This thesis has concentrated on those speculatively built estates in the Greater London area and in the south-east of England which were occupied by the working-classes. Where there were industries, there were sufficiently secure job opportunities for the working-classes to become mortgage payers. At the same time the new factories also provided some unskilled jobs for their wives. The hope of work also drew others in who could become lodgers for a temporary period in the new homes thus increasing further the income available to working-class households. These conditions existed in those areas of Hayes and Harrow Middlesex, and probably also occurred in other parts of England where similar circumstances prevailed, such as in Romford in Essex and Kingston-upon Thames in Surrey.
As has been shown the speculative developers were able to build houses at low price levels and building societies were able to provide mortgages at a cost where the weekly repayments were both lower or equal to the cost of rented accommodation, where rented accommodation was available. The building societies claimed that they were rehousing the working classes as did the speculative builders. Schedules No. 2 and 3, over page from the Borough of Surbiton, and the appendixes A, B and C from the builders John Laing and Wates illustrate that those who were unarguably working classes were buying houses in large numbers.[there is a handwritten note on the original schedules No.2 and 3 which says “practically all owner occupiers”] (1). As these schedules show virtually all the occupiers are clearly members of the working classes and were able to obtain mortgages with weekly wages as low as £2.10s.
Swenarton and Taylor in their article entitled ‘The Scale and Nature of the Growth of Owner-Occupation in Britain between the Wars’ examined the main aspects of the growth of owner occupancy in the inter-war period (2). Their principal objective was to determine the geographical and social distribution of owner-occupancy in Britain at the eve of the Second World War, and to contrast it with the position that existed in 1914.
In order to calculate the social distribution of owner-occupancy they sought to compare average weekly earnings with the building societies’ criteria for weekly income necessary to undertake a mortgage. For nationwide earnings Swenarton and Taylor used the statistical information in a Ministry of Labour report of 1931 (3). However, because of its date of publication and method of collation, the statistics do not take into account the changes which took place in the middle to latter part of the 1930s in the United Kingdom. The report was based on 62,000 returns from companies through the United Kingdom. The returns were for people in work on 24 October 1931 and included female and juvenile labour and those in part-time jobs, but excluded clerks, commercial travellers, shop assistants, civil servants, the self-employed and all salaried employees. The returns also included those on short-time working.
The changes taking place in the U.K. were more evident in the South of England, where the main effects of the boom were being felt. Swenarton and Taylor state that there are no precise surveys detailing the numbers of houses in the United Kingdom, but they took the returns from the Report to the Committee on Valuation for Rates of 1939 as giving the most accurate figures (4). The Report gives good general information on the numbers of dwellings, but there were few other precise surveys of households carried out during this inter-war period. The New Survey of London, and the research by Massey and, more recently by Daunton, may be considered too small to give a fair indication of the true position. The New Survey of London was carried out in 1930 and its detailed records relate mainly to working-class and lower-middle-class households. The Massey and Daunton work was carried out among 1,360 middle-class families with incomes of at least £4 15s 6d (5).
With a view to determining the percentage of homes which were owner- occupied, Swenarton and Taylor again looked at the Valuation for Rates data (6). They also looked at the previous work by other historians. The survey by the Departmental committee was incomplete and covered only three-quarters of the estimated housing stock at that time. The assumptions drawn by Swenarton and Taylor are logical, given the evidence that they looked at. They conclude that it is likely that the true level of owner-occupation in 1938 was somewhat below the figure of 35 per cent calculated by the Departmental Committee. This is due to the fact that the missing quarter of the housing stock was very likely to have been almost exclusively tenanted. If it is assumed that all the omitted properties were tenanted then the proportion of owner-occupied homes would drop to around 25 per cent, of the total. As to the levels of home ownership between the wars, there is only a limited amount of information available. Swenarton and Taylor convincingly dispute the arguments and assumptions which had led some historians to say that the level of housing stock in owner-occupation prior to 1914 was around 10 per cent; they say that there is no justification for adopting this figure (7). But they are unable to reach any firm conclusions as to the likely level of home-ownership during this period.
On the question of the numbers and the type of housing stock in the United Kingdom prior to World War II, Swenarton and Taylor use a schedule compiled as part of the Departmental report (8). The majority of the houses in the schedule, 7,471,891 out of 8,249,645, or 90 per cent, are smaller houses. The report shows that there are almost five times as many small, i.e. under £40 gross value post-1919, owner-occupied houses, as there are houses with a gross value of over £40. Of these houses in the band up to £40 gross value, 60 per cent were owner-occupied. Gross values for rating purposes bear some approximate value to sale price and in 1938 Tarbuck attempted to equate rateable values with capital values. He estimates that the houses in the band £20 to £40 had a sale value between £417 and £816 (9). The author has examined various properties in Harrow and Hayes in the Rating Register, and compared them with the prices advertised in the newspapers of the time to check the accuracy of the Tarbuck figures. The schedule appears to be broadly accurate. However, it is clear that the gross value band £20 to £40 is too large, and does not differentiate between the mass of houses which would have come within a band £17 to £30 gross value. For example, all the 1,200 houses on the Grange Park estate built by Taylor Woodrow in the early 1930s had a gross value of under £20 at the time of their original assessment. They were sold for amounts between £400 and £500. In the Borough of Sutton ‘All the new houses had an assessment of £38 gross value or less and most were under £27 gross value’ (10). In their evidence to the Committee the National Federation of House-Builders said that:
As at 16 March 1939 2,000,000 houses have been built [since 1919]…800,000 assessed at £13 and the Ministry of Health shows that the number provided by private enterprise with rateable values under £26 was 1,949,895 (11). We have no record of what the average income is of these people but we do know from our experience that in almost every instance these people are contracting to pay for a house to the full extent of their ability to pay…we deal very largely with wage earners who are getting £3, £3.10s and £4 0s per week’ (12).
The Committee said that ‘We find that of the returns submitted 49 per cent are owner-occupied, all but 10 per cent of these post war houses are under £40. The National Federation of Home Owners submitted examples of 1,223 houses most of which were owner-occupied, all of these had an assessment below £28’ (13). The evidence appears to be clear that the majority of the houses in existence prior to 1939 were the small type suitable to be bought by the working class or lower middle classes (14).
The most important conclusion reached by Swenarton and Taylor was that ‘By 1939 owner-occupation had become more middle-class.’ This immediately raises the problems of class definition. It also begs the question that the more important point in issue is the fact that the lower paid workers for the first time in English history were able to buy their own home. Swenarton and Taylor did not define middle, lower-middle or working classes. Referring to the schedule of wages in the Ministry of Labour’s Survey of 1931, they have, by inference, linked low wages to the working classes. However, as mentioned above, this survey is incomplete. Swenarton and Taylor have made their own calculations to arrive at the £3 5s average wage which they use, and it has not been possible to confirm their figures.
This thesis has likewise not sought to define class in any narrow or quantifiable terms. But the evidence is clear that labourers, carpenters, engineering workers, drivers and other who were clearly members of the working classes at the time were able to buy small houses from the speculative developers. These new working-class home-owners created a new class, an intermediate class, as yet neither middle class nor working class. They became increasingly middle class as their prospects improved, a class anxious to differentiate itself from those it believed its inferiors such as (those in council houses or rented accommodation), and to emulate those it conceived its as superiors.
Swenarton and Taylor link wages with the ability, or inability, to meet mortgage payments. They have taken figures from the 1931 survey based on selective earnings from only 2,700,000 workers. Swenarton and Taylor deduce from their interpretation of the figures that only 10.6 per cent of workers earned £3.5s per week or more, and only this narrow top band, Swenarton and Taylor claim, would have been able to support the building societies’ criteria for buying a house. There is very little reported material from government bodies as to levels of earnings during the 1930s. Evidence the author has collected from Nestlé, Lloyds and Barclays Banks, from the London County Council, the New Survey of London, Welwyn Garden City, and the Watford Civic Survey on the rates of pay that weekly paid workers and salaried staff were earning in the pre-war period, makes it clear that the low-paid workers were often earning in excess of the figure of £3.5s and certainly had a sufficient income to buy houses. In Appendix A Swenarton and Taylor show that an income of £3.8s.9d is necessary to buy a house with a value between £550 and £600 and for five shillings more a house of £601 to £650 could be acquired. A house costing £650 in the 1930s situated in the outer London area would have at the very top end of the range being built by the speculative builder as the majority of houses were costing less than £500.
As would be expected, the evidence from the New Survey of London also shows that incomes in the London area were higher than the 1931 survey showed (15). It is also likely that the situation in respect of high wage levels was mirrored in some other parts of the United Kingdom where new industries were established which required those with new skills such as drivers and electricians. The 1931 survey was conducted as the very bottom of the economic cycle at a time when there was severe depression in the older industries in the United Kingdom and the new industries had not been created. Unemployment in the construction industry peaked at 30 per cent in 1932; and the Ministry of Labour’s Gazette shows that there was a decline during 1931 in the average level of wage-rates exceeding that recorded in any year since 1922. In all the industries and services for which statistics are recorded the changes in wages reported to the Ministry resulted in an aggregate decrease of £406,300 in the weekly full-time rates of pay of 3,010,000 people. Coal-miners, who were excluded from the survey, recorded increases as a result of the Coal Mines Act of 1931 which adopted a 7.5 hour shift. This had the effect of giving the miners one hour extra pay per week and increased overtime rates (16). After 1933 the economy improved rapidly, and by 1937 the volume of production was 50 per cent above that in 1932. The housing boom was mainly in the prosperous south east of England and took place generally within the period between 1933 to 1939. Therefore, any proposal which is based on the use of figures from the 1931 survey is misleading.
A survey of 141 borrowers from the ledgers of the Leicester Permanent Building Society in 1924 and 1930 which show that only a small proportion of the borrowers were members of the working classes can also be considered as unrepresentative; the 1924 and 1930 are not comparable with the years of the speculative building boom of 1933 to 1939 (17).
However, based upon the survey by the Ministry of Labour and taking the average wage of £3 5s, Swenarton and Taylor compare these 1931 earnings with the average earnings and income required to comply with building society status requirements in 1939, almost a decade later. The schedule used by Swenarton and Taylor starts at a freehold price in a band of £500-£600, whereas there were very many houses sold at prices below this amount, especially where the interest acquired by the home owner was leasehold, as was the case in the Midlands and the North of England (18). The schedule does not make clear either the term of the mortgage or the interest rate used. The author has calculated that only if the mortgage were for a term of 20 years at a rate of 6 per cent interest would the figures match those used in the schedule. In 1938 it was likely that mortgages would have been at the rate of 5 per cent and for a term of 25 years, which would have reduced the average weekly total outgoings to 17s 11p as against the figure of £1 0s 5p or a reduction of around 9 per cent.
From calculation made by the author using the index cards of The New Survey of London, which was conducted in the autumn of 1930, it reveals that about 15 per cent of the people interviewed for the Survey owned their own homes (19). These houses were, in the main, the Victorian terraced villas in the London suburbs of Acton, Kentish Town and Camden Town. The Survey shows that the average wage of those who took part was in the order of £4.00s per week; this income ignores pensions received, rent allowance from the railway companies and police force or income from lodgers (20). Virtually all those who were interviewed could be said to be from the working-classes; of these, the printers, policemen, bus drivers and the decorators were in the upper register of earnings at around £5 per week.
The information on earnings collated by the author and evidence from the New Survey of London of 1930 and the schedules submitted by the Borough of Surbiton to the Departmental Committee on Rating and Valuation in 1939, almost a decade later, confirm the level of wages earned by those who could be considered to be members of the working classes (21). The schedules from the Borough of Surbiton show that in the outer London suburb of Surbiton the wages were lower, in 1939, than they had been in the inner London suburb of Acton which was the subject of the New Survey of London a decade before. In spite of wages being lower, all the occupiers of the estates submitted as evidence by the Borough of Surbiton were able to buy their own houses. The largest category of workers shown in the schedules were labourers earning £2.18s.9p per week – a wage at which Swenarton and Taylor say it would be impossible to buy a house in 1939.
The builders Wates and John Laing, in a submission to the Committee on Rating and Valuation, presented schedules, showing details of the first ten sales on two of their speculative developments and individual cases taken at random (22). These schedules show that all the sales were made to members of the working or lower-middle classes who, on average, were earning £4 18s 2s per week. All the information available shows that there were very large differences in the earnings of the people interviewed. Wages of up to £9 per week were recorded in the New Survey of London for people who could be considered to be working class, and printers and salespeople were well rewarded. Nestlé were paying travellers £41 13 4p per month in 1921 (23). The surveys from the Borough of Surbiton showed wage levels which were lower than might have been expected when compared with the New Survey of London and the evidence submitted by the developers Wates and John Laing. There could be many reasons for this; it is possible that only the basic wage was shown, without recording overtime, piece-work payments or bonuses. In their evident to the committee it was in the interest of the Borough of Surbiton to distort the true income of a household in order to show that the payment of rates represented a high proportion of the income of working people who occupied the estates in their area. The Borough of Surbiton were trying to make a case against any further increases in the rates payable and a need for grants from the Treasury.
The National Federation of Owner Occupiers said in their submission to the Committee that ‘There are at least one million owner occupiers with a total weekly income of not more than £5 per week who are buying property’ (24). They show examples of a clerk on an income of £4 per week buying a house which cost £470 and a worker, with three children, on an income of £3 5s, buying a home which cost £365. They also give details of two estates in Sheffield and Liverpool occupied by working-class people, comprising 1,223 houses, the majority of which are owner-occupied, where the average income was £5 per week.
From the evidence submitted to the committee it would appear that most of the houses which were being built were small enough and cheap enough to have been bought by the lower-paid members of the working and lower-middle classes. It is difficult to get evidence of the actual financial circumstances of the owner-occupiers who form by far the largest class of post-war occupiers. Probably the majority of them earned between £3 and £4 per week, although there is evidence to show that some of those who purchased their own house earned £3 or less, and some earned £5 a week or a little more. A committee member said that ‘If we take the income of the chief wage-earner alone,…we find that the percentages of repayments and rates is …46% in various private enterprise estates near London. Yet it is generally held by the building societies, I gather, that not more than one fifth of the household income should go in charges on his house’ (25).
In the pamphlet entitled Private Enterprise Housing, the Ministry of Health produced calculations showing the cost of buying the average priced house in July 1939 at rates of interest applying at that time. It shows that the weekly repayments were in the order of 13s 6p for such a house (26). The house price used by the Ministry was £480, and the majority of houses built in the boom years of 1933 to 1937 were sold at around £500. The advances by the building societies below £500 in the decade to 1936 had grown from 172,055 to 655,026 and the total lent on mortgages under £500 went from £54 million to £194 million. Almost at the end of the decade The Economist said that ‘The mortgage advances are heavily weighted in favour of “owner-occupier” business in the smaller house’. In 1938 [from the figures produced in 1939] the average value of mortgages granted was £604, but this also included mortgages on commercial properties and block loans to builders in respect of a number of properties. In fact the average value of a mortgage under £500 was £303 (27). This is confirmed by the statements made at the time by the building societies themselves and the statistics from the Registrar of Friendly Societies. The Co-operative Permanent Society recorded in their accounts for 1936 that they had advanced £4.37 million in that year to new home owners with an average mortgage of £450. Alfred Webb, the chairman, said that ‘The society concentrates on making advances in respect of working-class properties’ (28). Harold Bellman, the chairman of the Abbey Road Building Society said that ‘Of those who made the boom possible I should judge that about half the purchasers were black-coated workers and the other half better paid artisans for the boom was essentially a boom in houses of moderate size-largely within the price range £500 and £700…the average… monthly repayments…were £3.16s 8p for clerks and £3 4s 10p for artisans; these figures relate to advances made in 1936’ (29). The new trends of lending showed that the building societies had now got down to the business of housing the low-paid classes, these were working-class people not members of the middle classes as stated by Swenarton and Taylor.
The annual surveys in the Economist of building society finances during the 1930s show that by numbers and average value, the proportions of mortgages under £500 demonstrated the greatest expansion of any mortgage grouping during the decade from 1925 to 1936, and that this trend continued up to 1940. The surveys also show that the average value of individual mortgages had risen from £268 in 1929 to £295 in 1935. This figure is a little misleading as it takes into account mortgages which were in the course of being repaid. The figures from the Annual Reports of the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies, Part 5, show that from 1930 to 1938 the average value of new mortgage advances remained within a band of £469 to £471 and for the years of 1932, 1933 and 1934 reached a low of £446. Houses with a value of under £500 were small, and tended to be situated in the newer industrialised areas of the south-east of England, whereas those houses sold in the £700 to £1,00 price range were usually to be found, in the main, in the London suburbs close to the underground services. The small working-class houses were acquired with very small deposits as has been detailed on the chapter in building societies. In the minutes of the committee meeting of the Valuation for Rating Valuation the clerk to the South Middlesex Assessment Committee was asked if ‘it is possible for a person to obtain a house on payment of a mere trifling deposit’? He answered that ‘As a matter of fact there is a good example in this weeks copy of Smallholding. Not only can one get a house for £5 down but with a gift of furniture which is thrown in’. Questioned further the committee wished to know ‘and a wireless set?’. To which the response was ‘No, not in this instance but I have known it’ (30).
The schedules submitted by the Borough of Surbiton to the Committee for Valuation on Rates show that on the two estates, called Estates Nos 1 and 3, out of 905 owner-occupiers only six were in professions which were obviously other than working class (31). Mechanics, clerks and labourers were the most common vocations. The schedules submitted by Wates and Laing also show on the estates they were building working-classes were the predominant purchasers.
Hence the whole basis for the assumptions by Swenarton and Taylor as to the proportion of homes bought by the working classes is therefore open to doubt. The majority of the houses bought in the period 1933 to 1939 appear to have been bought by the lower paid. It is open to discussion whether such people were of the working classes, middle classes or any of the classes in between. The geographical location of industries in the United Kingdom during the inter-war period changed rapidly, especially in the period 1933 to 1939, having the effect of making the indexes prepared by the government unreliable as they were still tilted towards the historic industries in terms of production and labour costs. The prosperous south-east of England was a different place to the unemployment black-spots of Glasgow and Jarrow. ‘Thus for those who remained in work, wages held up under the impact of the slump’ (32). Wages in the south were higher and there were opportunities for overtime and for juvenile and female labour to gain employment. The large numbers of factories built in the southeast required those who might be considered working class to work in them, and the several thousand men employed in the building industry in the south of England building the new houses were also in the broad working-class category. These were among the buyers of the new houses.
Using the average wage from the 1931 survey of £3.5s per week, Swenarton and Taylor say that only workers on this level of income would have had the status to buy a new house. A worker on this average wage equating to £169 per annum would have been able to buy a house based on three times the income, that is, £507. At this price a small three-bedroomed house or a two-bedroomed home of about 470 square feet could have been acquired in the early 1930s. At two and a half times the income, £422, a Taylor Woodrow “Wonder House” could have been bought. The repayments on a mortgage of £500 over twenty-five years at 5 per cent. equate to 11s 8p per week, rates would have been about 2/6 pence (33). Even if the repayments required were in the order of 15/- per week, with rates, this would have represented 23 per cent. of the weekly wage of £3 5s, a figure which was in line with expectations. Indeed the Departmental Committee on Valuations for Rates noted that outgoings on property as a proportion of income were found to be as high as 46 per cent on certain estates near London. Bowley estimated that the weekly cost of buying a house during the period 1930 to 1936 dropped from 9s 9p per week to 7s 11, rising to 8s 10d in 1937. These calculations were made using an interest rate taken from the Annual Reports of the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies and assuming an advance of 70 per cent on the cost of purchase over a twenty year term (34).
But the income in most households in the prosperous south of England was in excess of the average wage of £3 5s. Wages were higher, overtime was readily available, and there were jobs for wives. In 1937 and 1938 an enquiry was undertaken by the Ministry of Labour in order to obtain a collection of budgets giving representative particulars of weekly expenditure in the United Kingdom. These were required to revise the cost of living index started in 1914. The Ministry realised that there had been many changes made in the way people lived and therefore the items in the index required amendment. It is important to note that they aimed for 10,000 households and therefore information packs were sent to 30,000 houses all over the United Kingdom during October 1937. They excluded households with lodgers and households where there were several wage-earners. They also excluded households where there were the long-term unemployed. From the 8,905 budgets supplied the total average expenditure in the household was 85s 9 p per week as at October 1937 (35). This expenditure of 85s 9p was 30 per cent more than the average wage rates referred to by Swenarton and Taylor.
Gallop Poll conducted a survey in 1948 and asked the question: If you had to say what social class you belonged to, which would it be? Based on this they produced a chart which showed that the working classes comprised 46 per cent of the population compared with 28 per cent for the middle class (36). Lewis and Maude believed that between 62.5 and 66.5 per cent of the population were working class and between 33.5 and 37.5 per cent middle class (37). If the working classes were such a large part of the population and had earnings sufficient to enable them to obtain a mortgage, then it is equally likely that they were the largest buyers of the small houses built at this time. It is not ultimately possible to prove absolutely which social class was the predominant buyer of houses during the building boom of the 1930s. ‘Rapid expansion of home-ownership has been possible by the entry of many more from those groups with lower income, and so that the degree of heterogeneity within home ownership has become even more marked'(38). Home-ownership ‘was much more a mixed tenure in terms of occupancy than was renting from the public authorities’ (39). If one of the criteria of being middle-class is to be a home-owner, then there would be no working class home-owners. The majority of the houses built in the 1930s were small and within the buying capacity of the working classes. If houses of the lower middle-class type become available then there will be a further migration from the working class to the lower and middle classes.
In the decades after 1939 in England, the proportion of home ownership grew to a level of around two-thirds. The establishment of this home-owning bourgeoisie, a class which aspired to materialistic values, was to become one of the most powerful economic and political forces in the country. The movement into home- ownership which resulted in these changes was led in the 1930s by the lower paid.
(1) From oral evidence of the Borough of Sutton to the Departmental Committee on Valuation for Rates. HLG/56/157
(2) M. Swenarton and S. Taylor, The Scale and Nature of the Growth of Owner-Occupation in Britain between the Wars, Economic History Review, (1985).vol no.38, pp 373-392
(3) Ministry of Labour Gazette,XL1 (January 1931) p. 8, (February 1933). p. 45, (March 1933), p. 82.
(4) Ministry of Health. Report to the Minister by the Departmental Committee on Valuations for Rates 1939 (HMSO, 1944).
(5)Urban History Year book (1976), pp. 21-27. P. Massey, The Expenditure of 1,360 British Middle-Class (5) Households in 1938-39, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 105,pt III (London, 1942), p. 169. M. Daunton, Coal Metropolis: Cardiff 1870-1914 (London, 1977).
(6) Ministry of Health. Report to the Minister by the Departmental Committee on Valuations for Rates 1939 (HMSO, 1944), p. 7 Appendix B.
(7) p. 375
(8) Ministry of Health. Report to the Minister by the Departmental Committee on Valuations for Rates 1939 (HMSO, 1944), Appendix D.
(9) E.Tarbuck, Handbook of House Property (London, 1938), p. 124.
(10) From oral evidence of the Borough of Sutton to the Departmental Committee on Valuation for Rates. HLG/56/160.
(11) Ratable value was calculated by making various deduction from the Gross Value. Ratable value was normally around £4 less than Gross value at the lower levels below £40 Gross value.
(12) HLG/56/157.
(13)HLG /56/157.
(14) M.Swenarton and S.Taylor, op.cit., p. 392.
(15) The Greater London Record Office LCC/CL/GP1/1/234-237 show wages paid to LCC employees. (16) LCC/EO/STA/4 cover the salaries paid.
(17) The Coal Mines Act 1931, 21 and 22 Geo. 5. ch 2 .
(18) M.Swenarton and S.Taylor, op. cit, p 386.
(19) M.Swenarton and S.Taylor, p. 385 and P.R.O.HLG 56/157.
(20) The New Survey of London boxes 12-14.
(21) About 17 per cent of the houses were occupied with lodgers. The police force pay a rent allowance calculated upon the notional rental value of the premises irrespective of the rent passing or the fact that the house may be owned by the policeman. The policemen who took part in the New London Survey received between 12/6p and 15/- per week rent allowance. Train drivers and firemen for the railway companies also received a rent allowance of 3/- per week.
(21) P.R.O.HLG 56/160.
(22) P.R.O. HLG 56/157.
(23) From a letter to the writer from Nestlé in September 1993, see after p.100.
(24) HLG 56/157.
(25) HLG/56/895 pp.51 and 52.
(26) Ministry of Health Private Enterprise Housing(H.M.S.O.1944), p.54. The figure assumes that the purchaser provided a deposit of 5 per cent and that the interest rate was 4.5 per cent and the mortgage term 20 years.
(27) July 1, 1939. pp 17-18.
(28) From their Report and Accounts and M. Cassell, Inside Nationwide:100 years of Co-operation (London, 1984), p. 51.
(29) H. Bellman, Capital, Confidence and the Community (Cambridge, 1938), p. 60
(30) HLG/56/157.
(31) HLG 56/160.
(32) J.Stevenson and C. Cook,The Slump: Society and Politics During the Depression.(London, 1979), p 17.
(33) P. White, Parry’s Valuation Tables (London, 1958), p. 140, Mortgage Instalment Tables. The monthly sum to repay £500 over twenty five years at 5 per cent is 11s 8p. At twenty years it increases to 13s 4 p.
(34) Marian Bowley,Housing and the State 1919-1944 (London, 1945 &1985), pp. 278 and 279.
(35) Weekly Expenditure of Working-Class Households in the United Kingdom in 1937-1938. Ministry of Labour Gazette XL VIII, No.12 (December 1940), pp. 300-305 and XLIX No.1 (January 1941), pp. 7-11.
(36) G.Gallop, Gallop International Public Opinion Polls,1937-1975 (London,1976), p.731.
(37) R.Lewis and A. Maude, The English Middle-Classes (London, 1949, revised 1973), p. 17.
(38) J.Doling and B.Stafford, Home Ownership:The Diversity of Experience (Aldershot, 1989), p.9.
(39) Department of Health and Social Security Technical Volume Part II Housing Policy (HMSO,1977), p. 84.