Product Description

Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain – and also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of ‘Supermac’ Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance. Above all, Having It So Good captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42834 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 752 pages

Review
Hennessy combines the balance and authority of a historian with the brilliantly selective eye of the investigative journalist ... if the Gods gossip this is how it would sound

Books of the Year (Spectator )

About the Author
Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of History at Queen Mary College, London, and the Director of the Mile End Institute of Contemporary British Government, Intelligence and Society. He is the author of Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (winner of the NCR and Duff Cooper Prizes); the bestselling The Prime Minister and The Secret State (all Penguin).

Customer Reviews

Evocative and Insightful
Peter Hennessy's second volume (of an intended five) depicting Britain since the war is vivid mixture of social history and his trademark archival excavations. Despite its reputation as a grey decade, the 50s have been well documented. Much of its subject matter - the last throes of Attlee's post war government; Churchill's last, Eden; Suez and Macmillan as he wrestled with the bomb, Europe, a decaying Empire and the Commonwealth - have been covered by numerous works- not least by Hennessy himself (Secret State, The Prime Minister, The Hidden Wiring). On Suez, he draws extensively on Percy Craddock's exposition of the Joint Intelligence Committee's deliberations in Know Your Enemy, while the extent to which the resignation of Macmillan's Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, in 1958 was a cause celebre of monetarists later in the vanguard of Thatcherism was covered by Peter Jenkins in Mrs Thatcher's Revolution as early as 1989.

All of this Hennessy readily acknowledges and his considerable skill is to bring together this vast literature in a gloriously coherent narrative, from the Korean War to the collapse of the Paris summit, illuminated by flashes of recently unearthed treasure from the National Archives in Kew. The early chapters, from Attlee to Suez, are the strongest. Churchill's broodings on the bomb and his anxiety over Eden as his successor are laced with the author's childhood memories of steam engines, Coronation street parties, Ashes cricket and trips to the seaside. The relative absence of such interludes in the later chapters makes them feel dry, and perhaps less original, by comparison. Instead, the focus is on Macmillan, the main counterpoint to the official archives being provided by his diaries, the seductiveness of which Hennessy himself feels compelled, helplessly, to warn against.

Despite this imbalance, the sheer breadth of both the primary and secondary sources on which it draws, combined with Hennessy's ready wit, and personal insight, means that Having It So Good offers both an evocative depiction of 1950s Britain for the general reader, as well as some important new material for the academic.

Not Quite What It Says on the Tin
This is a good book but don't be misled by the dust wrapper - it is not a history of everyday life in Britain in the 1950s. It is basically a political history from 1951 to 1960. If you are looking for descriptions of riding round in Humber Super Snipes or Standard Vanguards, attending the Festival of Britain, reading Eagle comic, buying Spangles "off-ration" in the corner sweet shop or playing with your Hornby Dublo train set you must look elsewhere.

The author never seems to quite know if he is writing a "popular" or an "academic" history. When he is in "academic" mode he really does go on a bit - to plough through these sections is akin to reading a 19th century novel of the Bleak House ilk. I'll reproduce one example sentence (which did not require much finding) from page 199 to give an idea:

"So were British ministers, who never failed to be irritated by lectures from successive administrations in Washington about the evils of colonialism - though this abated a little with the death of the greatest of the presidential preachers against European imperialisms, Franklin Roosevelt, and the developing Cold War, which usually, though not invariably, trumped strictures against British imperialism for reasons of solidarity against the consequences of the infinitely nastier Russian one."

At other times the author remembers his time as a journalist and writes in a much snappier style. He is however somewhat too inclined to intrude his own childhood reminiscences or to name drop - "when I interviewed Sir Hugely Important about this he confided to me..." and so on.

Perhaps it has done Peter Hennessy no good to be described as "a national treasure". His publishers may think it sacrilegious to cut out the circumlocutions and I-isms but this reader for one thinks they have done him no favours with their kid-glove treatment. This reviewer's standard for popular history is A J P Taylor's magisterial English History 1914-1945 (Oxford 1965, still in print, I believe). That is a model for beautifully written, direct prose, which the author could re-read to advantage.

However, excess verbiage aside, the author does give a very balanced and well-researched view about British political developments in the 1950s. The politician who seems to rise most in the author's - and hence the reader's - esteem is Harold Macmillan. Today Macmillan, with his "last of the Edwardians" air, may seem a faintly ridiculous figure. Here he comes over as an extremely astute man who came to office following the Suez debacle (well covered in the book) and overcame most if not all of the problems he inherited. In this respect he joins Attlee and Thatcher as the most successful post-war prime ministers (it is this country's profound misfortune to have experienced currently two of the least successful post-war prime ministers in succession).

One facet of the 1950s that perhaps the author could have brought out more is the things that Britain could achieve then but not now. A few examples will suffice:

a) build 300,000 houses per year;
b) develop its own independent nuclear deterrent and three weapons systems (Valiant, Victor, Vulcan) to deliver it;
c) hold the world speed records on land, water and in the air simultaneously;
d) fight and win a major war without allies against a well-armed and foreign-backed insurgency and bring democracy to a major country (Malaya).

These, and many other, achievements were pretty remarkable for a small cluster of islands off the north-west coast of Europe which had gone bust fighting and winning two world wars, one just a few years before.

Anyone interested in Britain in the 1950s could profit from reading this book. It is very well researched and caused at least this reviewer to see many events in a new light. The author's mannerisms may not be to everyone's taste but it must be at least one of the best histories of this period.

Superb work of political and social history
This is, quite simply, an excellent book. It is extremely well-written, handles its copious source material with panache and is a riveting read. Both 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' perspectives are provided, with lengthy and authoritative chapters dealing with politics and statecraft, consumerism and culture, and wider social issues as well. Britain's wider place in the world - its relations with Europe, the Commonwealth and the USA as well as the developing Cold War backdrop - is examined in detail and the author is invariably fair-minded in his appraisals of the conduct of political leaders, military commanders, civil servants and diplomats. The author usefully includes a liberal sprinkling of his own recollections, which help provide a vivid insight into 1950s Britain. A rewarding read for any fans of modern British history. It makes one look forward to the third volume, which will focus on the 1960s.