The twentieth-century world, Year 9: Britain and the world after 1945

Squalor; Idleness

HintOne is about filthy, overcrowded housing; the other is about having no job.

The whyEach giant was answered by a reform after 1945: benefits against Want, the NHS against Disease, free secondary schooling against Ignorance, new council housing, and a promise of work for all. The report came out in 1942 and sold in huge numbers, which is rare for a government document.

Labour

HintIts leader was Clement Attlee.

The whyChurchill was admired as a war leader, but many voters remembered the unemployment of the 1930s and did not trust his party to rebuild the country fairly. After six years of shared sacrifice, people wanted this peace to be better than the last one.

They were not covered, so they had to pay

HintIt is the reason many poor families put off sending for help until it was too late.

The whyNational Insurance covered about half the population, mostly working men, and not their wives or children. The NHS made care free at the point of use for everyone, paid for from taxes.

It showed the rest of the country how deep city poverty was

HintSome hosts were shocked by what arrived on their doorstep: thin, ill-clothed and sometimes unwell.

The whyBombing and rationing had a similar effect: danger and shortages were shared by all classes, and the government had organised fair shares for everyone. If the state could do that in war, many asked, why not in peace?

Rival systems: capitalist democracy against communism

HintOne side believed in private business and competing parties; the other in state ownership and a single party.

The whyA shared enemy had hidden the distrust between them. Once Germany was beaten, Stalin kept control of the countries his army had occupied in eastern Europe, and the Americans feared communism would spread further. Each side believed the other was out to destroy its way of life.

They flew everything in by air

HintThe one route nobody had closed was overhead.

The whyFor almost a year aircraft landed every few minutes with food, coal and medicine. Shooting one down would have meant war, so Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949. It shows how the Cold War worked: each side pushed hard but stopped short of fighting the other directly.

NATO

HintIts full name mentions the ocean between America and Europe.

The whyIts members agreed that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. The Soviet Union answered in 1955 with an alliance of its own, the Warsaw Pact. Europe was now split into two armed camps.

1961

HintIt stood for twenty-eight years and came down in 1989.

The whyBefore it was built, huge numbers of East Germans had left through Berlin, many of them young and skilled. A state that has to wall its citizens in is admitting something about itself, which is why the Wall became the best-known symbol of a divided continent.

It was short of workers to rebuild and run its services

HintBombed cities, new hospitals and understaffed buses all needed hands.

The whyLondon Transport recruited staff directly in Barbados from 1956, and the new NHS recruited nurses from the Caribbean. Many who came had served Britain in the war and thought of it as the 'mother country'. They were invited because they were needed.

The colour bar

HintThe second word also means a barrier across a doorway.

The whyNewcomers recalled signs in boarding-house windows turning them away, and being refused work they were qualified for. First-hand accounts like these are how historians know what daily life was like.

Bristol

HintA port city in the south-west of England, on the River Avon.

The whyCampaigners led by Paul Stephenson, inspired by the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, persuaded people to stay off the buses. The boycott began in April and the company gave way in August. Two years later Parliament passed the first law against racial discrimination.

1965

HintIt was passed in the middle of the 1960s.

The whyIt covered places such as hotels and restaurants but not housing or jobs, where discrimination did most harm. A stronger Act followed in 1968. The law changed step by step, pushed along by the people it affected.

Left it deeply in debt, unable to afford an empire

HintRuling distant lands needs soldiers, ships and officials, and all of them must be paid.

The whyBritain ended the war economically exhausted and heavily in debt. Meanwhile independence movements had grown stronger, and defeats such as the fall of Singapore in 1942 had damaged the idea that Britain could not be beaten. No single cause explains the end of empire; these worked together.

Ghana

HintIts first leader was Kwame Nkrumah, and its capital is Accra.

The whyThe name was borrowed from a wealthy medieval West African empire, a way of saying that African history did not begin with colonial rule. In the 1960s most of Britain’s other African colonies followed.

change

HintHe meant that things could not stay as they were.

The whyHe was telling a white-minority government, and his own party at home, that African independence could not be held back and that Britain would not try.

The Commonwealth

HintIts athletes meet every four years for a Games that carries the same title.

The whyIt has 56 members. It is one legacy of empire that is visible today, alongside the spread of the English language and the family ties behind migration to Britain.