Voices of change

Not every writer would begin a history of the 1950s with a vignette in which the young Keith Waterhouse treads on Princess Margaret by mistake. But David Kynaston is an unusual historian, rewardingly imbued with a sense of fun and convinced of the importance of the freakish; he is enamoured of the single incident and the obscure observer. Family Britain is as vivacious and alluring as Sabrina, the Ted’s pin-up, ‘symbol of opulent sex’, real name Norma Sykes, who pops up on page 608 between Peter Maxwell Davies and Sylvia Plath. I suppose she may still be alive.

This is the second volume in a projected series, Tales of a New Jerusalem, chronicle rather than a history, which will eventually cover the period between 1945 to 1979. The first volume, Austerity Britain was a considerable popular success, and this volume is every bit as enjoyable. Kynaston’s technique is a magpie one. He quotes witnesses from the period with huge abundance, always letting them tell their own story. What sets him apart is his interest in private diary-keepers and those anonymous voices from Mass Observation and other vox-pop interviewers. He gives us people who were close observers of the action, such as Clarissa Eden’s views on the Suez Crisis, and the words of the highly perceptive and historically minded. Doris Lessing’s account of her entanglement with the Communist Party is extensively used.

He also, however, draws substantially on the diaries of people who, to be frank, knew very little and saw almost nothing of conventional importance. Put like that, you can see why most historians have ignored such people. But these voices add a wonderful, pawky, startling texture to the account. When we come to the Coronation of 1953, we hear from Lady Violet Bonham-Carter (‘the crowds were most touching’), an observed account of some neighbours huddled round a collective and newly bought television set (‘they put a canopy over her when she’s anointed; that’s nice for her’) and a private diarist, Henry St John, who recorded that at his relations’ in Southall ‘one log of an electric fire was switched on, but it was still cold.’