between Germany and Great Britain and the British had emerged triumphant and vindicated.[44]
This sense of quiet pride at the country’s capacity to suffer, endure and win through had marked Britain off from the continent. It also shaped the political culture of the post-war years. In the elections of 1945 Labour won a clear parliamentary majority for the first time in its history and, as we have seen, pressed through a broad range of nationalizations and social reforms culminating in the constitution of the world’s first universal welfare state. The government’s reforms were mostly popular—in spite of prompting remarkably little change in the deepest habits and affinities of the nation. In the words of J. B. Priestley, writing in the
Domestic politics in post-war Britain were taken up with matters of social justice and the institutional reforms it required. This was to a considerable degree the result of a cumulative failure on the part of previous governments to address social inequalities; the belated re-centering of debate around urgently needed public expenditure—on health, education, transport, housing, pensions and the like—seemed to many to constitute a well-earned reward for the country’s recent sacrifices. But it also meant that most British voters (and many British Members of Parliament) had absolutely no idea of how poor their country was and what it had cost them to win their epic struggle with Germany.
In 1945 Britain was insolvent. The British mobilized more completely, and for longer than any other country: in 1945 10 million men and women were under arms or making them, in an employed population of 21.5 million adults. Rather than tailor the British war effort to the country’s limited means, Winston Churchill had gone for broke: borrowing from the Americans and selling British overseas assets to keep money and materiel flowing. As one wartime Chancellor of the Exchequer put it, these years saw ‘England’s transition from a position of the world’s largest creditor nation to the world’s largest debtor nation.’ The cost of World War Two to Britain was twice that of World War One; the country lost one quarter of its national wealth.
This accounts for Britain’s recurrent post-war currency crises, as the country struggled to pay off huge dollar-denominated debts from a drastically reduced income. That is one reason why the Marshall Plan in Britain had almost no impact upon investment or modernization in industry: 97 percent of the counterpart funds (more than anywhere else) were used to pay off the country’s massive debt. These problems would have been bad enough for any medium-sized European country in Britain’s straitened post-war circumstances; they were hugely exacerbated in this case by the global scale of British imperial responsibilities.
The cost to Britain of remaining a Great Power had greatly increased since 1939. The country’s expenditure on all military and diplomatic activity in the years 1934-38 was ?6 million per annum. In 1947, on military expenditure alone, the government budgeted ?209 million. In July 1950, on the eve of the Korean War—i.e.
The only way for the country to pay its way in these overstretched circumstances was for the British to impose on themselves unprecedented conditions of restraint and voluntary penury—which accounts for the much remarked upon feature of these years: that proud, victorious Great Britain seemed somehow tighter, poorer, grayer and grimmer than any of the erstwhile defeated, occupied and ravished lands across the water. Everything was rationed, restricted, controlled. The editor and essayist Cyril Connolly, admittedly a pessimistic soul at the best of times, nonetheless captured the mood of the times all too well in a comparison between America and Britain in April 1947:
‘Here the ego is at half-pressure; most of us are not men and women but members of a vast, seedy, overworked, over-legislated neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, strict, old-world apathies—a care-worn people. And the symbol of this mood is London, now the largest, saddest and dirtiest of great cities, with its miles of unpainted, half-inhabited houses, its chopless chop-houses, its beerless pubs, its once vivid quarters losing all personality, its squares bereft of elegance… its crowds mooning around the stained green wicker of the cafeterias in their shabby raincoats, under a sky permanently dull and lowering like a metal dish-cover.’
This was the age of austerity. In order to increase the country’s exports (and thus earn vital foreign currency) almost anything was either rationed or simply unavailable: meat, sugar, clothes, cars, gasoline, foreign travel, even sweets. Bread rationing, never imposed during the war, was introduced in 1946 and not abandoned until July 1948. The government ostentatiously celebrated a ‘bonfire of controls’ on November 5th 1949; but many of those same controls had to be re-imposed with the belt-tightening of the Korean War, and basic food rationing in Britain only ended in 1954—long after the rest of western Europe. Street scenes in post-war Britain would have been familiar to citizens in the Soviet bloc—in the words of one English housewife, recalling these years, ‘It was queues for everything, you know, even if you didn’t know what you were queuing for… you joined it because you knew there was something at the end of it.’
The British proved remarkably tolerant of their deprivations—in part because of a belief that these were, at least, shared fairly across the community—although the accumulated frustration with rations and regulations, and a certain air of puritanical paternalism that clung to some Labour ministers (notably the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps), contributed to Conservative electoral recovery in the 1950s. The sense that there was no choice and that the government knew best made the first generation of post-war England, in novelist David Lodge’s recollections of his youth, ‘cautious, unassertive, grateful for small mercies and modest in our ambition,’ in marked contrast to the generation that would succeed them. And the mercies did not seem so very small. As Sam Watson, the veteran leader of the Durham miners union, reminded the Labour Party’s annual conference in 1950: ‘Poverty has been abolished. Hunger is unknown. The sick are tended. The old folks are cherished, our children are growing up in a land of opportunity.’
Britain remained a deferential, class-divided society—and the welfare state, as we have seen, benefited the ‘middling sort’ above all. But income and wealth really
The feelings of the moment are nicely captured in Humphrey Jennings’ contemporary film documentary of England in 1951, ‘Family Portrait’. The title itself points to something distinctive about the country—no documentary film-maker in France or Italy or Germany or Belgium would have thought to use it. The film is a celebration of Englishness, strongly coloured by shared recollections of suffering and glory in the recent war, and it is suffused with an only partly self-conscious pride in the peculiarities of the place. There is much emphasis upon science and progress, design and work. And there is no reference whatsoever to England’s (
In 1828, the German poet Heinrich Heine made the already familiar observation that ‘it is rarely possible for the English, in their parliamentary debates, to give utterance to a principle. They discuss only the utility or disutility of a thing, and produce facts, for and against.’ The British rejected Robert Schuman’s invitation in 1950 because of what they took to be the disutility of joining a European economic project, and because of their longstanding discomfort with continental entanglements. But the British decision to stand aside from the ECSC was above all an instinctive, psychological and even emotional one, a product of the utter peculiarity of recent British experience. In Anthony Eden’s summary of the British decision, to a New York audience in January 1952, ‘This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do.’
