ABSTRACT
The 1950s was a curious and idiosyncratic decade, which, from the viewpoint of the 1990s, is a reservoir of distant, yet familiar images, close enough to be relevant, yet far enough away to be the object of nostalgia. It was a period of full employment, of prosperity and social stability, of the birth of the age of television, of the ‘New Elizabethan Age’ and the Coronation; it was also the decade of the teddy-boys, Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll, of CND and of the Angry Young Men. In effect, these two sets of images are associated with the two halves of the decade, with 1956 as the watershed, marking off a ‘then’ from a ‘now’ in cultural and political history.
