman says about her neighbour.
As to the sociological research, there’s a lot of weight given to Mass Observation (which is still brilliant at evoking ordinary people’s voices: No! – I can’t talk ducks – look! I’ve got no teeth.), but elsewhere you come across the platform problem of middle class university researchers trying to get a handle on a working class culture that is always somewhere else. Which is not to deny that the working class exists, but to point out that an awful lot of people were happier to self-identify as “lower middle class” than to admit to being working class. He should have called the volume Aspiration Britain (or Deluded Britain, perhaps). That famous sketch by Cleese and the Two Ronnies (“I know my place”) is inaccurate inasmuch as people were able to fit five classes on the head of a pin: working class, lower middle, middle, upper middle, and upper class. Phew! And it was a real discussion that people really had. I remember having it myself, when I was at middle school (I think). And I remember feeling faintly ashamed of the idea of being lower middle class. Imagine how people felt about being labelled working class.
Another theme Kynaston keeps returning to is television. It’s well known that the Queen’s coronation in 1953 drove adoption of the relatively new medium. Kynaston points out that it is not a myth: around a million extra sets were in use in the summer of 1953 than there had been a year before. And a year after that, nearly another million. So TV was growing and growing, and it becomes part of the wider theme of community and property. As soon as people could sit behind their closed curtains watching telly of an evening, that’s what they did. In the early 1950s, cinema was still far and away the number one leisure activity, with people often attending several times a week. I’d quite forgotten the days of different cinemas in a town (with single screens, natch) showing different films. What’s on at the Odeon? What about the ABC? But television was coming, and while Parliament debated whether commercial television should be allowed, it was already working its way into the nation’s hearts.
The number two leisure activity, by the way, was ballroom dancing. Or dancing, I suppose. So funny to think that by 1970, people would just be sitting around in baggy jumpers watching Led Zeppelin.
So: housing, television, the coronation, what else? The Festival of Britain, of course, and the many many sporting fixtures that obsessed the nation. Winning the Ashes back in 1953; that same year, losing 6-3 to Hungary at Wembley, an event people were still talking about in my 60s and 70s childhood. And then there was the very gradual coming of more leisure time, mass exoduses to the seaside, but not (yet) by motor car. Kynaston also keeps returning to the DeHavilland Comet, Britain’s pioneering jet airliner that had an unfortunate habit of falling out of the sky. Metal fatigue. Comes to us all.
Another thread, and another one that continues to vex the nation to this day, was education policy. One researcher showed evidence that boys who sat an entrance exam a year after failing the 11+ and got into grammar school late often did better than their peers who had got in the first time. This threw a spanner in the works, sure enough. The fucking 11+, though. Still exists where I live, still seething about it.
Talking of fucking: another Kynaston thread is the law concerning homosexuality. There were so many cases of really quite prominent people being ruined by arrest and trial for their sexual activites. Not just Alan Turing, but members of Parliament, actors (John Gielgud), and even Daily Mail journalists. Pour one out for that guy, who was definitely working for the wrong paper. The Times, at the time, was surprisingly liberal about it all, as they later were with rock star drug busts in the 60s. I miss that sense that respectable national newspapers had some kind of rational response to things. Should the government have a say on what people get up to in bed? Liberalisation of the law is definitely bubbling under in 1953, but it was a long way off.
Other national obsessions. Princess Margaret! Should she be allowed to marry a commoner!? A divorcee? Should Churchill (who had secretly had a stroke) retire?
Finally, there’s the rationing. Interesting to read how it was mostly over before it was officially over, with plentiful supply in the shops of things that were still rationed, but didn’t need to be. Ration books still existed, but a lot of places didn’t bother asking for them. Sugar, butter, bacon, all stayed on the ration for much longer than they ought to have. Interesting too to note that butchers began to have trouble shifting the shitty meat/offal that had been all some people could get a few years before. Goodbye to scrag end and tripe and rabbit; and HELLO AGAIN TO WHITE BREAD.
It’s easy to forget that the hardships of WW2 dragged on in Britain for nearly 10 years. It is surely one of the things that did for the post-war Labour government. In 1952, tea came off the ration (phew!); sweets came off in 1953. But even then: sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat, and eggs were all still rationed. Margarine was available more generously than butter, but people hated the taste of and complained that 2 ounces of butter wasn’t enough. So the end of rationing really signalled a sea change, which (in the words often said by people arriving at the cinema in the middle of the film and watching the whole programme in the wrong order) is where we came in.
Part 2 of this volume begins in 1954, and it finishes in early 1957 with the resignation of Anthony Eden, not (apparently) because of the fiasco of the Suez Crisis that ended 1956 but because he was genuinely ill. In fact, Eden still had public opinion in his favour when he resigned. He was far more popular than Kier Starmer is now. The general public either did not know or did not care that the Suez adventure had been a shitshow. You can always count on the general public to have basically racist opinions, and very few were in favour of the Egyptian government taking control of the canal zone.
The question of race and racism pervades this book. While there were still relatively few immigrants living in the UK in the mid-1950s, it was still a topic of conversation: whether people wanted a person of colour driving their bus, for example, or collecting their fares. Somehow it always comes down to jobs that people don’t want to do. You could hold a gun to my head, and I wouldn’t want to work in a care home. Or offer me £50k a year: no way. You do the maths, Mr Starmer.
The period following the end of rationing is really all about the growth of consumerism. Spend! Spend! Spend! People were out in the shops, supermarkets were becoming more common, and the old ways were going. Traditional shopkeepers complained that customers, now they weren’t relying on ration books, showed no loyalty. I’m sure the shopkeepers themselves did nothing to contribute to customer disenchantment during those austerity years. 🙄
For a while, I thought (given the dates in the title) that this volume might end with the Woolton Village Fete on July 6th 1957, but then it was the Suez Crisis at the close of 1956 and that seems to mark some kind of dividing line in history.
When I was first getting into music, 1956 was the magic year, broad-brushed as the “year rock ‘n’ roll began”. Of course, things weren’t really that neat and tidy, but it was the year when society began to change, young people started thinking differently about fashion, and the spending power of teenagers became a thing. Somewhere in there is the beginning of the end of deference (though there’s still too much of that around, imo). It was also the year when television definitively took over the nation’s brains.
While reading this, I was also reading Philip Norman’s absolutely awful biography of George Harrison, and the contrast couldn’t be more stark. Kynaston relies on a range of sources – as you might expect – and keeps returning to some, like the diaries of Nella Last and Anthony Heap, oe Kenneth Williams, and the records of Mass Observation. But, using these sources, Kynaston weaves a rich tapestry—whereas you might be better off just reading Patti Boyd’s autobiography rather than bothering with Norman, since he relies so heavily on it.
Politically, this book makes you yearn for the post-war consensus, when it really didn’t seem to matter who was in charge. The NHS was safe. The trade unions were a strong check on government power. All was (relatively) well, even with the Tories in charge.
As always, this is beautifully written, fantastically detailed, but sometimes a bit of a slog, simply because the paragraphs are really long and so much happens in them. I remain less interested in the poltical doings than I am in vast dancehalls, Butlins holiday camps and people complaining about the price of deckchair rental.
August 6, 2011
This is the second volume of Britain’s postwar history by David Kynaston. This volume covers the period 1951-57 (originally in two separate volumes: “A Certainty of Pace” and “A Thicker Cut”), and the period encompasses the first postwar Conservative government, starting with Churchill and ending with Eden’s post-Suez resignation at the beginning of 1958.
Although all of the major political events are covered, and we are introduced to fledgling politicians who will come to dominate the scene in the subsequent decades: Macmillan, Wilson, Benn and Heath, it is the snippets of information that is most tantalising rather than the broader political thrust which would be covered by any half-decent political history of the period. For example the Police advice to Edward Heath against continuing his practice of “cottaging” in 1955 upon entry to the Privy Council, or the near new-blackout about Churchill’s increasing infirmness following his heart attack, or Doris Lessing communist party loyalty (initially at least) even after Stalin had been exposed by Kruschev as the tyrant that he was and her inability to criticise even the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
But even greater than these fascinating nuggets, is the generous inclusion of the views of ordinary people on a whole range of issues, from the Festival of Britain to the Coronation, the initial distrust of commercial television to dislike of self-service shopping (initially introduced by the Co-Op). These views have been meticulously researched by Mr. Kynaston, from a variety of sources, ranging from the well-known Mass Observation archive, to numerous autobiographies and diaries and contemporaneous newspaper sources.
This is the second of Mr. Kynaston’s volumes in this series that is intended to continue to the 1979 Election (which is when my own political memory effectively starts), and I can’t wait to read the next instalment. It is eminently readable, and nicely illustrated by some poignant photographs. Highly recommended reading!
Although all of the major political events are covered, and we are introduced to fledgling politicians who will come to dominate the scene in the subsequent decades: Macmillan, Wilson, Benn and Heath, it is the snippets of information that is most tantalising rather than the broader political thrust which would be covered by any half-decent political history of the period. For example the Police advice to Edward Heath against continuing his practice of “cottaging” in 1955 upon entry to the Privy Council, or the near new-blackout about Churchill’s increasing infirmness following his heart attack, or Doris Lessing communist party loyalty (initially at least) even after Stalin had been exposed by Kruschev as the tyrant that he was and her inability to criticise even the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
But even greater than these fascinating nuggets, is the generous inclusion of the views of ordinary people on a whole range of issues, from the Festival of Britain to the Coronation, the initial distrust of commercial television to dislike of self-service shopping (initially introduced by the Co-Op). These views have been meticulously researched by Mr. Kynaston, from a variety of sources, ranging from the well-known Mass Observation archive, to numerous autobiographies and diaries and contemporaneous newspaper sources.
This is the second of Mr. Kynaston’s volumes in this series that is intended to continue to the 1979 Election (which is when my own political memory effectively starts), and I can’t wait to read the next instalment. It is eminently readable, and nicely illustrated by some poignant photographs. Highly recommended reading!
March 28, 2018
In the early 1950s Great Britain was a nation in transition. On the one hand it was still an imperial power, a workshop to much of the world, a land with a tradition-bound patriarchal society. Yet on the other it was seeing the first results of the many social and economic changes underway, with the clearing of the Victorian-era slums, the growing challenges of a multi-racial population, and the rapid proliferation of television just some of the signs pointing to the future that was to come. This transition and the people who faced it are the subjects of David Kynaston’s book, which chronicles life in Britain between the Festival of Britain in 1951 and Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s resignation six years later.
In many respects Kynaston’s book is less a narrative of these years than a panorama that allows the reader to take in details both large and small. Through them he depicts the emergence of what he calls a “proto-consumerist” society from years of rationing and deprivation. As Britain shook off the postwar austerity, its citizens embraced the burgeoning prosperity as their due after their years of sacrifice. As Kynaston demonstrates it was a reward enjoyed by a broader swath of society than ever before, yet as more people enjoyed the benefits of prosperity a growing number of concerns were expressed about the damage being done to society, of the breakdown of communities and the rebelliousness of youth.
Kynaston recounts these years in a sympathetic and perceptive manner. Seemingly nothing is too insignificant to escape his attention, while his ability to draw significance from these trivial facts supplies added depth his account of the events and developments of the era. Yet his narrative never bogs down in the facts, transitioning smoothly from one topic to another without ever losing his reader’s interest. The result is a magnificent work, a worthy sequel to his earlier volume, and one that leaves its readers eager for the next installment in his “Tales of a New Jerusalem” series.
In many respects Kynaston’s book is less a narrative of these years than a panorama that allows the reader to take in details both large and small. Through them he depicts the emergence of what he calls a “proto-consumerist” society from years of rationing and deprivation. As Britain shook off the postwar austerity, its citizens embraced the burgeoning prosperity as their due after their years of sacrifice. As Kynaston demonstrates it was a reward enjoyed by a broader swath of society than ever before, yet as more people enjoyed the benefits of prosperity a growing number of concerns were expressed about the damage being done to society, of the breakdown of communities and the rebelliousness of youth.
Kynaston recounts these years in a sympathetic and perceptive manner. Seemingly nothing is too insignificant to escape his attention, while his ability to draw significance from these trivial facts supplies added depth his account of the events and developments of the era. Yet his narrative never bogs down in the facts, transitioning smoothly from one topic to another without ever losing his reader’s interest. The result is a magnificent work, a worthy sequel to his earlier volume, and one that leaves its readers eager for the next installment in his “Tales of a New Jerusalem” series.
March 29, 2010
I was a big fan of Kynaston's earlier book in the series, Austerity Britain. In my opinion, Family Britain is just as good, and maybe even a bit better. Again, the book is less of a history book and more of a snapshot, or series of snapshots, of the culture during a certain period of time (1951-1957). What makes these books so special is that instead of focusing on major events, they let us see into the everyday lives of Britons of different classes. Family Britain touches on the end of rationing, the rise of television (threatening to End Civilization As We Know It Since At Least 1951), the housing situation, labor strikes, Communism, the relationship between the sexes, the differences between the classes, race relations, vacations, and much much more. Kynaston goes into some depth on all of these subjects, which makes this book big and dense and a slow read - but so worth it!
November 12, 2009
A fascinating insight into my early teenage years documenting the constraints on my parents.
March 17, 2023
Der Bericht fängt da an, wo sein Vorgänger, "Austerity Britain" aufgehört hat. Der größte Teil des Landes wist wieder aufgebaut, aber jetzt gibt es andere Probleme. David Kynaston erzählt die Geschichten der Menschen von der Straße und zeichnet so ein buntes Bild aus einer spannenden Zeit.
Wie sein Vorgänger auch, beruht das Buch auf Umfragen und unzähligen Interviews mit Menschen und so gibt es viele spannende Geschichten, die erzählt werden. Manche sind amüsant, wie die Suche nach der perfekten Familie, die einen Sommerurlaub gewinnen kann und die landesweit durch die Medien ging. Oder die Erleichterung, als die Butter nicht mehr rationiert wurde und man endlich auf die lästige Margarine verzichten konnte. Die Freude derjenigen, die endlich in eine größere Wohnung oder in ein eigenes Haus umziehen konnte, war in den Zeilen deutlich zu spüren. Die Leute verließen die Städte und zogen zwar nicht aufs Land, aber in neu geplante Vororte oder Ortschaften, die in rasender Geschwindigkeit errichtet werden.
Nachdem das Leben gesichert war, konnte man sich anderen Dingen zuwenden. Das Leben und die Liebe von Prinzessin Margaret bewegte die Gemüter. Ob sie Peter Townsend heiraten würde beherrschte lange Zeit die Schlagezeilen. Daneben gab es natürlich noch Fußball und Kricket.
Aber es gab auch nicht so schöne Themen. Zwischen den Zeilen und auch offen konnte ich immer mehr Rassismus herauslesen. Viele Frauen redeten mehr oder weniger offen über Gewalt in der Beziehung. Es ist eben ein Querschnitt durch die Gesellschaft, den David Kynaston präsentiert, mit allen Höhen und Tiefen.
Wie sein Vorgänger auch, beruht das Buch auf Umfragen und unzähligen Interviews mit Menschen und so gibt es viele spannende Geschichten, die erzählt werden. Manche sind amüsant, wie die Suche nach der perfekten Familie, die einen Sommerurlaub gewinnen kann und die landesweit durch die Medien ging. Oder die Erleichterung, als die Butter nicht mehr rationiert wurde und man endlich auf die lästige Margarine verzichten konnte. Die Freude derjenigen, die endlich in eine größere Wohnung oder in ein eigenes Haus umziehen konnte, war in den Zeilen deutlich zu spüren. Die Leute verließen die Städte und zogen zwar nicht aufs Land, aber in neu geplante Vororte oder Ortschaften, die in rasender Geschwindigkeit errichtet werden.
Nachdem das Leben gesichert war, konnte man sich anderen Dingen zuwenden. Das Leben und die Liebe von Prinzessin Margaret bewegte die Gemüter. Ob sie Peter Townsend heiraten würde beherrschte lange Zeit die Schlagezeilen. Daneben gab es natürlich noch Fußball und Kricket.
Aber es gab auch nicht so schöne Themen. Zwischen den Zeilen und auch offen konnte ich immer mehr Rassismus herauslesen. Viele Frauen redeten mehr oder weniger offen über Gewalt in der Beziehung. Es ist eben ein Querschnitt durch die Gesellschaft, den David Kynaston präsentiert, mit allen Höhen und Tiefen.
December 5, 2018
It’s a brilliant concept for a history book, leading the reader along a short, linear time line and observes, with the minimal of historian analysis, the period in a collection of newspaper and magazine articles, and excerpts from personal diaries, some of which belong to ordinary citizens.
Though compared to the previous and first volume of Kynaston’s Britain books, I found this disappointingly pedestrian. Maybe this was the fault of history or maybe the relative easement of austerity makes for less drama and interest. Nevertheless, it appears this period was a transition for British culture and politics: the end of a popular sense of empire, the end of deference, a new, young generation emerging without profound sense of the war, an emerging modernity, technology and household gadgets - the modern consumerism. It’s a world which still seems monochrome but is by degrees moving towards the colourful sixties.
Okay, not as impactful as the first volume but good enough to make me read more.
Though compared to the previous and first volume of Kynaston’s Britain books, I found this disappointingly pedestrian. Maybe this was the fault of history or maybe the relative easement of austerity makes for less drama and interest. Nevertheless, it appears this period was a transition for British culture and politics: the end of a popular sense of empire, the end of deference, a new, young generation emerging without profound sense of the war, an emerging modernity, technology and household gadgets - the modern consumerism. It’s a world which still seems monochrome but is by degrees moving towards the colourful sixties.
Okay, not as impactful as the first volume but good enough to make me read more.
July 26, 2025
A continuation of the first volume covering 45-51, this picks up at the end of the Attlee administration, covers the Churchill second period in office and ends with the suez crisis.
Massively detailed, meticulously researched with contemporary diary entries and accounts including from the famous and influential.
Whilst numerous events and issues are covered (including slum housing and the council estates that replaced them, the end of rationing, as well as sporting, cultural and political events), There is an overwhelming sense to me of both how times have changed whilst at the same time many attitudes simply haven’t such as the societies wariness of the other including the laws against homosexuality and the advent of immigration at a time the economy desperately needed it - with the accounts of how many refused to work with people from overseas (and particularly those from the Caribbean) shocking even in the divisive times of the 2020s…
Totally engrossing though, Onto the next volume it is then!
Massively detailed, meticulously researched with contemporary diary entries and accounts including from the famous and influential.
Whilst numerous events and issues are covered (including slum housing and the council estates that replaced them, the end of rationing, as well as sporting, cultural and political events), There is an overwhelming sense to me of both how times have changed whilst at the same time many attitudes simply haven’t such as the societies wariness of the other including the laws against homosexuality and the advent of immigration at a time the economy desperately needed it - with the accounts of how many refused to work with people from overseas (and particularly those from the Caribbean) shocking even in the divisive times of the 2020s…
Totally engrossing though, Onto the next volume it is then!
November 4, 2019
A detailed study of life in Great Britain I've the five tumultuous years 1951-1957. If you watch the Netflix series 'The Crown' that's all of season 1 and the first three episodes of season 2.
Kynaston does a wonderful job of integrating the actual diaries of everyday people into the narrative, so we learn how a Yorkshire shopgirl viewed the death of King George VI ("They've taken all the good shows off the telly."), a London housewife's view of her new government- built suburban house, and so on.
One unfortunate aspect of the book is that it was clearly written by someone who lived through those years. As such, the author rarely stops to explain the impact of certain people or events. For example, do you know who Tony Benn was? He was one of the 20th century's most important and influential members of Parliament without being prime minister. You'd never learn that from this book, because since the author already knew that, he unconsciously assumed you did too.
Kynaston does a wonderful job of integrating the actual diaries of everyday people into the narrative, so we learn how a Yorkshire shopgirl viewed the death of King George VI ("They've taken all the good shows off the telly."), a London housewife's view of her new government- built suburban house, and so on.
One unfortunate aspect of the book is that it was clearly written by someone who lived through those years. As such, the author rarely stops to explain the impact of certain people or events. For example, do you know who Tony Benn was? He was one of the 20th century's most important and influential members of Parliament without being prime minister. You'd never learn that from this book, because since the author already knew that, he unconsciously assumed you did too.
February 2, 2025
Volume 2 of an exhaustive look at the UK from the end of WW II to the rise of Thatcher in 1979 (this volume notes what the future Iron Lady is doing, even though she's not yet of importance). The focus is on the voices of the period: diaries, official pronouncements, complaints in newspapers, government speeches, hit movies, statistical surveys, which gives it a sense of life-as-it's-happening. It is also confusing in spots as Kynaston doesn't provide explanatory material — the school issues leave me completely scratching my head, fof instance. As another review pointed out, dropping the name of Christine Keeler into the book probably didn't mean much to many readers (she'll later become involved in a major government scandal).
Britain itself is a country shaking off rationing, dealing with rock and roll and black immigrants, struggling to stay an economic powerhouse, vowing never to joining the EU and where a lot of people were still beaten down and miserable.
Excellent work.
Britain itself is a country shaking off rationing, dealing with rock and roll and black immigrants, struggling to stay an economic powerhouse, vowing never to joining the EU and where a lot of people were still beaten down and miserable.
Excellent work.
July 2, 2017
700 pages of sheer quality.
We start with Churchill's re-election, and end with the Suez crisis. It is extraordinary, 60 years later, what a low level impact the latter made upon the public. Those who gave it any thought at all considered it to be a resounding triumph, rather than the end of an Empire.
Sandwiched in between we have accounts of myxamatosis, the introduction of commercial TV and adverts, latent racism, blatant homophobia, Teddy Boys, Rock n Roll, washing machines, high rise flats, and a national obsession with eating chicken.
Beautifully written and brilliantly put together. I highly recommend this.
We start with Churchill's re-election, and end with the Suez crisis. It is extraordinary, 60 years later, what a low level impact the latter made upon the public. Those who gave it any thought at all considered it to be a resounding triumph, rather than the end of an Empire.
Sandwiched in between we have accounts of myxamatosis, the introduction of commercial TV and adverts, latent racism, blatant homophobia, Teddy Boys, Rock n Roll, washing machines, high rise flats, and a national obsession with eating chicken.
Beautifully written and brilliantly put together. I highly recommend this.
June 19, 2017
This is splendid series of which I plan to read in full. I was born in 1956 so, for me, the series which covers the period from 1945-1979 chronicling the social history of Britain is part nostalgia & part history. There are many voices heard throughout. It is a joy to read because it gets you closer to the lives of ordinary people as well as the less ordinary. Having finished it the period before I was born I feel much better informed & have a better understanding of the lives led by my parent's generation.
April 29, 2024
Reading this series of books is a real commitment but at the same time incredibly rewarding.
Family Britain takes you into a new phase in Britain's post war history when rationing disappears, the economic green shoots start to appear and a new era of consumerism begins. You also start to see the early signs of the forthcoming 1960's cultural revolution with the birth of rock n roll, a greater affluence in young people and new styles of theatre, cinema and books. Warning signs also start to appear with industrial unrest and European economies starting to outperform the UK.
The book aptly finishes after the Suez Crisis with the UK realising that its colonial past was over and would potentially have to pursue a new path in the future. I look forward to moving on to the next phase - Modernity Britain.
Family Britain takes you into a new phase in Britain's post war history when rationing disappears, the economic green shoots start to appear and a new era of consumerism begins. You also start to see the early signs of the forthcoming 1960's cultural revolution with the birth of rock n roll, a greater affluence in young people and new styles of theatre, cinema and books. Warning signs also start to appear with industrial unrest and European economies starting to outperform the UK.
The book aptly finishes after the Suez Crisis with the UK realising that its colonial past was over and would potentially have to pursue a new path in the future. I look forward to moving on to the next phase - Modernity Britain.
August 14, 2017
I really enjoyed Austerity Britain, but this was a bit of a slog. I may be misremembering the first volume, but my recollection is that it had a really good balance between vox pop contributions and the author's own analysis. This seemed to rely much more heavily on anecdotal quotes and it lacked focus as a result. It's still a really interesting book, particularly if, like mine, your parents grew up in that era - I'm just not sure the 696 page count is really warranted.
April 24, 2020
I loved the first in the series - "Austerity Britain" - and whizzed through it, but for some reason I found this second one rather a slog. I see I bought it (admittedly for only £1.29) seven years ago! Still, glad to have ploughed on through as of course there were some very interesting bits in the mix.
August 28, 2025
Apparently it has taken me 3 years to read this book. It is a book (actually 2 in 1) to be dipped into. While undoubtedly a well researched & written guide to 1951-1957, you do need a good thriller as a palate cleanser. 700 pages of small font size dryness, needs to stretched out.
Better start the next one now I guess.
Better start the next one now I guess.
December 26, 2021
This book captures the atmosphere of the early 1950s. The main focus of British people was their families. It was still an era of austerity although Britain was gradually recovering from the Second World War years. Attitudes were still very old fashioned compared to the present.
December 9, 2025
I seem to have read these in reverse order. What a way to explore the world we were born into and see the same mistakes happen again. Does history repeat itself? You bet it does.
Think this book may well have been my favourite of the series so far. Looking forward to the next one.
Think this book may well have been my favourite of the series so far. Looking forward to the next one.
November 3, 2017
Exhaustive but never exhausting, Kynaston's book paints a vivid and detailed picture of everyday life in '50s Britain.
August 15, 2019
Terrific continuation of this classic.
December 19, 2019
Took a while to read, but a great read. Brilliant social history really well written.
April 9, 2025
Family Britain is the second in Kynaston's series 'Tales of a New Jerusalem', telling the story of Britain from VE day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.
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