Austerity Britain (Bloomsbury, 2007) is the first volume of what I hope will be a multi-volume history of Britain between 1945 and 1979. It covers the first six years after the war and draws on a wide range of contemporary sources and ‘voices’. Two of the witnesses – one a journalist, novelist and short story writer, the other a welfare worker who kept a diary – will be familiar to Persephone readers.

The first is Mollie Panter-Downes (1906-97), who wrote, in addition to her short stories (published in two volumes as Good Evening, Mrs Craven and Minnie’s Room), a regular ‘Letter from London’ for The New Yorker from the outbreak of war in 1939 until well into the 1980s. The wartime columns were collected in book form in 1972, but to the best of my knowledge the many post-war letters have hitherto lain in obscurity.
I found them beautifully written, fascinating and invaluable, not least for their frequent verbatim quotations of what people were actually saying. ‘It ’asn’t ’arf put the wind up people,’ declared a cockney matron whom Panter- Downes overheard on a bus following the government’s announcement, three months after Hiroshima, that the Civil Defence Services would not be disbanded. ‘They can’t seem to settle to things, and no wonder. Funny thing, even though I’ve taken every stitch off me back every night since VE Day, I can’t seem to feel easy, either. It’s peace, I tell meself, but some’ow it don’t feel like peace ought to feel.’

She herself recorded during that difficult, straitened first year of peace the ‘row of empty hooks’ in most butchers at Christmas, and how in Chelsea, where as in much of middle-class England ‘practically nobody has a servant to leave on guard in the kitchen’, a householder came home from the cinema to find that burglars had visited for the third time and taken his last overcoat, some tinned sardines, and a pound of tea and two pots of marmalade. ‘These are things,’ she comments, ‘which are painful and grievous to lose nowadays.’

Panter-Downes had an eye that was equally acute for social trends (such as the hunger for the New Look), culture (including a damning verdict on the ‘deadly facetiousness’ of Christopher Fry's Venus Observedthat has probably stood the test of time), and politics. Her treatment of Labour's conference at Margate in 1950 is typically brilliant. She not only describes how Aneurin Bevan looked on the platform ‘like a sort of walking Union Jack –crimson face, pugnacious blue eyes, and a thick, silvering thatch of hair’, whereas the ailing Ernest Bevin seemed ‘tired and oddly shrunken’, but also gives a delicious picture of how ‘in the evenings, when the delegates stopped at the various hotel bars to lower a pint before dinner, the regular customers, attended by their glum, well-tailored Scotties and fox terriers, sat sipping their gins with a self-conscious air of being in dubious company.’

The diarist is Vere Hodgson (1901-79). Her wartime diary, Few Eggs and No Oranges, is a deserved Persephone favourite, vividly relating her experiences in the Notting Hill area; but historians have been remarkably uncurious about her post-war diary, currently in the safekeeping of her literary executor, Veronica Bowater. There seems to be a gap for the 1950s, but happily there survives much from before and after.

Vere Hodgson was as little a lover of Clement Attlee and his colleagues as Mollie Panter-Downes was ‘WHAT A SHAKING THEY HAVE HAD’ she gleefully exclaimed after the 1950 election – but the real value of her diary is its wealth of telling detail. At the Ideal Home Exhibition there were ‘queues in all directions’ and as a result she ‘never got a bite’; on Workers’ Playtime she heard and noted down the gist of a decidedly bitter song called ‘I’d Like To Be A Refugee From Britain’; and, also on the radio, she vividly recorded listening enthusiastically to Sir
Alfred Munnings laying into Picasso and the moderns at the Royal Academy’s summer banquet.

‘Oh, for a little extra butter!’ she wailed in March 1949 after it had been announced that the meat ration was to go down again. ‘Then I should not mind the meat. I want half a pound of butter a week for myself alone... For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration, and I am fed up. I NEVER enjoy my lunch...’
Happily there were no such shortages by the 1960s, when Vere Hodgson was living in Church Stretton in Shropshire. In the dreadful winter of 1963 she struggled through the snow to a performance of The Messiah by the Ludlow Choral Society. ‘Stretton nobly turned up and the body of the Church was quite full,’ she noted. ‘But it was nice to plod back home and get a cup of hot Bovril!’ Later that year occurred the Profumo Scandal, profoundly shocking to Vere Hodgson and her friends. ‘Poor Mr Macmillan,’ she reflected. ‘He seems too unworldly to cope with people as they are today. He has the morals and values of the Victorian age.’

And when, two years later, there was a major outcry about ‘the low standard of plays on TV’, she offered her thoughts on the dominant medium of the day: ‘I don’t follow them, because I seldom look, except at “Dr Finlay’s Casebook” on Sunday evening. This I love. But I so dislike the interviewers like Robin Day, whose manners are all that you hope never to meet.’ The social and moral certainties of the 1940s already seemed a world away.

David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain 1945-51 is published by Bloomsbury

Ordering books from Persephone

You can see a complete list of Persephone Books and order online here. Or you can email us, telephone on 020 7242 9292, send a fax to 020 7242 9272 or write to the following address: Persephone Books Ltd, 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB All Persephone Books cost £10 each plus £2 postage (see more information on ordering). We can now send a book a month for six or twelve months - more >