On the roads, one out of every three vehicles was a bus or lorry. Tractors had largely replaced horses, but most farmers still employed poorly paid agricultural labourers, many of whom lived in tied cottages.
It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.Sign up to receive the latest and greatest articles from our site automatically each week (give or take)...right to your inbox.We hope you enjoy this website. Roland Quinault looks at the state of the islands immediately following the Second World War.Britain in 1950 was different, in many ways, from Britain today. The English-speaking industrial population of south Wales had little in common with the Welsh-speaking ruralists of the west and north, while the industrial and partly Catholic proletariat of Glasgow felt no kinship with the Edinburgh or Presbyterian elites.In England, the Second World War had revived a sense of Englishness which was reflected, for example, in Nikolaus Pevsner’s lectures on ‘The Englishness of English Art’ and the series of books on English heritage published by Collins.
The divorce rate had increased sharply in the 1940s – because of the war and a relaxation of the law – but in 1950 it was still less than a fifth of that today. Coal production was hindered by a shortage of miners and investment, but was twice the level of the mid-1980s and far greater than today.Although the great majority of British people lived and worked in urban or industrial areas, most of the land mass of Britain was still predominantly rural and agricultural in character. They provided practical skills, a code of morality and inexpensive outings and holidays.Primary schools had to cope with the post-war ‘baby boom’ – and classes of nearly fifty were common in urban areas.
The Empire was still of great political, military and economic importance. The immortal cancer cells collected from patient Henrietta Lacks months before her 1950 death are still alive and… Read More On their feet they wore short or long socks with shoes, sandals or canvas plimsolls. Many servicemen served abroad, especially in Germany or the Empire. Identified Flying Objects.
Popular fashion, however, was less influenced by America and the ‘Teddy boys’ were a distinctively British phenomenon. A communist government was established in the country under the leadership of Fidel Castro, with the help of the Soviet Union.Edmund Hillary, along with a Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, scaled Mount Everest and this duo was the first to reach its summit. The leading popular paper, the Visual entertainment for the masses was principally provided by films.
The sudden death of George VI in 1952 induced genuine national mourning and large crowds attended his lying-in-state.Britain, like its empire, was multi-racial and multi-cultural, for differences of nationality, locality, class and gender had prevented the emergence of a homogenised national identity and culture. The era was also a golden age for children’s comics, both humorous British strips like The national mood and character was epitomised by the 1951 Festival of Britain, sponsored by the Labour government as a symbol of Britain’s post-war revival, which celebrated national achievements from science, manufacturing and housing, to the arts and recreation.
The 1950s were a decade marked by the post-World War II boom, the dawn of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Other immigrants had come to Britain as refugees from the Nazis and the Second World War – including over 160,000 Poles and Jews from central Europe. A majority of them were conscripts, who were variously elated, bored or appalled by their experiences. Sports Trivia. Maybe in part due to the popularity of sci-fi at the time, the ‘50s saw many …