David Kynaston

This is a very rich, multi-layered account of life in Britain in the immediate post-war years, covering the years of the reforming Attlee Government, starting from VE day and ending in spring of 1951 just after the death of Ernest Bevin. It covers all aspects: political, economic, social, cultural, sporting, etc. There are many quotes from interviews taking place as part of the wonderful Mass Observation programme, as well as a lot of quotes from other sources, all of which cumulatively show show more the rich textures of life, the frustrations with austerity and deprivation even after years of peace, mixed with, for many, a real feeling that a marvellous new social direction had been undertaken, with the creation of the NHS and the welfare state and a feeling that mass unemployment had been banished forever. It was, in retrospect certainly, an era of ideological certainty and great hope for a better future, though the very granular picture shown in this book demonstrates that, as so often, hindsight oversimplifies the situation and gives to a whole era a plain gloss that masks the contradictions and complexities that always lie beneath. This is the first book of a projected series of six volumes covering the period 1945-79, the period during which the post-war consensus in favour of the welfare state more or less held firm. It promises to be a fascinating ride through this crucial period of modern history. 5/5 show less

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I read an greatly enjoyed the second book of this series a couple of years ago; I'm glad to say that the first is just as good, a detailed internal history of England (with a bit of Wales, less Scotland and no Northern Ireland) during basically the term of Attlee's Labour government. Kynaston's sympathy for the detail is tremendously engaging, and humanises a surprisingly alien place and time. There are some imporessive recurrent themes: rationing show more remained a constant reality (and of course enabled the black market to flourish), with most food remaining rationed until after the period covered in this book. Despite the Labour victory, government remained firmly in the hands of the civil service whose upper ranks shared a deep Establishment background - it was the 60s before anyone really challenged this. This was true also of the fledgling BBC, which did not even cover the 1950 World Cup (in which England was famously defeated by the Unites States). Some interesting people pop up again and again - Glenda Jackson and Pete Wyman, promising teenagers; the diarists both obscure (Henry St.John); and well-known (Molly Panter-Downs).

In contrast to the second book in the series, there is plenty of party politics here. The Labour Party, having won power (on the ideas framed by Michael Young, a figure I had forgotten about), successfully created the National Health Service and nationalised the coal mines, and crucially threw its lot in with Truman rather than Stalin. But I was unaware of the role that sudden death played in the politics of the day - Ellen Wilkinson, the Minister of Education, died in 1947, and Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary and the Lord Privy Seal, in 1951. (This just doesn't happen any more. The last British cabinet minister to die in office, of this writing, was Lord Williams of Mostyn in 2003; the last of the same weight as Wilkinson or Bevin was Anthony Crosland in 1977.)

The Labour government's reputation for competence was hit early on by an event for which it bore no responsibility and whose consequences it would have been very difficult for any government to mitigate: the exceptionally cold winter of 1946/47. Six weeks of very cold weather from late January to early March were followed by heavy rain, which added to the thaw to flood towns and countryside. The winter of 1962-63 was colder, but I guess that the country's infrastructure was better able to cope (and it was not immediately followed by heavy rain, as had happened in 1947). The bad weather hit industrial and agricultural productivity very hard, and certainly prolonged rationing and post-war hardship. Kynaston describes all of this vividly but unsentimentally, possibly the best passage of the book.

In summary, well worth reading. show less

Post-war Britain has been well-covered by historians in recent years but no one does it quite like David Kynaston. His books combine epic range with extraordinary detail. The panoramic sweep of a Kynaston sentence - collating events both momentous and mundane, sometimes undulating over a page and a half, and held together precariously by semi-colons - can be rather dizzying. He peppers his text with (or perhaps more accurately creates his text out of) extensive quotations from diarists (some show more famous but many not), contemporary interviews, memoirs and letters. This tapestry of voices brings the past to life with unusual vividness.

A Northern Wind is the fifth volume in Kynaston’s history of Britain from 1945 to 1979. It starts on Saturday 6th October 1962, the day after the release of the Beatles first single, and ends on Saturday 30th January 1965, the day of Winston Churchill’s funeral. So this doorstopper of a book covers just twenty-seven months. It was, though, an eventful period - the Profumo scandal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Train Robbery, the Big Freeze of 1963, Dr Beeching chopping up the railways and Doctor Who materialising for the first time - and one of accelerating change. 1963 was after all, at least according to Philip Larkin who makes frequent appearances in these pages, the year that sexual intercourse began. The Profumo scandal aside there’s not much sex here but lots of signs nonetheless that Britain was, albeit gingerly, starting to let its hair down: the rise of youth culture, the fresh energy of the Beatles and the Stones, increasing car ownership and the emergence of shopping as a leisure activity. The impression is of a culture transitioning from the communal to the individualistic. But not all the changes were for the better. Excessive slum clearance saw the widespread demolition of Victorian terraces and their working-class inhabitants transplanted to soulless and dehumanising tower blocks; atomisation rather than individualism.

One of Kynaston’s great strengths is his acute sensitivity to the muddled and even contradictory nature of history: ‘Any moment in history is Janus-faced: simultaneously looking backwards and forwards’. His somewhat tentative conclusion (judicious tentativeness is one of the many things I admire about him) is that at this stage Britain was still mainly looking backwards ‘despite the siren call of modernity from politicians, town planners, architects and others’. Borrowing a resonant phrase from Richard Hoggart he notes how ‘old habits persist’.

He certainly offers plenty of evidence that Britain in the early to mid-sixties remained a fundamentally conservative and hierarchical society characterised by deference, inequality, widespread poverty and strong class divisions. It was also a society in which racism, sexism and homophobia were endemic. In a quiet and entirely unshowy way Kynaston explodes a lot of myths. For instance, despite moral panic about mods and rockers causing havoc at the seaside, sociological surveys carried out at the time revealed that most teenagers wanted little more than a steady job and to get married and settle down; so much for ‘youthquake’. This might have been the golden age of the radical and challenging TV play but audience research showed that the majority of viewers disliked these plays, preferring more traditional fare such as Dixon of Dock Green and Dr Finlay’s Casebook. The satirical TV programme That Was The Week That Was, first aired in November 1962 and cancelled by the BBC just over a year later, has been both praised and blamed for contributing towards a liberalising mood and even bringing about the death of deference. It was certainly popular (around eight million viewers at its height) but, rather tellingly, nowhere near as popular as the egregious Black and White Minstrel Show (sixteen and a half million regular viewers). Canvassing for the Labour Party during the 1964 general election the young Tariq Ali was shocked by the deferential respect and support shown by many older working-class voters towards the leader of the Conservative Party, the aristocratic old Etonian Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Labour, led by the modernising, grammar school educated Yorkshireman Harold Wilson, won the election after thirteen years of Tory rule; but only just, scraping past the winning post with a measly overall majority of four, despite a widespread feeling that the Conservatives were out of touch and out of steam.

This is a magnificent book: densely packed and immersive history which conveys the bewildering diversity of daily life. Kynaston’s nuanced analysis rejects the familiar superficial and nostalgic cliches in favour of a more complex, and in many ways darker, portrait of sixties Britain. Above all he captures what it felt like for ordinary people to live through this particular stretch of time; grand events viewed from a quotidian perspective. show less

Whew! Six weeks and 692 pages after cracking it open, I finally turned the last page in this history of Britain in the years immediately following World War II. The first word that comes to mind is NOT "exhausting" — rather it's "fascinating". As long as it took to read, I was sorry to see it end, and you can't say that about every 600-page book you read!

I was completely absorbed in Kynaston's meticulously detailed and annotated social history. He draws on public records, contemporaneous show more media reports, and most of all the personal diaries of scads of ordinary and not-so-ordinary Britons to lay bare not only the facts of what happened, when, and by whom, but how people from all walks of life felt and coped with it. Now and then I spotted the name of a Brit who was unknown then and has since become famous, but I suspect I missed a number that would have been recognizable to their fellow countrymen. One that I didn't miss sent a bit of a chill up my spine, as Kynaston scatters without fanfare a few informational nuggets about an unsuccessful young Tory politician named Margaret Roberts, who had yet to marry her eventual husband, Denis Thatcher. We've all seen how that movie ends.

The beauty of Kynaston's approach of mining personal diaries for information is the sheer depth and breadth of his depiction of the era's impact on the people of Great Britain. Even though I consider myself a history junkie I confess I had no idea how seriously difficult the country's economic situation was once VE- and VJ-Day had come and gone. Anecdotes about massive housing shortages, the continuing rationing of just about every household good you can imagine, and mandatory electrical blackouts for hours every day to conserve energy took a tremendous toll on the quality of people's physical and emotional lives. Despite the landslide victory by the Labour Party in 1945, the government struggled to implement democratic socialist policies that were meant to ease the post-war pain and jump-start the economy. Kynaston does a good job of laying out the reasons for their only sporadic success. (The one program that was popular from the start was the National Health Service, which this American read about with wistful envy.)

The only blemish keeping this from being a 5-star book for me might not be a factor for others: The book is clearly written for a British audience, and Kynaston tosses out names of sports teams and players, radio and television programmes and actors with little or no context. More than once he related an anecdote about a big crowd at some sporting event or other without specifying what sport he was talking about. I'm sure to Britons it's all perfectly clear, but I felt a bit at sea with these pop-culture and other insular references.

There are two further books (so far) in this historical series, [Family Britain: 1951-57] and [Modernity Britain 1957-62]. I believe Kynaston intends to take the series up to Thatcher's ascension to prime minister in 1979. I'm already on the lookout for a reasonably priced ebook of the next, as I can't imagine not continuing to learn more about this utterly fascinating topic. show less