History of Modern Britain 1

A television documentary that covers many of the main points of the course is A History of Modern Britain by BBC politics editor Andrew Marr. Some clips from it will be familiar to you from class already.

The first episode, dealing with the years 1945-1955, below.

Beveridge Report

The Beveridge Report recommended a system whereby:

All people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who are sick, unemployed, retired or widowed.

There were existing systems of social insurance and poor relief (unemployment relief, old age pensions, and so forth), but as Beveridge himself can be heard saying in the film below (2min 17sec):

My plan for social security in Britain is to expand and combine our existing separate schemes of social insurance into one comprehensive scheme, which will secure to every citizen, on condition of working and contributing while he can work, an income sufficient for the subsistence of himself and his family when for any reason he cannot work, through sickness, accident, unemployment or old age.

film night 2

On Tuesday, 3 March, there will be a chance to see a film from the mid-1950s, the period immediately after the end of rationing but before Suez and the consumer boom.

The choice is between:

The Ladykillers (1955), starring Alec Guinness as the "brain" of a crime gang. An elaborate scheme of robbery relies on the unwitting co-operation of an old lady, and goes wrong when she realises what has happened. The film was remade in 2004, with an American setting, as a vehicle for Tom Hanks.

The Belles of St Trinian's (1954), a film inspired by the cartoons of Ronald Searle, a former prisoner of war of the Japanese, who took to drawing pictures of schoolgirls inflicting gruesome tortures on one another and on hapless bystanders. The cartoons are now available in a Penguin Modern Classics edition.

Both films are black comedies (The Ladykillers rather blacker than St Trinian's), and both play on the collision of "old school" values (in the one case Edwardian social manners, in the other the "free school" educationalism of the 1920s) and the acquisitive ethos of the austerity years. In this regard, the crucial line of dialogue from The Belles of St Trinian's, in the following clip, is 9 minutes in:

Clarence, when poor Frieda and I started this school during the General Strike of 1926, we vowed to make it the happiest care-free establishment in the whole of Britain, and what a gay arcadia of happy girlhood it was then, until the war broke out, and such things as good manners and good taste were replaced by your black market values.

The New Jerusalem

The Labour government of 1945-1951 built the British welfare state on the foundations of measures taken by the Liberal government of 1906-1914 and by the wartime coalition government headed by Churchill in 1940-1945. The aim was not only to repair the damage of war, but particularly to prevent a recurrence of forms of social deprivation that had been common before the war. Five areas were of particular concern: poverty, education, health, housing and employment; identified by William Beveridge as "five giants" on the road of social progress: Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor, Idleness. The three men of particular importance for laying the groundwork of the post-war welfare state are the Liberal William Beveridge (for social insurance), the Conservative R. A. Butler(for compulsory secondary education), and the Socialist Aneurin Bevan (for the National Health Service). The Prime Minister whose government implemented their reforms was Clement Attlee.

"Want" was to be tackled on the basis of the recommendations in the "Beveridge Report" (see here), through a series of acts of parliament, most importantly the Family Allowances Act 1945, National Insurance Act 1946, National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1946, Pensions (Increase) Act 1947, and National Assistance Act 1948.

"Ignorance" was to be beaten back by the implementation of the Education Act 1944 (see here). Not only was education to be free (and compulsory) to the age of 15, schools were also to provide their pupils with free meals, free milk, and free medical services.

"Disease" would be overcome by the creation of a National Health Service, providing universal medical care free at the point of need. The service began operation in 1948, on the basis of the National Health Service Act 1946.

"Squalor" would be abolished by programmes of slum clearance, the building of council flats and houses in existing towns (see here), the creation of planned communities (see here), and the regulation of existing accommodation through such measures as the Landlord and Tenant Act 1949.

"Idleness" was to become a thing of the past thanks to economic planning for full employment. In the words of the aristocratic left-winger Anthony Wedgwood Benn, elected to parliament as a Labour MP in 1950, "There was a feeling that if we can plan for war we can plan for peace."

Whatever government had been formed in 1945 would have had to do something about social issues, and some of the first steps in planning and legislation (commissioning the Beveridge Report, the Butler Education Act) had already been taken by the coalition government. The main reason for the Labour Party's landslide victory in the 1945 election was that the electorate knew that a commitment to tackling such problems was central to Labour's political identity, in a way it was not for the Conservative or Liberal parties.

Important measures were also taken to give ordinary people better access to healthy or cultural free-time activities (see here).

Less popular than the social legislation, but not very controversial at the time, were the measures to nationalise key parts of the economy, particularly energy, transport, and heavy industry (see here). What did make the Labour government unpopular, losing them seats in parliament at the 1950 general election and returning the Conservatives to power in the 1951 general election, were the "austerity measures" (see here) that included micromanaging domestic consumption.

Clement Attlee, Prime Minister 1945-1951, expressed the commitment to building a new society by quoting the poetry of William Blake:

Let us go forward into this fight in the spirit of William Blake:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall the sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

A useful six-minute overview of the aims and achievements of Attlee's government, from a present-day American perspective, can be found here.

Traditional dance

As there was some interest in class, and strictly for the enjoyment of those who might enjoy such things, here are some clips of traditional dances from Britain and Ireland.

From the North of England:



(As I mentioned in class, George Formby was married to a champion clog dancer)


From the South of England:



(It appears to be essential to such dances that they not be performed on stage, but in the street from pub to pub.)


From Scotland:




From Ireland:




From Wales:

"A country of tradition"

As somebody remarked in class, Britain is often regarded as a place very attached to traditions and traditional ways of doing things. The division of the Houses of Parliament into a House of Lords (with lords and bishops) and a House of Commons (with commoners) directly descends from the division of medieval representative institutions into first, second and third "estates" (a distinction lost in most of Europe during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars). The United Kingdom has a Chancellor of the Exchequer instead of a Minister of Finance, and a Lord Chancellor instead of a Minister of Justice.

The decision of the French Revolutionaries that wheeled vehicles should pass one another on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left (as had been customary) has gradually been adopted throughout all of mainland Europe (in Sweden as recently as 1963) but has had no impact in Britain or Ireland.

Much else in British public life attests to continuities with a pre-Revolutionary period. An obvious example is the wearing of wigs by judges who administer the Common Law. Two hundred years ago no gentleman would attend a public function without a wig; after the fashion changed it remained the "correct" attire for both judges and barristers. The Common Law, with trial by jury and the practice of adversarial advocacy, is the basis of the legal system not only in Britain and Ireland, but also in the United States at federal and state level (with the exception of the State of Louisiana) and in many Commonwealth countries throughout the world.

In academic life, too, England has maintained two medieval universities, in Oxford and Cambridge, and Scotland three, in St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen, without the sort of disruption that Louvain, for instance, suffered in 1797-1834. This is perhaps one of the reasons why, throughout the English-speaking world, academic dress is a much more common sight on special occasions, such as graduation ceremonies, than it is at most Continental universities. At Oxford and Cambridge it is still a daily necessity.

England continues to enjoy an Established Church (the "Church of England", a historical compromise between Catholic practices and Reformed theology) with the Queen as its Supreme Governor. When John Major quoted George Orwell about "old maids bicycling to holy communion" being one typically British sight, the unspoken assumption is that the church being attended is "C of E".

There has been a marked reluctance to adopt the French metric system (with metres, grammes, and litres) that Napoleon imposed on the rest of Western Europe, in place of the pre-Revolutionary "imperial measures" available: the inch, foot, yard and mile, the ounce, pound, stone, hundredweight and ton, and the fluid ounce, pint and gallon (official metric equivalents established in the Units of Measurement Regulations 1995). Even in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Part one, chapter 8), one of the characteristics of totalitarianism is the replacement of the pint by the half-litre. These days, with metrication in legal force as part of European harmonisation, few children can do calculations in the old measurements, but beer is still sold in pint glasses, and milk in cartons marked "568ml". For most of the period covered by the course (1945-1997), the imperial measurements were very much favoured.

The United Kingdom adopted a decimal currency (with 100 pennies to the pound) only in 1971, replacing a system of coinage with twelve pennies to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound which went back over 500 years in the case of shillings, and 1000 years for pounds and pence. Much like the changeover to the Euro, people would still ask years later, "What's that in old money?"

Apart from the visible continuities in political, legal, educational and religious institutions (often masking substantive change), and the long maintenance of idiosyncratic measurements and money, there are all sorts of popular, local, folkloristic and bizarre customs held in honour throughout the British Isles - but in much the same way that such customs are maintained in Binche or Echternach. For those interested, a good guide to such local traditions in England is the book England in Particular, or the associated website of the same name.

I Vow to Thee My Country

I vow to thee, my country — all earthly things above —
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago —
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

Text: Ce­cil A. Spring-Rice
Music: Gustav T. Holst