The record-breaking reign of Queen Elizabeth II has seen Britain transformed. Richard Nye travels back to 1952 with David Kynaston, a leading social historian of the postwar years.
Seven decades on, the Great Smog which blanketed London at the fag end of 1952 has come to seem curiously emblematic: a sulphurous curtain separating a lost world from the one we inhabit today. To revisit that first year of the new Elizabethan age is to discover a realm where, as in the smog, familiar landmarks loom erratically out of the blankness, reassuring time tourists that they are still in the country called home.
And yet, as in that same infamous peasouper, it is also to find oneself a stranger in a strange land; a place in which many of the assumptions, aspirations and boundaries are beyond recognition for the visitor from 2022.
Britain in the early 1950s was still a world of willowherb and collective convalescence. The good times, fuelled by full employment and a steady increase in prosperity, were close at hand. But on the sombre February morning when George VI died, and a young Princess Elizabeth was summoned from Kenya to ascend the throne, the landscape was still littered with bomb sites and aching gaps waiting to be filled.
Ration books, almost seven years on from the end of hostilities, remained a ‘must-have' accessory. In the parlour the wireless was king; rock ‘n’ roll had yet to enter the lexicon; Benidorm might as well have been the Congo.
Exhausted not only by hardship and war but also perhaps by the Labour government’s nationalizing zeal, the British people had re-elected the Conservatives the previous October, thus bringing Churchill back to power.
“British society was in some sense frozen in the ten years or so after the war,” writes historian David Kynaston in Family Britain, the second volume of his much-lauded, still unfolding chronicle of the homeland after 1945. “There was for most people…an instinctive retreat to familiar ways.”
The city centre bomb sites, he goes on, constituted “a visually eloquent symbol of this protracted hiatus” before the forces of change kicked in. It was the final, faltering fling for a way of life with its roots in Victorian soil.
“I called the first section The Certainties of Place,” he reflects from his New Malden home, more than a decade after the work was published and serialized as Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
“There was a geographical side to that, as people gravitated towards the familiar. Even on holiday, if you went to Blackpool, you were probably going to end up with your neighbour from Burnley.
But also life was hierarchical, very socially conservative – everyone had their place. With full employment, you were probably safe in your job, but you might be in it for 20 years before you got anywhere.
“Was that better or worse? Well, I’m on the fence. Yes, there was a lot of illiberalism and boring conformity, but on the other hand, there was a kind of security. As I get older, I value that more and more. Insecurity, I think, drives much of the mental illness we see today.”
And yet, as Heraclitus would insist, the only permanence is found in transition. Deep within this comfortable wilderness of lassitude and pedestrian relief, vigorous new streams were beginning to flow. And nowhere more so than on the contested battlefield of urban architectural reconstruction.
Some looked to the skies, chiselling out their brutalist, high-rise dreams amid the wreckage of insanitary slums; others got on by getting out, forsaking the traditional, tightknit communities of their birth for the new towns and planned estates beyond the suburban fringe. Each solution brought its own set of problems; isolation became a common complaint. Yet many of the early settlers of Harlow, Hemel Hempstead and the like flourished happily in their new surrounds.
“It wasn’t for everyone,” says Kynaston. “Many older people preferred to stay put, hoping their existing homes would see them out. But those wishing to move were more representative.”
Attitudes were changing too. Nobody yet was hurling deckchairs, looking back in anger or rocking around the clock. Yet above the surface calm rose the mutterings of youthful unrest, adumbrating more rebellious times to come. Teddy boys had arrived to strut the dance floor, haunt the sleep of the respectable and menace the maidens of Tunbridge Wells.
Within five years the theatre critic of the New Statesman would describe the tone of the 50s as “desperate, savage and resentful” – even if, for now at least, the reassuring rustle of Mrs Dale’s Diary still drowned out the ominous noises off.
“If you were a Teddy boy in 1952, you were probably a child during the war,” says David. “You may actually have enjoyed it – a lot of children did. Now, seven years on, you’re swilling in testosterone and longing for a bit more adventure.”
Doesn’t the undertow of rage speak too loudly of ingratitude for a people still banking the dividends of peace? “Yes, but people are ungrateful. I feel ashamed when I think of myself going off to university in the 70s, all paid for, and simply taking it for granted. Most people don’t care much about what happens beyond the White Cliffs of Dover.
Even things as big as Suez or Indian independence, ordinary diarists of the time barely mention them. And when George VI died, what really comes across is how upset they were that their favourite radio programmes were cancelled.”
Violence though comes in many forms – and the early 1950s had its very own signature mix. While the Teddy boys sharpened their quiffs, the hangman was busy despatching the likes of Tim Evans, John Christie and Ruth Ellis – the innocent, the guilty and the tragic alike. Bigotry cloaked in self-righteous rags still stalked the lavatories and the cells.
And then came the H bomb, generating heat and blinding light in a Cold War that threatened to put everything on ice. Plus ça change. Thirty years on from the end of that first Cold War, the successors of the Soviets have apparently pitched us all into a second. Suddenly, it is as if the patient work of the postwar years is in danger of evaporating into contaminated air.
Or is it? David Kynaston is not so sure. “I certainly think that the world is dividing more and more into liberal and illiberal camps, but beyond that, I would hesitate to go. Goethe once remarked that we are far too impressed with the present, and it’s simply too soon to know how significant recent events, the war in Ukraine and so on, will ultimately turn out to be.”
But at least for now, and for a little while longer, we have HM The Queen: the universally admired sovereign under whom the vast majority of us have lived our entire lives. This unprecedented Platinum Jubilee, with its rash of grateful parties and parades, will almost certainly be her last full-throated hurrah. Then comes the future.
Or perhaps it is already here. A decade into her reign, on a visit to Australia, the Queen was famously the recipient of a gushing public tribute from the long-term Liberal prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies.
“I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die,” he announced, quoting the 16th-century poet Thomas Ford. Now, when the royals go on Commonwealth tours, they are more likely to receive reparation demands for the evils of long ago. And here at home, one senses, republican sympathies will only gather strength once the Elizabethan bulwark is down.
“I feel sorry for Prince Charles,” muses Kynaston. “The monarchy is certainly in a worse place than 70 years ago, and it will lose popularity even further when the Queen dies. Will it still be here in 70 years’ time? I don’t know. But if I had to bet, I think I’d probably bet that it will. Never underestimate the forces of social conservatism.”
He makes it sound just like 1952.
Family Britain 1951-57, by David Kynaston, is published by Bloomsbury. The latest volume in the series, A Northern Wind: Opportunity Britain 1962-65, is due out in September 2023
