David Kynaston
Austerity Britain: 1945–51.
Walker & Company, 704 pages, $45
Britain emerged from the Second World War victorious but badly bruised. There was relief, of course; there was an underlying pride at having won through. But anything approaching euphoria was quickly dispelled by continuing hardships and restrictions, and by the prospect of more to come. In his new history, Austerity Britain: 1945–51, David Kynaston quotes a middle-aged schoolteacher writing in her diary, after the government had unveiled its 1951 Budget, “Oh, dear! What a THIN time lies ahead!” She might have been speaking, he adds, “for most people after most Budgets in the immediate post-war period.”
The title of Kynaston’s book virtually chose itself. “Austerity” has become a standard term for life in Britain after 1945, and with good reason. It was an age of shortages, waiting-lists, queues, power-cuts, permits, barely edible food substitutes, drab “utility” clothes. Taxation was at penal levels. Only a tiny amount of currency could be taken abroad. What you could buy was to a large extent determined by the “points” and coupons in your ration-book.
During the war conditions like these were generally understood to be unavoidable. They were much harder to accept in peacetime—the period was also a golden age of grumbling. And in some respects, too, things had actually got worse. Bread-rationing, for example, which had been unknown even in 1940, was introduced for the first time in 1946.
Yet austerity isn’t the same thing as
