Like many people living overseas, I like to keep up on events back home. A subscription to The Economist gives me the pulse of English politics, the London Review of Books helps me keep my English academic feet wet, and regular visits to the BBC Sport website allow me to follow the disappointments of the England football/soccer team. But there is nothing like a trip home to find out how home is really doing.
On a visit last summer, I met Raymond Elliott. Mr. Elliott is an affable fellow who cleans my parents’ windows. But of late, his visits to my parents’ house have become longer as he and my now-retired father discuss a shared enemy: squirrels. Gray, North American squirrels to be precise. Introduced to Britain in the 19th century, they have long been fauna non grata because of the harm they cause to native species. My dad hates them because they steal the nuts he puts out for the birds. To my utter surprise, he bought an air gun to attack the blighters (no luck there). Traps work better, and there is an ominous barrel of water at the side of the house in which many furry rodents have swum briefly and then expired.
At least there was a barrel. I think it is now out of commission due to conversations with Mr. Elliott, another bird-lover, who was on trial for cruelty to animals because he trapped and then drowned a squirrel. When I met him, he had just had his first court appearance; as I sit down to write, he has a criminal record, the first person to be convicted under the 2006 Animal Welfare Act for harming a non-domestic animal.
I took some perverse enjoyment in listening to Mr. Elliott and my father discuss different ways of disposing of squirrels. You can’t release them into the wild: that is forbidden under the 1981 Countryside Act. Apparently, putting them in a bag and whacking them with a shovel is humane and therefore allowed. You can also attach the bag to the exhaust of your car.
I thought of this story as I read the first two volumes of David Kynaston’s wonderful history of Britain.[1] They take the reader from 1945 to 1957, and are the start of a series of undisclosed length that will finish when Kynaston has made it to 1979. Both are long books, and certainly not for the time-pressed student looking for clear arguments to incorporate into a paper or dissertation. Rather, reading these books feels like a visit to the past. Many historians will give you the equivalent of The Economist or the BBC, with lots of detail on politics, economics, social trends, and the like, but Kynaston wants to do more than that. He wants you to know what life was like for the people who lived in Britain in the 1940s and ’50s.
It’s not an easy task. Historians will always tell you that their sources are too patchy to give a complete picture. But Kynaston has done an excellent job. The research behind his books is extraordinary. He has pillaged autobiographies, diaries, surveys, newspapers, and the archives of Mass Observation, an organization that used hundreds of volunteers to record what they saw and heard on the streets of mid-century Britain. Occasionally, there is still the problem that we hear more from the people at the top of the pile: Kynaston’s account of working-class culture depends heavily on autobiographies of those who made it big and therefore left that life behind. On the whole, however, he does as good a job as I have seen of bringing Britons of the recent past to life.
Whether charming, quirky, or poignant, Kynaston’s stories are not mere color. He uses them to illumine broad social trends. To return to squirrels for a moment: I found Mr. Elliott’s woes intriguing, but the real interest lay in what they revealed about contemporary Britain. Sitting here in my office in California, I could keep up on British debates about intrusive government, personal liberty, and the state of the legal system, but it was a conversation with Mr. Elliott that brought all these to life. So in Kynaston’s books. The stories are illustrative and highly evocative.
Kynaston begins volume 1 on May 8, 1945: VE Day. He contrasts the riotous scenes of singing and celebration in central London with the more subdued mood elsewhere, reminding us of the many whose joy carried a heavy tinge of grief. He also points to the hatreds the war had bred, telling of a children’s street party where a maid charged people sixpence a time to spit on a Nazi flag. After hundreds of pages, one gets used to this sort of thing: lots of detail and complexity portrayed through the accounts of everyone from diplomats to dressmakers.
After his account of VE Day in chapter 1, Kynaston sets out his stall on the first page of chapter 2 with a delightful and instructive list:
Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles [cell phones], no duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian Restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street … trams, trolley-buses, steam trains …. Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no “teenagers.” Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.
The rest of volume one describes the immediate postwar years. Americans are often puzzled by the British electorate’s dismissal of Churchill in 1945, their seeming ingratitude to the man who had urged them to fight on the beaches and so on. But Kynaston explains why most British people have long been able to be grateful both to Churchill and to Clement Attlee, the Labour party leader who replaced him in 10 Downing Street that summer. “There’ll have to be more equalness,” said one working-class Londoner. “Things not fair now. Nobody can tell me they are. There’s them with more money what they can ever use. This ain’t right and it’s got to be put right.” And here, the Conservative Churchill did not look a safe pair of hands. Attlee did, and most British people still regard the welfare state brought in by his government as one of the greatest political achievements of the 20th century.
The focus of volume 1 is on the appalling living conditions in Britain after the war. Rationing is a major topic. The end of the war did not mean the return of plentiful food; bacon and egg rations were cut further in February 1946. Kynaston records people’s responses to the idea that some of their food should go to help people in Germany who were even worse off: “I don’t think we could do it”; “It’s Germany’s turn to do without”; “I think it’s up to America—when you read in the papers about what they eat”; “I think the Germans ought to go short, after all they’ve done”; “I suppose we’d do it if we had to. I hope it won’t come to that.”
Kynaston uses postwar discussions about housing to very good effect. Thousands of properties were destroyed in the Blitz, and there were big debates about how to rebuild. What they reveal is that the people running the country often had a firm and yet very poor understanding of what everyone else wanted. In this case, the planners put their faith in high-rise apartment buildings, believing that people would eventually come around to them despite their stated preference for houses and privacy. (They didn’t.)
The rebuilding of Coventry was a case in point. Here, Donald Gibson won approval for a modernist-inspired, improving city on the bombed ruins, but the reception was very mixed. Some were enthusiastic, but other letters in the Coventry Evening Telegraph included sentiments such as “Give us Coventry back as we knew it” and Herbert E. Edwards’ panning of “the hard, rigid lines of those monstrous buildings.” What I found especially pleasing, and convincing, was that Kynaston also made room for those who didn’t have the energy to care. “Whatever they proposed to do in the rebuilding, you sort of went along with it in a sort of zombie-like fashion, at least I did,” recalled Celia Grew. ” ‘Cause you see I had got things happening in my own life with my husband getting wounded and being brought to Bromsgrove Hospital and me going over there to see him and all that kind of stuff.”
Here, the size of the books is a real asset: Kynaston has space to give Celia Grew her say. But the reader feels an odd tension: on the one hand, the rich description invites you to relax and wallow in the 1940s, but if you don’t pay attention you may miss the big points that Kynaston is trying to make. Occasionally, he flags particular debates as he goes along, as in chapter 9 of Family Britain, for example, where he spends 26 pages on the debate over whether working-class community really existed in postwar Britain (his answer: somewhat). But for the most part, Kynaston expects his readers to absorb his arguments. Thankfully, they are rather conventional anyway: there is no major reinterpretation of postwar Britain to worry about.
Family Britain picks up the story with the 1951 Festival of Britain, long lambasted as an élite attempt at moral improvement for the masses, and the by-now predictably varied responses emerge. Kynaston covers the coronation, the New Towns, smoking, Churchill’s return to power, Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile (when his time was announced, the crowd drowned out everything after “The time is 3 …”), education, West Indians, churchgoing, greyhound racing, the end of rationing, Hungary’s famous defeat of the England football team, and the Suez Crisis. To name a very few. The picture is the standard one of the conservative 1950s, a hierarchical society where most people were glad to have enough food and unlikely to grumble much. Family Britain also includes the tales and testimonies of innumerable individuals. Kynaston, born in 1951, includes one personal reminiscence from a visit to his uncle and aunt’s house to illustrate the growing popularity of chicken as factory farming made it more affordable: “Oh no, not another bloody chicken!” were the words of his cousin when it was poultry again for Sunday lunch.
Even British readers, let alone American ones, will stumble over some of the details. A Wykehamist is someone who attended the prestigious boarding school in Winchester; Ernie was the name of the computer that generated the winning numbers in a weekly savings lottery. People on this side of the Atlantic will recognize many of the they-grew-up-to-be-famous people, such as Mike [sic] Jagger and John Lennon; other British household names will elude them (Kenny Everett, anyone?).
These books have been very popular in Britain, with The Times naming Austerity Britain as its Book of the Decade in December 2009. It is not hard to see why so many have read at least some of one or the other of these books. Most readers are, I imagine, people like Kynaston, who lived in Britain during these years and who want to visit again. Thankfully, however, the books are not simply an exercise in nostalgia. Kynaston likes the country he describes and the people who lived there, but he is honest about the injustices, indignities, and dirt. I doubt that he or any of his readers would really want to go back and live in the world he describes. We rather like our washing machines, our chicken tikka masala, our mobile phones, our bananas, our clean air, our cars with windows that open. Although back then no one would have troubled Mr. Elliott for drowning squirrels.
Alister Chapman is associate professor of history at Westmont College. With John Coffey and Brad Gregory, he is the editor of Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Univ. of Notre Dame Press). His book Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
1. The first volume was reviewed by Bill McKibben in the September/October 2008 issue of Books and Culture.
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