A wonderful photograph; the hope that shines in every face; particularly in the faces of the children; it makes me think of Wordsworth's line: *Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.*
Britain won the war but lost the peace as someone observed. We could not have defeated the evil of the Third Reich without Canada and the Commonwealth, and the United States and President Roosevelt.
It is terrible to think that VE Day, and then the surrender of Japan, was followed by a sense of foreboding. It's there in the diarists of the period.
The shadow of the Atom Bomb; the tragedy of Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states; and the other countries that fell under Stalin's domination; the Cold War, and Churchill's haunting phrase about an Iron Curtain descending on Europe. Korea, China, and Vietnam, all in the future.
Peter Hennesy wrote a good history of the postwar period, *Never Again: Britain 1945-1951*; also worth reading, *Bread For All - The History of the Welfare State* by Chris Renwick; and Raymond Williams' classic cultural history *The Long Revolution*.
The term Welfare State was coined approvingly by a bishop in the Church of England who commended the ministers in Clement Atlee's postwar Labour Government 1945-1951, the greatest government we ever had in my opinion.
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Even the Queen had something to say!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=yMbJgZEpVkA&app=desktop
A wonderful photograph; the hope that shines in every face; particularly in the faces of the children; it makes me think of Wordsworth's line: *Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.*
Britain won the war but lost the peace as someone observed. We could not have defeated the evil of the Third Reich without Canada and the Commonwealth, and the United States and President Roosevelt.
It is terrible to think that VE Day, and then the surrender of Japan, was followed by a sense of foreboding. It's there in the diarists of the period.
The shadow of the Atom Bomb; the tragedy of Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states; and the other countries that fell under Stalin's domination; the Cold War, and Churchill's haunting phrase about an Iron Curtain descending on Europe. Korea, China, and Vietnam, all in the future.
Peter Hennesy wrote a good history of the postwar period, *Never Again: Britain 1945-1951*; also worth reading, *Bread For All - The History of the Welfare State* by Chris Renwick; and Raymond Williams' classic cultural history *The Long Revolution*.
The term Welfare State was coined approvingly by a bishop in the Church of England who commended the ministers in Clement Atlee's postwar Labour Government 1945-1951, the greatest government we ever had in my opinion.
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