Post-War Britain Quotes

The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.

In the 1950s, as food rationing ended, I remember a plentiful supply of sweets for the first time.

He [Clement Attlee] is a modest little man with much to be modest about.

My dad was my hero. He was part of the D-Day landings and came back to Reading in 1945 - I was born in 1946 - so the house was full of soldiers who'd been to war and that was obviously the main topic.

To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.

The Windrush era is a very important part of British history as it helps us understand how and why we became the multicultural society we are today, and also helps us understand the history of race relations in this country.

There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford.

The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.

Bob Monkhouse, Galton and Simpson, Spike Milligan and I all started around the same time with an enormous advantage: working to an audience all of whom had shared an awful, common experience - the war.

Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

I grew up abroad, and when I first passed through London in the 1970s, it seemed a drab and provincial place.

When I grew up, in the time of 'Look Back in Anger,' the theatre was very exciting, a place where you felt that social comment could lead to social change.

I'm obsessed with 'Call The Midwife.'

My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.

My parents came over from Barbados in the late 1950s and early '60s.

People talk about Thatcherism all the time. I felt it was important to record the memories of those almost written out of history who upheld the spirit of '45.

I think that Harold MacMillan is a very intelligent man, who, as so often happens in politics, achieved supreme power too late.

In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music.

I grew up moving from one council flat to another and finished up in a three-bedroom semi-detached on a council estate in Cranford, a suburb of Hounslow. This was in the days when there was still rationing, and we had to be thrifty.

I'm a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school - Prior Park College in Bath - my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: 'In arrears.'

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

If you want to know what London looked like in 1947, with all the bomb-sites, 'Hue and Cry' will tell you. And when I shot 'The Lavender Hill Mob' four years later, it didn't look that different.

Like the Caribbean Windrush generation, my parents came to this country from the Commonwealth in the 1960s. They, too, came to help rebuild this country and offer all that they had.

I grew up in London, a city devastated by the bombing. I am, you might say, a Blitz Baby.