Gender, Murder and Mid-Twentieth-Century England and Wales

Abstract

The period 1957–62 is a pivotal one in twentieth-century British history. This transitional era marks the growth of the ‘affluent’ society in which consumer goods became widely available and affordable with the advent of near full employment and a rise in average earnings. Sandbrook (2005, p. xx) explains that, ‘[i]t was in the mid-fifties, after all, that rationing and austerity came to an end, consumer activity began rapidly escalating, the first commercial television channel was established, and the retreat from empire began in earnest’. Social changes that would transform British society were underway. Hennessy (2007) characterises the early 1950s as a continuation of the ‘long 1930s’, when the culture of day-to-day life remained consistent with the interwar period. Between the early and late 1950s, Britain changed from ‘a right, tight, screwed-down society walled in every way’ (Hennessey, 2007, p. 5, quoting a senior civil servant in the Home Office) to one in which the ice started to break (ibid., 2007, p. xvii). He describes the major changes that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s as social ‘dam bursts’, which preceded the liberalising trends of the later 1960s.