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HCIC Periodic Assessment Test PT1

2020-05-14

Before you start, read these instructions carefully and follow them when you send your
answer:

1. You should send your answer via email (jacinta.matos@sapo.pt) by 13.00, Saturday 16.
May. Do NOT upload your answer to the Inforestudante.

2. You should send me both a Word and a PDF version of your answer. The title of both these
documents should identify the course (HCIC), the nature of the document (Test) and include
your name - in this order (ex.: HCIC Test Anabela Santos)

3. The first page of your answer should be headed: HCIC Test 2020 + your name.

4. Your answer should not exceed 4 pgs, Times New Roman, size 12, line spacing 1,5.

5. Bear in mind that this is a test, not an essay. Long quotations from critical sources are not
required or appropriate. If, however, you do quote briefly from a source, you should identify
it in a footnote to avoid plagiarism. (Problematic answers will be run through the University's
URKUND plagiarism detection system)

TEST

Analyse and critically discuss the passage below. You should go through it carefully and
identify references made to events, episodes or issues of relevance to the decade in
question. Explain, expand and contextualize them, but do not forget the text and simply
regurgitate everything you know about the decade. This will not gain you any points.
You should also comment on the author's opinion and his critical assessment of the 1950s.

'If I were asked to recall the formative childhood decade of my British life, I would arouse
my memory with a film, and a very obscure one at that. Holiday was made in Blackpool by
British Transport Films [in 1956], the cine art of the British Transport Commission which, in a
ramshackle and cash-strapped fashion, held together the railways, waterways and lorries
the Attlee government had brought into public ownership in the late 1940’s. […]

The first shot is of holidaymakers alighting in the sunshine in great numbers and lugging
suitcases along platforms 11 and 12 of Blackpool station […] The men are dressed in jackets
over open-necked shirts, the women are in flouncy summer dresses and their children wear
small versions of the same. […]

Most men are tidy and groomed, the women in slacks or skirts and just the occasional
cowboy hat or Teddy Boy hairstyle among the younger men. There is a lad in an RAF
uniform, part of the National Service generation required to man the late imperial garrisons
in Malaya and the new Cold War frontiers in Germany. The older men are in suits; their
ladies tote huge handbags. There are no black or brown faces. […]
 2

Holiday is a snapshot, a warm vignette of a settled moment in national life flecked with
gold, or so it can easily seem to eyes such as mine which first glimpsed the world in 1947.
Yet danger lurks among the sentiments it stimulates. […]

That society, in which anyone over thirty had personal memories of slump and war, had a
sense of the fragility of life and the caprice of events and, by 1956, an appreciation of how
the world might end in a nuclear cataclysm that could trump any previous shared
catastrophe. Prosperity might be growing, with full employment seemingly assured and a
health service still seen as a talisman of national progress, but the 'never again' impulse […]
might prove shallowly rooted.

There was anxiety mixed with pleasure and yet, in many ways, it was, as Holiday depicted, a
relatively golden time, a more innocent age before the jets from Manchester Ringway [1]
took the place of the holiday steam specials [2] and the Blackpool sands lost pride of place to
those of Torremolinos. From the Suez summer and autumn of 1956, illusion after illusion
was reluctantly and sometimes painfully shattered for the settled people on that Holiday
beach and those who governed them. Even by 1960 Anstey’s [3] film might have already
struck the discerning viewer as an evocation of a world we were losing. Some of that world’s
more socially rigid aspects we were well rid of; other solidarities less so or not at all. But dull
to live through it was not.'

From Peter Hennessy, Having it so Good. Britain in the Fifties

1
Ringway: area of Manchester where the airport is located.
2
Steam specials: trips on a steam train designed for holiday makers.
3
Edgar Anstey: producer of Holiday.