"Tales of a new Jerusalem"

Reading my Guardian newspaper yesterday evening my heart suddenly leapt, my spirits rose! Not because of the news which becomes more worrying and depressing by the day both here in the UK and further afield but because the Guardian ran a book review of a new publication which leapt off the page at me. I immediately jotted down the title in my diary - the book will be on my my Christmas present list when I write to Santa - and if Santa is kind its 700 plus pages will keep me engaged and enthralled in the dark days of January!

The book in question is the next volume in a series by English historian David Kynaston - unarguably the nation's greatest social historian. Its publication in the last few days has been an event I have been waiting for since I read the previous book in the series almost three years ago. The latest volume deals with the social history of the nation during the eighteenth month period from the death of Churchill in January 1965 to the World Cup victory by the England football team in July 1966. It is the sixth volume in Kynaston's mammoth social history of post war Britain, the others being: Austerity Britain, Family Britain, Modernity Britain, On the cusp, and A northern wind. The latest volume is titled Deep into the sixties. In writing the book Kynaston has just passed the half way point in his project, to write a history of Britain from 1945‑79. The series is subtitled "Tales of a New Jerusalem" recalling the phrase used by Prime Minister Clement Attlee when his Labour government swept to power in 1945. It chronicles British social, economic, and political history from the end of World War II up to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and within that tale plots how the collectivist desire for the common good that pervaded much of politics and society in the immediate post war years shifted into the individualism of the Thatcher era.

It is a title and a history that chimes with me for the tale told, within Kynaston's magnificent tomes, is also my history for I am a child, born in 1945, of Attlee's "New Jerusalem".

Within the five well thumbed volumes that already sit on my office bookshelves: "Austerity Britain", 1945–1951 (Published 2007) covers the aftermath of WWII and the post-war Labour government. "Family Britain", 1951–1957 (Published 2009) explores the transition from rationing to early affluence and events like the 1953 Coronation. "Modernity Britain", 1957–1962 (Published 2012) examines the march toward brash consumerism, changing social norms, and Macmillan's government. "On the Cusp: Days of '62" (Published 2021) focuses closely on the pivotal year of 1962. And "A Northern Wind",1962–1965 (Published 2023) wonderfully captures the cultural seismic shifts of those years, including the rise of the Beatles and Harold Wilson.

Over the past 15 or so years as each new volume has been published I have read of and recalled events that not only shaped the UK but also shaped me and my world. I remembered, when reading the first volume of the immediate post war years and the establishment of the NHS, that as a small child I had often stood with my mother in a queue at the new health clinic that had opened in Derby Square just round the corner from where I lived in Preston to receive various childhood inoculations for diseases that only a few years before had been killers. When reading the second volume (Family Britain) that covered the years 1951-1957 I was instantly taken back to one of the great national events of that year, the Festival of Britain, a celebration of Britain's regeneration after the war described and explained wonderfully by Kynaston. My Dad, a lorry driver, had to drive to London and he took my mother and me, squashed in his lorry cab, on that (in those days) long trip. While he carried out his work duties in and around London my mother took me to the site of the great Festival close to the River Thames. While there something happened that I can still vividly and completely recall and relive. We were on a bus going to the Festival and getting close to our destination we left our seats to stand on the platform at the back of the bus to get off at the bus stop. I was excited, thrilled to be in London - for a scruffy kid from a little town in Lancashire it seemed some great exciting citadel - and when the bus stopped, in my excitement I jumped off onto the pavement. But I had misjudged, we were not yet at the bus stop. The bus suddenly drove away, it had only stopped momentarily in the traffic and I stood, horrified, screaming, as the red London bus disappeared into the distance, my distraught mother standing on the platform shouting and waving to me. But in that instant a gentleman, I suppose one would call him a City gent, in black suit and bowler hat and carrying an umbrella and brief case saw what had happened and leapt off the moving bus. He ran up to me, grabbed my little hand and half carried, half dragged me after the bus until it got to the bus stop where my mother grabbed me (and told me off!) and thanked the man profusely for his kind and instant rection. I can still picture it all now; Kynaston's great history is my history too. And, of that history, when I read the third volume covering the years 1957 - 1962 I recalled that for families like mine things were slowly getting better; we got a fridge and a TV, a Hoover and a third or probably fourth hand car - in reality an "old banger" - but to us the height of luxury and a thing that opened up new vistas and opportunities. I can still remember sitting beside my Dad as we drove at my Dad's sedate speed of 30 mph along the newly opened Preston M6 motorway - the first few miles of motorway in the UK - in 1957, me feeling that as family and for myself as a 13 year we "had arrived". I never dreamed as I sat next to my Dad in our old Morris Oxford - registration number TTC 472! - that one day I would be rich enough to have my own brand new car and drive at high speed from one end of the country to the other on a great network of motorways. Such is the power of progress and such was the world that was being unleashed for ordinary people like me and my family following Attlee's great reforming government and his promise of a "New Jerusalem". Like the rest of society at that time we were living proof of then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's 1957 famous words "You've never had it so good". Changes to the education system also gave me the hugely important opportunity to study for GCEs and gain qualifications that changed the whole direction of my life. And so to the fourth and fifth volumes which brought other memories, memories that, with me by now a teenager/young adult were of widening impact and import: the dreadful days of the Cuban missile crisis when the world literally held its breath and I can remember going to bed worrying that I would not wake up in the morning as we seemed inevitably to tumble into nuclear Armageddon. Like so many I can recall exactly what I was doing when the news of JFKs assassination came through - a thing which, even to us non-Americans, became, I still believe, a hugely formative influence upon all our lives. I can remember, too, like most of the nation reading of the scandals associated with the Profumo Affair here in the UK; the UK was opening up, society was changing - things would never be the same again! And, of course, with that change, came the "swinging sixties" when Liverpool and London seemed to become the capitals of the world and as a 17 year old I danced each Saturday night to the music of the Beatles and the Stones at Preston's Top Rank ballroom, or visited the birthplace of the Beatles, to dance at The Cavern Club, in Liverpool. We drove around the Lancashire countryside to dance and drink far too much in Blackpool, Morecambe, at Burnley Mecca or Bolton Palais in my pal Stewart Kilner's green mini - like the mini skirt, footballer Georgie Best, and Chelsea's King's Road one of the great cultural icons of the sixties. I can still picture it all now; Kynaston's great history is my history too.

The whole series balance an in-depth account of politics, economics, industry, education and culture (both high and low) with personal stories of what it was like to be there and all through the intimate voices and words of both ordinary citizens and the great and good: the food we ate, the clothes we wore, the films we saw......... The sources are drawn from a range from statistical surveys and sociological reports, from political biographies, from newspaper reports, personal diaries and letters written by the ordinary and the not so ordinary of the age. As the Guardian said in its review "No living historian is as comprehensive as Kynaston or as readable".

The last few words of the new volume are, says the Guardian reviewer, "a tour de force" - he is not wrong; they are classic Kynaston. The Guardian reviewer says of the final paragraph "They intersperse Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary on the World Cup final (“Four minutes now left to play and the crowd biting fingernails down to the knuckles”) with the reactions of those watching on television, among them young Laurence Marks, the finest of the diarists quoted in the book, who stood to lose £2/12 shillings on a bet if England won, and Kynaston himself, on his 15th birthday: “I retreat upstairs to my bedroom and play a side of a Nancy Sinatra album, reckoning it will see both me and England through.” It did. The match was a triumph and so is the book. But spare a thought for the 6,000-strong crowd in Devon who’d paid to see the Kinks perform that night. The band stayed in London till the match was over and, arriving two hours late at 11.45pm, were allowed to play for just 10 minutes."

The reviews for Kynaston's latest volume David Kynaston are universally glowing:"No living historian is as comprehensive . . . full of humour and never dull . . ." says The Guardian, who make it their book of the year. "Remarkable . . . A sequence of colossally researched, witty, well-crafted, fun-loving and quietly impassioned social histories . . . Kynaston's books are little (or rather, large) miracles of research, oozing with primary sources" says The Times. "Many of the most celebrated moments in 'the Sixties' are here present . . . Wonderfully interesting and enjoyable . . . An unforeseen magic is creeping over the sequence as it progresses . . . Most books I get sent to review get dispatched to the charity shop quite quickly; these books of Kynaston's have remained on a much-cherished shelf " writes Philip Hensher in The Spectator. And The Literary Review is equally effusive, saying: "The sixth volume in David Kynaston's history of postwar Britain covers the eighteen months between the death of Winston Churchill and England's victory over Germany in the World Cup . . . Indeed, there was already hope in the air - what Kynaston describes as a palpable sense that possibilities were opening up . . . On the other hand - and this is the burden of Kynaston's story - continuity was probably more marked than change . . . The daemon of Kynaston's saga is in the detail. It is animated by minutiae, thumbnail sketches, arcane vignettes, evanescent slices of life . . . A magnificent series". Clearly this coming publication is something to look forward to!

But, forget what the press reviews say, important and enlightening though they are. If you want to know how and why we as a nation came to be at this point in time the answer is found in the past. As with all nations much of what we experience or enjoy in the UK - for example, the NHS, our popular culture, our politics, our economics, our education system, our core values, our laws, our landscape and a myriad of other facets of everyday life - have their roots in the people and the events of our history. And that is why Kynaston's great project is important and should be read by everyone. It's why I will look forward to the next instalment when, full of hope and anticipation, I open my Christmas presents after Santa has visited my house on December 25th!

So, I will look forward to cradling the huge tome in the days after Christmas - if I've been a good boy and Santa has left me some gifts to unwrap! I will not only be learning new things about the years through which I've lived but also remembering: the events, the people, the anxieties and the aspirations, the hopes and the fears, the joys and the sadnesses of those "swinging sixties" that made me when, to me as an older teenager and twenty year old, all seemed exciting, all things possible. Like all Kynaston's volumes this is not bed time reading - the content might be but the sheer weight of the tome makes it a book to read in the comfort of an armchair with it resting on one's lap. Meanwhile in the next few weeks I have a problem; my office bookshelves are already bulging so I'll need to somehow find more storage space to fit in the latest chapter of the nation's history and my own life's story. Even if you are not an historian you should track down Kynaston's wonderful "Tales of a new Jerusalem", they will give you a context for today and an insight into the journey that you and your parents and grandparents have made in getting to this point; they are the tales of "Everyman" in the nation's story and, even if you were born after the age covered by David Kynaston, they are the story of your history and what made you.