Austerity Britain, 1945-51

by David Kynaston

The Appointed Day itself was littered with claims and warnings. ‘We are leading the whole world in Social Security,’ boasted the Daily Mirror, adding: ‘Our State belongs to the people – unlike so many countries where the people belong to the State – and Social Security converts our democratic ideal into human reality.’ The Times wondered whether the next generation would be able to ‘reap the benefits of a social service State while avoiding the perils of a Santa Claus State’ but insisted that ‘it would be a grave mistake to overlook the deep feelings and sense of purpose and common humanity which all the new social services are trying, however imperfectly, to express.’ A surprisingly sour note came from the Manchester Guardian, which – true to its nineteenth-century laissez-faire roots – feared that the state provision of welfare

otherwise determinedly cheerful memoirs recall a series of gloomy images and episodes: an appalling London fog that ‘was almost combustible, so thick was it with soft-coal smoke’, lingering for almost a week ‘until a kind of claustrophobia threatened to drive everyone stir-crazy’; the only outdoor illumination coming from ‘dim and inadequate street lamps’; the ‘severe limitation on food’; and a hotel in Cardiff where Reagan in the small hours ran out of shillings for the gas fire and ‘finished the night wrapped in my overcoat’. At Elstree itself he was also unimpressed by the contrast between the ‘tremendously talented, creative people’ he was working with and the ‘incredible inefficiency that

makes everything take longer than it should’, not helped by union restrictions on the hours available for filming. A jocose Christmas letter to Jack Warner in Hollywood suggested disenchantment with Britain (‘what they do to the food we did to the American Indian’, while ‘cheerio’ was ‘a native word meaning good bye – it is spoken without moving the upper lip – while looking down the nose’), but it was in the New Year that he had a serious conversation with the film’s director, Vincent Sherman. ‘They had,’ according to Reagan’s most intimate biographer, ‘some long arguments over the Labour government’s so-called Welfare State. As far as Reagan could see, nobody was well, and everybody fared badly. If this was socialism – stoppages, six-hour hospital queues, mile after mile of slate-roofed council houses – what price the New

Deal?’ Reagan himself wrote in the 1970s that this trip to Britain had marked a defining stage in his political journey. He had seen the consequences of the natural economic order being turned upside-down, with civil servants becoming ...