A.N. Wilson says that times may ahead may be tough, as we enter a recession, but the people of Britain today have got it nowhere as bad as our grandparents did.
Think about those who still suffered rationing years after the War. Rationing did not end in Britain until 1954.
Compared with those who took part in the Jarrow Crusade of North East England in 1936, we are fortunate.
Unlike our parents and grandparents, we - those in our 50s and younger - have had an incredibly pampered life. We have never experienced a war near home - though we have lived through the anxieties of Vietnam, the Falklands, Desert Storm, Bosnia and Iraq.
There have been terrorist campaigns by the IRA and, more recently, Muslim fanatics. But we have endured nothing to compare with the Blitz - night after night watching streets in all major cities of Britain turn into raging infernos.
So, we should be thankful for how lucky we are....
Not all doom and gloom
Yes, we must tighten our belts. But the grit, humour and happiness shown by Britons during the last period of austerity, when both his grandfathers lost their jobs, make historian AN WILSON optimistic for the future
By A N Wilson
11th October 2008
Daily Mail
There can be no doubt that we have entered a new phase in the history of the West.
Capitalism itself will never be the same. The sheer number of people who could be ruined has probably not dawned on us all, not really registered inwardly. But it has dawned on the governments of the world.
How else can we explain the extraordinary spectacle of a Right-wing U.S. President ending his eight years in office by bringing in measures which would have been the delight of the Left-wing of the Labour Party in 1945 - nationalising banks and mortgage lenders?
The waiting game: Rationing abounded but many Britons revelled in post-war hardships
Any crisis which can make George W. Bush speak and act like the post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee has to be something pretty extraordinary.
The question in many of our minds is: are we about to face a period like the Thirties or the Fifties?
I am in my 50s. The people of my generation born after World War II - and even more, for those like my brother and sister a decade older - grew up on two big peacetime stories.
Yes, there was the war, and that changed everything. But almost as big a change came into the lives of ordinary people as a result of two great financial disasters - the Great Depression of the early Thirties and the austerity years after World War II.
Both these phases of history affected our families directly, whatever our class and wherever we lived in Britain or America. Every household was changed.
You could say that the two phases turned into myths - they were repeated over and over again and shaped the lives of those who listened to them. I have certainly been changed by these stories but, actually, they make me cautiously optimistic about the present crisis.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the 'slump' of the Thirties, many American and British families lost everything.
My family's story must have been typical of the middle classes. One grandfather was a rich Manchester broker, with a large house. His daughter (my mother) was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and he had business contacts all across Europe.
My other grandfather was a factory owner in the Potteries, with a farm on the Isle of Man - servants, cars, money.
All gone: After the 1929 Wall Street Crash many British and American families lost everything like this man who sold his car for $100
Both these prosperous grandfathers went bust, and with extraordinary speed, 20 years before I was born. It was only a matter of months before the money ran out.
My mother, instead of going to university, got a job as a secretary, where her boss was my father. So, in a sense, I owe my very existence to the slump during the Thirties.
While my parents were tightening their belts and feeling the humiliations of a descent from extreme comfort to austerity and - a real novelty - working for a living, those less fortunate were suffering appalling hardship.
A doctor about my mother's age once said to me: 'You're a Conservative, and I understand why. But if you had worked as a doctor in London's East End in 1935, and seen the children with rickets, their legs bent by the age of five, their stomachs distended with hunger, then like me, you would have become a Communist.'
I did not agree with her but it was a vivid illustration of how extreme times can change the most rational beings.
When my mother spoke to me of her father, the Northern businessman who lost everything, she always spoke with huge admiration for him.
The slump which ruined him and thousands of others provided him with a challenge.
He never returned to the Manchester Stock Exchange. He took up cotton trading in a small way, and, when there was no future in that, he did other types of business, the details of which had been forgotten.
The point of the story was that he did not accept defeat. She believed - as I am sure many people believed - that the grit shown by the British during the slump was a sort of moral training for the war against Hitler.
The British had grown used to facing up to disaster; facing it, but not succumbing to it.
They battled through.
It took many years to rebuild Britain's cities after the devastation wreaked by the Luftwaffe
Memories of the austerity years after World War II, however, are jollier. For one thing, the war was over.
For another, everyone knows that these austerity years gradually had a happy ending, when Harold Macmillan, like a raffish uncle, could drawl in his pseudo-Edwardian camp voice that we had 'never had it so good'.
Last year, one of the surprise bestsellers was a book by the historian David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, a wonderfully full account of the country from 1945 to 1951.
When it appeared, this account of our parents' generation, struggling through difficult times with irony and resourcefulness seemed like another world.
'Excellent women enjoying discomfort - one bar of a small electric fire, huddled in coats,' noted the novelist Barbara Pym in her uncomfortable flat in Pimlico, London.
She is only one of many lives noted by Kynaston, who created a tapestry of British people 'making do', many of them 'enjoying discomfort'.
There's no denying that times were exceptionally hard, though. Three-quarters of a million houses had been destroyed or severely damaged by German bombs, and Britain's war debt - £3.5 billion, a breathtaking figure at that time - somehow had to be repaid. (How small that sum now seems, compared with the £500 billion the Government has pledged to prop up our banks today).
Ten months after VE Day, in March 1946, a rehousing officer in Stanmore, North-West London, recorded this scene of squalor: 'A bus conductor, two women and three schoolchildren, driven desperate for somewhere to live, camp out in a large dilapidated room without light, water and (yesterday at least) fuel for a fire.
'Sullen and dirty faces swollen with colds, an orange-box scraped dry of all but coal dust, two saucepans on an unmade bed, a spirit stove on which bacon was frying, and a green teapot shaped like a racing car on a strip of newspaper-many times ringed.'
Rationing was in force - on meat, bacon, cheese, sugar, tea, sweets - and there was less food than during the war.
'Oh, for a little extra butter!' wailed a welfare worker in West London. 'For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration and I am fed up. I never enjoy my lunch!'
Tough: Compared with the Jarrow hunger marchers in 1936 our lives will be incredibly fortunate
Yet for all the hardship, there was a sense of community that made for a vastly more united nation than today's.
When Kynaston's book was first published - only 18 months ago - how unlike us it all seemed.
But then the Muse of History smiled. By the time the book had appeared in paperback, our own version of Austerity Britain was about to begin.
This is rather frightening - but it is surely also a challenge?
Unlike our parents and grandparents, we - those in our 50s and younger - have had an incredibly pampered life. We have never experienced a war near home - though we have lived through the anxieties of Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia and Iraq.
There have been terrorist campaigns by the IRA and, more recently, Muslim fanatics. But we have endured nothing to compare with the Blitz - night after night watching streets turn into infernos.
So, we must wonder a little wistfully whether we are made of the same, gritty, brave material as the older generation. The answer is that we undoubtedly are not, and
that we shall find it difficult to endure even the much gentler austerity that lies ahead. And it will be gentler.
After the Wall Street Crash, the austere U.S. treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, believed the system needed a shake-out. He almost saw it as bracing.
The best policy, he advised the President (Herbert Hoover), would be to 'liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate'.
Such a policy created John Steinbeck's America of grannies starving in wagons.
No government is ever going to allow such a thing to happen again. But we will see joblessness, we will see families - through no fault of their own - losing the flat or house for which they had painfully saved up. We will endure thousands of unwritten domestic tragedies.
It would be intolerable to suggest that these personal disasters are 'bracing' or 'good for us'.
But for many, and let us hope it is the majority, the austere times ahead will prove to be a challenge which may - if we show optimism and the right resourcefulness - even turn out to be half-enjoyable.
'Don't be a Squander Bug!' was the old legend on the posters in World War II. (Some of us recall Private Pike in Dad's Army, mincing about in a Squander Bug outfit sewn for him by his doting mother).
The truth is that, for the past 25 years, we have lived through a squander culture. Even before this crisis, we had all begun to be sickened by it.
We could remember that in our childhood, we took ginger-beer bottles to the grocer to be refilled, rather than chucking the glass away. We had started to recycle glass, card and paper.
Gritty: People had to ration in the austerity years after World War Two
We had begun to calculate the bulk of food which we buy quite needlessly one week and chuck away uneaten the next.
We had begun to question whether we need so many trips in aeroplanes, and whether a few days beside the Welsh coast or visiting an English cathedral city would not be just as restful an interlude as a weekend abroad.
My reason for being hopeful as we look ahead towards the lean years is that austerity binds us all together - as communities and as families.
Clothes and food are two prime examples. Our mothers never threw away our clothes.
They stitched and darned until we had outgrown them, and then they were handed on - either to the next child in the family or to a friend or cousin.
There was no snobbery about children wearing the smartest gear, and no nonsense, as we scuffed well-made Clarks sandals, about designer trainers at £100 a pair.
And let it not be thought sexist to have fond memories of mothers stitching. There is no reason why fathers should not learn to sew, as I have done in grown-up life.
As for food, my wife has put up a huge notice over our stove: DO YOUR BIT. DON'T WASTE FOOD.
Not only would a new age of austerity teach us the valuable lesson that we can eat the same stew three days' running or make the remains of the roast into cottage pie.
It saves time as well as money to go on eating the same dish until it is finished.
Moreover, eating up what is there, rather than extravagantly cooking something more to your taste, is a valuable lesson for children.
Such little things help to bind families together. There was far less divorce or domestic bust-up during the austerity years for the simple reason that they did not have the time or the money to break away from one another.
Relationships, as well as Aertex shirts, could be mended.
Most of us are not hedge-fund managers losing or making a trillion as the stock market swoops. And most of us, with any luck, will survive the present crisis without losing our livelihood or being kicked out of our homes. But we shall all be changed.
The lucky majority will merely find themselves in the somewhat grotesque position of paying higher tax to bail out the mistakes of an Icelandic bank or a City fat-cat.
However, we will be poorer. We won't buy a new car in a hurry. The new dishwasher or that foreign holiday will be put on hold. It will slowly dawn on us that our savings are worth half what they were.
Yet, compared with the children of the Thirties who contracted rickets, and compared with the Jarrow hunger marchers, our lives will be incredibly fortunate.
Yes, we will have to tighten our belts.
But if my reading of the British character is not too optimistic, I think we'll grumble a bit about it, and then - like Barbara Pym, huddled over the one bar of her electric fire in Pimlico while wearing her overcoat - we shall actually 'enjoy' the discomfort.
dailymail.co.uk
Think about those who still suffered rationing years after the War. Rationing did not end in Britain until 1954.
Compared with those who took part in the Jarrow Crusade of North East England in 1936, we are fortunate.
Unlike our parents and grandparents, we - those in our 50s and younger - have had an incredibly pampered life. We have never experienced a war near home - though we have lived through the anxieties of Vietnam, the Falklands, Desert Storm, Bosnia and Iraq.
There have been terrorist campaigns by the IRA and, more recently, Muslim fanatics. But we have endured nothing to compare with the Blitz - night after night watching streets in all major cities of Britain turn into raging infernos.
So, we should be thankful for how lucky we are....
Not all doom and gloom
Yes, we must tighten our belts. But the grit, humour and happiness shown by Britons during the last period of austerity, when both his grandfathers lost their jobs, make historian AN WILSON optimistic for the future
By A N Wilson
11th October 2008
Daily Mail
There can be no doubt that we have entered a new phase in the history of the West.
Capitalism itself will never be the same. The sheer number of people who could be ruined has probably not dawned on us all, not really registered inwardly. But it has dawned on the governments of the world.
How else can we explain the extraordinary spectacle of a Right-wing U.S. President ending his eight years in office by bringing in measures which would have been the delight of the Left-wing of the Labour Party in 1945 - nationalising banks and mortgage lenders?
The waiting game: Rationing abounded but many Britons revelled in post-war hardships
Any crisis which can make George W. Bush speak and act like the post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee has to be something pretty extraordinary.
The question in many of our minds is: are we about to face a period like the Thirties or the Fifties?
I am in my 50s. The people of my generation born after World War II - and even more, for those like my brother and sister a decade older - grew up on two big peacetime stories.
Yes, there was the war, and that changed everything. But almost as big a change came into the lives of ordinary people as a result of two great financial disasters - the Great Depression of the early Thirties and the austerity years after World War II.
Both these phases of history affected our families directly, whatever our class and wherever we lived in Britain or America. Every household was changed.
You could say that the two phases turned into myths - they were repeated over and over again and shaped the lives of those who listened to them. I have certainly been changed by these stories but, actually, they make me cautiously optimistic about the present crisis.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the 'slump' of the Thirties, many American and British families lost everything.
My family's story must have been typical of the middle classes. One grandfather was a rich Manchester broker, with a large house. His daughter (my mother) was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and he had business contacts all across Europe.
My other grandfather was a factory owner in the Potteries, with a farm on the Isle of Man - servants, cars, money.
All gone: After the 1929 Wall Street Crash many British and American families lost everything like this man who sold his car for $100
Both these prosperous grandfathers went bust, and with extraordinary speed, 20 years before I was born. It was only a matter of months before the money ran out.
My mother, instead of going to university, got a job as a secretary, where her boss was my father. So, in a sense, I owe my very existence to the slump during the Thirties.
While my parents were tightening their belts and feeling the humiliations of a descent from extreme comfort to austerity and - a real novelty - working for a living, those less fortunate were suffering appalling hardship.
A doctor about my mother's age once said to me: 'You're a Conservative, and I understand why. But if you had worked as a doctor in London's East End in 1935, and seen the children with rickets, their legs bent by the age of five, their stomachs distended with hunger, then like me, you would have become a Communist.'
I did not agree with her but it was a vivid illustration of how extreme times can change the most rational beings.
When my mother spoke to me of her father, the Northern businessman who lost everything, she always spoke with huge admiration for him.
The slump which ruined him and thousands of others provided him with a challenge.
He never returned to the Manchester Stock Exchange. He took up cotton trading in a small way, and, when there was no future in that, he did other types of business, the details of which had been forgotten.
The point of the story was that he did not accept defeat. She believed - as I am sure many people believed - that the grit shown by the British during the slump was a sort of moral training for the war against Hitler.
The British had grown used to facing up to disaster; facing it, but not succumbing to it.
They battled through.
It took many years to rebuild Britain's cities after the devastation wreaked by the Luftwaffe
Memories of the austerity years after World War II, however, are jollier. For one thing, the war was over.
For another, everyone knows that these austerity years gradually had a happy ending, when Harold Macmillan, like a raffish uncle, could drawl in his pseudo-Edwardian camp voice that we had 'never had it so good'.
Last year, one of the surprise bestsellers was a book by the historian David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, a wonderfully full account of the country from 1945 to 1951.
When it appeared, this account of our parents' generation, struggling through difficult times with irony and resourcefulness seemed like another world.
'Excellent women enjoying discomfort - one bar of a small electric fire, huddled in coats,' noted the novelist Barbara Pym in her uncomfortable flat in Pimlico, London.
She is only one of many lives noted by Kynaston, who created a tapestry of British people 'making do', many of them 'enjoying discomfort'.
There's no denying that times were exceptionally hard, though. Three-quarters of a million houses had been destroyed or severely damaged by German bombs, and Britain's war debt - £3.5 billion, a breathtaking figure at that time - somehow had to be repaid. (How small that sum now seems, compared with the £500 billion the Government has pledged to prop up our banks today).
Ten months after VE Day, in March 1946, a rehousing officer in Stanmore, North-West London, recorded this scene of squalor: 'A bus conductor, two women and three schoolchildren, driven desperate for somewhere to live, camp out in a large dilapidated room without light, water and (yesterday at least) fuel for a fire.
'Sullen and dirty faces swollen with colds, an orange-box scraped dry of all but coal dust, two saucepans on an unmade bed, a spirit stove on which bacon was frying, and a green teapot shaped like a racing car on a strip of newspaper-many times ringed.'
Rationing was in force - on meat, bacon, cheese, sugar, tea, sweets - and there was less food than during the war.
'Oh, for a little extra butter!' wailed a welfare worker in West London. 'For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration and I am fed up. I never enjoy my lunch!'
Tough: Compared with the Jarrow hunger marchers in 1936 our lives will be incredibly fortunate
Yet for all the hardship, there was a sense of community that made for a vastly more united nation than today's.
When Kynaston's book was first published - only 18 months ago - how unlike us it all seemed.
But then the Muse of History smiled. By the time the book had appeared in paperback, our own version of Austerity Britain was about to begin.
This is rather frightening - but it is surely also a challenge?
Unlike our parents and grandparents, we - those in our 50s and younger - have had an incredibly pampered life. We have never experienced a war near home - though we have lived through the anxieties of Vietnam, Desert Storm, Bosnia and Iraq.
There have been terrorist campaigns by the IRA and, more recently, Muslim fanatics. But we have endured nothing to compare with the Blitz - night after night watching streets turn into infernos.
So, we must wonder a little wistfully whether we are made of the same, gritty, brave material as the older generation. The answer is that we undoubtedly are not, and
that we shall find it difficult to endure even the much gentler austerity that lies ahead. And it will be gentler.
After the Wall Street Crash, the austere U.S. treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, believed the system needed a shake-out. He almost saw it as bracing.
The best policy, he advised the President (Herbert Hoover), would be to 'liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate'.
Such a policy created John Steinbeck's America of grannies starving in wagons.
No government is ever going to allow such a thing to happen again. But we will see joblessness, we will see families - through no fault of their own - losing the flat or house for which they had painfully saved up. We will endure thousands of unwritten domestic tragedies.
It would be intolerable to suggest that these personal disasters are 'bracing' or 'good for us'.
But for many, and let us hope it is the majority, the austere times ahead will prove to be a challenge which may - if we show optimism and the right resourcefulness - even turn out to be half-enjoyable.
'Don't be a Squander Bug!' was the old legend on the posters in World War II. (Some of us recall Private Pike in Dad's Army, mincing about in a Squander Bug outfit sewn for him by his doting mother).
The truth is that, for the past 25 years, we have lived through a squander culture. Even before this crisis, we had all begun to be sickened by it.
We could remember that in our childhood, we took ginger-beer bottles to the grocer to be refilled, rather than chucking the glass away. We had started to recycle glass, card and paper.
Gritty: People had to ration in the austerity years after World War Two
We had begun to calculate the bulk of food which we buy quite needlessly one week and chuck away uneaten the next.
We had begun to question whether we need so many trips in aeroplanes, and whether a few days beside the Welsh coast or visiting an English cathedral city would not be just as restful an interlude as a weekend abroad.
My reason for being hopeful as we look ahead towards the lean years is that austerity binds us all together - as communities and as families.
Clothes and food are two prime examples. Our mothers never threw away our clothes.
They stitched and darned until we had outgrown them, and then they were handed on - either to the next child in the family or to a friend or cousin.
There was no snobbery about children wearing the smartest gear, and no nonsense, as we scuffed well-made Clarks sandals, about designer trainers at £100 a pair.
And let it not be thought sexist to have fond memories of mothers stitching. There is no reason why fathers should not learn to sew, as I have done in grown-up life.
As for food, my wife has put up a huge notice over our stove: DO YOUR BIT. DON'T WASTE FOOD.
Not only would a new age of austerity teach us the valuable lesson that we can eat the same stew three days' running or make the remains of the roast into cottage pie.
It saves time as well as money to go on eating the same dish until it is finished.
Moreover, eating up what is there, rather than extravagantly cooking something more to your taste, is a valuable lesson for children.
Such little things help to bind families together. There was far less divorce or domestic bust-up during the austerity years for the simple reason that they did not have the time or the money to break away from one another.
Relationships, as well as Aertex shirts, could be mended.
Most of us are not hedge-fund managers losing or making a trillion as the stock market swoops. And most of us, with any luck, will survive the present crisis without losing our livelihood or being kicked out of our homes. But we shall all be changed.
The lucky majority will merely find themselves in the somewhat grotesque position of paying higher tax to bail out the mistakes of an Icelandic bank or a City fat-cat.
However, we will be poorer. We won't buy a new car in a hurry. The new dishwasher or that foreign holiday will be put on hold. It will slowly dawn on us that our savings are worth half what they were.
Yet, compared with the children of the Thirties who contracted rickets, and compared with the Jarrow hunger marchers, our lives will be incredibly fortunate.
Yes, we will have to tighten our belts.
But if my reading of the British character is not too optimistic, I think we'll grumble a bit about it, and then - like Barbara Pym, huddled over the one bar of her electric fire in Pimlico while wearing her overcoat - we shall actually 'enjoy' the discomfort.
dailymail.co.uk
