Family Britain, 1951-1957

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: As New
Jacket Condition: As New
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publisher Place: Uk
Publisher Year: 2009
Edition: First Edition

Description: 776 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in As new condition throughout.

Publishers Description: As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive this narrative. 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; and, 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 Tigers 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 Butlins holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, "Hancocks Half-Hour", Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynastons "Family Britain" offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

ISBN: 9780747583851