On New Year’s Day 1946, the people of Britain desperately wanted to look forward to a new and better life. The Second World War had ended four months earlier with the formal surrender of Imperial Japan. The war in Europe had been over for eight months. But, upon announcing to Parliament the German surrender, Winston Churchill had told the nation: “Let us not forget the toils and efforts that lie ahead.”
In 1946, Clement Attlee, leader of the newly elected Labour Government, underlined Churchill’s words, warning the nation that victory over Nazi Germany and Japan had heralded not a future of plenty – but one of greater austerity. The huge debt left by the war had crippled the British economy.
Those who fought in the Great War had been promised a land fit for heroes. That had not happened. After another world war, people now expected a better life than the poverty and hardship that had characterised much of the 1920s and 1930s, and Attlee pledged to end society’s five “Giant Evils” – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease – and to provide for the people “from the cradle to the grave”. It was going to be far from easy.
Life in Post-War Britain: "Toils and Efforts Ahead" tells what it was like to live in Britain as the nation battled to recover while still facing many hardships, including food rationing that, ironically, was to become more severe than that in wartime.
This was a unique time in British history and Life in Post-War Britain: “Toils and Efforts Ahead” captures the mood of the nation, examining all the great events of the post-war years and the effect that they had on the everyday life of the people who had won a war but who now faced an uncertain peace both at home and abroad.