Your NHS: The NHS Story: Week ending May 3

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This section gives you an archive of the stories which made it into the national press during 1948.

The King and Queen celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. Buckingham Palace and Edinburgh Castle are both floodlit on the eve of their anniversary and a thanksgiving service is held at St Paul's. A total of 147.5 million Silver Wedding commemorative stamps are issued and most are sold by early June.

At the Amsterdam Motor Show, the Rover Company of Solihull introduces the Land Rover, the first jeep-style vehicle designed specifically for civilian use.
Rover's chairman and chief engineer Maurice Wilkes, owned a farm and had bought an ex-US army Jeep. He became convinced that he could build a better four wheel drive vehicle using the same basic ideas. To overcome the steel shortage, body panels were originally made of aluminium. Models were secretly tested by pulling ploughs and other farming tools. The original Land Rovers equipped with permanent four wheel drive, a canvas roof and optional doors, was an instant success.

Tourist travel resumes to Switzerland, Austria, Holland, France, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Italy and Sweden. The Treasury's regulations on foreign currency and allowances stipulates the foreign currency allowance is £35 a year for adults and £25 for children up to the age of 16, only available in travellers' cheques. Travellers are allowed to take up to £5 in sterling notes out of the country on the understanding it can not be spent in foreign businesses or shops anywhere abroad or exchanged for foreign currency. If departing travellers attempt to take more than £5 in notes, they can be seized and confiscated. Similarly travellers are only allowed to take silver coins amounting to a maximum of £1 with them.

By 11.00am over 1000 travellers had left Victoria and Waterloo stations to travel abroad.

Norman Mailer, 25-year-old writer and US veteran, publishes his first novel 'The Naked and the Dead'. An indictment of the futility of war, the book describes the lives of GIs on reconnaissance patrol on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific.