Elizabethans

Just as young men going into the Army would face bullying rituals, dramatic haircuts and parade-ground square-bashing designed to erode their individuality, so too, in thousands of factories, young apprentices would be subjected to initiation ceremonies designed to humiliate them and above all ensure that they knew their place.

In general, today’s norms are more about blurring and ignoring difference than about reinforcing it.

The Britain of 1952 was a society in which the vast majority of people felt they had a place. They might have resented that place or they might have biddably ‘known’ their place. Yet however much they may have chafed against their position in the social spectrum, people understood that certain norms of behaviour were expected – at work, in the family, in streets and in towns and villages.

That post-imperial system was still overwhelmingly white. ‘We’ did not properly include the vast mass of impoverished Asian and African workers, certainly not black women. Yet the Queen lived to see her grandson Harry marry a mixed-race, divorced American woman, in a service at Windsor Chapel addressed by a black American pastor and featuring a black South London choir.

There’s a common misconception that, having voted in a socialist government in 1945, the British were speeding towards the more open, liberal, rebellious country we became later.

Because the stories of the numerous rebels against an essentially conservative, stratified and rationed society tend to be colourful and specific – frankly, more exciting – there is a serious danger of forgetting the majority view.

The British of 1952, in short, were a quietly religious, homogeneous, stratified, socially conservative, proud and comparatively closed-off country.

Thus politicians who were committed to limiting the size of the state and strongly believed in individual free will, exercised in the free market, also believed that they had obligations to all their fellow citizens.

Christianity encouraged some Conservative leaders to think harder about poorer and less powerful people, in a way that went well beyond market economics.

Her Christianity emphasized the family rather than the collective; individual will; the virtues of hard work; private charity; and one’s duty to look after one’s own.