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By Root 1750 0

us who were unprepared to welcome an era of spectacular capitalist success. By the early 1960s it became hard not to notice it. I cannot say that we recognized it as what I have called ‘The Golden Age’ in my Age of Extremes. That became possible only after 1973, when it was over. Like everyone else, historians are best at being wise after the event. Nevertheless, by the early 1960s it had become evident to my generation in Britain, that is to say the ordinary run of those who had come out of the war in their twenties, that we were living far better than we had ever expected to in the 1930s. If we belonged to the social strata whose male members expected to have ‘careers’ rather than just ‘go to work’ (at that time this was not yet a game played much by women), we discovered that we were doing rather better, sometimes considerably better, than our parents, especially if we had passed more examinations than they had. True, this did not apply to two sections of our generation: those whose careers had reached their peak during the war, and who therefore looked back with nostalgia from the comparative lowlands of postwar civilian life, and the members of the established upper strata, whose parents, as a group, already enjoyed as much wealth, privilege, power or professional distinction as their children could expect to inherit or achieve. Indeed, they might see themselves as also-rans, if they went into the fields in which their fathers had been unusually successful – politics, science, the old professions, or whatever. Who has not been sorry for the political son overshadowed by his father – Winston and Randolph Churchill are the classic example – or the decent but run-of-the-mill natural scientist sons of FRS or Nobel Prize fathers? Like any academic with a Cambridge background, I have known a few.

But for most of us postwar life was an escalator which, without any special effort, took us higher than we had ever expected to be. Even people like myself, whose career progress was unusually retarded by the Cold War, moved along it. Of course this was partly due to my historical luck in entering the academic profession at a time when it was still fairly small, its status was high, and it was consequently quite well paid by the standards the Benthamite, Liberal and Fabian reformers had established for the public service in Victorian and Edwardian days. For though, unlike in other European countries, university teachers were not civil servants, they were under the wing of the state, which provided the funds for the collective five-year forward planning of the universities, but kept at arm’s length. So long as the profession remained small, and free market ideology was held at bay, it was understood that the salary, like the status, of the averagely successful lecturer should take him or her to the level equivalent to an averagely successful civil servant in the administrative grade: not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but a decent middle-class existence. The costs were still modest, at least for those of progressive views who wanted to send their children to state schools, and could as yet see no reason for not doing so. The welfare state benefited the middle classes relatively more than the workers. Those were the days when, largely for reasons of principle – and not yet discouraged by the experience of the National Health Service in practice – people like me refused to take out medical insurance. The price of houses remained within reach until the boom of the early 1970s, and the rise in their value gave us a natural bonus. Just before they began their move towards the stratosphere, it was possible to buy a freehold house in Hampstead for just under £20,000 gross, or, allowing for the profit on the sale of the previous house, £7,000 net. For those who married and had children young, there were no doubt a few years of relative tightness, holidays on caravan sites and scrabbling for extra income from schools examinations and the like, but a previously childless academic like myself, halfway up the university scale, who remarried