My father, Norman Longmate, who has died aged 90, was an author, historian and broadcaster best known for his 1971 book How We Lived Then, a study of everyday life in second world war Britain, which took the then innovative approach of gathering personal recollections from more than 1,000 ordinary people.
Other wartime histories followed, including If Britain Had Fallen, The GIs, Air Raid and The Doodlebugs. He was the author of 31 books, including five detective stories, and became known in the 1960s for readable, thoroughly researched Victorian social histories: King Cholera – The Biography of a Disease, and The Waterdrinkers, on the temperance movement, whose policy of abstention from alcohol, as a former Fleet Street journalist, he never personally favoured.
The Workhouse followed in 1974, his interest originating in his childhood, when the grim building across the road from his council estate was still where people down on their luck feared ending up. Also in 1974 he wrote The Real Dad’s Army, to accompany an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.
Norman was born in Newbury, Berkshire, son of Ernest, a photographer, and Margaret (nee Rowden), a farmer’s daughter. His family were reduced to poverty after his father’s photography business collapsed in 1931. From St Nicholas junior school in Newbury, he won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital school in West Sussex. In the Home Guard at school, he was called up in 1944 and based in London, before being sent to Denmark after VE Day.
He went on to study modern history at Worcester College, Oxford, and was active in student journalism and the Labour Club. At Oxford he met his wife, Elizabeth, known as Betty (nee Taylor), a fellow historian, who made her career in teaching. My parents married in 1953.
My father did two years of postgraduate study before landing a job as a leader writer on the Evening Standard. From there he became a feature writer on the Daily Mirror. He later worked at the Electricity Council, before moving to the BBC in 1963, originally in schools broadcasting, but settling into the corporation’s internal “civil service”, the secretariat, where, among other things, he wrote speeches for the director general.
Meanwhile, though, he pursued his other life part-time as a historian and writer. He wrote freelance radio documentaries; and was often a historical adviser, including on Yorkshire TV’s series How We Used to Live. People who worked with him remember him as supportive, knowledgable, good humoured and entertaining company. Among many TV appearances, he was one of the advisory historians in the “war cabinet” in Channel 4’s The 1940s House in 2001, alongside Juliet Gardiner.
After retiring from the BBC in 1983, he wrote Defending the Island and Island Fortress on the Britain Isles’ resistance to invasion since Roman times, and an autobiography, The Shaping Season.
My parents separated in the early 1980s but remained friends; Elizabeth died in 2011. Norman is survived by me.