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UK: The golden age
Stanley and Dorothy Beaumont were both born in Batley in Yorkshire in the 1930s. Batley was a textile manufacturing town with giant mills employing most of the working population. Life was hard for the millworkers. Wages were low, working conditions bad and housing very poor.
Things improved after the war. With the wider opportunities of post war Britain and a lot of hard work Stanley and Dorothy built much better lives for themselves than their parents had enjoyed. They moved into a new house with previously unheard of luxuries like heating, running hot water and a garden. They bought a car and were able to take proper holidays - something only the better off could afford before the war.
By the 1970s they were even taking holidays abroad, something only the very rich could enjoy before the Second World War. Now in retirement they live in a house in the part of town that used to home to the mill owners.
Stanley and Dorothy's lives in the post war period match those of millions throughout Britain and Western Europe. The "golden age" between 1945 and the mid 1970s not only delivered record rates of growth but spread prosperity more widely than ever before.
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