Every card in The twentieth-century world, Year 9: Britain and the world after 1945
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- The Beveridge Report named five 'giants' that stood in the way of a better Britain: Want, Disease, Ignorance, ____ and ____.
Squalor; Idleness
HintOne is about filthy, overcrowded housing; the other is about having no job.
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.
- In July 1945 voters turned Winston Churchill out of office by a landslide. Which party won, promising to build the welfare state? (one word)
Labour
HintIts leader was Clement Attlee.
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.
- Before the NHS began in 1948, National Insurance paid the doctor's bills of many working men. Why did their wives and children often go without a doctor?
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.
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.
- Wartime evacuation sent children from the poorest city streets to live with families in the countryside, many of them better off. Why did that build support for a welfare state?
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.
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?
- The USA and the Soviet Union fought on the same side until 1945. What basic disagreement then drove them apart?
Rival systems: capitalist democracy against communism
HintOne side believed in private business and competing parties; the other in state ownership and a single party.
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.
- In 1948 Stalin blocked every road, railway and canal into West Berlin. How did the Western allies keep the city supplied without starting a war?
They flew everything in by air
HintThe one route nobody had closed was overhead.
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.
- The military alliance formed in 1949 by the USA, Britain and other Western countries to defend one another against attack
NATO
HintIts full name mentions the ocean between America and Europe.
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.
- In ____ East Germany built the Berlin Wall to stop its own people leaving for the West.
1961
HintIt stood for twenty-eight years and came down in 1989.
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.
- Why did Britain encourage workers from the Caribbean and the wider Commonwealth to come after 1945?
It was short of workers to rebuild and run its services
HintBombed cities, new hospitals and understaffed buses all needed hands.
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 two-word name used at the time for the open refusal of jobs, housing or service to people because of their skin colour, lawful in Britain until the 1960s
The colour bar
HintThe second word also means a barrier across a doorway.
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.
- In 1963 a boycott forced a bus company to drop its refusal to employ Black and Asian crews. In which English city did it happen? (one word)
Bristol
HintA port city in the south-west of England, on the River Avon.
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.
- The Race Relations Act of ____ was the first law in Britain to ban racial discrimination in public places.
1965
HintIt was passed in the middle of the 1960s.
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.
- Britain won the Second World War, yet within twenty years most of its empire was gone. What had the war done to Britain's finances that helps to explain this?
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.
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.
- In 1957 the Gold Coast became the first British colony in Africa south of the Sahara to win independence. What name did the new country take? (one word)
Ghana
HintIts first leader was Kwame Nkrumah, and its capital is Accra.
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.
- In 1960 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told South Africa's parliament that a 'wind of ____' was blowing through Africa.
change
HintHe meant that things could not stay as they were.
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 voluntary association of independent countries, most of them once ruled by Britain
The Commonwealth
HintIts athletes meet every four years for a Games that carries the same title.
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.
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Keep what you learn
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