The thirties in Britain have had a bad press. From W H Auden’s ‘low dishonest decade’ the era has been characterised by high unemployment, extremist politics and the menacing shadow of war.

There is much truth in this bleak picture. By 1930 it was clear that Britain’s economic problems could no longer be attributed to the disruption of the First World War. The country’s traditional heavy industries – coal mining, shipbuilding, iron and textile manufacture – were increasingly uncompetitive in the world market – a market that was even more restricted after the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Unemployment climbed to almost 3.5 million by 1932. It was particularly acute in the North East, the lowlands of Scotland and mining valleys of Wales. The government seemed incapable of any solution and reluctant to invest in public works to provide jobs, instead introducing the Means Test in 1931 that divided families and led to widespread hardship and bitterness.

The response was a series of hunger marches by which the unemployed sought to draw attention to their plight. The impotence of the government also encouraged the growth of extremist political parties – the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley and the Communist Party of Great Britain which started to attract young intellectuals to its core membership of industrial workers. But neither ever achieved mass support: most of the unemployed just wanted jobs.

Britain was a divided country. In the Midlands and South East new or expanded industries such as the manufacture of cars, synthetic textiles, pharmaceuticals and light engineering, were providing work, and with cheaper food, gradually rising wages and cheap mortgages, the dream of a suburban semi was becoming the realizable dream of the lower middle classes. Indeed house building boomed with four million houses built between 1919 and 1939. Of these three million were built for owner occupation, while local authorities provided one million in an attempt to clear the terrible slums and overcrowded housing that blighted most large industrial cities.

The dream of escaping into the countryside also fuelled the thirties obsession with fresh air and exercise. The government, concerned about the low level of fitness among young men, encouraged this since the international situation was growing tense with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the German reoccupation of the Rhineland and its demands on Czechoslovakia.

Rambling clubs sprang up – in some cases such as the Peak District Kinder Scout trespass in 1932 demanding the right to roam over private land. Nudist clubs flourished (though sensibly recommending air bathing rather than sun bathing in Britain’s uncertain climate); at least 180 lidos were opened, and health and fitness classes for all boomed.

New ‘Dream Palaces’ provided entertainment for the less active with exotic or stark modernist cinemas opening in almost every town and city: almost 20 million tickets were sold every week, while dance halls were another craze among the young. Since the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938 seaside resorts flourished and the first Butlin’s Holiday Camp opened in ‘bracing’ Skegness in 1936.

By early 1939 it was obvious that despite the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain’s promise of ‘peace for our time’, the policy of appeasement had failed and war with Germany was inevitable. The 1930s had been a golden age of science with the atom split, the neutron identified and advances in medical treatment, but at the end of the decade, science would be put to uses that were not in the interests of humanity, and the bold schemes for the future that many had planned for Britain ran into the sand – at least until peace came in 1945.

Juliet Gardiner is the author of ‘The Thirties: An Intimate History’.

For many people, the 1950s were a golden age. ‘Let’s be frank about it,’ declared Harold Macmillan in July 1957: ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’ Almost immediately the Prime Minister’s words became a symbol of the age, capturing the optimism of a nation basking in the sunshine of the affluent society. Yet like so many political quotations, they are often misunderstood. Macmillan meant them not as an expression of complacency, but as a warning. ‘What is worrying us,’ he went on, ‘is “Is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?”‘

It is no wonder that we rarely remember what Macmillan really meant by his famous phrase. Even at the time, most people preferred to enjoy the fruits of consumerism rather than worry about the future. At the beginning of the 1950s, after all, Britain had been threadbare, bombed-out, financially and morally exhausted. Its major cities were still bombsites, it was almost impossible for many families to borrow money, rationing was harsher than ever, and there was an acute shortage of decent housing. Yet within less than ten years, everything had changed; indeed, perhaps more than any other post-war decade, it was the 1950s that transformed Britain’s social and cultural landscape.

As the economy began to boom, wages soared and unemployment almost disappeared, everyday life became more comfortable. Towns and cities were reshaped by council estates, tower blocks and shopping centres. Supermarkets transformed families’ shopping habits, while the television began to make inroads into their leisure time. Millions of people tuned in especially for the Coronation in 1953, with neighbours crowding into the houses of those lucky few who owned or rented sets. Inspired by the groundbreaking Festival of Britain, the design of the typical home, self-consciously upbeat and forward-looking, marked the transition to what contemporaries optimistically called the Space Age. And even the nation’s roads reflected the new spirit, symbolized by the opening of Britain’s first motorway, the Preston bypass, in 1958.

It was this extraordinary economic growth that paved the way for everything that followed. In particular, the youth culture of the day was entirely based on the emergence of a new teenage generation. Better housed and educated than ever before, the generation of Cliff Richard and Adam Faith enjoyed unprecedented financial independence. They watched television and read comics; they bought records and danced to rock music. In their carefree hedonism and economic assertiveness, they often shocked their elders: when ‘Rock Around the Clock’ reached Britain in 1955, there was much anguished talk of ‘rock and roll riots’. In truth, though, most teenagers were fairly conservative, individualistic and materialistic – just like their parents.

Yet as the reaction to rock and roll suggests, there was a thick vein of anxiety beneath the surface of the affluent society. Despite the apparent complacency of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, many politicians were worried about Britain’s economic prospects. And though historians still argue about the extent of the famous ‘Butskellite’ consensus, epitomized by the moderate figures of R. A. Butler (Conservative) and Hugh Gaitskell (Labour), Britain’s political direction remained the stuff of ferocious debate. Inside the Labour Party, Aneurin Bevan’s resignation over the imposition of prescription charges in 1951 set the tone for a decade of bitter faction fighting. Inside the Tory Party, meanwhile, the abortive ‘Robot’ scheme to set the pound free a year later offered a hint of the emerging free-market doctrines that would eventually culminate in Thatcherism.

All the time, Britain’s world status was changing rapidly. As one colony after another chose independence, the Empire was slowly fading into history, while the fiasco of the Suez Crisis in 1956 seemed to mark the end of Britain’s days as a world power. Massive Commonwealth immigration, which transformed the face of the nation’s cities, alarmed many working-class voters, while the Notting Hill riots in 1958 exposed the ugly face of everyday racism. With violent crime rapidly increasing, many commentators warned of rising ‘juvenile delinquency’. And overshadowing everything else was the looming threat of nuclear war, which prompted some people to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Today, CND’s marches are some of the best-remembered events of the decade. Still, the truth is that they only attracted a minority. Most people preferred to spend their weekends shopping for a new sofa instead.

Dominic Sandbrook is the author of ‘Never Had it So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles’.

In October 1965, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, officially opened London’s new Post Office Tower. A gleaming cylinder of metal and glass, the tower could hardly have been a more fitting symbol of the scientific optimism of a self-consciously ‘go-ahead’ decade. It was a monument not just to the white heat of the technological revolution, but to the sheer self-confidence of a society basking in unprecedented prosperity. From the new tower blocks springing up in cities across the country to the radios in teenagers’ bedrooms, from Beatles hits and Bond films to comprehensive schools and nuclear power stations, Sixties Britain seemed – superficially at least – to be a country reborn in the crucible of affluence.

In some ways, the cliches of the 1960s ring absolutely true. With the economy buoyant, unemployment almost non-existent and wages steadily rising, millions of families bought their first cars, washing machines, fridges and televisions. Millions of teenagers, too, were transfixed by the sound of Radio Caroline and the look of Mary Quant — although, then as now, Carnaby Street catered more for tourists and day-trippers than the tiny handful at the cutting edge of fashion. Television transformed the imaginative landscape of almost every household in the country, not merely through pictures of faraway places, but through satirical programmes such as That Was the Week That Was. Even the nation’s diet was changing, transformed not just by the arrival of foreign imports from chicken tikka masala to spaghetti bolognese, but by the relentless advance of the supermarket.

Beneath the glamorous veneer of swinging London, however, Britain under Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson remained a remarkably conservative, even anxious society. Intellectuals worried that affluence and mass communications were undermining traditional working-class culture; in the Pilkington Report, published in 1962, it was hard to miss the disdain for commercial television. Meanwhile, despite the much-discussed stereotype of the ‘permissive society’, popular attitudes to moral and sexual issues remained strikingly slow to change. For all the excitement surrounding the landmark Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1960, or the liberalisation of the divorce, abortion and homosexuality laws later in the decade, most people held similar attitudes to their parents; in this respect, the generation gap was a media invention.

And although students marched on the US embassy in protest at the Vietnam War, or staged sit-ins at universities such as the London School of Economics, it is easy to forget that only one in ten young people became students. Polls showed that like their elders, most young people still supported the death penalty and were uneasy about large-scale Commonwealth immigration; by the end of the decade, it is probably no exaggeration to say that the Conservative maverick Enoch Powell, who was kicked off his party’s front bench after his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech, was the most popular politician in the country. Even Mary Whitehouse, a ferocious critic of televised obscenity, especially on the BBC, commanded the instinctive support of tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people.

By the end of the 1960s, the contradictions at the heart of the affluent society were becoming increasingly apparent. Despite Harold Wilson’s promises of endless growth thanks to his National Plan, the economy was running into serious trouble. The Aberfan catastrophe in 1966, the devaluation of the pound a year later and the Ronan Point disaster a year after that all hinted at the political and social traumas that would blight the following decade. Perhaps most ominously, Wilson’s last stab at modernisation, the trade union reforms outlined in the White Paper In Place of Strife, fell apart completely in 1969. A year later, the public punished the Labour government for its perceived under-achievement. A new and much unhappier era was at hand.

Dominic Sandbrook is the author of ‘White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties’.

Soon after Hitler came to power, Britain secretly made plans for evacuation – moving infants, schoolchildren and some adults to the countryside. In September 1939, several days before war was officially declared, the plan was put into action. Many evacuees returned home by early 1940 as the expected heavy air raids hadn’t taken place. With the Blitz later that same year, evacuation hurriedly begun again.

The original plans were just to evacuate people to places of safety in Britain, not overseas. As the Second World War progressed and an invasion of Britain became increasing likely, offers from British dominions and other countries were taken seriously. Many felt it would a sensible option, meaning children and others could be kept safe, far away from the war whilst also reducing the demand for limited food and resources in Britain.

Evacuation overseas began on a small scale and those featured in this lesson are examples of children send to Canada. The number of evacuees sent overseas was never to reach huge proportions though. Passenger ships that had been used to transport evacuees were soon needed for more important duties, such as movement of troops and prisoners. Once this began, any remaining passenger ships that could be used for evacuation became an even more obvious target for German U-boats.

In August 1940 the SS Volendam, carrying British children, was torpedoed, but thankfully all passengers were rescued. In September 1940, the SS City of Benares travelling from Liverpool to Canada was sunk with the loss of 77 children and over 200 adults. The British government immediately stopped the overseas evacuation scheme.

In total some 3,000 children were evacuated under the government scheme, with around 10,000 evacuated privately. This was a small proportion when compared with those evacuated within Britain. Nevertheless, as this lesson illustrates, the part played by British dominions in offering a place of safety and security for those in danger during the Second World War should not be overlooked.

William Shakespeare, also known as the ‘Bard’, was born in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23rd 1564. It is thought he married his wife, Anne Hathaway, in 1582, although we have no specific marriage certificate. He pursued a career as an actor, poet and dramatist in London. His now famous plays were performed widely during his lifetime, often at the purpose-built Globe Theatre in London on the south bank of the Thames. The first folio was published in 1623, with 154 sonnets, 37 plays, and 2 long poems. It is suggested that his friends put it together in case others tried to copy Shakespeare’s work and claim it as their own. Since then, he has become internationally renowned as the world’s greatest ever playwright.

On 25 March 1616, William Shakespeare made his will, signed ‘by me, William Shakspeare’. He probably died in April, after finalising his will over the preceding months, but scholars are unsure of the exact date of his death.

Shakespeare’s will itself is a matter of debate. The last will and testament helps us to learn about Shakespeare at the end of his life, providing us with minute details about his final wishes. The source evidence in this lesson shows that he was a man of considerable wealth by the time he died, and that most of it was left to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall. The will also provides us with three of only six surviving samples of his signature.

The issue of leaving his ‘second best bed’ to his wife appears insulting and mean to us today. Many scholars believe that Anne Hathaway would have received a considerable inheritance outside the will that would have left her financially secure, making the bed a poignant and personal gift. Some explain that the ‘second best bed’ was actually the bed in which William and his wife Anne would have slept, as the best bed would have been kept for guests only. Others describe this as a direct insult to his wife, yet there are also suggestions that leaving a bed to your wife was actually a magnificent gift, as all the valuable bed linen and fine materials would be included. Finally it has also been proposed that a wife would always get the second best things, with the best reserved for a son or daughter.