Introduction

The work covers the years 1945-83. I chose this period because I believe more change took place in Britain then (and elsewhere, no doubt) than during any other span of comparable length in our history. Whether industrial, social, familial, political, scientific, religious, artistic, sexual, or in any other sphere of human life, more real change coloured and shaped those years than any other, or so I believe and have tried to illustrate.

The story consists of a group of major characters, male and female – a young politician, a social scientist, an aristocrat, an artist, a trades’ union organiser, a political agent, a retail entrepreneur, a City banker and a clergyman are some of them – who begin to meet or connect soon after the war. Like people anywhere, they express a mixture of ambitions, desires, emotions and talents, against a mainly political background. They love, marry, fight, die, dream dreams, experience triumph and disaster. Some have children who grow to become part of the story.

Interwoven are themes of idealism and political chicanery, family and illicit love, selflessness and shifting morality, sexual liberation and occasional deviance, greed, rapacity, kindness and malevolence. The eclipse of Empire, the Cold War, atomic and hydrogen bomb politics, Suez, ping-pong government, the agonising death throes of capital punishment, the growth of trades’ union power and its eventual decline, Profumo and the ‘swinging sixties’, the winter of discontent and the arrival of Thatcherism – all these offer colourful backdrops to the story’s evolution.

Minor characters are plentiful: one is executed, another redeemed, a third carries a hopeless torch for an Irish drunkard; a tough barrister collects wild flowers whilst a soldier fights in the last flickering theatres of a passing empire. Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Denis Healey have walk-on parts during the progress of one of the principal characters from protégé of Aneurin Bevan to Cabinet minister under Wilson.

If I have a bee in my bonnet, and I do, it is that the parallel education systems in Britain have failed the country for at least the past sixty years, and probably much longer. They continue to do so. The brightest and most advantaged learn little of real value other than to themselves at the best funded schools and universities. Even now the state system continues to fail many of its pupils. A country of few natural resources needs engineers, innovators, export managers, industrial designers and scientists – not merchant bankers, lawyers, archaeologists and stockbrokers. This bonnet is lightly worn: expect no polemics.

I hope you enjoy it and will welcome your comments.

Hugo Johnson
hugo.johnson@gmail.com

June 2006