Why I Love the ... 1940s

Art gallery and museums expert Simon Hedges  has a passion or the 1940s.

I always think the 1940s must have been a period of unparalleled contrasts, he says.

It was a decade which started with some of the most memorable events of World War Two – both the Dunkirk evacuation and the Battle of Britain took place in 1940 – and ended with the country finally at peace, and optimistic about the future.

It was already busy planning for the Festival of Britain in 1951 – but still enduring hardships and deprivation that are almost unimaginable today.

Even in the midst of lockdown it’s easy to forget that some foods were still rationed until 1954.

There’s so much to love about that period – perhaps I wouldn’t feel that way if I’d lived through it – but I’d like to talk about just two of them here.

The first is the demob suit. In my younger days I was partial to a demob suit – in the 1980s, the ’40s still surrounded you – it was only 30-some years ago.

It was still possible to pick them up fairly cheaply in charity shops.

I think back then it was just vanity for me, but in retrospect, thinking about what these suits meant and what they were actually for has greater and greater impact: today I find myself reflecting on it more than I did at the time.

I was buying them for just a few pounds back in the late 1980s and ‘90s – today they belong in a social history museum.

For younger readers, ‘demob’ is short for demobilisation – the theory was that most servicemen who went through the war in uniform probably didn’t actually have many civilian clothes left, so as they left their service, they were given a set of ‘civvies’ to help get everyday life started up again.

This included a felt trilby or a flat cap of course. This was the 1940s, everyone wore hats, shoes, a raincoat, a couple of shirts – with matching collar studs – one must keep up standards, you know – a tie and that all-important suit, which had such style: the cut and quality was really high.