Post-modern reassessment The 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

Not until ten years after the end of the war did the most striking changes in social mores and external fashions take place which were to give the post-war world a totally distinct set of attitudes from those of the thirties. Under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was launched in 1958 and the first of the protest marches to Aldermaston was organised. The crushing of a Hungarian rising by Russian tanks in 1956 had added to the fear of Soviet intentions, while the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in the same year provoked in the so-called ‘Suez crisis’ a bitter national schism between those who, like Sir Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, believed in putting dictators such as President Nasser of Egypt in their place, and those who felt that British action of this kind was a throw-back to the bad old imperial days. Such political issues bred a smouldering sense that there was a lot of hard-bitten old prejudice to deal with in the British mind. It was fanned in the moral field by the controversy surrounding the publication in 1957 of the Wolfenden Report on Homosexual Offences which prepared the way for legalisation of homosexual practices between consenting adults, and by the unsuccessful prosecution of the publishers of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960.