When the going was good... the legacy of the 1950s

Tinged unashamedly with nostalgia, they would reminisce about watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium on their family’s first television set, the freedom they enjoyed during the school holidays when they would leave home in the morning with a football under their arm and not return until they were hungry and the excitement caused when they took delivery of brand new fridge freezer.

Always somewhere in the background was Harold Macmillan’s pronouncement in 1957 that in the decade which followed the war most British people “had never had it so good”.

Wondering whether the former Prime Minister was right and suspecting perhaps he might have been unwittingly viewing the past with the proverbial rose-tinted glasses, Kelly decided to put Mamillan’s words to the test. Was the 1950s really the decade which brought unprecedented prosperity to a Britain where everyone left their front doors open or did it just feel brighter and more optimistic against the backdrop of the war years?

“Sandwiched between the austerity of the 1940s and the sexy 1960s, the 1950s are often forgotten and overlooked,” says Kelly, a former journalism and media lecturer. “There were about four of us teaching at Huddersfield who were about the same age and as tends to happen we would spend lunchtimes chatting about the old days. There was something which stuck with me from those conservations and I guess I just wanted to see whether others who grew up then felt the same way.”

The result is You’ve Never Had It So Good – Recollections of Life in the 1950s made up largely from first hand memories of those who came of age in the decade which brought the birth of the NHS, the launch of the pop charts and crucially, full employment. For Kelly, it quickly became clear, that Macmillan’s now infamous quote was more than simple rhetoric.

“For the first time ever, pretty much everyone had jobs. When I left school in 1962 the country was still feeling the benefit of full-employment. I had two jobs to go to and that wasn’t unusual,” he says. “Couple that with a really strong trade union movement, which had successfully fought for better wages, and suddenly you don’t just have a population at work, you have one with a disposable income.

“People had money to spend and with the Americanisation of Britain and the arrival of white goods and television there was something to spend it on. Ordinary working class families were starting to go on holiday, the cinema thrived and glamorous film stars were front page news. When the Festival of Britain opened in 1951, there was definitely a sense that this country was going somewhere.”

Add in the impact of the newly launched NHS which gradually saw a reduction in deaths from polio and tuberculosis, the legacy of the 1944 Education Act, which gave hope to thousands of working class youngsters and a belief that Britain was at the forefront of technological breakthroughs, and it made for a pretty heady mix.

“What really struck me was how importantly science was viewed in the 1950s,” says Kelly, himself a grammar school boy. “It was a period which saw the arrival of the jet engine and where everyone knew the names of the great pilots. It contributed to a feeling that the future was going to be an exciting place to be and people wanted to be a part of it.” Having mined his own memories and having trawled newspapers from the time, Kelly visited a residential home near his home in Manchester and went through his own contacts book for possible contributors.

While former Labour leader Neil Kinnock wrote the foreword to the book, Kelly was less interested in finding famous names and much more keen to speak to those whose experiences are often omitted by the history books.

People like Mary James who talks of her annual trip to Busbys department store in Bradford where her gran used to take her fur coat for cold storage over the summer and Trevor Creaser, from Leeds, who remembers being sent to nearby allotments to find turnips and potatoes for a recipe his mother called nail soup.

“People’s lives were much less fragmented then than they are now,” says Kelly, who while at Huddersfield University began an aural history archive to record the stories of ordinary people. “Families sat down together to watch the same programme, they worked near to their homes and while it’s become something of a cliché to say, there was a much greater sense of community.”

It’s a point amply illustrated by Geoff Wright when he talks of living in Halifax, home to many of the top names in rugby league.

“All the players worked in local jobs,” he says. “I never worked with any of the players, but I knew Charlie Renilson very well because he came in the pub on a Saturday night. His wife Thelma and my wife Val, they’d be in one corner having a natter and we’d be in the other corner watching Match of the Day, cursing and swearing at the television.

“Another who played for Bradford and Wakefield had the chippy down the road, then he bought a milk van and was my in-laws’ milkman. They were part of the community; you could rub shoulders with these people.”

Kelly stops short of claiming the 1950s was the perfect decade and admits that many felt sidelined from the good times. While Britain had invited workers from the West Indies, Pakistan and India into the country, the reception they got when they arrived was less than edifying. Back street abortionists thrived, women were still very much second class citizens and the shadow cast by the development of the atomic bomb and the threat of nuclear war was large.

“My mum’s family was from Yorkshire and we used to go to Huddersfield every year on holiday, so I saw the change which took places with the arrival of the Afro-Caribbean community and how many struggled to adapt.

“Women who became pregnant were often expected or forced to leave their jobs and with contraception still not widely available many ended up living a life of domestic servitude.

“The treatment of homosexuals at that time was particularly appalling and there are definite blots on the decade. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that everything was wonderful in the 1950s, but was Macmillan right when he said most people had never had it so good? Absolutely.”

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You’ve Never Had It So Good – Recollections of Life in the 1950s, by Stephen F Kelly, is published by The History Press, priced £13.49. To order through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing costs £2.85.