Britain after the Second World War was a country yet to experience the collapse of the nuclear family, rampant consumerism or city centres full of “hoodies”.

But while many survivors of the 1940s recall it as a halcyon era of hope and freedom, most people’s immediate experience of the period was, in fact, unrelentingly grim, an audience at The TimesCheltenham Literature Festival was told yesterday. David Kynaston, the author of Austerity Britain, a bestselling social history of the years 1945-51, said: “My picture of Britain in the immediate postwar years is a bleak one. It was tired, worn out, undernourished and generally fed-up.”

It was also deeply conservative, obsessively private, illiberal, full of loveless marriages and lacking in community spirit, which is not necessarily how people alive today remember it, he said. “There is a discrepancy, which is largely because the people who are still alive are the people who were young then. We simply don’t have in 2007 the views of people who were at the sharp end in those difficult years after the war: the adults who had to put food on the table, make sure there were enough clothes and deal with the housing shortage.”

Mr Kynaston, born in 1951, added: “Everyone tends to privilege their youth and give it a romantic aura.”

Traditional histories of the period tend to emphasise the election of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government in 1945 and the birth of the welfare state. The resulting portrait is of an optimistic Britain emerging from the end of the war, stoically embracing rationing and looking to the future. Mr Kynaston’s account paints a different picture, built up from the diaries of ordinary people, contemporary sociological surveys and the exhaustive anthropological reports filed by the organisation Mass Observation. He cites the poll taken in 1945 in which 19 per cent of Britons said they wanted to emigrate. By 1948 it was 42 per cent.

People did routinely leave their houses unlocked and children played together in the streets much more than now but it is a mistake to rely on these cheery clichés as proof of stronger social cohesion, he said. “Society was still overwhelmingly working class but within that working class were all sorts of status distinctions which undermined the sense of community. Privacy was sacrosanct. Neighbours would help each other if they needed to borrow bread but they broadly kept themselves to themselves.”

Nor was it a time of feminist awakening for the majority. Most of the women who had filled men’s jobs during the war were only too happy to return to domesticity. Behind closed doors they waited for their husbands to return home from work and yearned for the luxury food and mod cons that they read about American housewives enjoying.

More than the end of the war, it was the West’s “long economic boom” from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s that transformed lifestyles, Mr Kynaston said. It brought with it the consumer revolution and a programme of slum clearances and city centre rebuilding that marked a clean break with the immediate postwar years.

“Somehow life was more real, more solid and more tangible [in the 1940s] than now. There was in that old world a greater sense of psychological certainty; people knew where they were. But it was also a society which put a huge premium on conformity and in which life choices were broadly predetermined. It is a huge boon that we are now a much more meritocratic society than we were and, on the whole, a more tolerant liberal one. I do not regret its passing,” Mr Kynaston said.

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