THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

days of the imperial dream became nightmarish (as in the bloody communal violence which attended the division of
India in 1947 and the expiry of the British mandate in Palestine in May 1948). The 1950s were marked not solely by
immigration but also by the deaths of conscripted British soldiers fighting against Communist insurgents in Malaya,
the Mau Mau in Kenya, and EOKA guerrillas in Cyprus. Perhaps the most notable example of the failure of the
imperial muscle and of the imperial will was the Anglo-French military débâcle at Suez in November 1956 following
the nationalization of the Canal by the Egyptian Government. The Conservative Government’s inept intervention, in
the face of a radically changing pattern of international relations, was readily interpreted by many jaded observers at
home as looking more like carelessness than misfortune.
It was a post-war Labour Government which, in the face of Winston Churchill’s impotent dismay, had brought in
the legislation which gave India its independence. This same government, led by Clement Attlee, had been elected
with a clear majority in 1945 (Labour had received some 47 per cent of the vote, though some 20 per cent of the
nation had declined to involve itself in the democratic process). Labour’s mandate for the domestic reforms it
attempted to introduce was based on a widespread popular acceptance that the war, the war economy, and wartime
propaganda had prepared the way for social change. An Act passed in 1944 had already radically reorganized stateaided
education by raising the school-leaving age and subdividing the system into primary, secondary, and further
educational stages. It also, for the first time, provided the opportunity of a free, if selective, academic education at
grammar schools irrespective of a pupil’s social background. The incoming government was pledged to nationalize
the railways and the coal and steel industries. It was also pledged to speed the advent of what had been hailed during
the war as the ‘Welfare State’ (as opposed to Hitler’s ‘warfare state’). The 1948 National Assistance Act formally
abolished the old, despised Poor Law, but the Welfare State’s cornerstone was the new National Health Service Act of
1946 which required that by 5 July 1948 free medical treatment should be available to all citizens.
An air of optimism, which was not generally shared by the Conservative Opposition, fostered the idea that Britain
was rebuilding itself in a new, socially responsive economic dawn. The mood had earlier been summed up in a
stylishly illustrated pamphlet issued in the election year of 1945 and ambitiously entitled Design for Britain. ‘The
Aeroplane has not only given us a new vision’, it blandly announced, ‘but a new chance by blasting away centres of
cities so that we can rebuild them with a new plan designed for the swift flow of modern traffic, for the play of light
and air, inspiring to look at and live in.’ This hopeful mood was also exemplified in the decision made by the Labour
government in 1947 to commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by celebrating ‘the British
contributions to world civilisation in the arts of
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peace’. This scheme, brought to its final realization by the Conservative Government elected in 1951, was the Festival
of Britain. The main Festival site was an area of bombed land on the south bank of the river Thames in London. Out
of the dereliction rose an architect-designed simulacrum of the brave new world. London got a new concert-hall as a
permanent memorial to the Festival’s somewhat lofty view of the nation’s culture, though airy, temporary pavilions on
the south bank had proudly shown off examples of new school equipment and domestic furniture and illustrated
modern advances in public health, industrial production, invention, and exploration. A pavilion called ‘The Lion and
the Unicorn’ had also attempted to define the ‘British character’ by endeavouring to represent ‘two of the main
qualities of the national character: on the one hand, realism and strength, on the other fantasy, independence and
imagination’. ‘If on leaving this Pavilion’, the official guide-book whimsically announced, ‘the visitor from overseas
concludes that he is still not much the wiser about the British national character, it might console him to know that
the British people are themselves very much in the dark about it.’
The optimism implicit in the Festival of Britain was not exactly forced, but it was clearly designed to cheer up a
dreary and deprived nation, one drained by the sacrifices which had been required of it by the effort of fighting the
war. It had, however, been a ‘People's War’, one which had forcibly suppressed distinctions between classes, genders,
and races through military conscription, a planned economy, the recruitment of women’s labour, and the rationing of
food and luxury goods. The victory, as much as the misery, had been shared by everyone. This was the loathsome
future Britain, with its earth inherited by Hoopers, that Evelyn Waugh saw coming into being in Brideshead Revisited
(1945). This was the drab, egalitarian Britain which found an exaggerated echo in the world of Oceania in George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). This was the Welfare Britain, with its citizens cared for from the cradle to the
grave, that the post-war Labour government nobly attempted to forge into a united nation by the exercise of benign
state planning. This too was the innocent world of the exemplary and improbable film comedy Holiday Camp (1948),
a delightfully naïve film in which the diverse social classes of Mr Attlee’s Britain are seen mixing easily amid the
obligatory but frugal cheer of a seaside holiday camp. It was an orderly and conformist Britain that was also ripe for
further change, not all of it disciplined or planned.