Post-war England: Affluence and Angst

The British population, at the end of the Second World War, was exhausted and relieved. It took a little while for things to get back to anything approaching normal; rationing stayed in force for another nine years for some goods, infrastructure needed rebuilding, industry needed reorganising. England, more directly affected by the war than Scotland or Wales, probably had more sorting-out to do, but even if that were not the case, my thoughts are more concerned with England.

Despite the poor material shape of the country, it's my sense that the people, having survived the privations of wartime conditions, rebounded fairly well and got on with life as best they could. However, if they thought life would go on just as it had before the war, they became disillusioned fairly soon. Changes were in the air.

It wasn't until the fifties that changes became really apparent. New buildings were in new styles, and with new purposes: council estates, secondary modern schools, technical colleges. There were new styles in clothes, new cars, new aircraft. The government tried to bolster a patchy spirit of optimism and confidence by launching the Festival of Britain, which was intended to show how British industry was forging ahead. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was a morale-booster, coinciding with a large increase in sales of TV sets and subsequent viewing.


Against the material advances there were some counter-currents: the Korean war, the Emergency in Malaya, the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, and at home, failure to achieve a satisfactory state of labour relations. This was part of of a larger picture of relative decline, in which Britain was losing her empire, and losing ground against other industrialised nations, having been the world leader in both these areas.

Within this milieu voices of dissent began to be heard. A group of writers labelled the Angry Young men expressed through their work a rumbling of dissatisfaction with the state of things. Post-war England was not shaping up in the way they had hoped, or had been led to expect. Look Back in Anger, the play by John Osborne, inspired the label. The group wasn't really cohesive, and it's members probably denied being members, or even denied it's existence. Room at the Top, the novel by John Braine, was not really anti-establishment, being the account of a bloke of working-class origins making his way up the social ladder in the provincial north of England. However it paved the way for a grittier style of writing and film-making as represented by A Kind of Loving, The L-Shaped Room, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Girl with Green Eyes, Up the Junction and The Pumpkin Eater. Most of them were successful as both books and films.

A more expressly anti-establishment voice was heard in the satirical TV show, That was the Week that Was, and in the magazine, Private Eye. Left-wing newspapers, the Daily Herald (Labour) and Daily Worker (Communist) were a bit stodgy and appealed only to staunch members of their respective constituencies. At some point more strident publications began to appear: Socialist Worker, Militant, Red Mole. These were matched by more radical groups, the Socialist Workers Party, International Socialists and the like.

On a more popular cultural level, unrest seemed to grow among young males, with battles between gangs of Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers, and later, skinheads and football hooligans. Milder forms of dissent appeared with the Beats, hippies, and Punks.

The context of the social scene was a growing affluence and vigorous modernisation schemes that saw the building of motorways, shopping centres, tower blocks, industrial estates. But in the larger world context, Britain was declining economically relative to other advanced countries and losing international influence.

It's hard to say what were the direct causes of the various forms of discontent: perhaps they were many. And it would probably be wrong to link together the various manifestations of discontent. Nevertheless it would be true to say that from 1945 until at least 1980 there was a sense of alienation and futility running through English society. I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of this subject and hope to develop it further. Having been out of the country for the last thirty years I'd like to find out if it persisted and whether it still exists.