SALE Making Do

Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World

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This book is unused and unread. It has some cosmetic imperfections such as scuffing and creasing. It is also stamped 'damaged'.

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Imagine a world in which clothing wasn't superabundant – cheap, disposable, indestructible – but perishable, threadbare and chronically scarce. Eighty years ago, when World War II ended, a textile famine loomed. What would everyone wear as uniforms were discarded and soldiers returned home, Nazi camps were liberated, and millions of uprooted people struggled to subsist? In this richly textured history, Carruthers unpicks a familiar wartime motto, 'Make Do and Mend', to reveal how central fabric was to postwar Britain. Clothes and footwear supplied a currency with which some were rewarded, while others went without. Making Do moves from Britain's demob centres to liberated Belsen – from razed German cities to refugee camps and troopships – to uncover intimate ties between Britons and others bound together in new patterns of mutual need. Filled with original research and personal stories, Making Do illuminates how lives were refashioned after the most devastating war in human history.

• Provides an intimate and textured account of the aftermath of WWII in the UK and the British empire through focusing on what people wore
• Foregrounds clothing as central to histories of postwar adjustment, including demobilization, humanitarianism and immigration
• Draws on extensive original research ranging from personal diaries and memoirs to Mass Observation responses and declassified official records from the UK, US and UN