News from a lifetime ago: opinion polls in the 1950s

Old Gallup surveys reveal a country beset by strikes, divided by royal scandal and pessimistic about the world, writes John Rentoul

In 1958 there were a lot of questions about whether the ‘railwaymen’ were justified in their demands for higher wages (PA)

I have been browsing old opinion polls again. One of my treasured possessions is a big two-volume compilation of Gallup polls in Great Britain from the start of opinion polling in 1937 until 1975. In the past week, I have got as far as 1958.

Britain was a different country then: 90 per cent of adults said they had gone to Sunday school as a child, and 71 per cent said they believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Most people smoked in those days: 56 per cent compared with 13 per cent today; and more people said that they didn’t “use alcoholic beverages” (in the terminology of the time): 32 per cent compared with 20 per cent now.

Yet it is often the similarities that stand out. In 1958 there were a lot of questions about whether the “railwaymen” were justified in their demands for higher wages: 63 per cent said yes and 20 per cent no. “If large-scale strikes should arise,” Gallup asked which party could handle the situation best, and found that Labour was favoured by 37 per cent to 29 per cent for the Conservative government, with a large proportion saying that they didn’t know.