There were plenty of reasons for a baby boom straight after the Second World War – happy times – but difficult times too – as families dealt with the challenges of day-to-day life in the late 1940s…
I’m sure there are many things that might trigger a rise in the birth rate – but consider these particular influencing factors for post-war Britain:
- couples were finally able to celebrate the end of six years of war
- wives and girlfriends could welcome the return of a loved one from the horrors at the front
- British women had a chance to meet and marry a military man from the US or Canada who had come to Britain to help the Allied Forces.
Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, to see the UK birth rate jump from around 795,000 in 1945 to over 955,000 in 1946. Quite a rise! But that wasn’t the real height, perhaps because there was a lag in the timing of demobbing, with some military men not arriving home until well into 1946. And so we see a further leap in numbers in 1947 to well over…
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Isabella Muir 