After the War Years

The ten years or so after the end of the Second World War in 1945 saw life in Britain change from austerity to prosperity. In the early years of that momentous decade, change for the better was slow in coming.Wartime food rationing, for instance, which actually became more stringent in the last years of the 1940s than it had been during the war, was not finally phased out until 1954 - nearly a year after the coronation of the young and lovely Elizabeth II had seemed to herald a new Elizabethan Age. Post-war Britain may not have seemed, on the surface, as glorious as the age of the first Queen Elizabeth, but its first decade did see remarkable changes for the better in many aspects of life. The poverty known by too many in the 1930s and the hard times of the war years were gradually replaced by wealth and affluence and the beginnings of what came to be called the 'consumer society'.