How Far Did British Society Change Between 1939 and the Mid-1970S

The Transformation of British Society 1951-79

The Butler Education Act 1944

. The Act raised the school leaving age from 14 to 15 and ensured that all children went to secondary education.

. Schools were divided into three categories:

. Grammar Schools provided a traditional education with modern languages, science etc.

. Modern Schools taught practical subjects with English and mathematics.

. Technical schools trained students in subjects that would lead to an apprenticeship, such as engineering.

. In theory all three types of schools would be treated equally, but in practice, Grammar Schools were always regarded as the best.

. They were usually older and often had better facilities. They often attracted the best teachers.

. Children took an exam at 11, the 11+, to decide which sort of school they would enter. The top 25% would go to Grammar Schools.

. Most schools were single-sex and boys and girls were usually educated differently.

. At Modern schools, girls would do needle-work and cooking, while boys did metalwork and woodwork.

. This was a clear attempt to maintain differences between the sexes.

Changes in education

Comprehensive Schools

. In the early 1950s, but increasingly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some local authorities began to create comprehensive schools.

. These were schools that included children of all abilities. These schools existed alongside Grammar and Modern Schools.

Why were there arguments over comprehensive schools?

. Some people saw comprehensive schools as a solution to the problems created by the eleven plus and the ‘tripartite system’.

. Many people believed that it 11 years of age was simply too early to decide a child’s future. 1 . In Comprehensive Schools there were usually three sections or streams, which were like the three types of school in the tripartite system. But in a comprehensive, children could move from one section to another very easily.

. Comprehensive Schools also seemed to fit in with some of the other changes that took place after the Second World War.

. But there were also arguments against the Comprehensive School. In the first place they tended to be much bigger than other schools.

. The new schools looked like huge factories, and sometimes appeared to have little character and few traditions.

. There were also complaints that Comprehensive Schools could not cater for the full range of ability.

. There were many arguments about the effectiveness of mixed ability classes.

. Supporters believed that it gave the same opportunities to all children; opponents believed that it meant that the teacher inevitably taught to the average level of ability.

. There was also a concern that the reason behind Comprehensive Schools was not really about education.

. People believed that the real reason for setting up comprehensives was to try to ensure some form of equality in Britain.

. This final point did appear to have some truth in it because the Labour Party became more and more convinced that comprehensives were the way forward.

. When it got back into power in 1965, it made no secret of the fact that it intended to make Comprehensive Schools compulsory.

. The arguments over Comprehensive Schools lasted until the end of the twentieth century.

. While many people agreed that comprehensives were a good idea in theory, they believed that they did not work in practice.

University Education

. The 1960s saw a big expansion in the numbers of universities and a corresponding expansion in the number of students.

. A large number of polytechnics was also set up, which provided course in vocational and practical subjects. Some towns and cities became dominated by student activity.

. The most important consequence was a major increase in the numbers of students in higher education, most of whom lived away from home; this was the first time that such large numbers had been independent of the parents.

2 . Grants were provided by local authorities to enable students to support themselves and consequently they were removed even more from the influence of the parents.

. The increase in student numbers and their growing independence was a major reason for the student protests that became very common at the end of the 1960s.

. Numbers of students in full-time education in Britain: 1961-200,000; 1969-390,000

Teenagers

. Sixties culture soon began to develop in different ways. Looking back, this was not surprising. Once teenagers began to acquire more freedom, they were bound to use that in different ways.

Teenagers as consumers

. By 1959, British teenagers were spending £8.00 a week on clothes, records, cosmetics and entertainment.

. A whole new market for selling had been created. Even the word ‘teenager’ was new. It would have meant nothing in the 1930s.

. Increasing earnings meant that the young had money to spend and no longer had to follow the fashions and interests on their parents. As one woman put it:

. Teen magazines appeared for the first time in 1961. ‘Honey’ and ‘19’ were the first big successes. They provided information about style, clothes, music etc.

. Manufacturers soon realised the potential of the teenage market. It soon became clear that anything ‘new’ was going to be bought in large quantities.

. Television and magazines made it possible for new trends and fashions to be created almost every week. One of the most important aspects of Sixties culture was that nothing stayed the same for very long.

Fashion

. One of the most important people in the changes that took place in the Sixties was Mary Quant. She opened her shop ‘Bazaar’ in the King’s Road in Chelsea in 1955.

. She had been an art student at Goldsmith’s College and had begun to design simple clothes, which she said:

. If Mary Quant was the designer of the Sixties, the faces of the sixties were Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. Both were tall and slim and wore simple, youthful clothes.

. The most well know fashion of the Sixties was the mini, even though it was followed by the maxi and flower-power and many other crazes. At the time it provoked strong reactions.

3 . Mary Quant’s success was followed by Barbara Hulanicki, who started a mail order business called ‘Biba’ and then set up a shop with the same name in Kensington in 1964. The impact was dramatic.

. What Mary Quant and other designers were doing was challenging traditional ideas. They were producing clothes for young people; clothes that allowed young people to be themselves, rather than miniature versions of their parents.

. By the late sixties women could wear almost anything and the word ‘unisex’ came into use. It meant that men and women could wear the same clothes and go to the same hairdressers.

. But this was not really a sign that women had achieved any sort of equality with men. It was evidence that in the 1960s what was really fashionable was to be young and new.

Media, communications and leisure 1960-79

Changes in media and entertainment

The big change in entertainment was the growth of television. ITV was created in 1955 and BBC 2 in 1964.

Cinemas

. An immediate effect of the popularity of television in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a big reduction in the numbers of people going to the cinema.

. By 1960 there were 3,000 cinemas in Britain, but this number dropped to 1,800 by 1966 and to 1,525 in 1976.

. The number of people going to the cinema every week fell even more sharply.

. From a peak of 28,000,000 in 1947, the number fell to 11,000,000 in 1959 and then to 4,000,000 in 1971. By 1979 the number was less than 2,000,000.

. The number of people listening to radio declined as a result of television.

. In the 1960s the BBC reorganised its broadcasting and added a fourth channel, which became known as Radio 1.

. The other three channels were renamed Radio 2 (The Light Programme) Radio 3 (The Third Programme) and Radio 4 (The Home Service).

. The reorganisation was caused partly by the number of people who were tuning into Radio Luxemburg, which played non-stop pop music and, from 1964, the pirate radio stations, such as Radio Caroline.

4 . Radio Caroline and Radio London, another pirate radio station, had enormous followings.

. Radio 1 on the BBC was not set up until 1967. The very first voice to be heard was Tony Blackburn’s.

. Many young people felt that the BBC was out of date and the changes were an attempt to win back the younger audience.

. In 1972 commercial radio began. This operated differently from the BBC local stations as it depended on finance from advertising.

. The biggest commercial stations, such as Capital and Virgin soon acquired tremendous influence.

The Press

. Television very quickly established itself as the most influential of all the mass media in Britain.

. Within a few years of the creation of ITV, television had stolen large chunks of the advertising revenue of the national newspapers and several were forced to close.

. The more popular papers were also faced with a dilemma. How could they continue to attract readers when the news was freely available on the television?

. Some decided to go ‘downmarket’ and provide something that television did not.

. In the late 1960s ‘The Sun’ began to offer ‘page three girls’ to its readers and other papers started to run stories of scandals and immorality.

. Another strategy was to offer more and more in a newspaper. Colour supplements began in the 1960s and editors tried to attract new readers.

. Unlike some other forms of media, newspapers survived, but in a very much altered state.

. The difference between the popular and serious papers was exaggerated and a new trend in titillation was begun.

Television in the 1970s

. By the end of the 1970s almost every one in Britain had a television set and there were 10 million colour sets in Britain.

. One reason for this was that during the 1970s the price of sets fell dramatically. The first colour set in 1968 cost about £300, but by 1978 they were down to less than £100.

. In 1978, 29 million people watched the ‘Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show’.

The Swinging Sixties

5 . In the middle of the decade the seven-inch single became wide-spread. It was light, cheap and easy to carry around.

. Teenagers could carry their music around with them and it became much easier to catch up with the latest songs.

. Singles could be played in juke-boxes, which appeared in many of the coffee bars that became popular at the time.

. There were also the first pop music shows on television. ‘Six Five Special’ and ‘Juke Box Jury’ were both popular, but tended to represent older tastes.

. The real breakthrough in music came in 1962 with an unlikely combination of individuals.

. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had been performing together for a number of years.

. There had been various other members of the band, but the group had not got very far. The change came about under the guidance of Brian Epstein.

. Epstein made the Beatles wear suits with no lapels and cut their hair into pudding basin style. In so doing he invented the Beatle jacket and the Beatle hairstyle.

. The Beatles wrote songs with real lyrics that caught the imagination of teenagers around the world.

. The influence of the Beatles went far beyond the music that they wrote and performed. Their clothes, their hair, their accents, their offhand attitudes seemed to sum up the new age of the Sixties.

Mods and Rockers

. In 1964 there were a number of outbreaks of violence between ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’.

. There was a battle between Mods, Rockers and the police in Clacton at Easter, and then later in the year more running fights at Margate, Brighton, Bournemouth and Hastings.

. The trouble between Mods and Rockers was short-lived. By the end of 1965 it was at an end. But it produced strong reactions from the forces of law and order.

. It also showed that the youth culture of the Sixties could have a darker side. Quite apart from the violence, it was clear that drug culture and its side effects were on the increase.

Beatniks

. Equally threatening at the time, but ultimately harmless, were the Beatniks.

. They dressed in black, grew unkempt beards and hung around in coffee bars reading the novels of Jean Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ and listening to the music of Bob Dylan. They drank and smoked a lot and looked and acted like rebels.

6 . Beatniks were in the end completely harmless. They were mostly students who either were, or pretended to be, intellectuals, but at the time they appeared to be threatening.

. They supported the views of Jean Paul Sartre, who was known to a Communist and joined ‘Ban the Bomb’ organisations.

. At a time when East and West were heavily involved in an arms race and the Cold War, these appeared to be dangerous views.

Hippies

. If some aspects of the Sixties appeared to challenge society and existing ideas, the hippie movement seemed to reject it altogether. Some people took the movement very seriously.

. To many people the most worrying aspect of the hippie movement was the way that its followers seemed to abandon responsibility.

. The emphasis on ‘love and peace’, while harmless enough in many ways, came at a time when the West was being challenged by the Soviet Union. In the late Sixties relations between the two sides appeared to be worsening.

. Not only did hippies appear to reject all forms of confrontation, but their behaviour suggested a weakening of society and the family in particular.

. The movement developed just as the contraceptive pill became widely available for the first time in 1967.

Developments in Popular Music

. It was not just the development of different forms of youth culture that upset people; popular music itself soon began to change.

. The lyrics of the first Beatles songs seemed completely harmless. ‘Love me do’, ‘Please, Please, Me’ and ‘I want to hold your hand’ were really no different from the songs that had been popular in the late fifties and early Sixties.

. But the Beatles style changed. Later songs like ‘All you need is love’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Lady Madonna’ had lyrics which were more serious and perplexing.

. The Beatles themselves also changed dramatically. The clean cut, cheerful boys of 1963 became the weird and wonderful followers of the Maharishi, an Indian guru.

. They began to dress in psychedelic clothing, take drugs and adopt a more and more outlandish pose.

. Worse still, in the eyes of some people, were the groups that followed them. The Rolling Stones started out as Beatles look-alikes, but soon developed a completely different style.

. The Rolling Stones were Rockers. Their stage act became more and more wild, as did their behaviour and the lyrics of their songs.

7 . ‘Satisfaction’ carried obvious sexual undertones and later ‘Brown Sugar’ explicitly suggested drug taking.

Reasons for social change 1960-79

Changing social attitudes

. The ‘Pill’ was available from Family Planning Clinics from 1967 and was free on the National Health in 1974.

. In 1967, abortion became legal in Britain for the first time. Until then the only way of terminating a pregnancy was to use a ‘back street’ abortion.

Why was the death penalty abolished?

. Many were particularly concerned that, if a mistake was made (regarding evidence, for instance), it was impossible to put things right.

. Particularly important were the cases of Timothy Evans (hanged in 1950) and Ruth Ellis (hanged in 1955).

. Timothy Evans was accused of murdering his wife and infant daughter at their residence at 10 Rillington Place, London.

. In January 1950 Evans was tried and convicted of the murder of his daughter, and he was sentenced to death by hanging.

. During his trial, Evans had accused his downstairs neighbour, John Christie of committing the murders.

. Three years after Evans's execution, Christie was found to be a serial killer who had murdered a number of other women in the same house.

. Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom, after being convicted of the murder of her lover, David Blakely.

. On Easter Sunday 1955, Ellis shot Blakely dead outside the Magdala public house in Hampstead, and immediately gave herself up to the police.

. At her trial, she took full responsibility for the murder and her courtesy and composure, both in court and in the cells, was noted in the press.

. She was hanged in July 1955. The case became well known because Ellis revealed after the trial that she had been given the gun by Desmond Cussen and that he had driven her to meet Blakely.

. But one of the most important cases leading to the abolition of the death penalty was that of Derek Bentley who was executed in 1953 for a crime he did not commit.

. On 2nd November 1952 two youths were spotted breaking into Barlow & Parker, a wholesale confectioner's.

8 . The police were called and they arrived at about 9.25pm in a van and a car. Bentley and Craig spotted the police and tried to hide behind a lift-housing on the flat roof of the warehouse.

. DC Frederick Fairfax noticed a footprint on a window-sill and climbed a drain-pipe onto the flat roof.

. Fairfax called on the two to surrender but was met with a stream of defiance from Craig. He charged at the pair and grabbed the nearest figure, which happened to be Bentley.

. Bentley broke free and called to his partner, 'Let him have it, Chris!' Craig fired and wounded DC Fairfax in the shoulder.

. Fairfax caught up with Bentley and flattened him with a punch.

. At their trial at the Old Bailey they were both charged with murder, even though Bentley was under arrest when Craig fired the shot that killed PC Miles.

. Craig, being 16 at the time, could not be hanged. There were many contentious points at their trial.

. The defence maintained that Craig had not been aiming at the policemen when he fired, but over their heads.

. A ballistics expert, Mr Lewis Nicholls, gave evidence that the gun, a sawn-off, First World War .455 Eley service revolver, was wildly inaccurate at distances over six feet.

. The jury considered their verdict for just 75 minutes before returning guilty verdicts on both youths, with a recommendation for mercy in Bentley's case.

. Bentley was sentenced to death. Craig, who the judge described as 'one of the most dangerous young criminals who has ever stood in that dock', was sentenced to be detained during Her Majesty's pleasure.

. Derek Bentley, aged nineteen, was hanged in Wandsworth at 9 a.m. on 28 January 1953. Craig was released from prison in May 1963 and he settled in Buckinghamshire.

. His family and supporters began a campaign to have the guilty verdict overturned by the courts.

. This campaign lasted 46 years, and was led by his sister, Iris. In July 1998, Lord Chief Justice Bingham quashed the guilty verdict.

Liberalisation of social attitudes

. The 1960s was a decade when traditional attitudes were challenged in many ways.

. Music, fashion, the government were all criticised and changed. One of the most famous attacks was the ‘Establishment.

9 . The Establishment was the people who ruled Britain; the people who had always ruled Britain.

. Most of these people came from very similar backgrounds and had been educated at the same schools.

. Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minster from 1957 to 1963 came from a very wealthy family and had been educated at Eton.

. This was the sort of background that people in the Establishment came from. But in the early Sixties, the Establishment came under attack

. One of the first attacks came from four undergraduates who met at Cambridge and created a revue called ‘Beyond the Fringe’ in 1961.

. They were Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. In their show they made fun of Harold Macmillan, the Church of England and the Royal Family.

. In the same year, ‘Private Eye’ was published for the first time. The early editions were stapled together, but it soon became a popular magazine that ridiculed politicians and public figures. It’s still going today. At first, however, it attracted very mixed reactions.

. In 1962 satire moved to television. ‘That was the week that was’ (TW3) was broadcast every Saturday night. It

. It made fun of news items and was soon being watched by 12,000,000 people. ‘Beyond the Fringe’, ‘Private Eye’ and TW3 were all challenges to accepted ways of doing things.

CND Protest Movements

. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a short-lived organisation that protested against nuclear threats in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

. It disappeared after the Test-Ban Treaty was signed in 1963, but reappeared in the 1980s.

. The founder was Bruce Kent and a main supporter was Michael Foot (on the left), who became leader of the Labour Party in 1979.

. The main activity of CND was an annual march to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston

10 Immigration

Immigration

Why did large numbers of immigrants begin to arrive in Britain from the Commonwealth in 1948 onwards?

. During the Second World War many Commonwealth citizens fought and died for Britain.

. After the war the Labour government passed the British Nationality Act in 1948.

. This said that all citizens of the Commonwealth were British citizens.

. The Act meant that Commonwealth citizens had the right to come and settle in Britain.

. The earliest immigrants came from India, where, after independence and partition in 1947, some Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs found themselves isolated.

. In the early 1950s many immigrants began to arrive from the West Indies.

. India, Pakistan and the West Indies came to be known as the New Commonwealth.

. The National Health Service had been set up in 1948 and railway and bus transport had been nationalised. Large numbers of extra workers were needed.

. Advertising campaigns were started in the West Indies and India and Pakistan to try to attract workers.

. In 1954, 9,000 West Indians came to Britain, rising to 26,000 in 1956 and 66,000 in 1961.

. Wages in Britain were much higher than in other parts of the Commonwealth and the standard of living was rising very quickly.

What problems did immigrants face when they arrived in Britain?

. Immigrants often found themselves living in the poorest accommodation in the worst areas of big cities.

. Landlords would not rent to immigrants, or that building societies would not lend them money. This treatment produced ‘black’ areas in many large cities and towns.

. In the early 1950s most British people were completely unfamiliar with the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religions.

. They found the rituals, ceremonies and festivals strange and reacted adversely.

11 . Many British people were unable to distinguish between West Indians and Asians and knew little about their history or where they had come from.

. At work immigrants often found that they were only offered the lowest-paid and most unskilled jobs.

. When they applied for promotion, they often found that they were blocked, no matter how well-qualified they were.

. Frequently increases in crime or disease were blamed on them and they were often barred from public houses, clubs and restaurants.

. This became known as the ‘colour bar’ and notices would often include the words ‘No Blacks’ or ‘No Asians’.

. Many immigrants settled in the West Midlands and in 1955 there were strikes against the employment of black and Asian workers.

. In 1958, violence broke out in Nottingham and then spread to Notting Hill in London.

. In September 1958, there were two weeks of riots in Notting Hill during which white youths attacked the homes and property of immigrants.

12 Why did such racial hatred develop?

. Many people were frightened of losing their jobs.

. They also believed that Britain was going to change for the worse in large numbers of immigrants settled permanently.

. Immigrants were blamed for increasing social problems, such as crime and drugs.

. By the end of the 1950s unemployment began to rise.

. Communities hardly mixed. Immigrants tended to live in small areas in big cities.

. In the mid-1950s, many white Britons had never actually met an immigrant, but were still often prejudiced against them.

. After the Nottingham riots, both of the city’s MPs called for an end to immigration and for some immigrants to be deported.

. A ‘Keep Britain White’ campaign was organised and groups like the White Defence League suggested that immigrants would soon outnumber white Britons.

. In fact in 1958 there were only about 190,000 immigrants in Britain from the New Commonwealth and there were signs that the number of immigrants was beginning to drop.

. In 1956, 37,450 immigrants came from India, Pakistan and the West Indies, but in 1957 the number fell to 34,800 and in 1958 to just 25,900.

. After the 1959 general election, which resulted in a large Conservative majority, MPs from Birmingham began to campaign for changes in the law.

. They were supported by many local groups and in 1962 the government passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

Social divisions and conflicts

How did government policies on immigration change in the 1960s?

The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act

. This stated that only immigrants with jobs waiting for them or those possessing certain skills would be allowed into Britain.

. Immigrants had to apply for a voucher, which would only be issued if they could offer skills that were needed in Britain. The number of vouchers was limited each year to about 9,000.

. The Act did not apply to Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Why did the situation get worse in the late 1960s?

13 . In 1967 the National Front, a racist party that wanted immigrants to be sent back to their original countries was set up.

. President Kenyatta ordered all Kenyan Asians to take Kenyan nationality or leave the country. Many left and came to Britain.

The 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act

. In response the British government passed the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act.

. This stated that immigrants must have some close connection with Britain. Close connection meant that the immigrant must have been born in Britain or have a parent or grandparent who had.

. The Act also restricted the number of vouchers to no more than 1,500 each year.

. By the late 1960s immigration had become a major political issue.

. Opinion polls showed that about 80% of people believed that too many immigrants had been allowed into Britain

. From 1968 a series of speeches was made by Enoch Powell, a Conservative Politician. He claimed that it would soon be impossible to get a bed in a hospital and predicted that ‘rivers of blood’ would be caused by racial violence.

The 1971 Immigration Act

. This created a new class of immigrants called ‘Patrials’. These were people who had been born in Britain, or who had lived in Britain for more than five years, or whose parents or grandparents had been born in Britain.

. Anyone else, whether they came from the Commonwealth or not, needed a work permit.

. All Commonwealth citizens now needed work permits or visas to come to Britain, unless they were Patrials.

. 70,000 Asians from Uganda were admitted from 1972, when President Amin ordered all Ugandan Asians to leave the country

Why did government policies on immigration change in the 1960s and 1970s?

. From the late 1950s and early 1960s the number of immigrants coming to Britain rose very rapidly.

. From 1955 to 1961 400,000 people came to Britain from the West Indies, India and Pakistan.

. Extra labour was not needed because most of the jobs in the National Health Service and transport had been filled.

14 . By 1960 many families were arriving, and men who had arrived in the early fifties were bringing their families over to join them. This meant that immigrants were becoming permanent settlers.

. By the early 1960s the British economy was beginning to slow down and unemployment was rising.

. By the early 1960s it was obvious that immigration had led to severe racial tension. The British government believed that it could reduce racial tension by placing limits on the number of immigrants allowed into Britain each year.

How did the British government try to reduce racial tension?

. In 1965 the Race Relations Act banned discrimination in all public places, such as pubs, clubs and dancehalls.

. It became illegal to publish anything, which incited racial hatred.

. The Act set up a Race Relations Board in 1966, which dealt with complaints. But this had no power to enforce its decisions and was made up almost entirely of white people

. In 1968 a second Race Relations Act banned discrimination in housing, work or training. It also banned racist adverts.

. But landlords could easily say that a house or room had already been rented and there was almost no way to prove otherwise. Employers could always find plenty of reasons for not giving jobs to immigrants.

. This Act also set up a Community Relations Commission to try to improve race relations.

. In 1976 the Racial Equality Act banned all attempts to discriminate by indirect means. Abusive or threatening language became illegal.

. Anyone who felt that they had been the victim of such discrimination could take their complaint to a tribunal.

. Local authorities had to improve race relations and opportunities for immigrants.

. The Act set up the Commission for Racial Equality, which could take up cases of discrimination. It had the power to serve legal notices on offenders.

15 Work

‘Never had it so good’

. The 1950s was a decade when the majority of British people became better off.

. Wages rose steadily and all political parties supported the principle of full employment.

. Major industries had been nationalised in the late 1940s and the NHS had been set up.

. These industries provided millions of jobs. One reason for Commonwealth immigration was that there was a shortage of labour.

. Rationing finally ended in 1954; it was the end of the ‘austerity’ that Britain had faced as a result of the struggle during the Second World War.

. By the late 1950s, it seemed as if Britain had complete recovered from the effects of the War.

Changes in employment

. The prosperity of the late 1950s continued into the early sixties, but from 1963, problems began to emerge and increased in significance for the rest of the decade.

. Britain began to face increased competition for exports, especially from Japan.

. British factories had not invested in new equipment and were increasingly uncompetitive.

. Some industries that had been important employers were also beginning to struggle.

. Coal mining, which had employed 1 million people at the beginning of the twentieth century, was declining.

. Pits were running out of coal and it was becoming more difficult to compete with imports.

. By 1967, 2.5 million people were out of work. In 1971, the figure was 3.5 million.

. Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970, tried to encourage the development of technology.

. In 1967, he was forced to devalue the £ to reduce the prices of British exports.

. He withdrew British forces from places around the world in an effort to save money.

. In 1970, the Labour Party lost the general election and Edward Heath became the Prime Minister of a Conservative government.

16 . As sales of British goods fell, wages fell and unemployment rose. The government tried to tackle the problem by imposing a Prices and Incomes Policy.

. It led to was increasing trade union action. The numbers of days lost to strikes rose steadily in the early 1970s.

The 3-Day Week

. In December 1973, the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, announced a 3-Day Week.

. Consumption of electricity by businesses was limited to three consecutive days each week.

. For households, there were shortages of food and sudden blackouts. People had to rely on candles for lighting.

The Oil Crisis

. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, in the War of Yom Kippur (October 1973).

. Arab oil-producing countries stopped exporting oil to western countries that had supported Israel, including Britain.

. People had to drive around petrol stations hoping to find them. Some stations would only serve regular customers and others limited the amount of petrol that could be bought.

. When exports started again, the price rose from $3 a barrel to $12.

. The 3-Day week resulted in the defeat of Edward Heath and the Conservative Party in the February 1974 general election.

. The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, called a second general election in October 1974 and won with a narrow majority in the House of Commons.

. Inflation reached 26.9% in 1975 and the Labour government tried to tackle this by agreeing a Social Contract with the Trades Union Congress.

The ‘Winter of Discontent’

. The Social Contract lasted until 1978 when the government announced a limit of 5% for increases on incomes below £8,500.

. By then, inflation had fallen to about 10%, but than suddenly rose again. The TUC refused to accept the 5% limit and trade unions began to demand big increases in pay.

. Workers at Ford demanded and got a large pay rise. Ford had done very well in recent years and could afford to pay more. Other unions followed suit and were turned down.

. In December 1978 and January 1979, there were widespread strikes in all sector of the economy.

17 . The most important was lorry drivers. Petrol stations ran dry and rubbish was not collected and food was in short supply.

. In Merseyside, gravediggers went on strike. Many hospitals could only admit emergency cases.

. The direct result of the Winter of Discontent was the defeat of the Labour Party in the 1979 general election.

. Margaret Thatcher, who been elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, became the first women Prime Minister.

18 Leisure

The family education and leisure

. The Second World War came to an end in 1945 and millions of soldiers were ‘demobbed’.

. Government policy was that women who had taken up jobs during the war should give them up.

. Women were expected to return to the roles that they had played before the war. Many thousands of women were sacked.

. The jobs that women lost were given to men who returned from the War.

. The structure of the family was patriarchal; the husband was in charge and the wife looked after the home and the children.

. Divorce was frowned upon; marriage was seen as the best way of raising a family and planning for the future.

. If children had part-time jobs, they were often expected to hand their earnings to their father.

Leisure

. The new form of leisure was television. Programmes had started in 1936 but had been stopped during the Second World War. They were restarted in 1946.

. By the early 1950s there were 1.5 million sets being used, but the big boost came in 1953 when the Cup Final and the Coronation were both shown live.

. Live sport was also very popular: cricket and football attracted very large crowds.

. Holidays were almost always spent in Britain and would either be in a holiday camp or at a seaside resort.

. The first package tours began in 1954, but did not really get going until the 1960s.

Changes in leisure

The Motor Car

. In the 50s and 60s many more people were able to buy a car. Cars such as the Mini and the Ford Cortina brought cheap motoring to the masses in the early sixties.

. The difference between family life with a car and without was huge. Car ownership made possible all sorts of day trips that would have taken forever by public transport.

19 . Once Britain's motorway network was in place, holiday traffic jams disappeared, at least for a few years and people were free to travel anywhere in the UK.

. It opened up Devon and Cornwall as holiday destinations and allowed ordinary people to discover new destinations, previously unthinkable by bus or train.

Holidays

. In the 1930s, the new form of holiday had been the ‘Holiday Camp’, which offered inclusive accommodation, meals, entertainment and leisure.

. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Britain suffered from the economic effects of the war and many families appreciated the good value offered by Butlins and Pontins.

. By the late 1950s the repetitive cheeriness and drab accommodation was beginning to wear a little thin.

. The first package tour was organised in 1954. In 1957, British European Airways introduced a route to Valencia, near Alicante in eastern Spain.

. By the late 1950s and 1960s, the cheap package holidays provided the first chance for most people in Britain to have affordable travel abroad.

. Throughout the 1960s, the package-holiday market expanded in parallel with increasing disposable income.

. Even the imposition of a £50 limit on spending abroad, part of a vain attempt to defend the pound, failed to dampen the British appetite for sun and indulgence on the cheap.

. Between 1960 and 1967, the number of Britons going abroad each year soared from 2.25 million to 5 million.

. In 1974, the Miners' Strike combined with an enfeebled economy and the Middle East oil crisis to bankrupt numerous holiday companies failed - including the giant Court Line, which left 40,000 British holidaymakers stranded abroad.

. On 15 August 1974, Court Line, which operated under the brand names of Horizon and Clarksons, collapsed.

. Nearly 50,000 tourists were stranded overseas and a further 100,000 faced the loss of booking deposits.

20 Women

Employment

Women after the war, 1945-51

. The war did change the attitudes of some women. War work gave them far more confidence and self-respect.

. They became far more confident about themselves and their abilities. Many enjoyed the independence and freedom the war had given them.

. The trade unions accepted women workers much more readily than they had done in the First World War.

. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) campaigned to make sure that women were treated the same as men.

. The majority of men continued to believe that in their traditional roles as wives and mothers and, that once the war ended, they should return to the home.

. Most women willingly left their wartime jobs because they wanted to return to the home.

. A government survey of 1947 revealed that 58 per cent of women believed that married women should not go out to work.

. Women’s career opportunities weren’t drastically improved by the war. The shutting down of nurseries after the war meant the end of jobs for women with children.

. They continued to make only slow progress in professions like medicine and law. As late as 1961, only 15 per cent of doctors and 3 per cent of lawyers were women.

. There were twice as many women employed in 1951 compared to 1939. 22% were working, although many were part-time and in low-paid jobs.

. Women usually earned at least 10% less than men for the same job and as much as 33%.

. In 1947, Cambridge University allowed women to receive full degrees for the first time and

. In 1949 women were allowed to become King’s Counsel (senior barristers) (KCs).

. The first woman to become a bank manager was not appointed until 1958.

21 . At the same time, the Royal Commission on Equal Pay reported in 1946 that women should only be paid equally with men in certain grades of the civil service.

. In 1955 the government agreed that professionals in all three services (teachers, doctors, accountants etc.) would receive equal pay in stages. Manual workers, including nurses, would not.

The changing role of women

Feminism

. Feminism developed in the late 1960s for a number of reasons. One was a feeling of desperation that intelligent and highly qualified women felt when they were unable to gain acceptance and promotion in the economy and society.

. A second factor was the realisation by many working women of the narrowness of their lives.

. This often came as a result of the formation of groups in local areas, such as the Peckham Rye Group.

. These women were drawn together in pre and ante-natal care, or met at social security offices.

. A third factor was a reassessment of the way that women were portrayed and treated in society; this had begun in the 1960s, but developed throughout the 1970s and the following decades.

. Feminist writers criticised the way that girls were usually described in story books, school textbooks and newspapers and the way that women were exploited in competitions like Miss World.

. The Miss World competition was picketed by feminists in 1969 for the first time.

Employment

. The prosperity that Britain enjoyed at the beginning of the 1960s provided many new sources of employment for women. Jobs as typists, receptionists, models, shop assistants were available in large numbers.

. Despite the reputation of the ‘swinging sixties’, in terms of employment opportunities, it remained almost totally male dominated.

. In 1968 there was a strike by women employees at Ford. A new grading system had placed skilled women workers on the same footing as unskilled men.

. Barbara Castle, the Minister for Employment and Productivity, visited the factory in person and promised more pay and legislation to make it compulsory.

. The women accepted the deal, although they did not get the higher grade that they were after.

22 . Their trade union persuaded them to accept the offer as it would avoid complaint from their male colleagues. Two years later the Equal Pay Act was passed.

. The Equal Pay Act made it illegal to pay different rates to ‘men and women employed on work rated as equivalent’.

. This left many loopholes for employers to take advantage of, if the work undertaken by women and men was not ‘rated as equivalent’, equal pay need not be paid.

. Some employers quite blatantly renamed jobs so that they could pay men and women different rates.

Family Planning

. The 1960s were the decade when the ‘pill’ arrived. It was available from Family Planning Clinics from 1967 and was free on the National Health in 1974.

. The medical complications involved in taking the pill meant that it came to be prescribed by doctors. This prevented women from having complete control over contraception as they had before.

. In 1967 abortion became legal in Britain for the first time. Until then the only way of terminating a pregnancy was to use a ‘back street’ abortion.

. The combined effect of the pill and abortion was to allow women to plan their lives much more effectively. Not only could the number of children be limited, but they were able to decide when to have them.

Marriage

. During the 1960s, as in every decade since the Second World War, marriage appeared to become less important to more people.

. The number of illegitimate births rose from 5.8% in 1960 to 8.2% in 1970. More women refused to marry the fathers of there children than ever before.

. The number of marriages ending in divorce rose yet again, from about one in fifteen to more than one in ten. Once again, one of the reasons for the increase was the age at which couples got married.

. A second reason for the increased number of divorces was the number of couples who were married when the woman was pregnant.

. There were three important Acts of Parliament in the 1960s that gave women a much stronger legal position in marriage.

. In 1964, the Married Women’s Property Act allowed women to retain half the money they saved from any housekeeping.

. In 1967, the Matrimonial Homes Act gave husband and wife exactly the same right of occupation to the family home. Before, courts had tended to favour the man.

23 . Most important of all, after 1970 a woman’s contribution to the upkeep of the household and the welfare of the family had to be taken into account when family assets were divide up after a divorce.

. A final influence came about at the end of the 1960s from the beginnings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, which held its first annual conference in 1970.

. The Feminist Movement, which developed during the 1960s, became very influential at the end of the decade.

. It began to challenge all traditional ideas of women’s role in society, the economy and the family. Eventually, in some cases, it led to the total rejection of men altogether.

Politics

. In the 1960s, for almost the first time, women in Britain began to organise themselves.

. The National Housewives’ register was set up in 1960, and was followed by groups like the Pre-School Playgroups Association.

. Self-help groups like these appeared all over the country. The most influential was the Peckham Rye Group, which met at 1.00 pm.

. This organisation played an important role in the first Women’s Liberation Conference held in February 1970

. Some women took this idea further and were inspired by books like The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch.

. These portrayed women as a depressed class and attacked the ways that society tried to keep them under control.

. One woman gained a distinction in her research at university, but was then told not to apply for a job because ‘ladies don’t do very well here’. . The 1960s did see the appointment of women as prominent Cabinet Ministers. The most influential was Barbara Castle, who served in Harold Wilson’s cabinet from 1964 to 1970. . Two other all-male occupations were invaded by women during the 1960s, showing that women were steadily, but very slowly, being allowed to climb up the ladder.

. In 1962 the first woman ambassador was appointed, to Israel. In 1965 the first woman high court judge was appointed.

. There were few areas of public life to which women had not gained access, but in the eyes of the Feminists, it was unacceptable that women should have to wait to be allowed into these areas.

Employment

Dagenham 1968

24 . In the summer of 1968 a small group of women at the Ford factory in Dagenham went on strike. They were protesting about the re-grading of their jobs.

. The women worked as sewing machinists, making seats for the thousands of cars which were produced there.

. The women's protest was soon taken up as a battle for equal pay and the strike was only ended when Barbara Castle, the Employment Secretary, invited the machinists to take tea in her office and talk over their problems.

. The women didn't know it, but they were walking into the history books: their protest led directly to the passing of the Equal Pay Act.

Legislation

. The 1970s saw the first real attempts to achieve equality between men and women at work.

. After the Equal Pay Act in 1970, the Sex Discrimination Act was introduced in 1975, which banned discrimination in employment, education and advertising.

. It set up the Equal Opportunities Commission to make sure that the terms of the Act were kept.

. In the same year the Employment Protection Act was passed. This prevented employers from dismissing a woman because she was pregnant and gave women the right to maternity leave and pay.

. Advertisements for jobs could no longer say that only men should apply, but it was still possible to draw up a shortlist in which most candidates were men.

. Proving to the Equal Opportunities Commission that discrimination had taken place was very difficult and took great courage. There were few cases and still are.

. The new laws also did relatively little for the great number of women who did part time work.

. Most Acts of Parliament only dealt with full time employees and part timers could easily be ignored. Real protection for part time workers only came about in the 1990s.

. Despite the promises of the Sex Discrimination Act, girls continued to study different subjects at school from boys.

. Craft subjects were still segregated, as were games lessons. English and History were still regarded as the natural subjects for girls, leaving boys to concentrate on Science and Maths.

. While women were almost equal in terms of numbers in education and some professions by the end of the 1970s, they were still far behind in terms of promotion prospects and senior posts. Less than 2% of university professors were women in 1980

25 . The rights of women to work and at work were also helped in the 1970s by trade unions. For the first time equal pay for women became the official policy of many unions.

. The policy was not always supported locally and in 1973 the AUEW (Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers) in Coventry refused to back a strike by women workers. Head office quickly reversed the decision.

. However, by the late 1970s there was little evidence that the Acts had had any real impact.

. Acts of Parliament could change the law, but they could not change people’s attitudes.

. Employers were able to get around the Equal Pay Act by regarding positions so that women had fewer responsibilities, fewer opportunities and consequently lower pay.

. There were spectacular examples of women who achieved high political office, but there were very few who made it to the top in business or the economy.