20th-century history and Britain since 1945 for the Life in the UK test

A time of reform

Britain began the 20th century as a confident global power, and the early 1900s were a period of reform:

• Old-age pensions, free school meals and financial help for the unemployed.
• Pay for MPs for the first time, and more democratic local government.
• Safer workplaces and stricter planning rules to stop new slums being built.
• In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst helped to found the Women's Social and Political Union. Its members, the suffragettes, chained themselves to railings, broke windows and went on hunger strike.

The First World War (1914–18)

28 June 1914

Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated. This sparks the First World War.

The two sides

Britain fought with the Allied Powers: France, Russia, Japan, Belgium and Serbia, later joined by Greece, Italy, Romania and the USA. The Central Powers were chiefly Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, with Bulgaria joining later.

The Empire at war

The whole Empire was involved. More than a million Indians fought for Britain, and Britain suffered more than two million casualties in all.

July 1916

The British attack on the Somme. The opening day alone brings about 60,000 British casualties.

11am, 11 November 1918

The war ends in victory for Britain and its allies. Each year on 11 November, Remembrance Day is marked with a two-minute silence at 11am.

War poets

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote poetry shaped by their time as soldiers. Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth mourns the soldiers who died.

Ireland is divided

Disagreement over the split between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State later fuelled the conflict known as 'the Troubles'.

1913

Home Rule is promised for Ireland. Protestants in the north strongly oppose it and threaten armed resistance.

1916

The Easter Rising: Irish Nationalists rise against British rule in Dublin. Its leaders are executed, and a guerrilla war follows.

1921

A peace treaty is signed.

1922

Ireland becomes two countries. Six mainly Protestant counties in the north stay in the UK as Northern Ireland. The rest becomes the Irish Free State, which declares itself a republic in 1949.

Between the wars

The BBC

Begins radio broadcasting in 1922. In 1936 it starts the world's first regular high-definition television service.

1929

The Great Depression begins. Parts of the UK suffer mass unemployment and shipbuilding is hit hard, but the car and aviation industries grow. The number of car owners doubles, from 1 million in 1930 to 2 million by 1939.

Writers and thinkers

Novelists Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas were highly influential.

The Second World War (1939–45)

1939

Hitler, in power in Germany since 1933, invades Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany. The Axis powers are Germany, Italy and Japan.

May 1940

Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister. In his first speech as Prime Minister he offers 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'.

Dunkirk (1940)

More than 300,000 men are rescued from France, helped by civilian boats. This gave rise to 'the Dunkirk spirit'.

The Battle of Britain

The air battle of summer 1940, won by the RAF flying Spitfires and Hurricanes, planes designed and built in Britain. Churchill paid tribute to the RAF: 'so much owed by so many to so few'.

The Blitz

German night bombing of London and other cities. Coventry was almost totally destroyed and London's East End was badly damaged. It gave rise to 'the Blitz spirit'.

June 1940 to June 1941

For a year, Britain and its Empire faced Nazi Germany with almost no allies, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

December 1941

Japan bombs the US naval base at Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war.

6 June 1944

D-Day: Allied forces land in Normandy.

May and August 1945

Germany is defeated in May. In August the USA drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war with Japan. Several British scientists worked on the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs.

Winston Churchill

Lost the 1945 election but returned as Prime Minister in 1951. In 2002 he was voted the greatest Briton of all time.

Building the welfare state

Britain came out of the war victorious but exhausted. In 1945 voters chose a Labour government, which built the welfare state.

The Beveridge Report (1942)

Named five 'Giants' to fight: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The welfare state was built on it.

R A Butler

Oversaw the Education Act 1944 ('the Butler Act'), which brought free secondary education to England and Wales.

Clement Attlee

Labour Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951. His government nationalised the railways, coal mines, gas and electricity, and set up a national system of benefits.

Aneurin (Nye) Bevan

Minister for Health who led the founding of the NHS in 1948. It gives everyone health care with no charge when they use it.

From Empire to Commonwealth

1947

India and Pakistan become independent. Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) follows in 1948, and more colonies over the next 20 years. The move from Empire to Commonwealth was mostly peaceful and orderly.

Harold Macmillan

Conservative Prime Minister in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His 'wind of change' speech recognised the move towards independence for colonies.

Defence

After the war the UK built its own atomic bomb and joined NATO, an alliance of countries formed to deter a possible Soviet invasion.

The United Nations

Founded after the Second World War to prevent war and promote peace. The UK is one of the five permanent members of its Security Council.

Migration after the war

• After the war there were not enough workers. Labour shortages drew workers to Britain from Ireland, Europe, the West Indies and South Asia.
• In 1948 people from the West Indies were invited to come and work in Britain. In the 1950s, recruitment centres in the West Indies hired bus drivers for Britain, and firms in the north and the Midlands sought workers in India and Pakistan.
• From the late 1960s, new laws restricted immigration. In the early 1970s, Britain admitted 28,000 people of Indian origin who had been forced out of Uganda.
• Because of immigration since the Second World War, almost one in ten people today has a parent or grandparent who was born abroad.

The 1960s and 1970s

'The Swinging Sixties'

The time of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Laws on divorce and abortion were made more liberal.

Women at work

The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, outlawing sex discrimination in the workplace.

Hard times

The 1970s brought rising prices, balance of payments problems and strikes.

1972

The Northern Ireland Parliament is suspended and direct rule from London begins. More than 3,000 people died in the violence after 1969.

1973

The UK joins the European Economic Community, formed in 1957 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany.

British science and invention

Ernest Rutherford

The New Zealand-born scientist who led the team at Manchester and Cambridge that was the first to 'split the atom'.

Alexander Fleming

Discovered penicillin in 1928. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain turned it into a usable drug, and Fleming received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945.

1920s and 1930s

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird develops television. Sir Robert Watson-Watt develops radar, first tested successfully in 1935. Sir Frank Whittle develops the jet engine, and the mathematician Alan Turing devises the Turing machine, a foundation of computer science.

1950s

Sir Christopher Cockerell invents the hovercraft. In 1953 the structure of DNA is discovered, and Briton Francis Crick shares the Nobel Prize.

Concorde

A supersonic passenger plane developed by Britain and France. It first flew in 1969, carried passengers from 1976 and retired in 2003.

The cash machine and the MRI scanner

The handbook credits James Goodfellow with the cash machine; the first was used by Barclays in Enfield in 1967. Sir Peter Mansfield co-invented the MRI scanner.

1978

The world's first 'test-tube baby' is born in Oldham, after IVF pioneered by Sir Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe.

1990s

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web is first used to send information on 25 December 1990. In 1996 Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

From Thatcher to today

Margaret Thatcher (1979–90)

The first woman Prime Minister and the longest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century. She privatised industries and curbed the power of trade unions.

1982

Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, and a British naval taskforce recovers them.

John Major

After Margaret Thatcher, John Major helped to establish the Northern Ireland peace process.

Tony Blair (1997–2007)

His Labour government brought in devolution: a new Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, first elected in 1999. It also helped to bring about the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

2007 to 2010

Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister in 2007. British combat troops leave Iraq in 2009. In 2010 a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government is formed under David Cameron.

23 June 2016

In a referendum, 51.9% vote to leave the European Union and 48.1% to remain. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020.