Unrecognisable: How Scotland has changed since the Queen's coronation

May 2022. I ask Tom - now a Sir and a celebrated historian - what he remembers most about those days of ‘53 and he says the bike race definitely - it was the only time he’s ever won anything. And the new smell of the house. And the coronation of course, which everyone who had one watched on their new tellies. Tom Devine also remembers being given a mug embossed with a picture of the Queen and Prince Philip. Millions of kids like Tom were given them that year.

However, Sir Tom also remembers something that’s a bit harder to pin down, some of which comes from hindsight and the eyes of the historian. Perhaps the best word for it would be atmosphere. Tom was born in 1945 and was seven when the Queen was crowned so this, he says, isn’t just history, it’s the story of his life. There was a sense in those days, he says, of a new dawn. Harold Macmillan said people had never had it so good. A slight exaggeration, says Sir Tom, but there’s truth in it.

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The obvious next question, then, is what came after the dawn and how much things have changed in the 70 years since the Queen was crowned and little Tom won that bike race on his wonky tricycle. Up in Perthshire, an 18-year-old girl called Sandra Findlay was also watching the coronation on television. And in Glasgow, the men of the Foggo family were making their living in the docks on the Clyde. To mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I’m going to speak to them, and others, and ask them how they think Scotland is different since the coronation. The answers are a little surprising.

So let’s start with what it was like then, back in the early 50s. Sir Tom says it’s important to remember people had just been through a rough time. Many were still feeling the effects of the economic depression of the ’30s and unemployment was high. We’d also come through a war from which many men had returned maimed or semi maimed or not returned at all. Rationing had also dragged on through the late ‘40s. In many ways, it was a difficult and dark time.

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And then the 50s happened and it seemed to be changing. There was a massive house building programme which meant conditions improved for thousands of families, including Tom’s. The great industries, including ship building, were also rapidly expanding. And there was an appreciable rise in the standard of life, the great symbol of which was the increasing ubiquity of household gadgets: vacuum cleaners, washing machines and, of course, the TV sets on which people watched the coronation.

Scots like Sandra Findlay remember the changes well. Mrs Findlay is 86 years old now and remembers her family buying a telly specifically for the coronation. Growing up in Bridge of Earn in Perthshire, she also remembers that there wasn’t much money but there was security: her dad was a window cleaner, her mum worked in a hospital and Sandra herself found work as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in Perth.

Things were also pretty good for the Foggo family in Glasgow. I speak to 63-year-old John Foggo - born just as the 50s was ending - at his local pub, The Viceroy in Kinning Park, and he tells me how the docks that used to line the river here provided employment for generation after generation of his family: John’s great-grandfather, grandfather and his father were all dockers and John himself became a draughtsman in the Govan shipyard, now BAE Systems. “Every second guy worked in the shipyards,” he says. “And although we were poor - I was lucky if my dad could get me a second-hand bike - there was regular money.”

The Queen in George Square in 1977

Sir Tom remembers something similar in Motherwell where he was growing up: it seemed every second man worked at the Ravenscraig steelworks, or “The Craig” as they knew it. By the early 90s, however, the plant was gone, and something similar was happening to the shipyards that had provided security for the Foggo family and thousands of others. In a sense, John Foggo was one of the lucky ones - he worked at BAE for 46 years until he retired recently - but for most people, the security they relied on was disappearing.

Sir Tom says the reasons for the decline and the collapse actually go back to the decade - the 1950s - that was apparently so positive. “One of the reasons why the old industries collapsed with such speed in the 1980s,” he says, “was that they were already in decline and ailing but they were still operating. The Craig was still a major source of employment right up until it closed in the early 90s. But to some extent a lot of this is happening underneath the surface.”

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It was only when he began working on the period as a historian, says, Sir Tom, that he began to realise that the 50s, 60s and 70s concealed what was essentially a “hollowing out” that helps to explain why a lot of the old industries and some of the newer ones collapsed so swiftly. He singles out competition from abroad, limited entrepreneurial talent in Scotland and trade unions that had become over mighty.

“Margaret Thatcher and her policies cannot necessarily be blamed for the crisis of the 80s and the long-time recession of that period,” he says, “But what they did was they imposed very rigorous financial policies on an economy which was already becoming sick. The famous phrase ‘Clyde built’ had become a byword for poor organisation, poor planning, over costing, and not least the demarcation disputes involving different unions. The Clyde was dying long before the Clyde died.”

John Foggo is one of those who saw the effect close-up and the consequences it had for his community. “Communities were closer then,” he says of his childhood in the ‘60s. “I knew everybody up the close and everybody in the side street where I used to play.” He also remembers the tenements along Paisley Road West where his mum and dad bought their first flat in 1958, for £350. John lived there right up until he got married in 1980.

Royal Command Performance

The tenements are all gone now of course, pulled down in the 70s and 80s when the area was in steep decline, and John is sad about that. But he is also typical of the kind of Scot who’s seen massive personal improvements to their standard of living over the last 70s years. His mum and dad eventually moved to a council house nearby which they bought in the ‘80s. His grandchildren also struggle to get their heads round the fact that when John was a kid, the toilet was on the landing and he had to get a bus to his granny’s in Pollok to have a bath. All of this has changed.

In some important ways, however, things aren’t as good as they used to be. John tells me about his son Craig, who works in the building trade and has to rely on short-term contracts. “It tends to be a few weeks here and a few weeks there,” he says. “There’s no job security. The shipyards gave me a wage every week for 46 years but now when one job finishes, all you can do is hope for another job. It’s a horrible existence.”

The academic and write Professor Gregor Gall, who is also director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, says this shift from secure to precarious employment is one of the key differences of the last 70 years. At the time of the Queen’s coronation, he says, there was a broad political consensus based around the creation of the NHS, mass house building and wage regulation. Part of that consensus, he says, was that workers’ interests were much better looked after.

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“If you think about where most employment was in 1953,” he says, “an awful lot of was comprised of manufacturing. You move from that to silicon glen in the 1980s when electronics was supposed to be the saviour but that clearly doesn’t take up the slack. Then we move to call centres in the early 2000s and now you’ve got the current situation - without ignoring the fact that there is still some manufacturing - where an awful lot of employment in Scotland is based around retail, culture and leisure. It’s increasingly precarious compared to the 1950s. So it’s not some kind of liberation that’s happened, it’s more an iteration of the kind of revolution that people have to accept, particularly now that the unions are weaker.”

Of course, Professor Gall, like everyone else, can also see the ways in which the standard of living for most people has improved since the coronation. Mrs Findlay is struck by the fact that everyone has a car now and John Foggo has grandchildren who cannot imagine the idea of an outside toilet, but Professor Gall says it depends how you look at it. Yes, we don’t have outside toilets anymore like we did 70 years ago, he says, but we do have food banks.

“It depends what kind of measure you want to use,” he says. “If you talk about poverty as a relativity between different social classes, your main argument would be that it doesn’t essentially matter that people have an inside toilet now. The floor has been increased but the disparity between the rich and the poor, even at a higher base, is still massive and we still have mortality rates that are different depending on what postal code you live in.”

With inflation outstripping wages again, Professor Gall can also see some historical parallels with the problems of the 1970s and says we should be cautious about thinking that the lesson of the last 70 years is that ‘we’re all middle class now’.

“Many more of us may own our own homes, our own cars, washing machines, and so on,” he says, “but the level of indebtedness to have all these things is very high so people are much more sensitive to changes in the economy. Yes, people could have lost their jobs in the 50s but now their exposure is much greater so many things are not there. The welfare state would have provided more of a cushion than it does now. Losing your job now means a lot more than it ever did.”

Mrs Findlay certainly doesn’t believe that the world is necessarily a better place than it was 70 years ago and, speaking from Balhousie Ruthven Towers care home in Auchterarder, she says she worries about our attitudes to money. “Children have more freedom now,” she says, “and a lot more money but young people are also more likely to spend - my mother was a saver. I think there was also more discipline when I was younger. Parents and teachers were stricter.” I ask her if she thinks Scotland is a better place than it was in the ‘50s and it’s striking that she’s not sure. One of the certainties - perhaps the only one - is the Queen herself. Mrs Findlay will be having a little champagne with friends to mark the platinum jubilee.

So should we be surprised that Mrs Findlay struggles a bit to make sense of the changes that have happened - and are still happening? Mrs Findlay’s grandfather ran a butcher’s shop but Tom Devine says one of the most striking differences in the last seven decades is the way work has changed for most people. Walk around any town in Scotland nowadays, he says, and the one big thing you’ll see that you wouldn’t have seen in the 50s is the profusion of “white van men” - small-scale joiners, carpenters, painters and so on - who are making a living on their own.

It is, says Sir Tom, one of the great transformations over the last 70 years. “Overwhelmingly we now have a service based economy,” he says. “The Scottish economy of 2022 has no resemblance to the way it was in the 1980s. Only 15% of Scottish GDP is of manufacturing products - that is an unbelievable statistic given the ‘workshop of the world’ description for Scotland in the first half of the 20th century and one of the great transformations is the rise of smaller-scale employment. The consequence of the disposal of the old heavies is the economy is not simply completely different, it’s more resilient because it’s more diversified. It’s a huge transformation - and with it has come an enormous increase in the number of women working. That was beginning the 50s.”

Along with the sexual revolution, the changes to the working lives of women in particular is certainly one of the biggest transformations since the coronation. Sir Tom’s mother was employed as a domestic servant before giving up work to raise her children whereas now, 70 years on, many more women work and with that has come their own wages and a greater sense of independence. Professor Gall points out, however, that the feminisation of the work place has not necessarily led to better conditions for women - in some jobs, for example, they still earn less than men, and the work is less reliable.

Professor Gall’s assessment is that women in Scotland, and all of us to some extent, have been subject not to a linear progression since the 50s but a series of steps forward and steps back. Everyone agrees, however, that the changes to the way most of us work is the one of the most profound transformations. The sense of Scotland as a country of manufacture, says Sir Tom, runs very deep and so its loss cut deep too. “The nation had a tremendous international reputation for making things,” he says. “So the loss of jobs was not simply an economic hit, it was a hit against the very psyche of the Scottish people.”

Which leads us to how that psyche might have changed. It’s striking that just two years after the Queen’s coronation, at the general election in 1955, the Conservative party won a majority of the seats in Scotland - and a majority of the votes. Britishness, says Sir Tom, was uncritically dominant and the SNP was, in his words, a “sect” and nothing more. From the 1960s onwards, there was also only one dominant political force: Labour.

What has happened to all the parties since then, says Sir Tom, is one of the most striking changes of the last 70 years. “Now the SNP is the acknowledged dominant force in Scottish politics and we’ve already had one referendum,” he says. “Compare it to the period immediately after the war - the nations had come together in a collective solidarity against the greatest evil that the world has ever known. And of course that was total war - Britishness was uncritically dominant and the national party in Scotland for that reason was a marginal force. Scots were still aware of their identity but as a political force, the SNP was weak. Now there is the very real possibility, given the polls, that Scotland might have a future as an independent state. People in the 1950s would have laughed at you if you’d even suggested it.”

Given all this dramatic change - economic and political - the final question really is what has stayed the same. For John Foggo and Sandra Findlay, the Queen is certainly one of the continuities but Sir Tom wonders if she’s the only one left. Not only has there been a kind of revolution during her reign, in recent years - thanks in large part to technology - it has been turbo-charged. “When I look at it across the panorama of the past,” says Sir Tom, “because that’s my trade, I can see that there has been a structural transformation in virtually every aspect of Scottish society.”

As for the Queen, Sir Tom says that she is one of the few consistencies. “The Queen is almost alone,” he says. “In a sense she demonstrates that she is an exception. I’m not one of those who thinks the monarchy will disappear after the death of the Queen but certainly the significance of the monarchy in British society will not be as great.” Seventy years ago, he says, the street parties on his housing estate in Motherwell were taken for granted. Not anymore.

The other profound signs of transition are all around us, he says - the decline of the Church for example. There have also been some great positive signs, he says, such as the relative decline of sectarianism. He also says he can detect in his ten grandchildren and their generation an increase in confidence and a much greater willingness to express their opinions and question the old perceived wisdoms.

However, Sir Tom can’t help comparing the new dawn of the 50s with the atmosphere of 2022. In the 50s, there were the new housing estates like the one Tom grew up on, and rising standards of living, and a feeling of relief and confidence after the War. But what do we have now? A troubled economy, Brexit, and a deeply unsettled political landscape. All of it, says Sir Tom, makes for difficult times. “I don’t think you could say there’s total depression across the land,” he says. “But there’s nothing like the atmosphere that existed in the 1950s. If the 50s was the age of optimism, we are now in the age of anxiety.”