The author conducted many interviews in 1992 and 1993 with working-class people who had bought homes in the 1930s, details from just three of these interviews are given below to illustration how three families, from rented accommodation, became home-owners. The examples demonstrate the practical and personal effect of the spread of home-ownership into the lower-paid manual classes.
In the first instance a Mr and Mrs Hood bought a house in Hurstfield Crescent, Hayes, Middlesex from T.F. Nash (Builders) Limited for £515 in 1937. Mr Hood was a carpenter who lived in rented rooms in Holloway with his wife, a native of Glasgow. He travelled to Hayes every day, by motorcycle, to work on the conversion of a chapel to a public library and saw the construction of new houses in the area. At the time he was earning £3.17s.6p per week plus some overtime, and his wife working in a biscuit factory earned about £2.0s per week. They met Mr Abbott, the salesman for T.F. Nash (Builders) Limited in his site office, picked the design of a house from plans and then decided where on the site lay-out plan they would like the house. They then put down a holding deposit of £5 and filled in forms which the salesman gave them from the Leicester Building Society, Harrow branch. They heard a few days later that their application had been approved. This type of arrangement was later commented on by Major J.Milner a Labour MP, in the debate to the second reading of the Building Societies Act 1939. He said that ‘commission is paid to builders’ foremen or to individuals or firms whose function is merely to put a rubber stamp on the application to the building society’ (40).
Eventually the Hoods received an offer from the society of a mortgage of £465; this represented 90 per cent of the total cost of the house including all fees, to be repaid over twenty-five years at £2.16.6 per month (41). The deposit was £50, Mr Hood had savings of £25, and borrowed £25 from his best man which was repaid at 2/6 per week. The house was a semi-detached with two bedrooms and a garage space (42). It was brick-built and cheaply rendered with stone chippings to the first floor elevations over a ground floor brick finish. It had a rateable value of £15 and the rates were in the order of 2/6 per week (43). The total cost of repayments plus rates would have been in the order of £40 per annum equivalent to 20 per cent of Mr Hood’s normal weekly income, ignoring overtime or piece work. (it also excluded the income of his wife.) His neighbours on either side were a painter with the Great Western Railway Company, and a self-employed driver on the opposite side of the road lived a toolmaker with Automobile and Electrical Company (AEC), the builder of London’s buses, and a draughtsman who worked for Quaker Oats in Southall. Both AEC and Quaker Oats had built new factories nearby in the early 1930s (44).
A second typical example is of a Mr and Mrs Herbert, who bought a house in Derwent Close, Hayes, Middlesex from R.T. Warren Limited for £500 in 1935. Mr Herbert had moved to the area from Gloucester, and met his wife in Hayes. He was a self-employed plumber and in the early days of marriage he lived with his wife in his fathers-in-law’s house. As he did some subcontracting work for Warrens, he bought one of their houses and they arranged a mortgage through the Halifax Building Society (45). The deposit of £50 was given to Mr Herbert by his mother and the mortgage arranged for a term of twenty years with the repayments in the order of 15/- per week, equating to an interest rate of 5 per cent. The house had a rateable value of £19, and Mr Herbert had an average income of £5 per week and worked mainly for United Dairies who were opening many depots in the area. His wife did not work outside the home. The repayment with rates would have been in the order of 18 per cent of his income. The people who lived next door to him were employed as a post office linesman and a milkman, and opposite lived a dustman and a retired tram driver (46).
A third example is of a Mr and Mrs Harrison who had always lived in rented accommodation in the Hayes area and bought a house in Bourne Avenue, Hayes, for £550 in about 1938 from a small local builder (47). They borrowed money from their parents for the deposit and put down £70. The balance was borrowed from the Burnley Building Society, on the recommendations of the builder, over a twenty-year period at weekly repayments of about 19s per week. Mr Harrison was an aero engineer with Fairey Aviation and earned about £6 per week (48). The repayments of 19/- per week together with the rates around 2/6p per week were equal to about 19 per cent of his income. The people in the adjoining houses worked at HMV and Kraft Foods in semi-skilled jobs.
(40) Hansard, 346, col. 403.
(41) Using compound interest tables the interest rate works out to be 5 per cent.
(42)The provision of garage space or even garages was a feature of the speculatively built houses. Few local authority houses had garages.
(43) From the Valuation List for the Borough Hayes and Harlington, 1936, now in Uxbridge Public Library.
(44) From five interviews between July and December 1993.
(45) R.T. Warren Limited are one of the many firms of builders which started in the 1930s and did very little after the Second World War. Uxbridge Gazette, 20 April 1988 (obituary of R.T. Warren) During the 1930s they built around twelve thousand houses in West Middlesex.
(46) From two interviews in October and December 1993.
(47) P. Oliver, I. Bentley and I. Davis Dunroamin: Suburban Semi and Its Enemies (London, 1981) was dedicated to the 76,112 builders [this figure should be treated with caution] who created the four million houses of pre-war Dunroamin.
(48) From an interview with Mrs Harrison in December 1993.