Family Britain 1951-1957
The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys.
4.7 out of 5 based on 11 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
History |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
784 |
| RRP |
£25.00 |
| Date of Publication |
November 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0747583851 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys.
Reviews
The Daily Express
Christopher Silvester
"This new instalment is every bit as multidimensional and fascinating as the first... The skill of knowing what to include, what to leave out and when to move from analysis and reflective debate to sheer immersion in the delights of memory is one that Kynaston exhibits with unflustered ease."
30/10/2009
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The Financial Times
Juliet Gardiner
"Evocative names such as Dab-it-off, Windolene, Spangles, I-Spy books, Toni perms, premium bonds, Green Line coaches, Tizer, Plasticine, The Glums and Kraft cheese triangles recur in a narrative shot through with sharp insights and thoughtful reflections... Since this is history of a high order, Family Britain is not simply a string of fascinating vignettes. Kynaston listens to his huge cast of voices and carefully interrogates their observations."
02/11/2009
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The Independent
D.J. Taylor
"Once again Kynaston's research is impeccable in its depth and precision... [His] reluctance to generalise is one of his most attractive characteristics. "So many individual lives," he reflects; "it makes one wonder about the validity of terms like 'class', 'culture' and 'community.'" It does, and yet his diagnosis is of a "frozen period", a ten-year gap following the war's end in which the old social patterns resumed, with rock'n'roll, Suez and a less deferential press lining up to blow them away."
30/10/2009
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The Mail on Sunday
Craig Brown
"It is [the] justaposition of the personal with the universal that makes Family Britain so utterly compelling. It is a technique to be found in the great novels, such as War and Peace, but it is rarely employed to such remarkable effect in non-fiction. It reminds us that although history rolls remorselessly onwards, there will always be individual lives, however modest, however overlooked, that exist to contradict it."
08/11/2009
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The Spectator
Philip Hensher
"[A] magnificent book. Professor Kynaston is the most entertaining historian alive, and his Tales of a New Jerusalem, when concluded, will undoubtedly be the first stop for any reader interested in the vitality, rather than the general contours, of this long period."
21/10/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Dominic Sandbrook
"It is in its evocation of the last days of settled, stable working-class life that Kynaston’s book really excels... Plenty of historians have written about [this period] before. But none have captured it better or with more human sympathy than David Kynaston, in this deeply researched, richly detailed and very moving book."
23/10/2009
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The Sunday Times
Robert Harris
"David Kynaston selects his words with the precise and evocative care of a Metaphysical poet exploring a new-found land... It is the great strength of Kynaston’s almost Shakespearian approach to social history — a vast canvas, huge detail, imaginative empathy and wise authorial neutrality — that he allows one half of his readers to wallow comfortably in nostalgia while the other half shudders with relief that the 1950s are half a century behind us."
25/10/2009
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The Guardian
Katherine Whitehorn
"Highly readable... There are surprises in it even for someone who lived delightedly through those years: was rationing really not finally called off until July 1954? Was a Tory government cheerfully still subsidising milk and National Butter in 1956?... the main way in which my memory differs from this account of what was actually going on is in what was happening to women."
14/11/2009
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The Literary Review
Paul Addison
"One of the hallmarks of his work is a determination to let ‘ordinary people’ speak for themselves about the things that really mattered to them... The trouble is that in displaying the past he sometimes disappears into the background: by p40 or so I was gagging for an idea or an argument. Many are the curious and wonderful discoveries on display, but the key judgements are like needles in a haystack."
01/12/2009
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The New Statesman
Vernon Bogdanor
"Family Britain is an entertaining bran-tub of information about the habits of the British people more than 50 years ago. It is a valuable corrective to the high-politics approach, but like the pudding served to Churchill at the Savoy, it has no theme... For this reason, Family Britain is unlikely to replace Peter Hennessy's Having It So Good as a standard history of the period."
12/11/2009
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The Observer
Simon Garfield
"He is a brilliant retriever, never elitist, delighting in the commonplace... Yet for all its splendours, Kynaston's massive project is beginning to creak a little at the spine. I'm a great fan of his first volume, Austerity Britain, where his style seemed both fresh and perfectly suited to his subject matter. But increasingly now we are coming close to "just one bloody thing after another""
01/11/2009
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