Above the ruins of London, shattered by the nightly raids of Hitler’s bombers, rises the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral: unbroken, undaunted.
At a party to mark the Coronation of Elizabeth II, a little girl grins behind her commemorative mug. In a gleaming new supermarket, a housewife fills her basket with the fruits of affluence.
On a packed football terrace, a vast crowd cheers for the camera. Teenage girls scream at the sight of their pop star heroes; a little boy poses with his toy astronauts; parents take their children to inspect the new tower blocks soaring above Britain’s towns and cities. Candles burn during the power cuts of the 1970s; festival-goers celebrate the age of Aquarius.
This is 20th-century Britain as captured in the photographic archives of the Daily Mail. It’s a country teeming with zest and vigour, the black and white images belying the joy and colour of so many people’s lives.
It’s a world we have lost, yet also one that feels uncannily recognisable, with characters who seem as distant as strangers and as close as family.
The launch of the Daily Mail, which became the bestselling newspaper on the planet, is the perfect point to mark Britain’s entrance into the new century.
The paper was the brainchild of Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, a self-made publishing magnate of unparalleled drive and vision.
Born in Ireland in 1865, Harmsworth recognised that the enormous changes of the late Victorian period had created a new kind of reader – literate, ambitious, hungry for information.
So it was that on Monday May 4, 1896, the news stands advertised a new title, billed as ‘The Busy Man’s Daily Journal’ and ‘A Penny Newspaper for One Halfpenny’. The tone of those first papers was fiercely aspirational; as Harmsworth told his staff, the typical Mail reader earned a hundred pounds a year but hoped one day to earn a thousand.
And it worked. As a news seller at King’s Cross reported, the Mail appealed to ‘thousands of working men who never bought a morning paper before’.
Unlike the older, stuffier papers, which concentrated largely on high politics and international affairs, Harmsworth’s new publication offered plenty of stories about technology, sport, food, even fashion and entertainment. He knew that human interest mattered more than anything.
‘The three things which are always news,’ he said bluntly, ‘are health things, sex things and money things’ – a statement that still rings true today.
Indeed, when you open an early edition of Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, it’s striking how little has changed. ‘The Truth About Nightclubs’ ran the headline on one article. ‘Do We Eat Too Much?’ wondered another.
All this might come as a surprise to readers who imagine that Britain at the turn of the 20th century was a prim, stuffy, conservative country, all starched collars and sweeping dresses. But the early photographs, taken from the Mail’s incomparable archive, show that the reality was very different.
As the historian Alwyn Turner reports in his excellent book on the period, the boards of Edwardian music halls boasted nubile performers in sheer bodystockings, calling themselves ‘living statues’.
At the Edinburgh Empire, dustman John Trundley exhibited his five-year-old son, the ‘Fat Boy of Peckham’, who boasted a 42-inch waist and weighed more than 10st.
In a theatre in Sheffield, the entertainer Marie Lloyd came up with the perfect response to persistent hecklers: ‘You know what you can do with your stainless knives and your scissors and your circular saws? You can stick ’em up your a***!’
If all this seems surprisingly contemporary, perhaps that invites us to rethink our view of the day before yesterday. Indeed, what these photographs remind us is just how variegated and diverse Britain was in the 20th century.
The 1930s, for example, are often seen as the ‘devil’s decade’, all dole queues and hunger marches.
Yet the 30s were also the decade of the car, the cinema and the suburban semi – an age of self-conscious modernity.
As the historian Juliet Gardiner puts it, the 1930s gave us ‘a branch of Woolworths in every town, roadhouses on every arterial road, lidos, cinemas, paid holidays, dance halls, greyhound racing, football pools, plate glass, the ‘modernist’ and the ‘moderne’.
Even before the war, as she points out, millions of ordinary Britons could glimpse the freedoms ahead. They took their new cars on outings to the countryside or the beach; they snapped up cinema tickets, cosmetics, cheap thrillers and celebrity magazines.
Intellectuals snobbishly claimed that the new suburbs sprawling across the south of England, with their Tudorbethan villas and faux-rural semis, were ‘crimes against truth and tradition’. But to the millions of people who lived in them, revelling in luxuries such as indoor bathrooms, they offered a taste of utopia.
What of the world after the war? As many of the images in this book remind us, fog – or perhaps more accurately, smog – was an unavoidable element of everyday life, the inevitable result of so many homes burning so much coal.
Like the Edwardian years, the 1950s are often seen as a lost golden age of stability and contentment: a world of smoky terraces and neighbourhood pubs, men in greatcoats huddled over pints of mild and weary-eyed women patiently unwrapping their meat-paste sandwiches, a vanishing proletarian landscape of pigeon lofts and pools coupons.
Yet this was also a society in which immigrants tramped the streets from one boarding house to another, their spirits dashed by the signs reading ‘No Coloureds’.
It was a society in which football yobs pelted rival fans with bottles, and one in which ‘teenage hooligans’ ran amok on Brighton seafront long before Mods and Rockers had been invented.
Did the 1960s bring radical change? As so often, the answer is complicated. A modern time traveller waking up, say, in the summer of 1961 would surely be struck by how antiquated everything seemed, from the trams rattling along many of Britain’s streets to the astonishing dearth of cars.
In many ways, Britain in the summer of 1961 looks like a lost world, an ancient civilization in which men wore thick wool suits, women stayed at home and children were seen but not heard.
Across the country, old habits died hard. Many people might have bought their first black and white televisions but a pub still stood on most street corners. Millions of men spent their weekends hopefully clutching a fishing rod. Millions of women looked forward eagerly to an evening’s bingo.
Yet in other ways, this single point in time, the middle of 1961, seems pregnant with possibility. From the opening of Britain’s first branch of Mothercare in Kingston upon Thames to Barclays Bank’s pioneering ‘Computer Centre’ in Drummond Street, London, the high street was being transformed.
And for one group in particular, things had never been better. With full employment and soaring wages, Britain’s five million teenagers commanded more spending power than any other comparable generation in history.
On average, boys spent 71 shillings and sixpence a week, while girls spent 54 shillings – the difference reflecting the prevailing sexism in pay and employment.
Teenagers spent their money on clothes and cigarettes, make-up and dance hall tickets – and above all, on records. Many older observers were shocked by their children’s enthusiastic spending.
One 16-year-old typist, a journalist wrote disapprovingly, already owned ‘six dresses and seven straight skirts’, as well as an Italian suit and a staggering three pairs of high heels. Was this really the future of Britain, a world of reckless consumerism? We know now, of course, that this was merely a taste of what was coming.
And so to the 1970s, where this book ends. Of all post-war decades, the 1970s have undoubtedly had the worst Press. The 1950s are symbolised by the television and the washing machine, the 1960s by the Mini and the mini skirt.
But in the popular imagination, the 1970s are the poor relations, lampooned and despised: the era of Edward Heath, the decade of the donkey jacket, the age of the Austin Allegro. When they flash up on our screens, we see lurid wallpaper, silly hairstyles and burly men warming their hands around braziers.
Yet this habit of giving decades different historical personalities is little more than a gimmick that distorts the way we remember the recent past.
As the photographs in this book suggest, most people in the late 1960s and early 1970s wore clothes that would have been at the cutting edge of fashion in 1958. Pictures of picket line confrontations often show strikers wearing suits and ties, as though dressing for a family wedding.
Like many stereotypes, the cliches of the grim 1970s contain more than a grain of truth, of course. These were desperately difficult years for Britain, both politically and economically.
In 1970, the self-made builder’s son Edward Heath came to power promising a ‘quiet revolution’. Sailor Ted, however, soon ran aground, his ship scuppered by the lethal combination of an energy crisis, a financial crash and a second miners’ strike in two years.
And though Labour’s Harold Wilson got the country back to work, it came at the price of inflation reaching almost 30 per cent and a humiliating bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
Perhaps fittingly, the decade ended with another Prime Minister being humiliated by the unions in the Winter Of Discontent, though this time the victim was the veteran Labour bruiser Jim Callaghan.
Perhaps never before had the political establishment seemed so impotent.
And yet the strange thing about the 1970s is that although many people vividly remember the power cuts, strikes and shocking headlines, they often have surprisingly affectionate personal memories of the decade that taste forgot.
It has become a cliche to look back through rose-tinted glasses at the world of Bagpuss, Space Hoppers and Curly Wurlies. But in a funny way, those things actually work very well as symbols of the decade, because they represent the reality of everyday affluence.
Even working-class families now had a solid disposable income and could afford toys for their younger members. Most families in 1970s Britain were better off than ever.
And although we often think of the decade as the end of something, it makes more sense to see it as the beginning of a new chapter in the story of modern Britain.
For most ordinary people, the 1970s brought new experiences that their grandparents could barely have imagined, epitomised by overseas package holidays. For even relatively poor, working-class families, holidays no longer meant Blackpool and Bognor but Malta and Majorca.
From professional working women to long-haired footballers, from pornography in the corner shop to computers in the office, the cultural texture of British life probably changed more quickly after 1970 than during any other post-war decade. As late as 1971, women were banned from going into Wimpy Bars on their own after midnight, on the grounds that they must be prostitutes.
Yet only eight years after that rule was lifted, Margaret Thatcher was walking into Downing Street as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.
Perhaps the last word should go to the most thoughtful and influential of all observers of British life in the 20th century, George Orwell. As he famously wrote at the height of the Second World War, Britain might appear to be a country in the throes of change, yet the continuity of the national story was stronger and more resilient than the whims of fashion.
National character, he thought, was ‘continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.
‘What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps in the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.’
And when you look at the photos in this book, you know exactly what he meant.
- Photographing A Modern World: Britain 1900-75 From The Archives Of The Daily Mail is published by HENI, £49.99. To order a copy for £44.99, click this link to visit the Mail Bookshop or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Promotional price valid until 31/12/2025.
