Barbara Betts, the daughter of a tax inspector, was born in Bradford in 1910. Her childhood was steeped in left-wing politics. Her father was an active member of the Independent Labour Party and she became a socialist at an early age. She was educated at Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Oxford University. Her father had been a William Morris-esque Guild Socialist; her mother used to set up a maypole on their patch of Pontefract cinder track. In the 1950s, she watched in horror as her vision of an English working-class improving itself through education being washed away as a slew of jukeboxes, Hollywood movies, quiz shows, T-shirts and chewing gum tumbled over the Atlantic. English culture was being subsumed by the American Vulgar. Some of the fiercest resistance came from the left - JB Priestley and Richard Hoggart and Barbara Castle.

Producer: Mohini Patel. Show less