Customer Reviews

Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (Tales of a New Jerusalem 1)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

David Kynaston begins his book, the first of a planned multi-volume survey of Britain, on a high note by chronicling the celebrations of V-E Day. It is a joyous starting point for his ambitious goal, which is to chart the evolution of the nation from the end of the Second World War to the election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in 1979. It is an era that began with the commitment to nationalizing industries and creating the modern welfare state and ended with a government winning power with a promise to undo many of these programs, and Kynaston plans to show how the country developed over this period. This he does by focusing on the people who lived in those times, drawing from the early work of Mass-Observation, contemporary press accounts and the private writings of diarists to provide a sprawling portrait of Britain in the late 1940s.

What particularly stands out is how much different the nation was back then. The Britain that emerges from these pages is a nation driven by an industrial economy, with an overwhelmingly white and predominantly male workforce in physically demanding jobs producing a quarter of the world's manufactured goods. The everyday lives of these Britons was different as well, lacking not only the modern conveniences that the author notes early in the text but even many of the basics of prewar life, basics which had been sacrificed to the exigencies of war. Kynaston notes their growing frustration with ongoing scarcity, a frustration that illustrated the gulf between their harsh realities and the idealistic dreams of government planners that is a persistent theme of the book.

Richly detailed, superbly written, and supplemented with excellent photographs, Kynaston's book is an outstanding account of postwar Britain. It offers readers an evocative account of a much different era of British history, yet one with all-too familiar concerns over youth, crime, and an emerging multiracial society. Having devoured its pages, I look forward eagerly to the next installment and the insights Kynaston will offer.

Written for a British eye more than for an American, this American learned a stronger respect for the people of Britain for the way they won the war and then won back their share of industry and prosperity. Having won a glorious victory, within hours the victorious citizens of the country that sustained almost six years of war following on a prolonged depression realized that the trials of war time would be extended by the austerity of post-war Europe. While England won the war, they paid a high price. More important, the collective, heroic efforts of the large working class produced a tide of enthusiasm for nationalisation of industry, housing to replace the hundreds of thousands displaced by German bombing, and a broad social welfare plan focusing primarily on health care.

It is not a pretty story. Post-war England was drab, lacking many basics, watching its empire dissolve, and driven by a strong, centralized plan to restore the economy that changed the basic way people looked at business and government. And, with the continuing pressures of rebuilding the rest of Europe, the threat of further communist expansion, and the rise of American power, perhaps Britain went too far in moving towards a benevolent but often clumsy and experimental form of socialism. It would be almost another forty years and the decisions of the Thatcher government, that saw the maturity and, in some cases, the reversal of this social and cultural experiment.

This is a long, dense and colorful book, full of first-person details and observations, many of them from the surveys and observations of the government itself. Chapters focus on various aspects of the cultural and social revolution, in the classroom, on the factory floor, in the (mine) pits, in the shops, in the media, and more. At one bookstore where I looked for the book, they claimed that it was a textbook and not part of their trade book collection. While it is as thorough -- or more -- as any academic textbook, it reads more like a highly detailed, multi-authored journal or catalog of the period. Invest the time.

I bought this book at the same time I purchased Peter Clarke's marvelous "The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire" on what I thought the reasonable assumption that it might provide the social history complement to Clarke's account of the geopolitical death rattles of the Empire following the war. That it precisely served that function better than I could have imagined does not in any way diminish its value as a brilliant stand-alone analysis of everyday life in post-war Britain that will certainly never be duplicated in either its scholarship or compass. Kynaston weaves an incredibly rich fabric of first-person accounts and commentaries ranging from housewives to the Labour party's leadership to incipient and established entertainers to sports stars and innumerable others high and low on the social scale, each citation perfectly apt and illustrative in its context. The reader feels he is living the period, suffering with the deprived homemaker, hoping against experience with the coal miner, sensing pitfalls to the social planning completely unanticipated at the time, and generally acquiring an understanding of those years that completely supplants everything one thought one knew of the subject. The book is a bit of a slog what with over 600 pages of text, and in my experience, there are very few works of this size that are worth the time and effort. Be assured that this is one of them and that every reader is looking forward to the promised sequel covering the years 1953-79. Social history, indeed, history, doesn't get much better than this.

Austerity Britain presents an interesting retrospective on the tough times in the immediate post-war era. It is a good companion/follow on to "How we lived then" about the actual war years. Some of the political philosophy, particularly in the earlier chapters can be a bit heavy going, but the view on what it was like to live through the period is good, particularly if you did actually survive those years, as did this reviewer.

A very nice journey into the past, where you as the traveler, are entertained, amazed and surprised at how the English people survived the war. I was entranced to read how the English took everything, well actually, without anything that we all took for granted, in stride. They suffered the most during the war and gave their all for victory. This is a wonderful story told as how it was to live, eat, entertain and get on.

Before purchasing this book, I actually bought and read Austerity Britain: Smoke In The Valley by the same author. I didn't know at the time of the recent purchase that 'Smoke in the Valley' is actually a stand-alone publication of the second half of 'Austerity Britain 1945-51'. Prospective purchasers of either should be aware of this fact.

All in all, I derived some enjoyment from this book because of my interest in the time period. However, I did not feel able to award more than three stars because of a couple of serious criticisms: Firstly (and I admit this is a matter of personal taste), I thought the focus on the politics of the period was given too much emphasis over other aspects of social life. Secondly, and far more importantly, the structure and organization of this fairly lengthy work is abominable. In any give chapter, the author will speak of some particular general topic (such as rationing) and then, within a paragraph or so, suddenly switch to something like the divorce rate in a specified year, and then, just as suddenly and haphazardly, go onto something just as radically different. These same topics will then get visited and re-visited dozens of times (the order of change from one to the other differing from chapter to chapter) without any sort of logical linkage. I might have enjoyed this work very much had not the disorganization made reading it so very laborious to plod through.

David Kynaston takes a very simple, but efective approach, to his social history of Britain in the immediate post war years. He has scanned the newspapers and magazines of the day, read the diaries of the famous and the not so famous, made a lot of use of Mass Observation and the nascent public opinion polling of the day to construct both a people's narrative of 1945 to 1951 but also to explore in more depth issues such as nationalisation, the setting up of the welfare state, women in the workplace, urban planning and reconstruction and others.
All of which makes it highly readable, and one is struck both by the conservatism of British society (even though a reformist, overtly Socialist Labour government was elected to power in 1945) and the determination to create social justice (The New Jerusalem of the title) in Britain with scant regard for the situation in Britain's many colonies. Indeed one of the most striking arguments put forward in the book is that an early abandonment of the colonial project and deployment of the resources it took up into trade and industry may have resulted in Britain at least maintaining its pre war position as one of the great powers, rather than standing by as that preeminence gradually dribbled away
If there are any criticisms of this work, it is probably reflects the sources available to Kyanaston. There is no mention of Northern Ireland, little of Wales (other than the South Wales collieries) and little of the northern parts of England. Scotland is mainly discussed in the context of the urban planning of Glasgow
But as I say, this may be due to a lack of sources from those areas. What is a little more puzzling is a lack of discussion of the reintegration into society of demobilised servicemen - surely a key issue of the time
But none the less an excellent history, I am looking forward to the next volume

I was born in England a few weeks after the end of WWII, and the book brought back bittersweet memories of the period David Kynaston writes about. Reading Austerity Britain, I can picture walking to the little parade of shops with my mother, and seing her hand over coupons for the miserable rations of butter and sugar we were allowed. I remember seeing the Festival of Britain, the Skylon and the Emmett Railway, (and eating doughnuts for the first time - a taste I've never lost!). And that period where just about every man wore a trilby hat.
Kynaston describes it all so perfectly, and his writing style is so unobtrusive, I could hardly put the book down. Like the other reviewers, I am very much looking forward to the next volume.

An excellent description of that time in England. Brought back a lot of memories. Probably less interesting to folks who had NOT lived through it.

I have to confess to being somewhat disappointed by David Kynaston's Austerity Britain: 1945 to 1951. At 633 pages (plus notes), it brings new meaning to the terms "ponderous tome" and "laborious read". On the plus side, it does offer a considerable amount of well-researched detail about the period. But that said, it is crippled in presentation by a frequently frustrating lack of context and a baffling lack of structure. Reading through it was a considerable struggle, somewhat on the scale of attempting to put together a 10K piece jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box cover to serve as a guide. All in all, I think that the real target audience for this book is either people who are already fairly familiar with the period or Britons who are over the age of 60 and can actually remember it.

While the individual details are interesting, the lack of context leave the reader in something of a muddle, very much a case of being unable to see the forest for the trees. And while the quotes from individuals, famous and ordinary, from the period do offer interesting insight, after a while one gets the impression that Kynaston is determined to include a quote from every single person who ever lived in or visited Britain during those years. It really does get to be overkill after a while.

And once one has finally slogged through the 600-plus pages, the final frustration is that the book simply ends. No conclusion, no summary, no particular historical event or context to mark the end of the period. It just... stops. One is left with the impression that no editor ever came anywhere near this book before it was sent off to the printers.

I can partly recommend this for anyone who is already fairly familiar with the period as it can offer some interesting details on what was going on and how people felt about it, a useful reference for those who want to dig deeper on a particular aspect. But for anyone unfamiliar with the period who wants to learn about it and understand it, this is definitely not the book you want.