Revisiting the dark days of postwar Britain.
By Martin Rubin, Special to The (L.A.) Times
May 23, 2008
“In Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 [Walker & Co., 694pp, $45], British social historian David Kynaston tells the story of those drab, difficult postwar years so familiar to viewers of the stiff-upper-lip, black-and-white films the British studios were turning out at the time (“Brief Encounter,” “Passport to Pimlico”). Reading the many first-person accounts in this weighty, immensely detailed and sometimes evocative volume, you begin to see that, for countless people in that place at that time, life really was lived in a world devoid of color—a place of long lines, of shortages, of frustration.
“All the combatant nations of World War II had their problems adjusting to postwar realities in the late 1940s, but the British had a particularly extended and hard time of it. Not, it is true, as tough as the Germans or the Japanese—but, after all, those countries had lost the war and Britain had won it. The cost of victory, however, had been high: the loss of Britain’s foreign assets, the ‘convertibility crisis’ that saw a run on the pound sterling, and immense damage to public infrastructure and private property. . . .”
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