Butler, Beveridge and Dylan Thomas

The welfare state grew out of wartime planning. In 1941, the wartime government commissioned the Beveridge Report, which recommended fighting five great social evils and became the basis of the modern welfare state. That same year, R A Butler, who had been born in 1902, became responsible for education. In that role he later oversaw the Education Act, often called the Butler Act, which brought in free secondary schooling across England and Wales.

Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, belongs to the same years. He wrote Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night for his dying father in 1952, and his radio play Under Milk Wood was first performed in 1954, after his death.

Rebuilding Britain after the war left labour shortages. The government had already encouraged people from Ireland and elsewhere in Europe to help, and in 1948 it invited people from the West Indies to come over for work too.