ABSTRACT
The 1950s and early 1960s was an age that was riven with paradox and contradiction, although this was not always apparent at the time. Given a unity at the national political level by three successive Conservative administrations (from 1951 to 1964), it seemed to be a time of unprecedented social stability and prosperity-especially when compared with the vicissitudes of the 1930s and 1940s, or when viewed with hindsight as ‘the last period of quiet before the storm’ (Bogdanor and Skidelsky 1970:7) of the 1960s and 1970s. It is characteristic of the era that many of the major indices of this stability were associated with conservative, even hierarchical, symbols and traditions; the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Harold Macmillan’s effortless ‘Edwardian’ amateurism, the last vestiges of Reithian formality at the BBC. However, one of the central contradictions of the age is that this conservatism was most apparent when it appeared in response to another dominant theme in the decade, the sense of ‘newness’, of change, that was felt in all areas of social experience and which helped to mark off the pre-from the post-war worlds. Conservatism in this context is not simply to do with the Tory Party’s electoral success (the battle between the major parties in the period was always much closer than the election results suggest) but is much wider, moving beyond the narrowly political into many areas of social and cultural life in the early 1950s, and providing the immediate context for the emergence of new, more progressive, forces in 1956 and after.
