Andrew Marr: A swansong to 'olde Britain'
[The 1950s marked the last decade of "olde Britain" - when women were housewives, men smoked pipes and schoolboys sported caps and shorts, says Andrew Marr (right), whose TV history of post-war UK starts on Tuesday.]
Between the fall of Attlee's Labour government and the return of Labour under cocky Harold Wilson, Britain went through a time which some believe to be a golden-tinted era of lost content.
To millions of others these were the grey, conformist, "13 wasted years" of Tory misrule.
It seems that today's British, when they think about the 50s, cannot decide whether to idealise or to mock.
This is for a good reason. Before the arrival of the 60s and rebel consumerism, this was for the last time truly a different country.
People still looked different. No schoolboy was without a cap and shorts; every woman is a housewife; hair-cream, corsets and pipe-tobacco are advertised everywhere. Hats and moustaches adorn "Mr Average".
Britain was still a military nation, whose generals were famous public figures and whose new jet-bombers provoke gasps of pride.
National Service, which was introduced by Attlee in 1947 to replace wartime conscription, and began properly at the beginning of 1949, would last until 1963, bringing more than two million young British men into the forces.
This was a huge, often underestimated, social force. It brought all classes together at a young and vulnerable age, subjecting them to ferocious discipline, often to privation, and sometimes to real danger.
Some of the anti-authority anger and sarcasm of British plays and novels derived directly or indirectly from National Service; but so did the habits of polishing, dressing smartly and conforming to authority in millions of homes.
In general, it probably kept some of the spirit of the Forties going for a decade longer than would otherwise have happened....
Read entire article at BBC
Between the fall of Attlee's Labour government and the return of Labour under cocky Harold Wilson, Britain went through a time which some believe to be a golden-tinted era of lost content.
To millions of others these were the grey, conformist, "13 wasted years" of Tory misrule.
It seems that today's British, when they think about the 50s, cannot decide whether to idealise or to mock.
This is for a good reason. Before the arrival of the 60s and rebel consumerism, this was for the last time truly a different country.
People still looked different. No schoolboy was without a cap and shorts; every woman is a housewife; hair-cream, corsets and pipe-tobacco are advertised everywhere. Hats and moustaches adorn "Mr Average".
Britain was still a military nation, whose generals were famous public figures and whose new jet-bombers provoke gasps of pride.
National Service, which was introduced by Attlee in 1947 to replace wartime conscription, and began properly at the beginning of 1949, would last until 1963, bringing more than two million young British men into the forces.
This was a huge, often underestimated, social force. It brought all classes together at a young and vulnerable age, subjecting them to ferocious discipline, often to privation, and sometimes to real danger.
Some of the anti-authority anger and sarcasm of British plays and novels derived directly or indirectly from National Service; but so did the habits of polishing, dressing smartly and conforming to authority in millions of homes.
In general, it probably kept some of the spirit of the Forties going for a decade longer than would otherwise have happened....