Post-war Britain Research Articles

ПАРЛАМЕНТСЬКІ ВИБОРИ У ВЕЛИКІЙ БРИТАНІЇ 1945 РОКУ: АНАЛІЗ ПОРАЗКИ КОНСЕРВАТИВНОЇ ПАРТІЇ В КОНТЕКСТІ ЗМІНИ СОЦІАЛЬНИХ ПОТРЕБ СУСПІЛЬСТВА ПІСЛЯ ДРУГОЇ СВІТОВОЇ ВІЙНИ

The article covers an analysis of the 1945 parliamentary elections in Great Britain as a pivotal moment in the country’s development following World War II. It offers a detailed examination of the historical context preceding the elections, considering the socio-political situation marked by post-war reconstruction and shifting social paradigms. The article analyzes the strategies and programs of key political parties, revealing their contrasting visions for post-war Britain. Additionally, it examines societal attitudes and changing public expectations, which significantly influenced electoral outcomes, highlighting a growing demand from voters for comprehensive social reforms and economic stability. Central to the article is the analysis of the Conservative Party’s defeat, which is explained by several factors, including their perception of societal needs, leadership dynamics, and demographic changes among voters. The article thoroughly explores the Conservatives’ response to the challenges of the post-war period, comparing it with the Labour Party’s agenda focused on social welfare policy and economic reconstruction. The article discusses the outcomes of the 1945 parliamentary elections in Great Britain and their impact on the nation’s social needs post-war. The loss of seats by the Conservatives and the rise in Labour representation signify a shift in the political landscape and societal attitudes. The article examines the underestimation of social needs, which led to the Conservative Party’s defeat. Post-war, destroyed cities and economic difficulties created radical changes in social needs, particularly in housing policy and social protection. The Conservative approach was less socially oriented compared to Labour’s programs. Furthermore, the insufficient emphasis by the Conservatives on economic stability and social protection, which did not align with voters’ demands, is noted. The public image of the Conservatives no longer matched the requirements of the time, and the gap between elites and ordinary citizens became a problem. The impact of leadership and the public image of party leaders on the results of the 1945 elections is also analyzed, noting that the leadership of Winston Churchill was based on wartime merits but was not able to effectively respond to social and economic changes.

Scientizing the 'environment': Solly Zuckerman and the idea of the School of Environmental Sciences.

In 1960 Sir Solly Zuckerman proposed the idea of an interdisciplinary department of 'environmental sciences' (ENV) for the newly established University of East Anglia (UEA). Prior to this point, the concept of 'environmental sciences' was little known: since then, departments and degree courses have rapidly proliferated through universities and colleges around the globe. This paper draws on archival research to explore the conditions and contexts that led to the proposal of a new and interdisciplinary grouping of sciences by Zuckerman. It argues that the activities of Zuckerman and other scientists in Britain during the Second World War and in the post-war period helped to create fertile conditions for a new kind of scientific authority to emerge as a tool of governance and source of policy advice. In particular, the specific challenges of post-war Britain - as addressed through scientific advisers and civil servants - led to the 'environment' becoming both the subject of sustained scientific study and an object of concern.

The Retreat from ‘High Technology’ in Post-War Britain

Abstract This article argues that the 1970s saw an important change in the attitude of the British state to civil technological projects. It focuses on supersonic aviation and nuclear power policy as its case-studies, which were the key areas of techno-nationalist investment in the post-war period. It shows that Whitehall became radically more sceptical about state-led Research and Development, scrapped many core long-term projects, and cut back others. The politics and timing of this shift matter for our wider understanding of post-war British history, the history of technology, and histories of ‘neo-liberalism’. Thatcherism is supposed to have brought with it the decisive move away from industrial intervention by the state. Such a characterisation, while containing important truths, makes it difficult to see that the retreat from the most spectacular industrial investments of the British state in fact occurred during the 1970s in what was an economic liberalism from within, rather than a ‘neo-liberalism’ from without. This paper also challenges the narrative that the ‘technological disillusion’ of the 1970s came via the New Left and environmentalists, demonstrating the importance of an expert critique focused on economic and industrial arguments that emerged from inside the state itself.

‘The voice of the true British housewife’: the politics of housewifery at Labour’s women’s conferences, 1945–1959

ABSTRACT Drawing on the records of Labour’s annual women’s conference, this article analyses why, how and with what effects women activists in the Labour Party claimed to represent ‘the housewife’ in post-war Britain. Building on longstanding traditions on the left, Labour women saw a politics of housewifery as the most effective means of advancing the interests of working-class women in post-war Britain, and asserted the housewife's need for state intervention, good quality housing, and generous welfare provision. They also recognised that the housewife’s concerns extended far beyond her own home, and were keen to promote her interests in different arenas, including paid work. Yet the success of groups like the British Housewives League meant that Labour women found it increasingly difficult to pursue a left-wing politics of the housewife. In opposition, they began to adopt the language of consumerism, losing sight of the emphasis on gender which had made their politics distinctive. This article thus shows that housewifery was a malleable and contested identity in the post-war period, valuable to those on the left as well as non-partisan women and those on the right. It also provides a new perspective on longstanding debates over the Labour Party’s failure to appeal to women voters.

‘I am almost the middle-class white man, aren’t I?’: elite women, education and occupational trajectories in late twentieth-century Britain

ABSTRACT This paper makes a major intervention in the historiography of elites through analysis of the experience of women occupational elites born in post-war Britain. The paper draws on a new set of oral history interviews recently conducted with women born in the post-war decades with an entry in Who’s Who which is the leading biographical dictionary of ‘noteworthy and influential’ people in the UK. The women we interviewed were all highly occupationally successful and those analysed here also attended one of twelve elite girls’ schools. This article argues that our interviewees can be separated into two distinct post-war cohorts: one born between early 1940s and mid-1950s and the other born late 1950s to late 1960s. The shape and structure of the cohort’s trajectories were different, their relationship to their careers were different, and, even though both groups faced sexual discrimination and unequal divisions of labour, the nature of these gendered inequalities changed too. By foregrounding elite women within this shifting historical context, this article illuminates broader trends in both classed and gendered experience and how this related to the changing nature of the economy in recent history.

Conjuring Up a King

Conjuring Up a King

From sacred place to outer space: Collective creativity and the iconographies of mid-twentieth century English modernity in Guildford Cathedral's kneelers

Between 1936 and 1969, around 1600 kneelers were produced for the new Anglican cathedral at Guildford in Surrey, southern England. This was a major collective devotional artwork, involving hundreds of embroiderers, mostly local women. The project was a distinctive form of community and collective artwork, that complicates established understandings of embroidery, craftwork, femininity and politics. It worked within guidelines for design and materials set by the interior designer Lady Prudence Maufe and her husband Sir Edward Maufe, the cathedral's architect. However, it also allowed for considerable autonomy and self-expression on the part of the volunteers. The kneeler collection has a rich and varied iconography that ranges from expected Christian symbolism to representations of modern technology and nuclear weaponry. What emerged over the length of the project was a complex expression of the worldview of post-war England, and particularly the England and Englishness of the Home Counties. This worldview attempted to combine faith in God with faith in technological progress, and to reconcile internationalism with confidence in British military power. The Guildford kneelers are best understood as a distinctive form of conservative modernity, an attempt to place the changes of the mid twentieth century into longer traditions of Christian worship and Englishness.

Olympic flames, Olympic films: ancient Greece and international peace at London 1948

ABSTRACT This essay offers a comparative analysis of the reception of ancient Greece at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1948 London Olympics. Focusing specifically on the respective Games’ torch relays and official films, it explores the ways that the contrasting messages of the 1936 and 1948 Games as a whole were advanced through symbolic engagement with Greek antiquity. In 1936, the torch relay and the subsequent film (Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia) invoked Greek antiquity in the service of zealous nationalism, positioning Nazi Germany as the living embodiment of the glorious legacy of ancient Greece. In 1948, on the other hand, the relay and film (Castleton Knight’s XIVth Olympiad: The Glory of Sport) portrayed ancient Greece as a benign example from the distant past toward which all modern-day nations could turn for inspiration in dealing with each other in peace. Ultimately, what makes this 1948 attempt to pacify Nazi Germany’s 1936 Olympic Hellenism even more interesting is that it was only partially successful: although London 1948 stripped away the spirit of Nazism from certain classicised elements of Berlin 1936, there also remained an unsettling coherence between the Olympic messaging of pre-war Germany and post-war Britain.

Voluntary organizations and the provision of health services in England and France, 1917–29

ABSTRACT As the First World War came to an end, governments in the UK and France began the process of planning for reconstruction. In both cases health services emerged as key features of the post-war settlement with ambitious new Ministries of Health proposed to coordinate and deliver essential services. Public health infrastructure was at the heart of these plans, with the physical and social conditions that caused disease to be the focus of state activity. But there was also a need to take on key causes of mortality and improve the institutional infrastructure necessary to challenge old and new threats to life. Yet neither the funding nor political will existed to overhaul service provision in these areas. As a result, in both countries it was necessary for voluntary organizations to fill many of the gaps in provision expected or promised by the new state commitment to health care. To meet these tests a number of interested parties – the Rockefeller Foundation, the Red Cross, the Croix-Rouge Française, the Order of St John, voluntary hospitals and local charities – extended their work. Their contributions underpinned an extensive mixed economy of provision that ensured the reconstruction of health services in a way that met at least some of the promises of government. This article focuses on three key areas of voluntary involvement in health in post-war Britain and France: maternity and child welfare services; hospital services, especially tuberculosis provision; and accident response, in particular ambulance services. It argues that while local and national governments focused on improving health through environmental transformations, the voluntary sector stepped in to extend personal services aimed at saving individual lives, curing those suffering from specific diseases and preventing deaths through better education and care.

“How Far Should We Go?”: Adolescent Sexual Activity and Understandings of the Sexual Life Cycle in Postwar Britain

“How Far Should We Go?”: Adolescent Sexual Activity and Understandings of the Sexual Life Cycle in Postwar Britain

State–business–civic partnerships in children’s film policy: the roles of the CFD/CEF Advisory Council in post-war Britain

ABSTRACT Established in 1951, the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) contributed to the growth of children’s film culture in Britain. This paper aims to show how the CFF’s active involvement of public authorities, film industry organisations and educationalists resulted in partnerships between them and in the growing production of children’s films in Britain. Drawing on under-investigated archival materials, this paper argues that the Advisory Council of the Children’s Film Department and Children’s Entertainment Films, precursors of the CFF, offered significant platforms for mediation between public authorities, industry organisations and educationalists, and for shaping new beliefs about child audiences and children’s cinema, which resulted in both the film industry’s and educationalists’ support for, and commitment to, producing films with entertaining and educational values. The case study demonstrates how the CFF overcame a commerce – culture dichotomy. It therefore offers a more nuanced understanding of state–market–civic relations in British cultural policy.

Private Worlds by Jeremy Seabrook: a response

This year, 2023, marks the sixtieth anniversary of Jeremy Seabrook’s authorial career as one of our finest and most impassioned writers on the nexus of the personal, the political and the global. And, it is just over three decades since he first wrote in Race & Class. With a depth and range that spans the life situation of the poor in Britain, the underprivileged and precariat of the Asian sub-continent, the impact of imperialism and consumerism on the psyche, the meaning of work, the impact of environmental disaster and the essence of what it is to be human – and a gift for striking prophecy – Seabrook’s career has been marked by the telling of beautifully expressed but often deeply uncomfortable and challenging truths. Yet always with immense feeling for the other at their heart. As expressed in his seminal piece, ‘The soul of man under globalism’ ( Race & Class 43, no. 4, 2002), ‘There are many macro-economic accounts of globalisation, but we rarely learn how it affects the psyche and sensibility of lives uprooted and radically reshaped by the penetration of their world by the market economy.’ We are therefore delighted to publish in this issue and this anniversary year, not only Jeremy Seabrook’s latest article for us, ‘The present imperium’, but also this response, by a contemporary, to his recently published autobiography, Private Worlds: growing up gay in post-war Britain (Pluto Press, 2023) which raises not only fundamental themes relating to the gay community in the UK and its history, but also profound, wider societal issues.

The hidden half: the double lives of Chinese migrant women in post-war Britain

ABSTRACT Drawing on oral histories of first-generation migrant women, this paper explores Chinese women’s role in financing migrant households, mothering children and promoting the well-being of the British Chinese community after 1945. It argues that, with better educational attainment and wider participation in professional occupations Chinese migrant women played an increasingly essential yet unrecognised role in private and public lives. This paper expands knowledge of Chinese women’s experiences in contemporary international migration and confirms the necessity of understanding migration through the lens of gender to reveal evolving gendered family roles within migrant households and migrant women’s manifold but unrecognised merits.

Me Too? Re-encountering youth experiences of sexual violence in post-war England from the vantage point of later life

ABSTRACT Cultural understandings of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault have shifted considerably since the 1960s in the United Kingdom and more widely. This article investigates how changing discourses around sexual abuse, harassment and assault are navigated by British women in later life when they narrate experiences that occurred in their youth in the 1960s and early 1970s. It identifies six sites of youth that are relevant to understanding how women narrate experiences of sexual violence: home; school; local outdoor places; workplaces; heterosexual intimacies; independent travel. These sites are associated with different points on a ‘girl to woman’ register, tracing a pathway from the immaturity of girlhood, through the liminal state of young womanhood, into maturity. How interviewees positioned themselves on this register reflects how they understood their youthful selves in different sites, and their past experiences of unwanted sexual attentions. While gender inequality is understood to have limited women’s education and employment opportunities in youth, it is surprisingly absent from narratives of sexual violence. In attending to this absence, we argue that what is at stake for the women in how they navigate shifting cultural discourses is narrating a version of themselves that is agentic and morally responsible.

Between life course research and social history: new approaches to qualitative data in the British birth cohort studies

ABSTRACT This article discusses a new interdisciplinary, mixed-methods approach to using data from the first British Birth Cohort Study, the National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD, 1946). It emerges from a collaboration between two historians of postwar Britain and a mixed-methods life course studies researcher. Our approach brings together cohort-level quantitative data with less well-known qualitative data from a sample of 150 participants’ original NSHD interview questionnaires to generate new perspectives on how macro processes of social change were experienced at an individual level and varied across the life course. The NSHD school-age and early adulthood sweeps included a series of open-ended questions relating to education, work, and social identities, which offer a sense of how participants responded to and understood the social transformations of the postwar decades within their everyday lives. This article explains our methodological rationale, before focussing on the wider analytical possibilities of our approach in relation to social mobility.

The African Grounds of Race Relations in Britain.

'Race relations' became the most common way of conceptualizing the 'integration' of Commonwealth migrants and various obstacles to it in post-war Britain. However, interest in race relations did not centre initially on Afro-Caribbeans and other non-white migrants to metropolitan Britain as is commonly assumed. Before the 1960s, efforts to study and manage them centred primarily on British settler colonies in Africa. This article demonstrates how colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies directed towards race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of African liberation movements and to shape post-colonial futures with neoliberal solutions.

Projecting Creative Processes: Art Films and Art Education in Post-war Britain

The relationship between film and art education has received little scholarly attention. This paper describes and discusses one instance in the long and multifaceted history of this relationship: the educational uses of nonfiction films about art and artists in post-Second World War Britain, known then invariably either as ‘films on art’ or ‘art films.’ As a new international genre (backed by UNESCO’s educational distribution schemes), it gained particular momentum in the UK with the Arts Council of Great Britain, a public body, set up after the war with a mission ‘to increase the accessibility of the fine arts.’ And one of the ways it did was via 16mm projection. Alongside building a substantial film library, in 1950 the Council, in collaboration with the British Film Institute (BFI), started a new mobile cinema scheme, the Art Film Tour, to directly engage with the nontheatrical cinema sector, especially its educational venues. By drawing on my research in the Arts Council Archive, I propose to adopt a ‘historical pragmatics’ perspective and to study the Art Film Tour’s media configuration as a dispositif (Kessler, 2018). In the 1950s, with an increasing number of art films dedicated to artists at work, art students encountered cinematic renderings of the creative process by renowned modern artists, such as Picasso, Henry Moore and Jackson Pollock. And therefore, I make a case for an inductive analysis of ‘showing making’ on screen and its implications within historicised art education contexts.

Imagining Economic Growth in Post-War Britain.

This article contends that common representations of the history of the British economy and economic policy in the 'Golden Age' period (circa 1950-73) as a story of 'failure' rely overwhelmingly on one measure, that of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. Drawing on the foundational criticisms of this metric made by Simon Kuznets, it is argued that, for this period of British economic history, shortfalls in measured GDP growth in comparison with other rich countries are a very poor measure of changes in economic well-being in the UK. If we follow this argument and discard the belief that one metric can summarize trends in such well-being, the notion of 'failure' in this period should be set aside in favour of a more nuanced, multidimensional assessment.

Rethinking Postwar Liberalism: The Road to 2010 and Beyond

AbstractThe nineteenth and early twentieth century Liberal Party has been well served by British political historians. By contrast, research on the post‐1945 Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats has become a specialised field, with strong empirical foundations (including in biographies and political science work) but few connections with the larger narratives that historians tell about postwar Britain. This article explores how the story of the ‘long Liberal revival’ from the late 1950s to the 2010–15 coalition might be reintegrated with contemporary historiography, including debates about deindustrialisation, class dealignment and the rise of ‘popular individualism’. It argues that careful attention to the nature and limits of Liberals’ political agency can help us understand the changing meaning and significance of third‐party politics in Britain.

Elizabeth T. Hurren. Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research.

When we think of the relationship of the dead body to British medical research, we might imagine the work of the “resurrection men” who turned a profit by grave robbing and selling corpses to medical schools in the early nineteenth century, or perhaps the Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare, whose victims were bought and dissected by Robert Knox. Maybe we think of the numerous “unclaimed” poor, who died alone in hospitals, workhouses, and prisons, their bodies used by medical science following the 1832 Anatomy Act. But as Elizabeth T. Hurren, whose previous research has focused on death and dissection in nineteenth-century Britain, shows in Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research, the relationship between the world of medical and scientific research and the bodies of the dead remains both complex and contentious in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. Hidden Histories of the Dead traces the contested relationship between the individual body and British Medical Research in postwar Britain, showing how the belief that the bodies of the dead were the property of medical science did not die with the creation of the National Health Service. Its scope is wide, encompassing issues of consent, organ donation, developments in medical technology, changing understandings of death, and the increased medicalization of death as the process of dying moved from the home to the hospital (or sometimes the hospice). The book examines medical ethics and their relationship to both scientific developments and social mores, considering issues such as the harvesting of human tissue and organs and questions of consent. At its heart, though, is the question of who “owns” the dead body. In a time of rapid medical developments, as we uncover the secrets of the genome with its ability to predict, and thus to prevent or control, a range of health conditions, and as transplant surgery becomes more reliable, the ethical questions around usage of the dead body become more important and more widely debated.