Britain since 1945: Life in the UK test study notes

Key facts to remember

• 1942 – the Beveridge Report names five 'Giants' to fight: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. 1944 – R A Butler's Education Act brings free secondary education to England and Wales.
• 1945 – Labour wins the election; Clement Attlee is Prime Minister until 1951 and nationalises the railways, coal mines, gas and electricity (the handbook also lists water).
• 1948 – Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, Minister for Health, leads the founding of the NHS, which gives everyone health care with no charge when they use it. People from the West Indies are invited to work in Britain.
• 1947 – India and Pakistan become independent, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) follows in 1948; the handbook groups them among nine countries granted independence in 1947. More colonies follow over the next 20 years.
• Post-war years – the UK builds its own atomic bomb and joins NATO, an alliance of countries formed to deter a possible Soviet invasion.
• 1951–64 – Conservative governments; Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech addresses decolonisation.
• 1950s – bus drivers are recruited in the West Indies, and northern and Midlands firms seek workers in India and Pakistan. New laws restrict immigration from the late 1960s; in the early 1970s Britain admits 28,000 people of Indian origin forced out of Uganda.
• 1960s – 'the Swinging Sixties': The Beatles and The Rolling Stones; laws on divorce and abortion are liberalised. In the 1970s, legislation entitles women to equal pay and outlaws sex discrimination in the workplace.
• Inventions: television (John Logie Baird, 1920s); radar (Sir Robert Watson-Watt, first test 1935); the jet engine (Sir Frank Whittle, 1930s); the Turing machine (Alan Turing, 1930s); the hovercraft (Sir Christopher Cockerell, 1950s).
• More inventions: insulin co-discovered by John Macleod; the structure of DNA (1953, with Francis Crick among the Nobel winners); Sir Bernard Lovell's Jodrell Bank radio telescope; the Harrier jump jet; the MRI scanner (Sir Peter Mansfield).
• Concorde (Britain and France) – first flight 1969, passengers from 1976, retired 2003. The cash machine – credited to James Goodfellow; the first was used by Barclays in Enfield in 1967.
• 1978 – the first 'test-tube baby' is born in Oldham after IVF pioneered by Sir Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe. 1996 – Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell (Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell). 25 December 1990 – first transfer of information via Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web.
• 1970s – rising prices, balance of payments problems and strikes. 1972 – the Northern Ireland Parliament is suspended and direct rule begins; more than 3,000 people died in the violence after 1969.
• 1957 – six countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany) form the EEC; the UK joins in 1973. (The UK never adopted the euro while it was a member, and it left the EU on 31 January 2020.)
• 1979–90 – Margaret Thatcher, the first woman Prime Minister, privatises industries and curbs trade union power; 1982 – the Falklands are recovered after Argentina invades. John Major then helps establish the Northern Ireland peace process.
• 1997 – Tony Blair's Labour government is elected; devolution follows, with a new Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly (first elected in 1999); 1998 – Good Friday Agreement; 2007 – Gordon Brown becomes PM; 2009 – British combat troops leave Iraq; 2010 – Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition under David Cameron.
• 23 June 2016 – in a referendum, 51.9% vote to leave the European Union and 48.1% to remain.
• Dylan Thomas – Welsh poet who wrote Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (a poem) and Under Milk Wood (a radio play).
• Roald Dahl – Welsh-born son of Norwegian parents; his children's books include George's Marvellous Medicine and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
• Mary Peters – 1972 Olympic pentathlon champion who promotes sport in Northern Ireland.