The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street established him as a historian with a confident command of a huge body of information, as bloodless and dry as the subject was. Embarking on Tales of a New Jerusalem, a history of Britain from 1945 to 1979, he has undertaken another marathon and earned magisterial rank.
Yet, from the first, Kynaston has shown that he is prepared to leave the bench to sweep the Ealing and Islington Local History Centres, Wandsworth Library, the East Riding Archives and especially that extraordinary resource, the Mass Observation Archive, kept in The Keep at the University of Sussex.
This is the fifth volume, just over half-way between the cabinets of Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, but the significance is in the title, On the Cusp, from June to October 1962 —
a moment marked by the release of the first Beatles single and the premiere of the first James Bond film on the very same day. It is not intended as a comprehensive portrait of Britain at this time…
This is history not by excursion, nor indeed diversion, but by immersion in an extraordinary accumulation of detail. As with the first volume, Austerity Britain: A World to Build, 1945-48, this one is framed by observations from ‘ordinary people’. It opens, on the second Sunday in June 1962, with 17-year-old Veronica Lee with her father at church, St Swithun’s, Shobrooke, in Devon: ‘New parson, who looked like a sparrow & whistled.’
Next we turn to Rev. W.A. Wood from St James’s, Accrington, in Lancashire. In addressing the local motor-cycle club, he compares
motor-cycle scrambling to the ‘scramble of life’, which got everybody ‘out of breath’ from time to time; and just as the riders had to clean their machines, so people had to clean up their lives through reading the Bible and prayer.
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