Chronicling My Origins

Reviewed by Benjamin Schwarz
Atlantic Monthly, June 2008

Review edited by Andy Ross
Pictures courtesy of Google
 

This sparkling book charts the evolution of British society during the depleted and dingy years 1945–1951. As Britain shifted from desperate war to bankrupt peace, its Labour government set about building the first welfare state and attempting in myriad ways to uplift the country and its people.

Austerity meant a home front without a war. Food, clothing, and coal would now in some cases be even more sparingly apportioned than they had been when the war was on. With wit and ingenuity, Kynaston mines opinion surveys, radio shows, advertising slogans, parliamentary reports, and above all letters, diaries, and memoirs to evoke the gray tinge that permeated postwar life — the shabby frocks, the sallow faces, the grubby train compartments, the dreary meals.

Austerity was merely an underlying condition, like the weather and the Victorian industrial environment, that shaped the totality of the British national experience, which is the real subject of this ambitious work.
 

Kynaston probes the personal and political clashes within the Labour Party intelligentsia — and recounts how women appropriated and adapted the New Look fashions. He analyzes labor-management relations in the British automotive industry — and traces the relationship between the decline in married women's employment and changes in landscape design. He assesses the birth and progress of the National Health Service — and adumbrates the impact of the hit BBC radio series Listen With Mother on a generation of children.

Throughout, Kynaston is alive to the peculiar tactile features — the "heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs" — that make this recent past a foreign country.

Sports forms one leitmotif. The record-breaking attendance figures for soccer, dog races, and speedway no doubt signified the ascendancy of working-class culture in national life. The audience for cricket, which appealed especially to the middle and upper classes, also reached its apogee. I wish Kynaston had more to say about the Victorian seaside resorts, the dance halls, and the pictures, all of which were also at the peak of their popularity.

Kynaston's narrative is constantly poised on a high-wire. He consciously tries to impart a sense of the fortuitousness and richness of the everyday, with its jumble of seismic and banal events, and he seems to relish smashing any too-neat frame the analytically inclined reader would impose on his story.
 

Again and again Kynaston reminds readers that the working class, which made up 75 percent of the country, had never had it so good: its standard of living was 10 percent higher in 1948 than a decade earlier, even as that of the middle class declined by 20 percent. And for unskilled workers and the unemployed, the mandated fairness of rationing ensured adequate food. Moreover, the drab but nutritious rationed diet gave Britain the healthiest people in its history.

Kynaston's sense of structure and pacing is sure, his mastery of his astonishingly diverse material unfailing. More vividly and penetratingly than any work of history I can recall, this book captures the rhythms and texture of everyday life. To read it is to enter a world.

The voices of women dominate this panoramic but fine-grained portrait of the quotidian. Recurring references to the unpublished diaries of a dozen ordinary women form the backbone of the book. What clearly emerges from Kynaston's book is how much more exquisitely than men women experienced daily life, acutely analyzed and assimilated that experience, and shrewdly, vividly, and precisely spoke and wrote about it.
 

Kynaston's focus on women sheds light on his broadest theme: the chasm between the intellectuals, mandarins, and planners and those who were the object of their ministrations. Long before its electoral victory in 1945, the Labour Party had expanded its ranks to include an ascendant, brainy, progressive bunch. Far more bent on cultural renewal than on economic or social egalitarianism, this new group actually believed, as Deputy Prime Minister Herbert Morrison said, that "part of our work in politics ... must be to improve human nature."

The reformers were confronted with the most unpromising clay to work with. Emerging from Kynaston's minute examination of the everyday is the British people's profound social conservatism: its unshakable ability to tune out all earnest discussion of politics and world affairs and stick to talk about gardens and hemlines, its strictly limited appetite for the communal, and its devotion to the home and the nuclear family.
 

At war's end, Britain faced a housing crisis. German bombs had destroyed or severely damaged 750,000 houses, and virtually no new ones had been built for six years. Kynaston shows that "across the country, it was on the home that most people's hopes and concerns were really focused." In their diaries and letters as well as in survey after survey, people made clear their strong dislikes in housing and their equally strong desire: a small suburban house with a garden. The planners and reformers would have none of it.

Kynaston's judgment is implicit but clear: Austerity Britain was a better place for being a worse place. The better grew out of the worse, the worse out of the better.
 

AR   Born in Britain in 1949, I naturally respond to this topic with some intensity.