Within a few years, a giant change in the very nature of British society would happen.  The Queen's Christmas message - once a shared nation experience - would begin to fall from popularity and the programme would be watched only by the old, the traditionalists and the patriotic, who were frequently a single person.

There have been many discussions on why this decline in 'respect' and, indeed, love, for the royals happened.  But perhaps the untold story is why the UK embraced the age of deference in and around the 1950s.

The cliché is the exemplary behaviour of the royal family during the war.  The King and Queen - later the Queen Mother - were seen as heroes for their refusal to leave London at the height of the blitz.  Their willingness to walk through streets destroyed a few hours earlier by the Luftwaffe, to engage the public in conversation, and to share in the people's struggles were honest reflections of George's beliefs and his wife's commitment to the institution of the Monarchy - so nearly destroyed a few years earlier by her brother-in-law.

But George VI's early death is perhaps more important.  The event left three women to be photographed in mourning black - his mother, wife and eldest daughter.  Those images were then as heart-breaking as the scenes of William and Harry of Wales walking behind their late mother's coffin in recent times.

Soon after, a 'young girl' - actually in her twenties - looking fragile and nervous but determined was crowned Queen.  This girl, with a nervous but winning smile and determined eyes was enough for the nation to again draw her to their hearts.  Add a young son, interested in the events on the periphery like all small people, and you have the ideal family.

And this was the ideal - husband, wife, a son and a daughter.  A comfortable life, a standing in the community, a job for the men, shopping for the women, free education for the children, free healthcare for all.  Everything Mr and Mrs Britain had felt entitled to after so many years of total war followed by the first touch of a true socialist government concerned in making a country fit for heroes to live in.

This ideal sounds perfect even today.  The sense of community and of well-being were all-consuming.  But, like in the rest of the western world, it was actually bought with a large price.  Ant-like conformity of the people was required.  A distance was required between fathers and their children.  Deference extended beyond the royals to anyone who was considered to have a place in society above your own.

The police were brutal with offenders, using forms of instant punishment unimaginable now.  The judiciary was worse with non-conformity.  Murder meant the state breaking your neck as punishment.  Homosexuality meant life in prison or simple blackmail by anyone with a mind to it.  Unwanted pregnancy meant an unwanted child and ostracism from friends and family, or possible death in a back street with the aid of a coat hanger and some gin.

Any sign of nonconformity was to be condemned, feared, as if it threatened the very fabric of society.  Which it did.  Only the ideals - if not the practice - of freedom of speech survived the rush to conform.  But the severity of society's response to things 'out of the norm' plus the obvious inequalities it brought would guarantee that youth would not accept it without question.