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The article discusses marketing in Great Britain in the late 1940's. The author begins by explaining some of the differences between the market structure in the United States and Great Britain. Much of the power industries have been taken over by the government and those that have not are indirectly controlled by it, through allocation of resources and consumer rationing. The diminished infrastructure in Great Britain is also a limiting factor in export trade, where the United States was untouched after the war. Three major features are the heart of British marketing, the right to buy, inflationary tendencies, and discrimination by buyers. An increase in output of factories has resulted in a relaxing of rationing by the government and export sales have become more of a focus.

Abstract: During the ten years following the end of the Second World War, the role of the Royal Navy and even the significance of sea power for Britain came under sustained challenge. A group of sceptics including cabinet ministers (not least the prime minister), as well as senior civil servants and Royal Air Force officers argued that the only conceivable war would see the use of nuclear weapons, leaving little need for the Navy, and any roles at sea that were still required could be taken over by land‐based aircraft. This article explores these arguments and the response of the Admiralty, as it fought and eventually defeated what amounted to the bitterest peacetime challenge to the role of naval power in British strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern kitchen was emblematic of a cold war obsession with household consumer durables as a measure of national progress. Its roots lay in a largely American idea of the ‘new household’ and the modern housewife. The article explores how television advertising in Britain played its part in helping to promote these co-joined aspects of the cross-Atlantic domestic ideal. In pursuing this argument, the article emphasises the way American domestic ideals took distinctive directions in Britain. Contributing to this adaptation of American ideals was a range of home-grown influences that shaped the remaking of the post-war home and women’s social role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to deepen scholarly understanding of the special political and economic connection between Britain and Socialist China during the 1950s and the 1960s. After 1949, the British government had substantive reasons to preserve a link with Beijing, despite the unfolding of the Cold War. First, British assets in China were numerous. Second, the Crown colony of Hong Kong was an indispensable strategic enclave, although militarily indefensible. Third, the Foreign Office considered that Asia should represent an exception to unquestioned British loyalty to the Atlantic alliance, since the United Kingdom needed to prove that it was able to represent and preserve Commonwealth interests in the area. The article will point out that the United Kingdom maintained a privileged role as the main trading partner of the People's Republic of China (PRC) outside the Socialist bloc, thanks to the financial and commercial role played by Hong Kong. This is proved through an analysis of the fate of British financial institutions in China, which represented a favourable exception in the bleak scenario of the PRC nationalization process, as well as of the industrial development of the British colony, which was based on importing food and labour from the mainland, while serving as a financial hub in support of the PRC economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an anniversary tribute to Winston Churchill, who served as Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1940-1945 and 1951-1955. Topics include Churchill's reporting of the British war against the Boer Republics in South Africa for "Morning Post" newspaper, his determination to see that justice was served to humble individuals, and his close friendship with Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts.

The political and economic situation that developed at the global front during the Second World War, coupled with the political consciousness and the anti-colonial attitude of the Indians, was a clear indication of the ultimate pack up of the British rule from India. Initially, the British tried different options to sustain or at least to prolong their departure, but eventually Prime Minister Attlee announced the decision of the British withdrawal on February 20, 1947. To execute the idea, Mountbatten was selected and was sent as the last British Viceroy to India. It was expected from the man with a career of unbroken success, that he would not only transfer the power in a peaceful environment but would also take all stakeholder on board while making the decisions. However, Mountbatten's friendship with Nehru and tilt towards the Congress has left many question marks on his credibility as well as on the objectivity of the process. His decision to fast forward the partition process resulted in a massive bloodshed on short term basis and permanent hatred and disputes for the generations to come. History of South Asia might have been different had the British adopted a policy for the transfer of power in India with better intensions and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Second World War was a crucial period in the development of the British left, and particularly in finally delineating between the Labour and Communist parties. Communist party membership hit record levels just when Labour’s own organization was creaking under the impact of war, while Britain’s alliance with the USSR from 1941 onwards brought reflected glory on the CP. This gave the Communists their best-ever opportunity to influence, and perhaps even join, Labour. Yet Labour’s leaders and officials were clear in their opposition to Communism, and worked hard to contain the threat they believed that it posed. This led to a long-running battle, which was only ended by Labour’s landslide victory in 1945, and the concomitant organizational changes that it, and the deterioration of Anglo-Soviet relations in 1945–46, allowed. By 1946, for all the fleeting successes of wartime, the Communists were more effectively shut out of Labour politics than ever before. There were long-term effects on Labour’s leadership and officials. By 1946, partly as a result of the war years, Labour language had developed in ways that would enable a close fit with Cold War stereotypes. Crucially, too, Labour’s long struggle against the British Communists prepared it well for the rigours of office after 1945, and set the tone for much of Labour politics over the next three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the 1959 decision of the Northern Ireland Ulster Unionist Party (U.U.P.) to openly support the British Conservative Party and disparage the British Labour Party. An overview of Northern Ireland unionists' relationship with the British federal government, including in regard to unionists' distrust of the British government, is provided.

This article uses a detailed examination on the 1948 and 1949 Bonfires of Controls to reassess Harold Wilson’s development as a politician and examine the broader relationship between popular politics and economic policy. Whilst acknowledging the continued importance of the latter within Wilson’s self-identification as a modernizing ‘specialist’, it contends that these events are best viewed as representing the birth of a professional politician. It will show that, although economically motivated, there was a marked disparity between each Bonfire’s illusion and reality. Far from being entirely rational, each announcement straddled the gap between politics and economics. Within a post-war political landscape that had seen debates about controls become increasingly emotive, Wilson used the Bonfires to seize advantage. As a result, they can be seen to signify the point of his development from a self-identified professional economist to an astute political actor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article shows how the popular press debate over Europe was fundamentally conditioned by the wider political, social, and cultural tensions of early 1960s Britain. By asking how the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror came to represent almost diametrically opposed views on Europe when both reached out to broadly comparable mass readerships, it exposes the many diverse and often contradictory responses that the far-reaching domestic and international transformations of post-war Britain provoked in the public discourse over Europe. Yet, while the Express’s opposition to the British application, based on its conservative and imperialist self-identity, has often been highlighted, the Mirror’s strong support of European integration, as part of its wider agenda for social and cultural change, has been all but ignored. Thus, the article exposes a previously overlooked line of public engagement with Europe at that time: through the eyes of the young, affluent consumer, unmoved by the claims of ‘tradition’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines British signals intelligence on Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1958 Middle East Crisis and the Egyptian intervention in the Yemen. It explains the production of signals intelligence and reviews the evidence that GCHQ could read Egyptian and other Arab communications. It then identifies some of the intelligence provided by GCHQ and considers its influence on British policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of obscenity law in Great Britain and the 1960 obscenity trial that sought to charge publishing company Penguin Books with violating the 1959 Obscene Publications Act by printing the sexually explicit book "Lady Chatterley's Lover," by D. H. Lawrence. The author examines how English obscenity law targeted specific social classes of women and the working class, explores the politics of reading in Great Britain during the 20th century, and discusses the how cultural change can impact the notion of freedom of speech.

In late 1959, Hugh Gaitskell declared that the Labour Party needed to revise Clause IV of its 1918 Constitution. Within the party, his proposals faced much opposition. Ultimately, the strength of this opposition meant that Gaitskell was forced to retreat on the issue. Historians have noted Labour's emotional attachment to Clause IV. However, they have not examined the nature of this attachment in any detail. Moreover, they have tended to focus on the ideological dimensions of the dispute. In contrast, this article argues that nostalgia decisively shaped the episode's outcome. Nostalgia is fundamental to any explanation of why Gaitskell was unable to revise Clause IV of the party's Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is well known the membership of British Conservative Party in the 1950s dwarfed that of other parties, but despite this there has been very little examination of the party's grassroots in this crucial period. What literature there is comes predominantly from the top-down focus of national politics and revolves around four disputed images. Firstly, high-levels of membership are associated with commendable engagement with formal politics. Secondly, local associations are presented as inconsequential but autonomous. Thirdly, activists are seen as uninterested in ideology and focused on campaigning and social activity. Finally, associations are presented as dominated by women precisely because of their primarily social nature. This article examines the debates about these conventional images through an analysis of the rival Conservative factions in two Newcastle-upon-Tyne Associations, the location of probably the most divisive splits in twentieth-century Conservatism. It suggests that presentations of a 'golden age' of activism are unhelpful, that the conventional conception of autonomy obscures informal relationships, that attention to the ideological dimension is central to understanding and that the nature of female participation can only be understood by challenging the false dichotomy of social and political motivations. Taken together it argues that the study of grassroots Conservatism needs to grapple with the meanings, motivations and practices as seen from below as well as the consequences of such activity for those above. In this way the study of politics from the bottom-up can have significant consequences for our understanding of the Conservative Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It became increasingly apparent in the 1950s that Britain was in long-term relative economic decline. However, during far-reaching reviews in 1959–1963 of future policy, the Foreign Office and the Treasury could not agree that timely strategic retrenchment would be an appropriate response. Ministers believed that Britain would remain a world Power; the British economy continued to be handicapped by higher levels of defence expenditure than those of other western European Powers; and it took an economic crisis to force a decision to withdraw from east of Suez. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Duncan Sandys' tenure at the Ministry of Defence has usually been seen as one of the major turning points in post-war British defence policy. The consensus is that Sandys was a prime mover in bringing about a contraction of Britain's military capabilities in an era when economic constraints, coupled with the need for Britain to play a full part in maintaining the Western deterrent against Soviet expansion in Europe, dictated that Britain's ability to project military power beyond Europe had to shrink. Sandys' task was “radically pruning Britain's military capacity and adopting a defence posture more in keeping with a medium-size power.” This shift in policy was brought about by the April 1957 Defence White Paper. It amounted to “the biggest change in military policy ever made in normal times.” But emphasising that the Sandys White Paper was part of the wider process of decolonisation and nuclearisation overlooks the fact that in the seven years after it was published the British used conventional forces to mount no fewer than three expeditionary operations outside Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reappraises the theoretical and political significance of the socialist humanism developed within the early British New Left between 1956 and 1962. Over-identified with the thought of E.P. Thompson, and too-readily assimilated to a polarizing narrative of theoretical development in British historiography, which pitted humanism and ‘culturalism’ against Althusserian structuralism, the complexity and diversity of socialist humanist thought in this early period has not been adequately appreciated. A re-examination of debates around socialist humanism within the early New Left yields three main arguments. First, that these debates reveal a theoretical richness, especially around questions of the relationship of Marxism and socialism to morality and ethics, which has been unjustly neglected. Second, that the distinctive contribution of thinkers associated with Universities and Left Review amounted to an alternative conception of socialist humanism deserving greater recognition. Finally, it is argued that the activist politics of the early New Left represented an original effort to model and realize socialist humanist ideals in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews periodical literature on economic history that was published in 2011. Topics noted include the origins of medieval common rights systems, statistics from the record-keeping text "Little Domesday Book," and gender roles in medieval Europe. Also addressed are the history of British maritime trade, the payment of compensation to British slave owners following abolition, and the history of the Scottish banking system. In addition, the history of property rights, cultural aspects of feminism, and post-World War II British politics are discussed.

During the Suez crisis the head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Lord Mountbatten, twice appeared to offer his resignation, fearing Sir Anthony Eden favoured a military resolution of Britain's dispute with President Nasser over Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal. Mountbatten believed that an Anglo-French seizure of the Canal Zone would destabilize the Middle East, undermine the authority of the UN, divide the Commonwealth and diminish Britain's global standing. Within the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and in advice to cabinet, the First Sea Lord voiced his fears, querying what the exit strategy was. The parallels with the Iraq war are striking, except that in 1956 the White House opposed military intervention, compounding Mountbatten's unease by deploying the US Navy to delay its erstwhile allies' taskforce en route to Port Said. Mountbatten believed his unique status as royal confidant and imperial consul, and presumed close friend of the prime minister, allowed him to buck constitutional convention and complement military advice with keenly felt political opinion. Yet at the same time he prepared the Royal Navy for war with characteristic professionalism and thoroughness, finding himself party to the collusion with Israel which he later condemned. How did Mountbatten reconcile genuine dissent with a state servant's obvious sense of duty, and was this achieved through constructing an alternative version of events that ran counter to actuality? From a contemporary perspective what insight does this episode offer into the historic relationship between executive and chiefs of staff within the British model of civil-military relations? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns the Atom Train travelling exhibition that the chief body of the British nuclear scientists' movement, the Atomic Scientists' Association (ASA), organized in collaboration with government offices and private industry in 1947–1948. It argues that the exhibition marked an important moment within post-war British nuclear culture where nuclear scientists shared aspects of their nuclear knowledge with the British public, while simultaneously clashing with the interests of the emerging British national security state in the early Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1957, the Labour Party published radical proposals for a state earnings-related pension scheme ('national superannuation') whose funds were to be invested in stock markets to generate high returns, and to help modernize and dynamize the British economy. This article explores a sophisticated campaign against the proposal by the insurance industry, and the resistance of the unions. In doing so, it considers the implications of this cross-class alliance, not least in terms of a possible missed opportunity to build a 'developmental state' in the UK, but also in terms of the country's increasingly inadequate and inequitable system of pension provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of the 1963 court case brought by the Board of Trade's Restrictive Trading Agreements Office against jute manufacturers, in order to examine the impact of the newly introduced competition policy for government–business relationships. Government's active enforcement of competition marked an important change in the direction of industrial policy in the UK and the jute industry was one of the cases to be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategic culture, beliefs, and perceived status in an anarchic international system played a crucial role in the development of British nuclear weapons policy from its inception in the Second World War through to the Nassau Agreement in 1962 that provided Britain with a sophisticated submarine nuclear deterrent—Part Two, in the next issue of Diplomacy and Statecraft, will look at the period from 1962 to the present day. Adopting what has been described as a “Conventional Constructivist” approach, the argument is that these ideational factors have helped to shape the character of Britain's nuclear capability and the operational plans for the potential employment of those capabilities. It also provides an insight into how these factors have shaped elite views of the UK nuclear deterrent in the crucial early years of its development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Board of Trade officials had contemplated a drastic de-restriction of trade with Eastern Europe as early as winter 1952. However, no initiative was undertaken until autumn 1953, by which time Dwight Eisenhower had launched a gradual review of US embargo policy. Although Winston Churchill was behind the impetus to relax strategic export controls, his government acquiesced to the Americans and agreed to a further curtailment of dual-purpose goods, which it was keen to decontrol as part of its efforts to increase trade with the Soviet bloc. A new review of documents reveals that the decision-making process in Whitehall, with its internal division between the Board of Trade and other economic departments on one side, and the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence on the other, and the interactions with the Americans were more complex and subtle than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the reasons why the Attlee government passed the 1949 Parliament Act to reduce the House of Lords' power to delay legislation from two years to one year. It is argued that this was a departure from pre-war Labour policy and ideology on the upper house, which was located firmly within the progressive tradition, and that therefore this change needs explaining. The article argues that under Attlee the government's approach to the Lords became more conciliatory as a result of the experience of working with the upper house. Both the constitutional and the political nature of this experience are examined here. This article also seeks to explain why the government entered into negotiations with the Conservatives about the future of the Lords and why these talks were more or less doomed to failure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper concerns three significant aspects of twentieth-century history in both Australia and Britain: trade unions, railways and war. During the world wars trade unionists in both countries worked under poor conditions, and sometimes endured the loss of hard-won privileges in order to further the war effort, and in the hope that governments and employers would acknowledge their sacrifices and redress their grievances once peace was restored. The paper discusses two instances, one in Western Australia and one in Britain, where these grievances were not addressed after the war, and examines the different outcomes. After comparing the circumstances in which the Australian Standard Garratt and the WD 'Austerity' heavy freight locomotives were produced, it explores the problems with these engines and the outcomes arising from union grievances. Finally, the paper posits that studying the outcomes of these industrial disputes on the railways, arising out of wartime conditions, furthers our understanding of the stresses of war on society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the deployment of nationalization within Labour's policy-making in opposition after 1951. During this time, Labour's thinking about nationalization developed through three distinct phases that highlight the diverse objectives attached to the concept and the complex relationship between socialism and nationalization. From general consensus on the need for more nationalization in the early 1950s, policy developed by the end of the decade into a broader, but unclear, conception of ‘public ownership’ shaped by Trades Union Congress (TUC) opposition. Finally, between 1960 and 1964, a wider definition of ‘public ownership’ gained momentum within a modernizing agenda based on ‘planning’ that reframed ‘common ownership’ to make it relevant, cohesive and (at least from the party's perspective) socialist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The American acquisition of military and naval facilities at Chaguaramas in Trinidad during World War II led to a significant Anglo-American controversy during the late 1950s. In 1957 the Chief Minister of Trinidad, Eric Williams, began a campaign to eject the Americans from the base. Members of the Eisenhower administration regarded the campaign as evidence of anti-Americanism and the US Navy sought to undermine Williams by cooperating with his opponents. This interference was resented by British policy-makers who were planning to grant independence to Trinidad as part of a West Indian federation. The resulting Anglo-American disagreement continued until a compromise, which allowed the United States to retain the base in return for economic aid, was reached in 1961. The episode is significant in demonstrating that Washington was concerned about incipient anti-Americanism within the Anglophone Caribbean and in signifying British determination to defend their remaining colonial interests after the Suez crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will look at one of the key aspects in the role of local government in post-war Britain by considering how local authorities adopted broadly entrepreneurial strategies, working in partnership with the private sector, to attract investment and redevelop large sections of Britain’s major city centres from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Focusing on some of the traditional industrial cities, it will examine the idea of the entrepreneurial city and how, while it has come to partially define the role of local government from the 1980s onwards, broadly similar approaches and attitudes to city-centre development were a marked feature of the role of local government policies from a much earlier period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the official cover up of the mysterious disappearance of naval frogman Lionel Buster Crabb in 1956. Existing histories of the affair have tended to focus on the manner of Crabb's death, advancing a series of plausible and suitably implausible explanations. Using recently declassified sources, this article, in contrast, seeks to use the Crabb affair as a window onto government secrecy and relations between the press and the intelligence services. It is argued that the affair was a climacteric for the intelligence community and its relationship with Fleet Street, rupturing long-standing taboos about secret service work and bringing to the fore a brand of investigative journalist determined to make front-page news of intelligence shortcomings and failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]