#postwar england

[beatleshistoryblog207]

LECTURE 2 – THE WORLD THAT GAVE US THE BEATLES: This nostalgic and poignant British documentary, titled Those Were the Days: Britain in the 1950s (2003), depicts life in 1950s’ England through British Pathé newsreel footage. Much of the newsreel footage contains announcers from the time they were made narrating scenes of daily life in Great Britain in the early Postwar years. But there is also more recent narration by Michael Dean, who walks us through this fascinating period of time. The footage goes right up to the late 1950s, roughly around the time – as we shall soon see in History 207 – that John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were playing together in The Quarrymen. While the documentary presents a decidedly romanticized view of the past, the original newsreel footage is quite mesmerizing, and makes you feel like you’re right there in England in the 1950s.:

[beatleshistoryblog207]

LECTURE 2 – THE WORLD THAT GAVE US THE BEATLES: I mention the British working class fairly often in History 207: The Beatles and the Sixties. But what did it mean to be part of the British working class in Postwar UK? This fascinating film, from the YouTube page Postcards From Britannia, offers a succinct yet compelling answer to that question with a mix of compelling film footage and insightful narration. Class distinctions in mid-century Great Britain ran deep, and the conventional wisdom held that if you were born into a particular class, you would spend your life in that class. The British author George Orwell (1903-1950), born to a middle-class family, observed these class differences when he wrote about his interactions with the British working class:

“I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance, I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation, there is always that accursed itch of class-difference… It is not a question of dislike or distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible… I found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me ‘sir’; and all of them… softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it.”

[beatleshistoryblog]

Lecture 2: This nostalgic and poignant British documentary, titled Those Were the Days (2003), depicts life in 1950s’ England through British Pathé newsreel footage. Much of the newsreel footage contains announcers from the time they were made narrating scenes of daily life in Great Britain in the early Postwar years. But there is also more recent narration by Michael Dean, who walks us through this fascinating period of time. The footage goes right up to the late 1950s, roughly around the time -- as we shall soon see in History 207 -- that John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were playing together in The Quarrymen. While the documentary presents a decidedly romanticized view of the past, the original newsreel footage is quite mesmerizing, and makes you feel like you’re right there in England in the 1950s.

[beatleshistoryblog]

LECTURE 2 – THE WORLD THAT GAVE US THE BEATLES: Watch out! This sexist 1948 newsreel film footage reflects the rigid gender roles of the early postwar years in Great Britain. In this case, women are shown watching a marionette performance of female puppets trying on the latest fashionable shoes (!!!). It’s quite disturbing (you’ve been warned). But it serves the valuable purpose of illustrating the pervasive sexist attitudes toward women in the years that followed World War II in the UK. 

[thequille]

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters

Goodreads Time: Postwar England MCs: M/F Sub-Genre: Historical Gothic Fiction Themes: Inheritance; Horror; Family Mystery; Medical; Not a Romance Summary: One postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country physician, is called to a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two…

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[beatlesblog207]

LECTURE 2 – THE WORLD THAT GAVE US THE BEATLES: Watch out! This sexist 1948 newsreel film footage reflects the rigid gender roles of the early postwar years in Great Britain. In this case, women are shown watching a marionette performance of female puppets trying on the latest fashionable shoes (!!!). It’s quite disturbing (you’ve been warned). But it serves the valuable purpose of illustrating the pervasive sexist attitudes toward women in the years that followed World War II in the UK. 

[modernistliving]

A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940-1980

A Broken Wave: The Rebuilding of England 1940-1980

Lionel Esher

Published by Viking/Allen Lane, 1981

I finally bought this book after asking a fellow instagramer his opinion - it has been sitting in my basket for ages and finally took the plunge. I was very lucky to get a very good copy for a good price (around £10ish). The dust wrapper is pretty much is perfect condition and it features the Barbican under construction, need I say more?

Now to get on the nitty gritty of the book...I actually only read the introduction and quickly glanced through the other chapters and it has been fabulous so far. I don’t normally make posts on books until I have read it so this is definitely something good.

In summary, Lionel Esher retells the story of the rebuilding of England which began drink the Blitz years of the 1940s and was completed by 1980. The book is sectioned into only five chapters and they are: London, Newcastle, Sheffield, Liverpool, and Milton Keynes, so this book isn’t just for those London folks!

There are also numerous photographs and I can’t help but stare at all those modernist building (drool). I will do an updated post when I finish this book and hopefully have more to report back.

[squeeterbee]

Based on the fact that Dion’s “The Wanderer” is playing on the radio as Rocky rides through the countryside, Chicken Run is set no earlier than 1961. This dating is reinforced by Big Joe Turner’s “Flip Flop Fly” (1955) having played on the rat radio in the henhouse earlier on.

Which means that Fowler the elderly rooster is at most 63 years old. The RAF was formed towards the end of WWI, in 1918. Assuming he enlisted at the start of WWI in 1914 at the very youngest at 16 yoa, he would have been born at the earliest in 1898).