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Roberta Bivins, Mathew Thomson, Anniversary fever? History and the culture of NHS celebration, Modern British History, Volume 36, Issue 1, 2025, hwae066, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae066
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Abstract
Delivered a day after Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) reached its 75th year since its opening on the Appointed Day of 5 July 1948, the Pimlott Lecture for 2023 explored the culture of NHS anniversary-making. What can the marking of these anniversaries tell us about changing attitudes towards the service, and indeed, the British state? Here, examining evidence from the media, government archives, and Mass Observation, we argue that NHS anniversaries have long functioned as points of reflection but that their role as moments of national celebration and even communion has come to the fore only recently and culminated in the apparent ‘anniversary fever’ of 2018. We will explore the reasons behind the growing public fervour, what it can tell us, and the lessons offered by our work on this (still) best-loved of British institutions for historians working on highly politicized objects in ‘fevered’ times.
From its inception, Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has been a subject for anniversary reflections. Politicians, the press, and the broadcast media have used NHS anniversaries as opportunities to review the service’s achievements and failures, reflect on its future, and sometimes offer thanks to its staff. Only more recently has this developed into an exercise in public celebration.1 Reflecting on our own experience of developing a cultural history of the NHS in the lead-up to its 70th anniversary in 2018, this essay examines the challenges and opportunities for historians in a context of what one might describe as ‘anniversary fever’. Across the article, we look at the affective and effective labour anniversary moments perform for NHS activists and critics alike, arguing that NHS anniversaries have come to serve, yes, as birthdays, but also as X-rays, focusing public attention on the NHS to elicit at some moments critical complaint, and at others, protective ‘love’.
The marking of anniversaries, particularly centenaries, came to the fore in the 19th century, part of the era’s invention of tradition and national self-historicization.2 A century later, nation-making events continue to be a focus for anniversaries, including those of much shorter periods, such as quinquennial and decennial moments. If anything, these have become more all-consuming. The Sunday Times for instance described the 1989 commemoration of World War II as a cult of ‘Total Anniversary’.3 We have also seen an expansion in what is commemorated. Now, hardly a day passes without mention of some sort of anniversary event. Though some still mark great national moments, the focus has become far more diverse. In 2023, the ‘Bit about Britain’ website listed over 50 historical anniversaries for the year, placing the 75th anniversary of the NHS alongside the 1948 introduction of Polo Mints and Britain’s first supermarket, the 25th anniversary of DVDs, the 50th anniversaries of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, and, further back, 200 years of Rugby, 250 years since the Boston Tea Party, and 675 and 725 years since the Black Death and the Battle of Falkirk, where the numbers feel increasingly arbitrary.4 This anniversary culture can no longer be explained simply in relation to nationalism. It also reflects a democratization and commodification in how we approach the past.5 NHS anniversary culture in particular has become so prominent because it can provide a new symbol of the nation that is in line with the more democratic spirit of the age, and perhaps also a uniquely accessible form of activist community building and mobilization—whether driven by the grassroots, or deliberately leveraged by, for example, the Department of Health, or the NHS itself.6
Development of an anniversary culture
Things were very different at the launch of the NHS. The 5th of July 1948 saw surprisingly little public fanfare. Striking photographs of Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan symbolically opening the service through a visit to one of the hospitals taken over by the NHS (in particular images of Bevan beside the bed of the service’s ‘first patient’), have become prominent in later anniversaries, but at the time, this event attracted little publicity.7 Instead, a single image of a rather regimental ceremony appeared in the local Manchester Guardian on 6th July. The picture’s caption highlighted the event, attended by Health Minister and only subsequently ‘Father of the NHS’, Aneurin Bevan, as a process of hospital ‘transfer’ rather than a more momentous ‘creation’ of the NHS.8 Around the country, one can trace some small local ceremonies, but these usually thanked those who had run hospitals that were now being taken over: in other words, to commemorate a passing rather than a ‘birth’.9 On the eve of the launch, Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee addressed the nation via a 15-minute BBC radio broadcast on ‘The New Social Services and the Citizen’.10 Even here, the NHS had a surprisingly low profile, not mentioned until the last 5 minutes. The speech was an exercise in calming both the fears of opponents and the hopes and expectations of those who had the most to gain. Beyond providing a platform for this muted statement, BBC coverage of the launch was virtually non-existent.
The British press swiftly came to appreciate the value of the Appointed Day anniversary as an opportunity to take stock of the successes and failures of the service. Numbers on spending and provision made for easy and striking copy. On the 6th of July 1953, for example, the press made good use of figures supplied by the Ministry of Health. These indicated that across its first 5 years, the NHS had dispensed 1,062,000,000 prescriptions, along with 27,000,000 million pairs of spectacles, 10,500,000 dentures, and 305,000 hearing aids; while dentists had filled 43,000,000 cavities on the NHS, and hospital doctors had seen 156,000,000 outpatients.11 Coverage domestically but also in the US press indicates fascination with the experiment of a nationalized health service from the start.12 What was not apparent in the early anniversaries was a prominent or widespread culture of public celebration. Indeed, as the service reached its 10th anniversary, the then-broadsheet, socially conservative Daily Mail newspaper avoided even the term ‘celebrate’, preferring only to ‘record’ the occasion.13 So too did a seemingly bemused Conservative Health Minister, Derek Walker Smith. In the first of what would become regular anniversary debates, he suggested that the circulation of celebratory material was simply not an ‘appropriate’ task for the State.14 Like his civil servants, Walker-Smith clearly felt it was no part of his role to ‘stimulate a major celebration of the Anniversary’.15 The BBC likewise still seems to have seen its main role as a provider of public information. ITV, in contrast, devoted a substantial portion (10 of 30 minutes) of its very first ‘Look Ahead’ programme, broadcast in the week of 5th July, to the NHS. But this was about mapping its next 10 years, rather than celebrating its accomplishments.16 When there was a focus on celebration, it was turned inwards towards the staff of the service in reward for their contribution and in an effort to boost morale and maintain manpower.17 Maybe Public Service, the house journal of the NALGO [National and Local Government Officers] union got it right in their own deliberately celebratory anniversary supplement: ‘Most of us now accept it as part of the background of existence.’18 And perhaps, after its apparently uncertain prospects in the early years, this was celebration enough for advocates of the Service.
By the 1960s, the mood was shifting. After two decades of post-war security, rising expectations, and growing (if still insufficient) budgets for the NHS, the 20th anniversary was marked by a BBC Panorama documentary, Something for Nothing, which starkly reminds us that there is nothing new in the idea of the NHS being in a state of crisis. Presented by James Burke of Tomorrow’s World, Something for Nothing reflected a new sensibility: the NHS, it urged, must shed the burden of what it had come to mean to the British people over its first 20 years and turn its attention to a challenging future. Universal health provision might have begun as a principled position, but it had grown into an immutable force through the self-interest of patients and the fear of politicians to question what rapidly became—at least in the eyes of its opponents, including the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine—a ‘sacred cow’.19 Arguably, this ideal now prevented proper evaluation of the challenges that the health service now faced and added an unsustainable burden of demand to a service unequipped to cope. Spurred into reflection by what it saw as the complacency of anniversary celebration—the ‘birthday’ approach—Something for Nothing suggested that the distorting weight of public meaningfulness was the root problem of a service now dying on its feet.
The 25th anniversary of the service provided a further excuse for a round of programming and debate over the future of the institution, but the kind of celebration that we have become used to in recent years remained strikingly absent. One difference to the 20th anniversary was the arrival of a new hope for the future in the form of plans for major reorganization of the service, disrupting the already emerging narrative of the NHS as untouchable. Yet even NHS staff required education to understand the coming revolution, which had, nonetheless, almost eradicated talk of NHS stagnancy in key professional journals.20 A number of BBC programmes attempted to evaluate the merits of the proposed changes; however, the issues were complex, with no easy answers. This did not make for exciting programming.21 Bone-deep and radical the anniversary examinations may have been amongst the experts, but these were hardly issues suited to capturing the public’s anniversary imagination.
The decade ended with efforts from the Labour Party explicitly to ‘celebrate’ the 30th anniversary as a vehicle for a positive vision of the welfare state both past and—importantly to avoid the appearance of ‘complacency’—future. Pragmatically, the Health Minister saw this as a useful tool ‘to improve relations within the Service’ and hoped ‘political credit may be got for it’. But he also argued that the 30th anniversary was momentous, ‘since it represented a whole generation’ since specifically Labour’s founding of the Welfare State and its emblematic services. Civil servants admitted qualms about the choice internally: ‘Why celebrate the 30th anniversary and not the 25th? Only one answer—election—which cynics would be quick to discern’.22 There were also concerns not only that activist groups like ‘Save Our Hospitals’ might take advantage of any events, but that the 20th anniversary commemorations had done ‘more harm’ than good. The health unions, in contrast, remained more positive (at least initially), seeing the 30th anniversary as an important moment to ‘appeal to a lot of people who had no recollection of what life was like before the introduction of the NHS’.23 Unfortunately, internal NHS dynamics were unfavourable: ‘there was already a feeling of cynicism and anti-Central Government in the service’, one memo-writer grumbled, while the Union leaders were concerned instead by ‘the general feeling of self-criticism current in the NHS’.24 Even reaching a consensus’ statement of faith in the NHS proved impossible.25 Yet worse, Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), Patrick Nairne complained ‘We have got to get the media on our side but with the English genius for disparaging its own institutions, the Press have got into the habit of knocking the Welfare State’.26
This framing of the NHS anniversary as a moment to push back against a rising tide of cynicism permeates internal discussions. It set the stage for what we see as the emergence of affective activism around the NHS: the deliberate mobilization of feelings, as much as meanings and facts, around the Health Service to ward off perceived threats to its survival. In the 30th Anniversary moment, the threat was at its heart, declinism. A draft of the Prime Minister’s speech for the event explicitly made this point: ‘I know some people think we have nothing to celebrate. Pessimism and cynicism are in fashion.’ Striking back at the already common critical claim that the health service was unduly sacralised, he turned the tables: national cynicism, not the NHS, was ‘almost a religion’, burdening ‘the British people’ with ‘the clamour of the fainthearts and the knockers’. Moreover, this dark mood threatened the NHS specifically: ‘They claim the health service is in a state of collapse—when in fact it continues to provide a splendid service for our people … in a world of limited resources and unlimited demand.’27
In the event, economic conditions made it difficult for the Labour government to produce an anniversary ‘statement of faith’ in the NHS with the backing of all sections of its workforce.28 Civil servants were ambivalent about marking the anniversary with any pomp at a time of economic retrenchment and political instability: ‘there should be no lavish social entertainment’ one memo insisted.29 Plans to mark the day by giving guests a meagre ‘two sandwiches and one warm gin and tonic’ capture the sense that this was no time for celebration.30 Rather than the 20th anniversary’s critical but confident look forward, those cultivating NHS anniversary culture at thirty turned to history—and interestingly, at least within the DHSS and among some in the Service, to what might be called the ‘view from abroad’, which some saw as both more accurate and more positive than attitudes shaped by cynicism and disputes at home.31
The mood in relation to the NHS as the 40th anniversary approached in 1988 was also thoroughly gloomy. Strikingly like the 75th anniversary we have just seen, this mood reflected not just the critiques from right and left but also the everyday realities of a service under ever-increasing strain. The subdued tone is indicated in Conservative Health Secretary John Moore’s reported plans to mark the 40th anniversary again simply through a ‘few drinks’ with NHS workers.32 Brushing the moment under the carpet was unsurprising given that the Labour Party used the event to attack the Conservatives on their scant support for the service. Labour leader Neil Kinnock, for instance, addressed a 40th anniversary NHS rally at Alexander Palace.33 The fact that Moore chose July 5th to tell employers to look to private health insurance for their workers is further indication of the fragility and divisiveness of the anniversary moment at this midpoint of the service’s history.34
Yet analysis of press coverage indicates that the position of the government was out of line with the public mood. Press reports in the USA described public affection and even ‘love’ for the NHS.35 Sylvia Beckingham, pictured with Nye Bevan as a child patient in once-little known (but since their 40th anniversary re-discovery, endlessly reprinted) publicity stills for the Appointed Day, made similar claims in a Daily Mail interview: ‘We have not got a lot to be proud of around the world—but by gum we have got our National Health. It matters to the British people, and I am so glad to be able to say it.’36 Elsewhere the Daily Mail editorial staff suggested that at forty, the Health Service suffered less from failings or underfunding than from its own success and ‘the revolution of rising expectations’ in an era of increasing prosperity.37 Even the staid Sunday Times poked fun at DHSS Secretary John Moores for his sudden about-face ‘from being the arch-proponent of privatisation to … the best friend in government of free health care’, ‘bringing cheer to the birthday party’ and committing to the preservation of the NHS. The paper even admitted that the NHS has a track record of achievements ‘that would make private industry gasp’.38 An earlier national ‘Day of Action’ protest in Trafalgar Square hints again at a relationship between perceptions that the Service’s survival was under threat and the emerging links between NHS affective discourse and NHS activism.39 The Illustrated London News pictured nurses marching with a skeleton. The skeleton carried a placard begging ‘Save the NHS’.40 This connection between public affect—here, fear of threatened changes to the NHS—and public activism was already seen by some policymakers and politicians as a dangerous obstacle to reform.41
A significant shift in tone followed the defeat of the Conservatives and the election of Tony Blair in 1997. Most significantly, the 50th anniversary was, for the first time in such an organized form, recognized as a day for national and explicitly public celebration. The landmark of the half-century no doubt helped. It facilitated official state endorsement in the form of commemorative stamps and coins.42 Moreover, the NHS itself became involved in creating a national campaign of events and competitions, dramatically reversing staff opposition to ‘celebrations’ on the 30th. At the grander age of fifty, the NHS even took to the internet, which now reached 9 per cent of the population, with a website to coordinate activity and promote commemorative electronic postcards.43 The expenditure involved did, as expected, prompt criticism.44 But this time, well ahead of the anniversary, increasingly elaborate plans for the celebration were being planned and publicised.
Organization began even before the election of the new Labour government in May 1997. Already in January of that year, Sandy Macara, Chair of the BMA, was looking forward to a celebration ‘transcending the traumas of the recent past’.45 Following their election, Labour was keen to back celebration plans and used the anniversary to announce new funding and support. Health Secretary Frank Dobson, in a symbolic act of ‘unashamed nostalgia’, visited Trafford General Hospital where Bevan had opened the service, to baptise self-proclaimed New Labour in the bubbling spring of public affection for the service.46 Centre-piece events included a garden party for NHS workers at Buckingham Palace and a ceremony at Westminster Abbey. With an eye to justifying costs, health-promoting activities for the public featured strongly, for instance, a healthy eating demonstration in Bournemouth and a Birmingham Schools competition to design a nurse uniform for the future. People were also encouraged to self-fund their events or seek sponsorship, even from private health providers.47
Broadcasting reflected the new enthusiasm for the celebration. A special episode of Songs of Praise also visited Trafford General Hospital.48 We see the blossoming of a language of ‘birthday’.49 We even find coverage seeping over from the more highbrow debate of Radio 4 to the light-entertainment of Radio 2, with its primetime Beveridge, Bevan and the Bombs looking at the founding of the NHS through memories, archive recordings and music from the time.50 The shift in tone from previous low-key and gloomy anniversaries is striking. It is hard not to emerge with the impression that the 1998 anniversary serves as something of a pivot point. It was certainly easier for politicians to evoke ‘loving’ the NHS as a mainstream sentiment in a time of financial largess than one of crisis: Blair’s New Labour received the ‘political credit’ that had eluded Callaghan at the 30th anniversary. But these celebrations also confirmed the NHS as an object appropriate for general public feeling and affirmed the sense of ‘ownership’ Jennifer Crane has documented emerging from activism in the 1980s.51
The 60th anniversary saw this enthusiasm maintained. The state of play was characterized by an hour-long historical documentary, The NHS: A Difficult Beginning, broadcast on BBC2 in the prime 8.30 pm evening slot on 5th July. Wholly absent were the uncertainties and ambivalences that characterized the 1982 BBC Radio 3 programme Stuffing their Mouths with Gold—which provocatively suggested that ‘three bold words’ (National Health Service) had become so familiar and overworked as to no longer mean anything at all.52 Instead, the creation of the NHS was presented as a health revolution centred on the heroics of Aneurin Bevan and his struggle with the opposing forces of the Conservative Party and the medical profession. In an opening monologue, narrator Imelda Staunton tells us that the National Health Service is now ‘beyond political debate’, a telling phrase that exemplifies the cultural and political shift to celebration that had taken place. Previous anniversaries had offered aspects of the narrative but had never been so explicitly political about its origins nor so celebratory or confident about its acceptance. If that opening is significant, so too is the point made in conclusion: the NHS was now a ‘national treasure’. But clouds were also visible on the horizon, at least to NHS activists, who commemorated the 60th anniversary through protests, placards, and a radical rather than a nostalgic history. These evoked the public’s affection for the NHS to ward off privatization.
The NHS at 70
The 70th anniversary of 2018 took celebration to a new level. This had not just the powerful institutional support of the BBC and broader media behind it, but also the backing of politicians and NHS leadership. Prime Minister Theresa May (following in Blairite footsteps) proclaimed a ‘very special birthday of a very special institution’ on the eve of the 5th July, having already announced a very special financial birthday present to capitalize on the moment (or at least mitigate her party’s persistent reputational vulnerability in relation to the NHS).53 Conservative politicians eulogized the NHS as our national religion, a claim that had originally been made as something of a cry of despair by Nigel Lawson.54 Indeed, politicians of all parties competed to ‘love’ the NHS most after a turbulent decade that saw financial retrenchment and uninhibited politicization of the Service during the Brexit debates, prompting media scorn.55 And NHS England created a publicity machine for ensuring that the anniversary took centre stage, involving services at Westminster Abbey and York Minster and ‘NHS70Tea’ parties across the country. Foreign correspondents looked on bemused, seeking explanations from experts and service users alike.56
History was again deployed as an anniversary tool. There were programmes celebrating Nye Bevan, including The Man Who Made the NHS. But drawing on interviews with patients and staff, Owen Sheers’ poetic BBC drama, The NHS: To Provide all People, exemplified another important trend that came to the fore more powerfully than ever before in 2018: meaning, affection, even faith now centred on the stories and experiences of ordinary people.57 In a powerful populist equation, seeing the NHS as the people’s NHS elevated it beyond criticism over its many recognized faults.
The year 2018 may have seen crystallization of the ‘national treasure’ status of the NHS but in prompting a spike of anniversary fever it also saw such representation begin to be called into question. Seeing the service as the ‘People’s NHS’ could provide the platform to ask new questions that went beyond the contrarianism of a programme like The Moral Maze, where panellists such as Michael Portillo, in the vein of Lawson, had a long history of wanting to challenge popular faith in the service.58
This was evident in the BBC’s The NHS: A People’s History, which drew upon our People’s History of the NHS project and used the device of telling history through individual stories to diversify the standard picture, exposing tensions across class, gender, sexuality, and ‘race’.59 Indeed, in the context of Brexit and the Windrush scandal, there was growing interest in the way in which immigrants had historically been vital to the functioning of the service but had often been treated as second-class citizens.60 But for all that such attention exposed elements to be criticized in the history of the service, the resulting critiques were consistently diluted by the incorporation of hitherto overlooked constituencies into the prevailing narrative of heroic achievement and exceptionalism. For instance, ‘Black nurses: the women who saved the NHS’, as one BBC documentary titled them, were invited to recount their experiences of shocking racism and discrimination and lauded for their decades of service, but implicit in such accounts was an assumption that the sins were historic and the Service grateful.61
Perspective also came from religious broadcasters and commentators intrigued by the proposition that the NHS was some kind of national religion. Sometimes this was handled in a rather literal fashion: for instance, had religious faith informed development of the service; and had the service provided a space for religious practice as part of a more holistic approach to therapy and well-being?62 More interestingly, this constituency began to consider the function of the metaphor: whether public attitudes to the service had indeed become something akin to a religion, and the implications of this.63
In other words, there were some signs of a willingness to problematize public attitudes and meaning in the face of anniversary fever, but this was on the margins and was overshadowed by the most pervasive public exercise of celebration in the life of the service. The scale, range, and celebratory, affectionate nature of coverage on a forum like the BBC, historically had been more reticent and open to searching criticism, was remarkable. In fact, on the day itself, content that did not fit with the prevailing tone tended to be side-lined. On Radio Five, free of World Cup football on the morning of the 5th, a doctor who was there at the birth of the NHS pointed out that there had been health provision before the NHS, free to some and with a graduated fee calculated by the almoner for others. He also described how doctors had to be paid off before agreeing to work in a state service. He recalled 5 July 1948 as a day that hardly anyone had noticed in his Oxford hospital, a day with no flags or celebrations. Such points of tension contradicted the presenter’s assumptions and later summaries of the interview recast it to fit more comfortably with the day’s dominant narrative of an NHS revolution. Next up on Radio 5 was ‘Your Call’: the station’s daily invitation for the British public to vent their opinions. ‘NHS Heroes’ was wall-to-wall stories of how the NHS had saved people’s lives. Midway through the presenter admitted that some people had been calling in with rather different views about the service, but that these were more appropriate for another day. This was a day for celebration.64
The reach of such programming was also remarkable. It became the central theme of daily television and radio talk, news, and even music programming.65 Across the four nations of the NHS, local radio stations set off to their local hospitals to broadcast programmes, host discussions, and generally take the lead in showing that the NHS was a subject of local as well as national pride and thanksgiving.66 Not just on the 5th, but across the weeks before and after, the anniversary and its framing as a moment of thanks and birthday celebration pervaded the broadcasting landscape. Some of this coverage and some of the associated activities did really begin to give a degree of credence to the idea of the NHS as some kind of national religion. The formal anniversary religious services televised on Songs of Praise and Sunday Worship, stretching across nearly a whole month, were just the tip of the iceberg.67 More intriguingly, programming such as Sheers’ extended poem, Radio 3’s NHS Symphony which combined rhythms from the work of two Birmingham Hospitals with specially commissioned choral music and NHS choirs, and BBC Wales’ mass ‘Lip Sync’ version of the pop song ‘Hold my Hand’ took audiences beyond public information and beyond critical analysis towards a form of attempted emotional and even spiritual union.68
Mass observation
It would be tempting to say that the anniversary coverage of 2018 had become inescapable. It would also be tempting to extrapolate from the tone and message of such coverage to public feeling. Perhaps the encompassing cultural celebration of the NHS was a reflexive response to the growth in public fears for the NHS after a decade that saw a global financial crash, Brexit, and intense anxiety about ‘creeping privatisation’ of the NHS under the Coalition and then Conservative governments. Certainly, the ‘Born in the NHS’ and NHS love heart tropes arose under these conditions, as did social media accounts like @NHSMillion (founded in 2016 by NHS staff), actively seeking to recruit an affectionate public to clamour for NHS protection.69 But this rests on assumptions about the audience: that the public was following this type of media in large numbers and across demographic categories; and that they agreed with, accepted, or were influenced by its messages. Understanding such issues is always challenging. We cannot provide definitive answers here; however, we do have access to a body of evidence that casts light on the popular response to the anniversary moment and its culture. At the very least, this evidence forces us to think more carefully about a history of anniversaries that rests on what the public was being told.
In the summer of 2018, we worked with the Mass Observation Project to launch a Directive that would survey its panel of respondents about the NHS including a question on the anniversary.70 It goes without saying that Mass Observation cannot be regarded as representative of public opinion as a whole. The Mass Observation panel was by no means scientifically designed. It has over-represented the middle classes, women, the elderly, Southerners, and those with the interest and time to respond to Directives.71 Given these biases, one might expect Mass Observers to be, if anything, more conscious of an event like the anniversary and perhaps more sympathetic. The results, however, are very mixed, ranging from the enthusiastic to the unaware or uninterested, to the hostile. What the responses make very clear is that we need to be very cautious in interpreting the significance of media enthusiasm for the anniversary.
One of the stronger statements in support of the prominence of the 2018 anniversary came from a woman whose husband had worked in the NHS since 1987 and who had worked in it herself. She called herself an NHS insider. In her view, the level and tone of attention had stood out: ‘You could hardly miss the “NHS at 70” celebrations. There has been so much on Radio 4 and TV. I don’t remember half as much for the NHS at 60.’72 But even among those respondents whose remarks were largely positive, it becomes very clear that it was rare for anyone to have followed much of the programming.
The Mass Observation material is also useful in helping to think about differences across age and gender. An 80-year-old man from Cambridge enjoyed the television but saw the press handling as more ephemeral and was not aware of the public events.73 The way that many older people relied heavily on television for contact with the outside, but also their history of growing up alongside the NHS, meant that this generation was particularly alert and receptive to the coverage. In contrast, a 47-year-old woman from Southampton spoke positively about ‘Hands of Love’, a local public event which celebrated 70 years of the NHS and the ‘contribution made by black, Asian and minority ethnic people from all around the world’, but she did not watch television.74 Likewise, a 40-year-old woman attended a ‘birthday’ rally in Belfast, with a good turnout, but did not comment on television.75 A 35-year-old female nurse from Stratton on the Fosse had been distracted from the anniversary by the arrival of her baby but had been impressed by the group photos for the anniversary that she followed on Twitter and Facebook and hoped that some kind of social legacy might be kept for historians of the future.76 It was women, particularly women of middle age, who appear to have been more likely to be involved in or aware of public activity, whether formal and in person or more organically emerging via the social networks of the digital world. Younger respondents were, unsurprisingly, the most likely to mention coverage of social media such as Twitter.77 A 39-year-old male reported an ‘outpouring of anecdotal testimonies about how the NHS has helped people’ on this medium.78 As with the public events, indeed even more so, this indicates that anniversary culture could develop in a more bottom-up fashion than was the case with television or radio. The fact that many people were now streaming their digital entertainment may well mean that the kind of national moment envisaged in the television and radio programming was now far harder to realize.79 A 42-year-old woman recalled there being a section of BBC iplayer devoted to the NHS and its anniversary but did not watch anything as the programmes ‘looked boring’.80 Consciousness of the anniversary did find its way, through different routes, right across the age spectrum, but the days of creating a national, collective moment were numbered against the backdrop of an increasingly variegated entertainment landscape, with the younger the least accessible.81
Some respondents mentioned specific television programmes. A 50-year-old female designer from Bishop Auckland praised the Owen Sheers ‘film poem’ but also an interview with Aneira Thomas, who had come to be known as the first baby born in the NHS.82 Often it was the programmes that highlighted the contrast to pre-NHS lack of provision that cut through most powerfully. A 73-year-old retired male teacher from Hampshire had particularly appreciated the radio serialization of A.J. Cronin’s The Citadel. He also commended documentaries for bringing ‘home the heart-breaking costs of consulting a doctor in the days before 1948’.83 Unsurprisingly, respondents from this generation were particularly alert to the importance of this longer-term historical perspective. A 78-year-old female retired librarian from London highlighted the importance of coverage on improvements since the start of the service.84 And a male 77-year-old retired teacher from Lancashire commended the National Health Stories series on Radio 4 presented by historian Sally Sheard.85 It is also worth noting, however, that several respondents ended up reflecting upon not on a programme from 2018, but instead the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, which ‘seemed to rejuvenate our complete respect for the service’.86 That event prominently staged the NHS as an emblem of national pride and an appropriate object for affectionate celebration.
Among those offering more hostile comment, some objected to what they saw as a forced sentimentalism. A 35-year-old male senior manager from Bristol was unenthusiastic, even though his wife worked for the NHS. ‘To be honest’ he admitted ‘I find such things a bit tiresome. It all seems a little overhyped to me’. Why was 70 such a big deal he wondered, before suggesting that packaging extra funding as a birthday present was ‘cynical, media-appeasing policy’.87 The interesting thing about such criticism was that it tended to be directed at the hyperbole and misdirection of emotional energy inherent in anniversary cultures rather than at the NHS itself. A retired, 73-year-old male filmmaker and writer from Scotland made that point: ‘Britain has become a country somewhat obsessed by the necessity to over-celebrate what the media (and sometimes the government) decide are “national anniversaries”’. But his particular ire was directed at those anniversaries, often with the military to the fore that tried to perpetuate the image of Britain as a great power. He acknowledged that if there was a place for anniversaries, the NHS was a much more deserving subject for celebration in that it did not simply exist in the past and was still regarded by most people as a vital national resource.88 A 71-year-old male financial consultant (a user of private medicine himself) reflected that the celebration had been more muted than he had expected. He accused it of ‘parroting the standard formulaic stuff set down by a Government and Press elite who really neither care or feel there is a need for the NHS’.89 Though it is a small sample, the fact these critics were all men may be significant; research suggests that men feel less connection to the NHS and to matters of health more generally.90
Finally, there were respondents who were aware of the anniversary but simply uninterested, explaining this on the basis that such celebrations were largely irrelevant to the real issue of protecting the service. A 71-year-old retired bank manager wrote that he was ‘vaguely aware’ of celebrations ‘without taking much heed of them’. He did not watch or read any of the coverage and reflected that it was ‘good to acknowledge this anniversary, but more effort should be made to ensure the NHS continues to thrive’.91 Such feelings spilled over in a more critical tone in the reflections of a 33-year-old male teacher from Northwich: ‘With all the pressures the NHS is facing, it seemed ill-timed to be having a large celebration.’92 There was similar frustration when it came to a female community health worker from Nottingham. In her case, it was the tendency to give a very partial view of the service that grated. She had watched some of the ‘usual stuff’ about people using Accident and Emergency services and ‘heart warming stories’ about children receiving surgery but had seen nothing about work like hers. She noted that ‘No one marked it [the anniversary] at work. It was a non-event. We’re all exhausted’.93
For all its variety, the Mass Observation material suggests that the public were far from being swept up by any NHS anniversary fever. This ties in with the way respondents were also often critical of the idea that the NHS was akin to a religion; many, indeed, found that proposition not just surprising but offensive. Respondents were keen to present their attitude to the service as rational and pragmatic. They may have developed affection and gratitude for the service, but as other scholarship has been revealing this was grounded in experience and rational calculation and did not exclude criticism.94
Conclusions
The NHS has been the subject of anniversary marking from the start. That in itself is of note: state services are not the normal focus for such activity, nor did the other remarkable innovations of the post-war Welfare State receive similar anniversary attention. Just as significantly, the nature and scale of anniversary culture has shifted. Relatively late in the day, the scale of activity has increased and has become more celebratory. For a long time, the government feared criticism for spending money on self-celebration. Meagre drinks to thank selected staff were the order of the day. As so often, and as Ben Pimlott argued, the idea of a post-war consensus is misleading.95 Labour was consistently more enthusiastic about the welfare state than the Conservatives. In fact, it is only recently that the two parties have competed to out anniversary one another. The shifting role of the media was also important, moving from provision of public information, to being a platform for debate, to forsaking neutrality in the context of the NHS’s assumed national treasure status. The increase in broadcasting channels and the advent of the internet offered new opportunities too, even if it made it harder to bring people together (the fact that the Olympics ceremony stood out is because, unusually, it could still do that).
It is tempting to see the 1997 election of New Labour as a pivot point for the increased volume and changing tone of anniversary activity. The 50th anniversary saw the NHS itself coming to recognize more clearly that the way it was represented and communicated to the public was crucial for its future. The volume on the anniversary dial reached a peak in 2018. This was partly a result of the kind of structural, institutional reasons already noted—for instance, changes in the media landscape and the nature of the NHS. However, it also reflected developments beyond the scope of this essay, such as concern about the state and future of the service after a decade of austerity, and the appeal of the NHS as a national and social symbol in a neo-liberal, post-Brexit, independence-riven Britain.
We have used the metaphor of a ‘fever’ to capture the mood of that anniversary moment. This has two connotations. The first is the idea of something spiking and breaking. The peak we have hopefully established; it is notable that even after the COVID crisis saw weekly public celebrations of NHS ‘heroes’ and other essential workers, the 75th anniversary of the NHS did not attract the levels of attention achieved in 2018. Whether this represents NHS fever breaking is too early to judge but it does feel like there has been a shift in mood. Retrospective cynicism around ‘clapping for carers’ during the COVID crisis has, perhaps, dealt a blow to anniversary fever. The second connotation of fever is that it involves a state of delirium. Here the picture is mixed. On one hand, the 2018 anniversary did in some respects treat the NHS as akin to a faith. On the other, and this may undercut the idea of a genuine peak too, the Mass Observation material highlights the real danger in assuming that the anniversary culture provided by the NHS and the media accurately reflected national feeling. Perhaps too, in its exuberance, the 70th anniversary also sowed the seeds for a return of the critical anniversary X-ray as expectations and assumptions—not to mention the much celebrated selfless ‘heroism’ of the pandemic NHS—crumble under the weight of economic retrenchment and the greying of Polly Toynbee’s ‘monster generation’.96 What certainly emerges powerfully from Mass Observation’s individual testimony is that people were keen to see their own positions on the service as rational, not under the sway of any anniversary fever.
Although in the age of social media and populist politics, there was a much greater disposition to democratize an anniversary such as this, it was still driven from the top down. The prominent place of the NHS in the menu of British anniversaries was undoubtedly helped by democratization, but it rested also on the way in which celebration of the institution has become a focus for the state. Andrew Seaton has used the term ‘welfare nationalism’ for this phenomenon and that term is very fitting.97 Commodification—the third force behind the modern obsession with anniversaries—is harder to weave into the explanation if we take this in a material sense. Indeed, the focus on defending a free NHS, service, and voluntary action were at first glance diametrically in tension with commodification (though there certainly was NHS ‘merch’ available to buy, as there had been since the 50th anniversary). What we see instead is popular investment in an economy of emotions: involving a weighing up of the value of the service in terms of affection; an emphasis on thanking and feeling; and an anniversary culture of providing people with the opportunity to publicly express their emotions. This fits much better with the hypothesis that celebrating the NHS, whether at anniversaries or during crises like COVID, has become a form of (self) protective activism, or at least a highly accessible way to signal support for the national institution, its workers, and its ‘values’, whatever they are construed to be. Retweeting the @NHSMillion, buying an ‘I Heart the NHS’ badge or wearing an NHS T-shirt, like standing at the kerb clapping on a Thursday night, may well be a low bar for qualification as a supporter of the NHS. However, ephemeral as they are, the hostility these gestures, like the marches and placards of earlier generations, provoke among policymakers and experts suggests that they do have an effect.
Finally, we should say something in conclusion about the place of history within this anniversary story. The NHS anniversaries emerge as moments for historical reflection but also the creation of simplified historical narratives. These narratives have changed over the life of the service. In 1948, the NHS was tied to the centenary of the 1848 Public Health Act: a story of evolution. Amidst uncertainty about the present, there have been moments for narratives that emphasize the struggle to introduce the service. Over time, a heroic and revolutionary narrative has come to dominate. Recently, ‘people’s history’ has also come to the fore, turning our focus to the sacrifice and service of staff and the saving of lives, and providing a largely, but not entirely, affirming archive of experience and emotion. In 2018, we found ourselves positioned to deliver material for such a people’s history and able in some ways to complicate its assumptions. We also, however, found ourselves on the outside looking in, intrigued by the climate of anniversary fever, and keen to situate it within a cultural history of the service. That second role can be an awkward one within a fevered climate. Looking forward, in challenging times for the NHS, historians have a difficult but important position. Our culture will make it hard to avoid the anniversary wave, but historians’ most valuable contribution may demand turning that wave into the subject of history.
Funding
The research underpinning the article was generously funded by the Wellcome Trust through Investigator Award 104837/Z/14/Z, ‘The Cultural History of the NHS’.
Footnotes
The turn to ‘birthday’ celebration since the 40th anniversary is also a line of argument in Andrew Seaton, Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best Loved Institution, pp. 260–83 (New Haven CT: Yale, 2023).
Thomas Otte, ed., The Age of Anniversaries: The Cult of Commemoration, 1895-1925 (London: Routledge, 2017); Roland Quinault, ‘The Cult of the Centenary, 1784-1914’, Historical Research, 71 (1998), 303–23.
Robert Harris, ‘50 Years On: Is Thatcher Churchill’s True Heir?’, Sunday Times 3 Sept. 1989, p. B3.
https://bitaboutbritain.com/anniversaries-in-2023/ accessed 15 Mar. 2023.
Priscilla Boniface, ‘History and the Public in the UK’, The Public Historian, 17 (1995), 21–37; Justin Court, ‘Picturing History, Remembering Soldiers: World War I Photography between the Public and the Private’, History and Memory, 29 (2017), 72–103; John Tosh, ‘Public History, Civic Engagement and the Historical Profession in Britain’, History, 99 (2014), 191–212.
Jennifer Crane, ‘“Save our NHS”: Activism, Information-based Expertise and the “new times” of the 1980s’, Contemporary British History, 33 (2019) 52–74.
For instance: ‘The Dream and the Reality’, Guardian, 5 July 1988, 19; and Neal Ascherson and Jay Rayner, ‘She was the first Patient Cared for by the NHS. Fifty years later they’re both going strong’, Guardian, 21 June 1998, 72.
‘The Transfer of the Hospitals’, Guardian, 6 July 1948, 3.
For instance: ‘Mansfield Hospital’, Nottingham Journal, 6 July 1948, 4; ‘The State Takes Over Arbroath Infirmary’, Arbroath Herald and Advertiser, 9 July 1948, 3; ‘67 Years’ Progress of the Buchanan: Tributes at Voluntary Hospital’s Final Meeting’, Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 10 July 1948, 2.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/the-new-social-services-and-the-citizen/zhrwbdm accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
‘Health Service helped millions—Minister’, Daily Mail, 6 July 1953, 2.
eg Lucy Freeman, ‘Briton Asks Study of Medical Plan; Asserts England’s Program is a “Test-Tube Experiment” from Which to Learn’, New York Times, 28 Sept. 1949, 34; Ysabel Rennie, ‘Hints From British Health Plan’, Washington Post, 25 Dec. 1949, B5; David M. Heymann, ‘Britain’s Health Plan: The Lesson for Us’, New York Times Sunday Magazine, 15 Jan. 1950, 12, 51–3.
‘Ten Years of Triumph’, Daily Mail, 2 July 1958, 1.
‘National Health Service – “Public Service” Supplement’, Hansard House of Commons Written Answer, 16 June 1958 [No. 807/1957/8]; on anniversary debates, Nicholas Timmins, ‘The NHS at 60: Calm Before the Storm?’ in Nicholas Timmins, ed., Rejuvenate or Retire? Views of the NHS at 60, p. 9 (9-30) (London: Nuffield Trust, 2008).
The National Archives, Public Record Office, Kew [TNA:PRO] MH55/2205, ‘Tenth Anniversary of National Health Service’, 6 June 1958.
See TNA:PRO MH55/2205 for memos and (rather grudging) civil service responses to the ITV request for a ministerial contribution.
See TNA:PRO MH55/2205 for exchanges between the editor of Public Service and S.A. Heald, a Ministry Public Relations Officer.
National and Local Government Officers Union, Supplement to Public Service, June 1958.
Andrew Seaton, ‘Against the “Sacred Cow”: NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine, 1948–72’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (2015), 424–49.
NHS Training Aids Unit, ‘A New Way of Caring’ (Dir. Trevor Payne; Sponsor DHSS), 1973 accessed online at https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-new-way-of-caring-1973-online accessed 1 June 2023. Whereas some 14 articles in the BMJ and Lancet condemned NHS as a sacred cow between 1958 and 1967, only 2 spoke to this theme between 1968 and 1977.
For instance, the debate hosted by Robin Day on his Talk-in To Day, BBC1 6 July 1973.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481 ‘30th Anniversary etc’; ‘Notes on 9th Jan. Ministerial Luncheon Meeting’.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481 ‘Note of an Informal Meeting with Leaders of the Health Service Unions, 9th January’ 1978.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481 ‘Thirtieth Anniversary of the NHS and Social Service Acts Background Note’, 30 January 1978; ‘Note of an Informal Meeting with Leaders of Health Service Unions, 9th Jan.’
Melanie Phillips, ‘A Cloud over NHS Anniversary’, Guardian, 1 July 1978, 1.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481 Patrick Nairne to Malone Lee, 13 January 1978.
TNA MH:PRO 160/1484 Mike Hartley-Brewer, Draft ‘Prime Minister’s Speech on 30th Anniversary’.
Melanie Phillips, ‘A Cloud over NHS Anniversary’, Guardian, 1 July 1978, 1.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481 ‘30th Anniversary of NHS and National Insurance Act Agenda Note Jan 16’.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481 Cover letter on PM reception invitees list, Collier to various, 27 Jan. 1978.
TNA:PRO MH160/1481, ‘Notes on 9th Jan. Ministerial Luncheon Meeting’; MH160/1484 ‘30th Anniversary of the NHS: Text of a Speech by the Prime Minister’, 5 July 1978.
Nursing Standard, 2 (35), 4 June 1998, 35.
‘Desperate Kinnock Steps up Fight to Halt Slide in Labour’s Fortunes’, Daily Mail, 4 July 1988.
‘Moore Tells Employers to Get Health Insurance for Workers’, Guardian, 5 July 1988, 20.
Karen de Young, ‘The British Love their NHS’, Washington Post, 1988.
Margaret Henfield, ‘Sylvia… First Lady of the Health Service’, Daily Mail, 6 July 1988, 9.
‘Suitable Case for Treatment’, Daily Mail 5 July 1988, 6.
Brian Deer, ‘Perking up on the Medicine of Competition’ and ‘Moore’s new Approach Brings Cheer for the Birthday Party’, Sunday Times, 3 July 1988, A11. It is unlikely to be coincidental that these articles surround a large advertisement for French champagne.
See also Seaton’s analysis of the development of activist marking of NHS Day: Our NHS, 264-9.
Julian Simmonds, ‘Nurses were among 1,000 Demonstrators in Trafalgar Square Who took Part in a Nationwide “Day of Action” to Protest about the State of the NHS’ in ‘Voting for Action’, Illustrated London News, 26 Mar. 1988, 10.
Jennifer Crane, ‘Why the History of Public Consultation Matters for Contemporary Health Policy’, Endeavour 42 (2018), 9–16; Crane, ‘“Save our NHS”’, 52–74. Note that the ‘feeling’ operationalized for activism from the 1980s is specifically not rooted in personal experiences, but in discourses about values and meanings of the NHS.
These were advertised for sale at £9.99 for commemorative sets of both: ‘Celebrate 50 Years of the NHS’, Daily Mail, 19 May 1998, 20.
A copy of the home page of the website is accessible at: https://tomgidden.gitlab.io/home.htm accessed 16 Feb. 2024.
‘Outrage at Cost of NHS’s 50th Birthday’, Daily Mail, 30 June 1998, 13.
‘Revels for a Revolution’, Guardian, 29 January 1997, B15.
‘Dobson Affirms “Gifts” to NHS on Ward Round’, Guardian, 6 July 1998, 8.
‘Tea with Queen for NHS Anniversary’, Observer, 15 March 1998, 9; David Brindle, ‘Feeling the Pulse’, Guardian, 27 May 1998, B18.
Songs of Praise, 5 July 1998, BBC1.
Taking the Pulse, 5 July 1998, Radio 4.
Beveridge, Bevan and the Bombs, 21.00, 7 July 1998, Radio 2.
Crane, ‘“Save our NHS”’, 58–60.
‘Stuffing their mouths with gold’, BBC Radio 3, 16 Feb. 1983 was presented by historian of medicine Michael Neve. It is freely accessible on the BBC Archive: s://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/stuffing-their-mouths-with-gold/zvw68xs accessed 16 Feb. 2024.
Speech at Downing Street reception on 4 July 2018: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-at-nhs-70-reception-4-july-2018 accessed 16 Feb. 2024. The announcement of the £20 billion present came in a speech on 18 July, though it had been trailed for several months: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-the-nhs-18-june-2018 accessed 16 Feb. 2024.
For instance, ‘NHS a National Religion—Ruth Davidson HAILS Theresa May’s MASSIVE NHS spending boost’, Daily Express, 19 June 2018: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/976208/Theresa-May-NHS-spending-boost-Ruth-Davidson-hails-Prime-Minister-BBC-Newsnight-SNP accessed 16 Feb. 2024. In contrast, Lawson’s remarks in his memoir, The View from Number 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), 613.
An array of political cartoons drew attention to the perceived hypocrisy of these claims across the year. See for example, Patrick Blower, ‘I [heart] the NHS’, Daily Telegraph, 17 Jan. 2018; Brian Adcock, ‘NHS Funding Explained’, Independent, 18 June 2018; Martin Rowson, ‘Making Every Penny Count’, Guardian, 19 June 2018. All accessible via The British Cartoon Archive, https://archive.cartoons.ac.uk/accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
We were ourselves regularly asked for such explanations, before and during the anniversary. See for example, Sviergesradio P1-Morgon, ‘NHS brittisk nationalreligion (NHS British National Religion)’ 30 June, 2015; BBC Radio 4, ‘Analysis Radio Four with Sonya Sodha’, 23 Jan. 2017; National Public Radio (USA) ‘Weekend Edition Sunday’, 25 February 2015; Melle Garschagen, ‘Volle wachtkamers in de winter, maar Britten zijn trots op hun zorgstelsel’, NRC Hanselblad (Dutch national broadsheet, and paper of record), 1 Mar. 2018; Olga Smirnova, ‘NHS популярнее королевы: почему британцы так любят свою систему здравоохранения (NHS is more popular than the Queen: why the British love their healthcare system so much)’, BBC Russia, 25 Apr. 2021.
Broadcast on BBC 1 at 9pm on 28 June 2018.
‘The NHS at 70’, Moral Maze, 20 June 2018, BBC Radio 4; Michael Portillo, ‘The Bevan Legacy’, British Medical Journal, 4 July 1998, 317 (7150), 37–40.
The television series was broadcast in three parts on BBC4 on 2, 9, and 16 July 2018. An archived version of our People’s History of the NHS project is available at: https://peopleshistorynhs.org/ accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
Roberta Bivins, ‘Picturing Race in the British National Health Service, 1948-1988’, Twentieth Century British History, 28 (2017), 83–109; Julian Simpson, Migrant Architects of the NHS: South Asian doctors and the Reinvention of British General Practice (1940s–1980s) (Manchester, 2018).
Victor Chimara, ‘Black Nurses: The Women who Saved the NHS’, Maroon Productions for BBC, 2016, re-aired repeatedly since then, including in 2018 and 2023. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b083dgtb accessed 11 Dec. 2023.
For instance, All Things Considered: Believing in the NHS, 1 July 2018, BBC Radio Wales. There was similar exploration of spiritual care in the NHS in Scotland on Sunday Morning, 1 July 2018, BBC Radio Scotland.
Linda Woodhead, ‘The NHS, our National Religion’, Religion Media Centre, 1 April 2020: https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/news/the-nhs-our-national-religion-2/ accessed 15 Feb. 2024.
Nicky Campbell, Five Live Breakfast: Your Call, 5 July 1948, BBC Radio 5.
Vanessa Feltz, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio 2.
For example on the 5th July alone: Chelsea at Breakfast (Live from Salford Royal Hospital), 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Manchester; Breakfast, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Humberside; Steve Harris (Live at Dorset County Hospital), 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Solent; Julian Clegg: NHS 70th Birthday Celebration—What has the Service Done for You?, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Solent; Aled Hughes, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Cymru; The Kaye Adams Programme: On the 70th anniversary of the National Health Service, what has the NHS done for you and yours? Who is your NHS hero?, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Scotland; Asian Network’s Big Debate (from a tea party at Sandwell General Hospital), 5 July 2018, BBC Asian Network; Sara Walker, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Wiltshire; Wynne Evans—NHS at 70: Live from the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Wales; Helen Blaby—Celebrating 70 Years of the NHS, 5 July 2018, BBC Radio Northampton.
Sunday Worship, 10 June 2018, BBC Radio 4; Celebration, 1 July 2018, BBC Radio Wales; Daily Service, 6 July 2018, BBC Radio 4.
The NHS—To Provide All People, 28 June 2018, BBC1; ‘The NHS Symphony’, Between the Ears, 30 June 2018, Radio 3; NHS at 70: Hold my Hand Lip Sync, 4 July 2018, BBC1 Wales.
https://www.nhsmillion.co.uk/about accessed 2 June 2023.
‘To start we would like you to write about any efforts you have noticed to mark the 70th Anniversary of the NHS? This might include television programs, radio, newspaper coverage, or public events. What are your views of these?’: Mass Observation Project (MOP), Summer Directive 2018 (112), ‘You and the NHS’: http://www.massobs.org.uk/images/Summer_2018_Directive_final.pdf accessed 16 Feb. 2024.
Annebella Pollen, ‘Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: “Scientifically, about as Valuable as a Chimpanzee’s Tea Party at the Zoo”?’, History Workshop Journal, 75 (2013), 213–35. On the other hand, emphasizing the value of the collection in accessing the everyday: Nick Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (London: Routledge, 2011).
Mass Observation Archive (University of Sussex): Replies to Summer 2018 Mass Observation Project Directive (112), C 5847 (subsequent references abbreviated as MOP (112): C 5847).
MOP (112): V 3767.
MOP (112): P 6588.
MOP (112): M 6082.
MOP (112): M 6193.
For instance, 30-year-old female journalist from Birmingham: MOP (112): R 6581.
MOP (112): F 5186.
As explained in the response of a 42-year-old planning officer from Sheffield: MOP (112): S 3711.
MOP (112): M 4859.
On that collective experience: Joe Moran, Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (London, 2013).
MOP (112): W 4376.
MOP (112): W 2322.
MOP (112): H 2637.
MOP (112): W 3176.
MOP (112): P5940, commenting on Danny Boyle, Isles of Wonder, Olympics Broadcasting Service, 27 July 2012. To watch the ceremony itself as broadcast on British terrestrial television, see: ‘The Complete London 2012 Opening Ceremony London Olympics 2012’, available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4As0e4de-rI accessed 16 Feb. 2024.
MOP (112): T 5672.
MOP (112): H 1541.
MOP (112): N 6622.
Ian Banks, ‘No man’s land: men, illness, and the NHS’, BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 323 (2001), 1058–60.
MOP (112): S 3035.
MOP (112): P 5715.
MOP (112): T 4715.
Agnes Arnold-Forster, ‘Ordinary People and the Royal Commission on the NHS’, Twentieth Century British History, 34 (2023), 275–98; Martin D. Moore, ‘Waiting for the Doctor: Managing Time and Emotion in the British National Health Service, 1948-80’, Twentieth Century British History, 33 (2022), 203–29; Jennifer Crane, ‘Loving the National Health Service: Social Surveys and Activist Feelings’, in Jennifer Crane and Jane Hand, eds, Posters, Protests and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the National Health Service in Britain, pp. 79–102 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).
Ben Pimlott, ‘The Myth of Consensus’ in L.M. Smith, ed. The Making of Britain, p. 129 (London: Macmillan, 1988); Ben Pimlott, ‘Is The “Postwar Consensus” A Myth?’, Contemporary Record, 2 (1989), 12–15.
Polly Toynbee, ‘We’re All Young Now’, Guardian, 4 Feb. 1998, 17.
Seaton, Our NHS, 260.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Wellcome for their support. We are also grateful to the members of the project team, the Mass Observers who replied to our Directive, the wider CHM community, the NHS Tribes and the audience of the 2023 Pimlott Lecture for their questions, responses, suggestions, and enthusiasm.
