History

The spirit of 1945 No one would have been more surprised at the sight of 100,000 people marching in London under the banner ‘End Austerity Now’ and demanding ‘Tories Out’ than Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer in Attlee’s government. — Hard though it might be to remember now, but austerity was once a proud Labour policy. The rationale of the policy, devised by Cripps, was that by suppressing private consumption, resources could be spent instead on boosting exports. — Any anti-austerity march in 1947 would have been led by the Conservatives, whose slogans of the time included ‘Starve with Strachey’

First test The driving test celebrated its 80th anniversary. The first person to take the test, R.E.L. Beene of Kensington, passed. Here is some of the advice given to candidates on a Pathé newsreel: — ‘Don’t flick your cigarette ash outside. It’s very confusing.’ (The driver behind would have been looking for hand signals.) — ‘Never drive on the crown of the road.’ — ‘Don’t look down at the gear lever while you change gear.’ — ‘Don’t be nervous. The examination is not an inquisition but a series of very reasonable tests.’ Old story The chief medical officer and British Pregnancy Advisory Service argued over whether women should be advised

Steam privatisation Cunard celebrated its 175th birthday by sailing three liners down the Mersey. The formation of the Cunard Line was an early triumph of privatisation. — The Post Office had been operating a monthly service to New York with sailing brigs since 1756. In 1836 a parliamentary committee decided that a steamship service should replace it, and that it would be more efficient for the Admiralty to put it out to tender to private operators. — Samuel Cunard defeated the Great Western Steamship Company and the St George Steam Packet Company by offering a fortnightly service from Liverpool for an annual subsidy of £55,000. The service, which at first only

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial