Post-war Britain Research Articles

Piers Legh. The Conservative Party and the Destruction of Selective Education in Post-War Britain: The Great Evasion London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Pp. 256. $115.00 (cloth).

Piers Legh. The Conservative Party and the Destruction of Selective Education in Post-War Britain: The Great Evasion London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Pp. 256. $115.00 (cloth).

Constructing Disraeli in Twentieth-Century Conservatism

Abstract Since the 1960s, when historians first dethroned the dominant view of Benjamin Disraeli as a Tory democrat and social reformer, his association with an interventionist, socially inclusive Conservatism has largely been considered an exercise in political myth-making. This focus on the Disraeli ‘myth’ has tended to obscure the myriad and substantive ways in which Disraeli’s life and works were interpreted and put to work in Conservative ideological debates and political practice in the twentieth century, reducing them to social policy and state intervention in the economy and overlooking the lineages of his political career in Conservative political economy debates, conceptions of the nation and the constitution, and imperial and foreign policy thinking. This article examines interpretations of Disraeli, and how his legacy was constructed, by conservative biographers, historians and public intellectuals from the decades after his death until the historiography of the 1960s. It traces how Disraeli was memorialised and celebrated in the Conservative movement and popular culture; how his life and works were interpreted for popular audiences by an important group of conservative historians in the inter-war period; and how Disraeli was mobilised in Conservative and Unionist Party debates on tariff reform, social reform, the nation and empire, concluding in the aftermath of the Second World War, when his legacy and statecraft were consistently evoked in Conservative debates on post-war Britain. It demonstrates that Disraeli was interpreted in much more diverse ways, and with more diverse political objectives, than the standard readings of the Disraelian tradition have hitherto appreciated.

Reading The Dissolution of Traditional Family Values through Harold Pinter’s Betrayal

This paper examines the disintegration of traditional British family values as reflected in Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal (1978). Historical events like the world wars and the Great Depression, along with advancements in technology, have profoundly influenced the Theater of the Absurd by deepening its exploration of existential themes and enhancing its stage capabilities. The devastating effects of wars have deeply impacted the disintegration of society and the fragmentation of the collective spirit, significantly affecting the institution of the family as well. The play vividly portrays the erosion of familial structures, with characters betraying each other in a bid to fill the void left by social upheavals. The paper explores the evolution of British family dynamics from the 1950s onwards. It further conducts a textual analysis of Betrayal, focusing on themes of dysfunctional families, self-betrayal, and communication breakdowns. The paper ultimately argues that the fragmentation of family values depicted in Betrayal mirrors the broader social disintegration post-WWII. The traditional family, once a foundation of stability, is portrayed as increasingly susceptible to internal and external pressures, leading to its eventual collapse. This study provides a critical insight into the transformations of family unit during post-war Britain and their representation in modern drama.

Joanne F Sonin, Shareholders and Stakeholders: The Unrealised Promise of Company Law in Post-War Britain

Joanne F Sonin, <i>Shareholders and Stakeholders: The Unrealised Promise of Company Law in Post-War Britain</i>

“Once it was Ireland, Now it is Kenya”: anti-colonialism and internationalism in the pages of the Connolly Association’s Irish Democrat in the 1950s–60s

ABSTRACT Irish Democrat was the paper of the Connolly Association, a diaspora organisation established to build support for Irish republicanism within the British labour movement. The Connolly Association and the Irish Democrat had strong links to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which advocated for a peaceful mass movement to challenge the British presence in Northern Ireland and to remove discrimination faced by Catholics in the Six Counties. Encouraged by the wave of decolonisation across the British Empire in the 1950s-60s, both the CA and the CPGB saw the struggle against Unionist rule in Northern Ireland as analogous to events in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This paper explores the narration of anti-colonial and national liberation movements elsewhere in the British Empire in the pages of the Irish Democrat and the overdetermination of Irish national questions by post-war discourses of radical decolonisation. It also traces the formation across difference of specific solidarities between the Connolly Association and other migrant communities within the multicultural political geography of post-war Britain, including out of campaigns against racial discrimination, the “colour bar” and post-war immigration controls.

New Wave Women: Paying Attention to Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Scholarship in British film history has tended to suggest that the female characters in New Wave films are marginalised, dismissively associated with the trappings of consumer culture and responsible for the ultimate containment of their ‘Angry Young Men’ protagonists. In Sex, Class and Realism, which was published in 1986, John Hill situates the New Wave in relation to broader socio-economic and cultural changes in post-war Britain, including women’s shifting relationships with work, motherhood, family life and patterns of consumption. However, he concludes that the cycle failed to register women’s changing lives in the late 1950s and identifies the ‘dramatic and thematic subordination of female characters’ and a ‘streak of misogyny’ running through the cycle. Revisiting the treatment of women in the British New Wave, this article focuses on the characters Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and instead explores how Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field’s performances offer potent expressions of women’s changing lives in this period. Poised between representing individual desires, confidence and autonomy, and feelings of frustration, reserve and uncertainty, their performances vividly convey their characters’ experiences and expectations in ways that chimed with mobilities and new constructions of selfhood that were increasingly being practised by a ‘transition’ generation of young women in post-war Britain. I argue that Roberts’s and Field’s performances evoke the feelings of two different, working-class women, for whom expressions of assertiveness, sexuality and aspiration are shaped by contradictions, anxieties and feelings of vulnerability. In doing so, the article foregrounds and re-contextualises Roberts’s and Field’s contributions to the New Wave, recognising their representation of contemporary femininities in flux; and explores the promotion and critical reception of their roles, highlighting the tensions between social realism and glamour that shaped their New Wave stardom.

Piers Legh, The Conservative Party and the Destruction of Selective Education in Post-War Britain: The Great Evasion

Piers Legh, The Conservative Party and the Destruction of Selective Education in Post-War Britain: The Great Evasion

Forging the West Indian Nation: Federation and Caribbean Activism in Post-war Britain, 1945-60.

This article explores how Caribbean activists living in Britain after 1945 engaged with the movement for the West Indies Federation. By considering overlooked organizations such as the Caribbean Labour Congress, London Branch (CLC) and the West Indian Workers and Students Association (WIWSA), it shows that, first, Britain became a hub for Caribbean nationalism and support for Federation in the post-war years. Secondly, it argues that the West Indies Federation of 1958-62 significantly influenced the formation of important British Caribbean institutions, such as the West Indian Gazette and the Caribbean Carnival. In contrast to traditional narratives regarding post-war Caribbean political activity in Britain, which often treat the 1950s conjuncture through the lens of race and of the prehistory of a 'multi-cultural' Britain, this article seeks to recover a moment when British Caribbean activism was moved by a broader, transnational, self-consciously 'West Indian' nationalist movement. In doing so, it reveals the significance of the West Indies Federation, and Caribbean decolonization more broadly, to the Caribbean diaspora in Britain, and their political activities. Moreover, it illustrates how diasporic and exilic communities and figures continued to play an important role in anti-colonial and nation-building projects.

Diplomatic Identity in Postwar Britain: The Deconstruction of the Foreign Office ‘Type’, 1945–1997 By James Southern

Diplomatic Identity in Postwar Britain: The Deconstruction of the Foreign Office ‘Type’, 1945–1997 By James Southern

A Private Function: Independent Providers of Vocational Education and Training in Post-War England

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on independent training providers (ITPs) – in other words, private companies – as suppliers of vocational education and training in post-war England. Whilst acknowledging the central role of further education (FE) colleges in delivering vocational learning, it draws attention to a large, diverse sector of ITPs operating alongside FE colleges, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. Data suggest that around 15–20% of vocational learners were enrolled as fee-paying customers with private providers at that time – a figure broadly similar to today. There are, it is argued, three related reasons for this. First, the post-war policy environment, and the varied and uneven nature of colleges at that time, allowed significant room for ITPs to operate as alternative providers of vocational education. Second, the far-reaching ‘efficiency’ gains required since FE colleges left local authority control have largely attenuated the space in which ITPs previously operated. Third, neoliberal assumptions about the superiority of private enterprise mean that ITPs now receive significant funding from the state, largely to deliver Apprenticeships and other programmes of work-related learning – which has, somewhat perversely, reduced the incentive for them to act as bone fide commercial providers of a broader range of vocational learning.

Henry Moore: Neo-Working-Classicist

With his Family Group of 1948&amp;ndash;49, Henry Moore seemed to have reneged upon his early-career commitment to modernist experimentation, pivoting towards a more representational style for this large public sculpture, his first major bronze, sculpted for and installed in one of the first purpose-built secondary modern schools of post-war Britain. The results aren&amp;rsquo;t easy to define stylistically. Figurative, certainly, but barely concealing a stockpile of references ranging across centuries and continents. In this essay I will explore the implications of Moore&amp;rsquo;s stylistic shift with respect to both the contexts of the work&amp;rsquo;s conceptualisation and Moore&amp;rsquo;s personal investment in the opportunities presented to work publicly in that context. Moore&amp;rsquo;s working-class origins will be identified as foundational in the formation of an ideology given plastic purpose in this period, whilst the narratives of working-class experience at mid-century will be drawn upon to account for the ways this work relates to that period of social change. Taking Andrew Causey&amp;rsquo;s identification of an affinity between Moore&amp;rsquo;s work at this time and Picasso&amp;rsquo;s &amp;lsquo;neo-classical&amp;rsquo; period in the years after the Great War as a starting point, I will explore the consequence of Moore&amp;rsquo;s ostensibly retrogressive turn towards figuration with respect to the questions of context and intent that have informed writings on Picasso before proposing alternative terms on which Moore&amp;rsquo;s figurative turn might be understood, tied up with the socio-political upheavals of mid-century Britain. Banner Photograph: Acervo Judith Lauand, 'A artista Judith Lauand (&amp;agrave; esq.) e o escultor brit&amp;acirc;nico Henry Moore (&amp;agrave; dir.) durante workshop para monitores da 2&amp;ordf; Bienal de S&amp;atilde;o Paulo ministrado em dezembro de 1953' ['Artist Judith Lauand (left) and British sculptor Henry Moore (right) during a workshop for monitors at the 2nd S&amp;atilde;o Paulo Biennial held in December 1953']. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

‘The Needs of New Communities’: Social Development, the New Towns, and the Case of Milton Keynes, c. 1962–87

Abstract This article contributes to the emerging history of ‘community’ in post-war Britain by considering what was known as ‘social development’ in Britain’s new towns, with particular reference to Milton Keynes between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. This article traces the roots of social development in the activities and ideas of the voluntary sector during the 1920s and 1930s and notes how they were co-opted by the state during the 1940s and 1950s. The ‘mark 1’ new towns of that period in some cases took steps to promote social development, understood in terms of an active community life and civic engagement, but the practice was particularly promoted in 1967 by a government committee, which called for new towns to be based on clear social plans as well as physical land-use proposals. In making this argument, the committee reflected a wider train of thought, which had already informed the likes of the Parker Morris report on housing; in essence, they scaled up Parker Morris’ approach from the home to the urban level. These ideas were especially influential in Milton Keynes, whose planners and administrators took a broad, even philosophical view of their role. This article considers the extent to which social development was as much about individual aspiration and opportunity as communal activity and also explores the role of the voluntary sector. In so doing, it makes observations about the nature of the post-war state as an enabler, rather than a universal provider.

On Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson's 'Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the "Crisis" of the 1970s' (2017).

On Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson's 'Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the "Crisis" of the 1970s' (2017).

On Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson's 'Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the "Crisis" of the 1970s' (2017).

On Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson's 'Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the "Crisis" of the 1970s' (2017).

Heating Standards and Obsolescence in Post-War Britain’s Homes for Today and Tomorrow

In 1962, a short film by Shell-Mex and BP Limited (Companies of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and the British Petroleum Group) was prepared for the 29th Annual Conference and Exhibition of the National Society of Clean Air in Britain to encourage British households to shift from coal domestic fires to smokeless heating appliances. One year earlier, in 1961, the most influential report on space standards in Britain was published, titled &lt;em&gt;Homes for Today and Tomorrow &lt;/em&gt;(also known as the &lt;em&gt;Parker Morris Report&lt;/em&gt;), which advocated for flexibility in the home through larger size homes and better heating. This article focuses on the report’s emphasis on better heating as one way to fulfil the concept of the “adaptable home,” and it introduces the discussions about heating standards during the report’s making, underlining the open domestic fire as an obsolete technology. These discussions, however, were entangled with socio-cultural endeavours and consumerist aspirations for modernisation, placing the removal of an otherwise pervasive domestic element within a broader net of forces, actors, and dilemmas involved in decision-making and planning. This article, composed as a historical acquisition, oscillates from the scale of the domestic fireplace to the housing scale, raising the issue of obsolescence in housing provision, which is still salient today.

Educating the Younger Generation of Polish Female Refugees in Postwar Britain

Abstract This study explores the education of young Polish female refugees in postwar Britain, and the implications of the establishment of the Committee for the Education of Poles, a body brought into being on April 1, 1947, as a consequence of the passage of the Polish Resettlement Bill in March 1947 (the first ever British legislation dealing with mass immigration). It examines the newly introduced grammar schools for girls, the challenges raised for these new educational establishments, and the strategies introduced by the British authorities in order to cope with the growing numbers of Polish adolescents entering the country after World War II. Based on archival records and supported by oral interviews, the sample case studies presented herein highlight one way in which the young Polish community was rehabilitated in exile at the start of their path towards civic integration. They highlight the key importance of education to that pathway. The studies presented here provide an insight into the experiences of, and challenges faced by, young Polish women during the Process of their education and resettlement. Thanks to extant school reports, it has been possible to ascertain not only the practical and financial problems that impacted the schools presented in the paper, which operated under the auspices of the Committee for the Education of Poles, but also their slow, but steady improvement over time. The paper provides clear evidence that it was thanks to the Committee that a significant proportion of the younger generation of Poles managed to acquire the qualifications needed to secure their first jobs and ultimately a career in industry or business and so play a useful part in the economic life of Great Britain and her overseas territories.

Education, Art and Activism in Post-War Britain: Nan Youngman and Pictures for Schools

ABSTRACT This paper explores the British art patronage scheme Pictures for Schools, which sold affordable works of art to educational buyers at annual exhibitions between 1947 and 1969, focusing on the work of Pictures for Schools founder and organiser Nan Youngman (1906–1995) as an artist, educationalist and activist. It shows that, while social and cultural changes in post-war Britain around the development of the welfare state provided a receptive environment for Pictures for Schools, it was largely driven by Youngman’s personal convictions and experiences. This paper traces the ideological motivations behind Pictures for Schools to the interwar period, exploring Youngman’s involvement in two progressive organisations, the Artists’ International Association (AIA) and the Society for Education through Art (SEA), which enabled her to campaign for progressive art and education. In doing so, it positions Pictures for Schools as a socially engaged intervention into the post-war education system in England and society.

The Global Rise of the British Property Development Sector, 1945–1975

Abstract In the three decades after 1945 the British property development sector exploded in size and began operating on a worldwide scale. The largest property companies in the world were British in this era and they built office blocks, shopping centres and hotels in cities all over the world. These overseas property developments overlapped firmly with the pre-existing political and economic geographies of empire, and their speculative transnational financing was made possible by allying with London’s financial sector and the world of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. This article surveys the rise, financialization, and imperially inflected internationalization of the British property development sector in this period, showing how property companies capitalized upon post-war Britain’s developer-friendly urban renewal order, internationalist financial sector, and inherited imperial advantages even as many of the formal political structures of empire were being dismantled. In the post-war decades, the remnants of empire as a commercial world system provided Britain’s property developers with vital stepping stones towards the fully globalized forms of financialized real-estate development that shape cities around the world today.

Exploring Masculinity and Femininity in the Husband-Wife Dynamics of Look Back in Anger

This paper explores the complex dynamics of male-female relationship within the framework of masculinity and femininity as presented in John Osborne's path breaking drama Look Back in Anger. The purpose of this study is to illuminate how the author uses gender roles to create and deconstruct the relationships at the heart of the story by looking closely at the characters and their interactions. The purpose of this article is to explore how the character follows or subverts established gender norms, which in turn affects their marriage and the overall flow of the play. This paper does this using an interdisciplinary approach based on literature, gender studies and theatre analysis. It focuses on two main characters, Jimmy and Alison, who struggle with the changing nature of cultural expectations and gender roles in post-war England.

Exploring Masculinity and Femininity in the Husband-Wife Dynamics of Look Back in Anger

This paper explores the complex dynamics of male-female relationship within the framework of masculinity and femininity as presented in John Osborne's path breaking drama Look Back in Anger. The purpose of this study is to illuminate how the author uses gender roles to create and deconstruct the relationships at the heart of the story by looking closely at the characters and their interactions. The purpose of this article is to explore how the character follows or subverts established gender norms, which in turn affects their marriage and the overall flow of the play. This paper does this using an interdisciplinary approach based on literature, gender studies and theatre analysis. It focuses on two main characters, Jimmy and Alison, who struggle with the changing nature of cultural expectations and gender roles in post-war England.