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…

Consider how it must have been after the Second World War for millions of families who were all desperate for somewhere to live – somewhere ‘fit for purpose’, many having lost everything during the wartime London Blitz and similar devastation across the country. House building on a grand scale was promised by the post-war Labour government, but it was taking too long and in many ways falling short of what was needed.

It should be no surprise then that some people chose to take the situation into their own hands. Shortly after the war ended – in the summer of 1945 – a group of people in Brighton decided to solve the housing crisis by ‘commandeering any house that is empty and installing in it a family in need of accommodation.’ These squatters called themselves the ‘Vigilantes’.

A year on, what had started as small-scale developed into something much more…

‘A landmark has been set up in English education’

Times Educational Supplement, 1944

Such was the general reception to the Butler Act of 1944. The paper’s editor went on to comment that ‘there shall be equality of opportunity, and diversity of provision without impairment of the social unity’.

So why did the Butler Act promise such wide-reaching changes to education and how successful were they in reality? Up until this point state education provided for children aged five through to fourteen in one ‘elementary sector’. Butler, however, recommended a division in education between ‘primary’ (five to eleven) and ‘secondary’ (eleven to fifteen). Some local authorities were already offering state funded secondary education, but with this Act the intention was to ensure fairer and widespread access, particularly for girls and, more broadly, children from working class families.

Although the Act was passed during the Second World War, it wasn’t until…

If you wanted to travel around Britain in the 1940s it’s likely you would have been walking, cycling or travelling on public transport. And if you were a critical worker, delivering milk to doorsteps early mornings, then you might even still be relying on a horse-drawn cart.

The average distance people needed to travel to get to work was around five miles and a bare six percent of workers choose to get there in a car. The motor car was still an unaffordable luxury for many.

Take the Ford Anglia, for example. In 1950 it would have set you back around £310. And to give that figure some context, the average house price in 1950 was £1,940 – making a car purchase one sixth of the cost of a house. So, converting that in today’s terms, (with the average house price around £256,000) it would mean the cost of an…

The perils of war concentrate the mind when it comes to romance. If your sweetheart is about to go off to fight and you couldn’t be sure when or if you would see them again, then it would make sense to confirm your love for each other by ‘tying the knot’.

In the early months and years of the Second World War thousands of young women decided to marry. The wedding was often planned in haste, with no white dress or finery, no posh reception and certainly no honeymoon. Some couples might have managed a ‘knees up’ with friends and family at the local pub or village hall, but many others would merely attend the register office with the barest minimum of guests to act as witnesses before the solder had to return to the front.

After the Second World War Britain saw arrivals of folk from all across the globe – many from Commonwealth countries who were intrigued to discover what the ‘mother country’ was like. But it was also a time when some British people decided to leave – to emigrate.

The situation in Britain was dire. For some families, it seemed that everywhere they looked all they could see was hardship. Decent housing was difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve, rationing of basic foodstuffs was still in place, secure employment was often unattainable and with the war debt hanging over the economy it seemed that the situation would be unlikely to change any time soon.

No surprise then that in spring 1948 a Gallup poll indicated that around ’42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate’ (Austerity Britain by David Kynaston). Nevertheless, there was a big gap between wanting to leave and…

When I dig around in my tin of old photos I find a picture of my brother – just a toddler at the time – standing in the kitchen sink to be washed. In 1940s Britain this would have been a typical scene in many houses as few had indoor bathrooms, with the only running water being a cold supply to the kitchen sink. Perhaps an gas-fired Ascot water heater would provide a little hot water, but for many families the only way to heat a large amount of water – enough for a bath – would have been to put a large copper pan over a coal fire to heat it up. The water, once heated, would be poured into a tin bath that would be taken down from its hook on the outside wall of the house and placed into the middle of the kitchen. Imagine how much…

Imagine yourself in 1940s Britain, when it was more than likely you would be sharing an outside toilet with other houses in the street, or sharing one on the landing of your block of flats. The kitchen sink might have doubled up as a bath for the little ones in the family, and the luxury of an electric washing machine was yet to arrive in most homes.

Monday was washday for most people. And the popular choice for the weekly laundry was to tackle it by hand – using the kitchen sink or a copper pot and a wooden scrubbing board to scrub the clothes. Steam clogged up the windows and red-faced housewives used all their energy to tug at the clothes with wooden tongs, trying – sometimes in vain – to keep their hands out of the boiling hot water! It was really back-breaking work. Then it was a…