On Saturday afternoon, 27 October 1962, a 19-year-old Juliet Gardiner sat “rigid with fear” in her local launderette reading that day’s news report of Soviet ships heading towards the US blockade around Cuba. She wondered “what on earth was the point of having clean knickers, pillowcases and tea towels, since the world seemed about to end in a nuclear holocaust”. The moment comes early in the latest volume of David Kynaston’s history of postwar Britain, Tales of a New Jerusalem, and typifies its brilliant double vision, between the wide angle and the closeup: world and washing both in a spin. With a beady but compassionate eye, Kynaston ranges over public records and private diaries, political speeches and TV interviews, in conjuring this fresco of the panoramic and the intimate.
Catastrophe was averted and launderettes were safe for now, but there is more trouble brewing in the convulsive years charted here. Much of it chimes weirdly with our present moment. A Conservative government was clinging on, 13 years in power and humiliated by scandal (Profumo instead of Partygate), while Labour, ahead in the polls under Harold Wilson, was sitting pretty for the next general election. France thought Britain too “insular” for membership of the EEC, and De Gaulle slammed the door on Macmillan. The PM’s verdict in 1957 that we’d “never had it so good” was looking doubtful in the face of a continuing north-south divide. Despite improvements, poverty was chronic and the guardians of the welfare state weren’t often reliable in judging who needed help the most. In short: “Victorian values had never quite gone away.” It’s also plus ça change with the railways; where we have the debacle of HS2, back then, a third of the rail network was about to disappear under Beeching’s cuts; more than 2,000 stations closed and once-thriving industrial towns were “left behind”. Meanwhile, a different travel chaos hit Bristol when a boycott followed the city bus company’s refusal to employ minority ethnic crews, one of several race flashpoints of the early 1960s; Kynaston highlights prejudice (and cowardice) at every level.
