‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire

Abstract

In 1950, few Britons would have recognized the narrative of British imperial decline across the second half of the twentieth century, a narrative which, seen from our own perspective, seems to have taken on the status of historical inevitability. Indeed, much of the 1950s in Britain was characterized by a new-found climate of optimism. Rationing finally came to an end in 1954, and with it ended the period of what David Kynaston has recently termed ‘Austerity Britain’.¹ In Britain as in America, the 1950s witnessed a consumer boom — by the mid-50s, Kynaston writes, Britain was, ‘if not quite yet a fully fledged consumerist society, at least a proto-consumerist one’² — with the increased availability of both everyday necessities and luxury commodities accompanying a period of widespread employment, as the depression and dole queues of the previous generation disappeared over the horizon of the past, perhaps for good. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 had many commentators proclaiming the arrival of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’, a new golden age predicted by Winston Churchill when, on 11 February 1952, he paid tribute to the late King George VI in the House of Commons:

‘A fair and youthful figure, Princess, wife, and mother, is the heir to all our traditions and glories … and to all our perplexities and dangers never greater in peacetime than now. She is also heir to all our united strength and loyalty. She comes to the Throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands poised between world catastrophe and a golden age. That it should be a golden age of art and letters we can only hope — science and machinery have their other tales to tell — but it is certain that if a true and lasting peace can be achieved … an immense and undreamed of prosperity with culture and leisure ever more widely spread can come … to the masses of the people.’³