Search results for ""Author Mike Hutton""

The year 1919 has often been ignored in historians’ dizzy haste to enter the world of the Roaring Twenties but it was a year of enormous challenges and change. After a brief period of celebration after the Armistice, reality began to sink in. Returning servicemen were resentful at the prospect of unemployment and lack of available housing. Many of the troops had lost their jobs to women on lower rates of pay. Soon there were strikes, with soldiers and tanks on the streets of Britain. This is also the year in which The Troubles began in earnest. The Spanish Flu epidemic continued to take its toll. Even the gilded few were unhappy with rising taxation and a scarcity of servants. Worse, men who had made fortunes from the war had invaded their exclusive clubs. The bars and smoking rooms were full of regional accents and loud suits. Remarkably, something like 40 per cent of all the tax revenue the government raised in the twenties was swallowed up by the war bonds debt. The emerging ‘bright young things’ embraced sex, drugs and Dixieland jazz. Motor transport was replacing horses, whilst the first crossing of the Atlantic by air showed the way forward. There was entertainment to be had, with sport providing a popular outlet. Long queues formed outside cinemas to see the latest silent films. Theatres and music halls played to packed houses. It was a year of creativity and invention within the arts but also one of nostalgia for old Edwardian certainties. The nation rediscovered a love of shopping in the expanding number of department stores. The year was also a pause for breath after the horrors of war; a time to take stock before rushing into an uncertain future that was rapidly announcing itself.

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What was it really like growing up in the 1940s? There are tales of being dragged from bombed out homes and of watching dog fights in the skies above. Of evacuation and a clash of cultures between city centre kids and their country cousins. All endured strict discipline at school and a shortage of food due to stringent rationing. Bomb sites provided ready made adventure playgrounds. Pleasures were simple with a weekly pilgrimage to the local cinema for Saturday morning pictures. Sales of comics boomed and Enid Blyton churned out countless books generally loved by the young. The arrival of the Americans caused a flutter of excitement for children and quite a few of their elder sisters and mums too. Just when it appeared it was all over there was a new threat as buzz bombs brought fear and devastation. Eventually there was a brief moment of celebration with VE Day followed by a massive victory parade. Austerity continued to gnaw away, not helped by cold winters with frost lining the inside of window frames. Returning fathers were often unwanted strangers whilst some returning were confronted with babies fathered by other men. There was much to be sorted out. Mike Hutton takes you back to a different world. One where streets offered live theatre populated by knife grinders, rat catchers and the cries of the rag and bone man. The skinny army of the 1940s are old now but their stories live on. Some are desperately sad, all warmly nostalgic whilst others are quite hilarious.

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