Austerity Britain 1951-56 by David Kynaston
Bloomsbury, £25
Planning and control were the catch phrases of the 1950s as Britain slowly began to recover from the devastation wreaked by the Second World War. Rationing continued until 1954 and, when Winston Churchill was told what constituted the weekly food ration, he assumed it was for a single meal rather than for the whole week, beautifully illustrating the prevalence of class within a society undergoing profound change.
After the heady programme of the post-war Labour Party, including the nationalisation of failing major industries and the foundation of the welfare state under the governments of Clement Attlee, the Tory victory reflected popular doubts about the rate of change. As David Kynaston makes clear in his sociological account of this fascinating period, far from attempting to reverse any of the dramatic changes, they pursued them with renewed vigour. Committed to a huge housing programme, the Tories deviously reduced the size of flats and houses so enabling them to more easily meet their targets, though at the expense of decent sized flats in favour of cramped, pokey spaces.
Having scoured newspapers, magazines, individual reminiscences, diaries and surveys, including Mass Observation, Austerity Britain paints a vivid and often gripping picture of the lives of ordinary people as well as those of the middle classes. Tribune is among publications quoted for its progressive comments on topical affairs. While planning committees sought to redevelop, what is clear is that ordinary people were rarely consulted or their views taken into account. While they wanted to retain their two-up and two-down houses but to have them modernised with bathrooms and hot water, the authorities wanted them demolished in favour of more economical high rise flats, so destroying any sense of community or collective identity.
Popular developments such as the advent of television, human stories like Princess Margaret’s affair with Peter Townsend, as well as the Suez crisis, are just a few of the topics covered. Occasionally Kynaston appears naïve. Women in working class homes may have knitted as a hobby but it was more a way of providing good cheap clothes. Football had such a huge following because the teams included local lads, so had a strong identification with place. But these are minor carps in a book that brings the period to life through real, lived experience, intelligently knitted together in a narrative that is both highly readable and informative.
Emmanuel Cooper
