HareBrain, it sounds like Sandbrook is doing for 1956-1979 something similar to what David Kynaston has done for Britain 1945-1962. The first volume, Austerity Britain, in particular was compelling, and gave me part of the answer to those who've objected to Tolkien's hobbits' enjoyment of food, with the author's evident approval.
From my article "Austerity Britain and Tolkien" from 2010 (published in the excellent newsletter Beyond Bree):
-----readers of David Kynaston’s recent and much-praised book Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, may become sympathetic to the Tolkien’s unabashed celebration of creature comforts in their own right, when they come to perceive the British people’s deprivations during those long, cold, dirty, polluted, and just plain hungry years.
Kynaston’s book, drawing on diaries, letters, Mass Observation interviews, and other documents, superbly evokes the dismal condition of postwar Britain (1945-1951). This is the period in which Tolkien was finishing the writing of The Lord of the Rings (composed from mid-Dec. 1937 to the end of 1949). The postwar austerity period had become so grim that, in spring 1948, “as many as 42 percent of people wanted to emigrate, compared with 19 percent immediately after the war” (p. 249). I don’t suggest that this is the reason that departure (from the Shire; from Middle-earth itself) is such an important theme of LOTR, but I do think the theme would have a poignancy for Tolkien and his fellow citizens that readers today, especially Americans, would not suspect.
Largely dependent on imported supplies to feed its population, the United Kingdom began rationing common foodstuffs in Jan. 1940, knowing that some shipments would be destroyed by German U-boats. British people sometimes envied American servicemen stationed in the UK during World War II as “oversexed, overfed, over here.” Note the “overfed” -- the Americans arrived not having experienced the British deprivation. After the war, rationing actually intensified, because of UK indebtedness to America and the end of Lend-Lease, the determination to fund the new welfare state, etc.
Throughout much of Tolkien’s book, the hobbit heroes must ration their food (e.g. Frodo and Sam trying to stretch their supply of lembas). They keenly miss the Shire’s abundant good, plain “vittles.” Consider the context of the time. Kynaston notes that, in late 1947, the already stringent British food rationing was made even more severe. He quotes Rose Uttin of Wembley:
“Our rations are now 1 oz bacon per week – 3 lbs potatoes – 2 ozs butter – 3 ozs marge – 1 oz cooking fat – 2 ozs cheese & 1/- [one shilling’s worth] meat – 1 lb jam or marmalade per month – ½ lb bread per day. … My dinner today 2 sausages which tasted like wet bread with sage added – mashed potato – ½ tomato – 1 cube cheese & 1 slice bread & butter. The only consolation no air raids to worry us” (pp. 246-7)
Kynaston could have quoted C. S. Lewis’s brother Warren’s diary (10 Nov. 1947):
“A staggering blow in the papers this morning: potatoes are put ‘on rations’ on a scale of 3 lbs. per week for the bourgeois. And so the last ‘filler’ food disappears from the diet, and the days of real hunger come upon us. It’s extraordinary how one is conditioned by a secure past: even now I can’t grasp the fact that this means that I, WHL, will go to bed hungry and get up hungry; these, I say, are things that happen to nations one reads about in the papers, not to me” (Lewis, p. 213).
The importance of potatoes for hungry Britons as familiar and palatable “filler food” -- “rare good ballast for an empty belly,” as Samwise puts it -- justifies Tolkien’s occasionally-censured inclusion of a New World tuber in Middle-earth’s agriculture.
..........Reading Austerity Britain may prompt Tolkien’s readers to reconsider before criticizing or mocking his celebration of the creature comforts that were in such short supply while The Lord of the Rings was being written. And although the Shire is restored by the book’s end, I now see that LOTR is a book about emigration – think of the Elves’ departure, but especially of Frodo’s, at the Grey Havens. I will always think of The Lord of the Rings, hereafter, as an “austerity” book.------
It would be interesting to get Sandbrook's take, especially in the first two of the four books you list, on the Britain in which Tolkien's books took off as so-called "cult books."
(I have to finish Kynaston's volume, A Shake of the Dice, that brings the narrative through 1962. That done, I will have read the whole series so far.)
