Product Description

As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-02
• Binding: Hardcover
• 784 pages

Review
I could quote forever from this magnificent book. Professor Kynaston is the most entertaining historian alive, and his Tales of a New Jerusalem, when concluded, will undoubtedly be the first stop for any reader interested in the vitality, rather than the general contours, of this long period. --The Spectator

Kynaston's book is a deeply textured tapestry of everyday life the day before yesterday, a collage of diaries and memoirs every bit as rich and rewarding as a great Victorian novel... Kynaston is a master of these kinds of stories, funny and touching by turns... Plenty of historians have written about it before. But none have captured it better or with more human sympathy than David Kynaston, in this deeply researched, richly detailed and very moving book. --The Telegraph

David Kynaston selects his words with the precise and evocative care of a Metaphysical poet exploring a new-found land... It is the great strength of Kynaston's almost Shakespearian approach to social history -- a vast canvas, huge detail, imaginative empathy and wise authorial neutrality -- that he allows one half of his readers to wallow comfortably in nostalgia while the other half shudders with relief that the 1950s are half a century behind us... On almost every page there is an arresting detail, statistic or quotation. --The Sunday Times

The second volume of David Kynaston's chronicle of postwar Britain has the virtues of the first - insight into the concerns of everyday people as well as those of their rulers.
--The Observer

`Marvellously entertaining' --Philip Hensher, Spectator Books of the Year

`Kynaston has dredged reminiscences, diaries, political archives, newspapers and magazines for every scrap of interest and detail.' --Joan Bakewell, Observer Books of the Year

`David Kynaston, in the brilliant second volume of his social history of Britain, has taken a microscope, and then a sharp scalpel, to that one-dimensional halcyon memory ... weaving an intricate tapestry of the national mood' --Ben Macintyre, Times

`With his second brick-sized volume, Family Britain 1951-57, David Kynaston magnificently continues his sociocultural history of postwar Britain, bringing my formative years into sharper focus on every page' --Philip French, Observer Books of the Year

`David Kynaston has done it again ... he has created a living, breathing, talking, singing, dancing, grumbling and complaining portrait of the British as they used to be'
--Literary Review

About the Author
David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written fifteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and W.G.'s Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman vs. the Players at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945-51, the first title in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title 'Tales of a New Jerusalem'. He is currently a visiting professor at Kingston University.

Customer Reviews

Social Change
Family Britain by David Kynaston is a comprehensive study of life in Britain after the Second World War. It is very well researched and although over 700 pages long it is written in a style which makes few strenuous demands on the reader - the pages can be turned quickly and effortlessly as the narrative unfolds.

It covers a wide range of domestic issues, focusing both on the poorer sections of society and those who survived the deprivations of the war from a better-off postion. The politics are carefully explained, supported by extensive quotations drawn from a wide range of sources. The author also brings into the picture vignettes of certain people who have susequently become more well-known showing where they were in their chilhood days of the 50s.

For those of us who were brought up in this period, this book provides a useful reminder of how our own lives formed part of the greater pattern of change that was unfolding. It also helps to place our own experiences into perspective. My only slight criticism is that the chapters occasionally jump from one topic to another without a clear link, but the chronlogy of the period 1951-1957 is always maintained.

Invaluable
This awesome study is the follow-up to Austerity Britain 1945-1951, and if you've read that book then you will know what to expect here. Family Britain contains the same mixture of social issues, politics, cultural developments and personal reminiscences - drawn from a wide variety of sources including Mass Observation studies and personal diaries (we continue following the lives of Nella Last, Judy Haines, Anthony Heap and the other private diarists from the first book) - with the emphasis always on how the great events and changing times affected ordinary people living ordinary lives.

(Also what may or may not become worth noting for when the paperback/s come out: Family Britain is divided into two 'books' - 'The Certainties of Place' and 'A Thicker Cut', in the same way that Austerity Britain comprised the books 'A World to Build' and 'Smoke in the Valley.')

Beginning with the Festival of Britain and ending with Eden's resignation, the book goes through the years basically chronologically, but pauses to consider the general themes and social issues of the period looking at race, class, housing, secondary schools, religion, the place of women and of course family life among many other things.

It really is a fascinating book, breathtaking in its scope and range of sources and at all times a joy to read. It was also very satisfying how the author looked at issues in order to test our conventional wisdom of the period and - pleasingly - often shows how much more complicated the true picture is (eg the place of Christianity in Britain or the state of neighbourliness and sense of community etc.) It is also frequently pretty funny, with wry asides and the inclusion of the odd amusing response in with the contemporaneous survey evidence ("Sorry, can't talk ducks look - I got no teeth!) and I always looked forward to the latest reviews from the private diary of minor civil servant and theatre nut Anthony Heap (Waiting for Godot is "infantile...dreary...preposterous," Look Back In Anger is "monotonous...puerile...nauseating.") In addition to the voices featured in the previous book we follow such now-well-known figures as Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing and John Fowles as well as hearing mention of kids like 'Mike' Jagger and Christine Keeler, foreshadowing the next instalment.

I would have liked a bit more politics (not at the expense of anything else though) and some of the transitions between paragraphs were a bit silly (eg after talking about two people he might continue with: "Probably neither were in Ipswich two days later when..." etc.) Plus, although the book does spend a fair amount of time in Glasgow and the English North and Midlands as well as the South, there isn't much about Wales, the rest of Scotland or Northern Ireland (nothing at all if I remember rightly) - which I know a lot of people take issue over with books that claim to be about 'Britain.'

Having said that, this book is a fantastic read for anyone with an interest in recent history and, I would think, an invaluable resource for any student or anyone
with a professional interest in this period. You don't have to have read the previous volume to enjoy this book I'm sure, though I read Austerity Britain directly before reading this so I've basically just read 1,350 pages of this stuff and if the subsequent volumes were available I would happily read straight through to the page 3,500 or whatever it will be when this series is finished. From the afterword in this book we can infer that the next volume will be called Modernity Britain.

An excellent detailed report of the times
Having lived through the times detailed in the book, I can recall incidents that had slipped my mind. The details contained in the book are really quite outstanding, and I would recommend it to any student of the period.