Stand up and stand still, or else....

[Floydian]

Does anyone remember how we had to stand up for the national anthem after a film finished at our local fleapit? I also remember during the intermission (lol!) a member of staff used to walk down the central aisles spraying rose water or something similar into the air. 

[Alex22]

Rosewater ?  what kind of flicks did YOU go to  ?   

[zoony]

Not sure how much difference rosewater would've made in our local bug hut...Disinfectant might've been more what was needed.

[minniemouse]

Nothing was sprayed at our picture houses. 

I do remember, we all stood up for the National Anthem and if anyone 'broke ranks' and was walking out they were looked down on.  Just shows how brainwashed we all were 

[Johned]

In a number of ways, perhaps a time when the lower orders including myself, knew their place and showed deference and respect.  Sadly now, nobody respects anything very much.  I was reading in the press yesterday about a charity cafe in North London which did a big English breakfast called the "Winston."  Unbelievably they were raided by left wing weirdo beardies chanting Churchill was a racist colonialist.  Were they never educated enough to know that he was our revered wartime leader who led perhaps by sheer bluster and bravado yet inspired the British people to victory?  Nobody else could have done it; certainly not Lord Halifax who the Conservatives wanted as leader in 1940.  He would have made terms with Hitler and today we and those silly demonstrators would have been speaking German.   

[minniemouse]

Churchill was a great leader.  Why did he lose the election after the war then?  I could never understand this.

[zoony]

It's a long story Minnie, beginning before the Boer War but Mr Churchill was, what might be called, 'A Man for One Season'.
He was so disliked, disapproved of and disdained by his Parliamentary colleagues, for a variety of reasons, that as soon as World War 2 was over they were glad to get rid of him.
 I'm not sure that the war was easy to get through for he and his wife Clemmie (Clementine Ogilvy Spencer gives you a clue to the breeding) but they got on with it. Not nearly as simple as it looks on the face of it.

[Johned]

They called the 1945 election, the "Khaki" election zoony because it was reckoned the overwhelming majority of service voters went for Labour; they were fed up being bossed about by the officer types; had had enough and wanted to get their own back in some way on the boss class.

[Undercover Pensioner]

Churchill was a great leader.  Why did he lose the election after the war then?  I could never understand this.

Because he was leading a Conservative government.  He may have done okay for us during the war but people believed the Labour government would do a better job rebuilding the country for all not just a few. He was also 71 by this stage and beginning to show his age.   People were now looking at what the government would  I think, from what my parents told me (both in the Air Force during the war) that many service men and women voted for Labour.  As seems to happen after wars those who fought together seem to want more equality.  The LP fought on employment - a real worry after wars, the NHS and a comprehensive welfare state.  Economically they were Keynesian.  Economically the Conservatives where a sort of old fashioned version of the current neoliberalism so were rather as the Cons are now, offering similar things the LP but always on a very guarded scale which meant not everyone would benefit and some would be able to get very rich.   


Churchill was a very flawed personality when we look back.  He was both racist and a colonialist but I doubt that would have affected more than a minority in '45.  I am not sure I would call 'chanting' a 'raid' but I do think we are wrong to take down statues, etc., because people were who they were.  It would be better to surround them with people who were written out of history at the time and to teach history explain how the world was then.


He was returned to power in 1951.