1950s
The fifties have been overshadowed by the war which preceded them and the lively sixties
which followed. Although fifties fashion and music are having a revival today, it is
still difficult to understand what it was like to live at that time.
History rarely falls
neatly into decades and the fifties are no exception. In the first few years Britain was still
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recovering from the war, but by 1959
Harold Macmillan was able to boast, `You've never
had it so good', and an artistic and social revolt against the Establishment had started
which continued into the sixties.
If a
time traveller
from the present day could be taken to a British town in 1950, he would immediately notice the
dilapidated, unpainted buildings and the shabbily dressed people. Although five years
had gone by since the end of the War, there were still gaps between buildings caused by bomb damage.
Few cars were on the roads and people used bicycles or public transport.
A `points' rationing system for clothes had been abolished in 1949, but there was still little choice for women. Nylon stockings were scarce, although sometimes `export rejects' could be found in shops or from a `spiv' on the black market. Men wore drab `Demob' clothes generally a sports jacket and baggy trousers or an ill fitting suit given to them in exchange for their uniform when they left the Army.
Looking back on the early fifties, Neal Ascherson described them as `the years on the grey
plateau . . . everything dangerous or vivid lay in the past' (The Observer, June 1987). On an
average wage of £68s a week there was little to spare for entertainment. Suburban High Streets
were deserted at night. An evening out for young people generally meant the pictures or a dance.
Couples were often chaste as they had nowhere to go to be alone together. In the pre pill age birth
control was unreliable, abortion dangerous and illegitimacy frowned upon. Girls married early and
settled down to family life like their mothers. Although Labour had started to tackle the shortage
of housing, much had yet to be done. Many lived in `prefabs' prefabricated houses which had originally
been put up as temporary accommodation, but were to remain part of the urban scene for many years to come.
Apart from giving the British new hope in their future, the Festival promoted a style in architecture and design known as `Contemporary', which rapidly spread across the country, influencing a generation. Describing a `Contemporary' living room,
A.S. Byatt writes: `The walls, in a way that was fashionable in those post festival years, were all painted in different pastel colours: duck egg blue, watered grass green, muted salmon rose, pale and sandy gold. The armchairs were pale beach, upholstered in olive cord.' (The Virgin in the Garden.) People painted their houses and put out window boxes, restaurants opened and towns became more cheerful places. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was another cause for celebration, some seeing it as the dawn of a New Elizabethan age.
The Festival was also a stimulus to the arts. Sixty painters and 12 sculptors were commissioned to provide works for exhibition, among them the painters John Piper, Lucien Freud, John Minton, Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland, and sculptors Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein, Reg Butler and Barbara Hepworth. Coventry Cathedral, designed by Basil Spence and commissioned in 1951, was a lasting monument to Festival style. The Council of Industrial Design (now The Design Council), which had played an important part in the Festival, became a powerful arbiter of taste in the fifties and sixties.
The deterioration of relations between East and West cast a shadow over the decade and nuclear war became a terrible possibility. In 1956 the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Russia showed the cold face of Communism to the world. Young men still had to do compulsory National Service and many saw active service in Korea, the Canal Zone, Cyprus, with the British Army of the Rhine, and in other parts of the world. The fifties also saw a loosening of Commonwealth ties, and the gradual realization that Britain was no longer one of the leading powers, but that her future lay with America and Europe.
Scientists were horrified by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In 1955, 52 Nobel Prize winners signed an appeal warning the world that `whole nations, neutral or belligerent' could be wiped out, stimulating a lobby for nuclear disarmament. Britain's first nuclear power station, Calder Hall, was opened 1956 and hailed as the first plant to harness atomic power for peaceful purposes. No one knew at the time that it would also be producing plutonium for military use. When a fire broke out at the Windscale nuclear plant in 1957, the British public were not told that it caused a radioactive cloud to drift over most of England.
In 1956 teenagers began to be a social force to be reckoned with. As there was little unemployment, many young people now had lucrative jobs with money to spend on clothes and entertainment. Rock `n' roll music came over from America and Tommy Steele became Britain's first home grown pop star. A new teenage culture sprang up with its own music, meeting places and clothes, common phenomena today but quite new in the fifties. Gangs of `Teddy Boys' were often feared when they carried their anti social behaviour to extremes, and some helped to provoke race riots at Notting Hill Gate in 1958. The number of immigrants from the commonwealth, particularly from the West Indies, increased in the fifties and many encountered racial prejudice in their homes and workplaces, as well as from street gangs.
Reacting against the War, women during the fifties decided to become housewives again, after doing men's jobs in the forces and factories in wartime. Few married women now worked and equal pay was virtually non-existent until granted by the Civil Service in 1958. In 1954 the average annual wage for a man was £546 13s and for a woman £276 10s 6d.
The Guardian reported in 1959 that a group of Girton graduates had agreed
that politics was not a good career for women and `only the exceptional woman is now going to go
on working outside her home' after marriage. Advertisements were blatantly sexist, emphasizing women's domestic duties something which television helped to promote when commercial television was introduced in 1954. Picture Post worked out in 1954 that a woman spent at least five hours in the kitchen each day. Even the elaborately corsetted fashions of Dior, Sarah Mower of The Guardian realized with hindsight, `encapsulated the spirit of the good little wife, the ideal woman of the fifties' (26 March 1987).
The status of women in the fifties led to the women's liberation movement of the sixties.
Extract from “Living Through History, Britain In The 1950s”, written by Pat Hodgson. London: B.T. Batsford LTD. 1989.
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