Identity Cards:

Wartime identity cards, when introduced in 1939, had just three administrative functions: national service, national security and food rationing.  Within eleven years this had risen to thirty-nine, and showing your identity card for the most trivial of purposes had become routine. A few years after the war ended the British public were becoming fed up with growing intrusion and harassment, with every jobs-worth official from post office clerks to railway porters, bus inspectors to bobbies on the beat constantly demanding people’s identity cards.  People began to gather in the streets to burn their cards in defiance of what had come to symbolise an overbearing and ever more intrusive state. The identity card scheme began to unravel on June 26th 1951, due to the defiance of one man: Clarence Willcock. Mr Willcock refused to produce his ID card when stopped by a police officer.  Lord Goddard, Lord Chief Justice, summing up in the resulting appeal court case said; “To use Acts of Parliament, passed for particular purposes during war, in times when the war is past - tends to turn law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs”.  As a result Winston Churchill abolished the last compulsory ID scheme in Britain in 1952 .
 
Two identity cards - which on is the fake and which one is the real thing? Click on each image to find out.