In the 1930s the larger contractors, together with the Building Research Station, were experimenting with ways of building houses quickly without the need for trained craftsmen. The experiments with system building was an attempt to get round the difficulties of a booming industry and a shortage of skilled men, especially bricklayers. The Illustrated Carpenter and Builder in 1935 noted that ‘Several housing schemes in Scotland were delayed because of the shortage of bricklayers'(29). The numbers of insured bricklayers did increase over the period 1930 to 1939 from seventy-nine thousand to one hundred and ten thousand but the weekly wage rate remained fairly static during that period, moving only from 100 to 102 on the scale used by Bowley (30). The insured workers registered as bricklayers would not have represented all the bricklayers employed in the industry. It would also not show their level of skill or physical fitness. It is ‘likely that most of the labour employed by local authorities in their house-building programme were registered and that most of those casually employed by the majority of speculative builders were unregistered'(31).
The new house-building methods being explored needed to be able to build a house of a conventional arrangement and style in order to suit the tastes of the buyers. The options available included the prefabrication of parts of houses, and the use of mass-produced components, prefabricated frames in steel, concrete or in timber. Generally, the results were not good. A decade later and even with the experiences gained from the war, the 1944 Dudley Report was to say that,
“The process of house construction is developing in the direction of greater pre-assembly of parts of the house in the factory. It is not yet possible to state with confidence how far such methods can be carried with satisfactory results. While, therefore, the case for entire prefabrication is by no means yet established, it is possible that in the future complete houses may come to be built this way. Subject to sound construction coupled with sound planning and attention to the tenants’ comfort, we should welcome any system of mass-production which would lead to greater speed in erection” (32).
Grant has noted that ‘Everywhere, except in the United States, interwar experiments in prefabrication took the form of heavy concrete or steel structures. Inevitably there were problems of cracking, leaking and corrosion’ (33). Walls of poured concrete and pre-laid panels of bricks were alternatives tried but not used to any large degree. Trying to cost the new methods was not easy. Bowley said that ‘The problem of discovering whether one way of building is cheaper than another is most baffling’ (34). Jackson said that ‘it is notoriously difficult to estimate with accuracy the full cost of building a house as it was the sum of a large number of items with labour accounting for about one third of the total’ (35). Many factors would have affected the cost of a housing development on each site, such as distance from the suppliers of heavy items like bricks, ground conditions and the English weather during the construction period. Wimpey’s No-Fines, Laing’s Easyform and Wates precast concrete slabs were all developed by the named contractors during the 1920s and 1930s as ways of trying to industrialize the building process. They were based around concrete construction methods and required the construction of formwork, in timber or steel, around and into which concrete was poured.
Concrete used in the Easyform and No-Fines method was made using aggregate of at least one inch; there was no sand used in the mix. Crushed brick, clinker or concrete could be substituted for the aggregate, which was an advantage since it often was more readily available. The resultant mix was then poured into shutters. The disadvantage of using a poured concrete system was that it only worked if large numbers of identical houses were being built; it allowed no scope for variations. The shuttering was easier to handle if cranes were used, which was not common in the English construction industry and especially not during the 1930s. The resultant walls were difficult to fix into and to cut accurately. There was also a considerable problem with dry shrinkage if the water content ratio was not strictly adhered to. Although unskilled labour can be used in the erection of the form-work and the pouring of the concrete, the mixing and the curing of the cement is very critical and requires a high level of supervision. The system building methods using concrete were used in local authority contracts but seldom in speculative schemes for the private purchaser. John Laing Limited were to build estates of houses in 1924 using the Easyform system in south Wales in connection with the steel works, and for a number of local authorities throughout England. ‘The Gosport Borough Engineer wrote to the Times to praise the new system, stressing the cavity walls and the roofs of tiles over felt;122 houses had been built for a cost of £54,000’ (36). The cost of these houses at around £440 a house compares with the Ministry of Health report which showed that the cost of the standard non-parlour house had fallen from nine hundred and thirty pounds in August 1920 to four hundred and thirty six pounds in March 1932 (37). On that evidence the system-built house was not cheaper than the conventionally built dwelling, and this was found to have been generally been the case. From the relative few estates of system built houses which exist it appears that there was a reluctance even by local authorities to commission developments of this type. After the initial enthusiasm for the prospect of mass-producing houses by factory methods, very few estates were actually built. It is significant that of the approximately fifty-four thousand houses built by 1944 in non-traditional methods, fifty thousand of those had been built by 1928 (38). Very few were built by the speculative builder for the working classes. The experiences gained from the tenants who lived in system-built houses and the difficulties in obtaining skilled labour to complete the fittings and finishing of such dwellings led to the waning of their popularity with local authorities. In the final analysis, the system-built house was not any cheaper or quicker to build than a conventionally built house. It had the disadvantage of being inflexible in design, difficult to make even small amendments to and liable to crack and to have problems with condensation.
As subsidies increased through the 1920s the problem was not only a shortage of craftsmen but of some building materials. The supply of bricks was restricted as ‘brickworks have fallen out of commission…in the period immediately after the war’ (39). In addition, the transport system was not adequate to serve the new demands made by the building industry. If all the labour had been in place and the materials needed in plentiful and convenient supply, the working-class houses of the 1930s might not have been built in the form they were. If there had been a plentiful supply of skilled labour prepared to work in a flexible manner it is likely that the small speculative house would have been better built, as the labour would have had the inherent skills to turn out a superior product.
Taking the three divisions of workmen likely to be employed in building the small speculative house for the working classes, (i) masons and bricklayers, (ii) plasterers, painters and plumbers, and (iii) labourers and miscellaneous, only in class (iii) was there any growth, 31 per cent. to 44 per cent. in the numbers employed over the period 1929-1936 (40).
The astonishing growth in the importance of the unskilled worker is therefore connected with the introduction new methods of production. The speculative builder would also have used the labourers, that is the unskilled element of his labour force, to handle new machinery such as diggers, pneumatic drills and cement mixers. The labourer was able to work the new machinery, which required virtually no training, and he was not restricted by any craft barriers or formal apprenticeship. The speculative builder could afford to pay the labourer more than his basic hourly rate to carry out such tasks, for the costs of labour were not moving much during the 1930s reinforcing the view that ‘wages are stickier than prices’ (41). The labour rates tended to remain at roughly the same level for a period of time, then moved up in sudden jumps. The Times of 6 July 1937 quoted statistics from the Ministry of Labour to indicate that if 1924 is taken as 100, the costs fall gradually down to 90 by 1933 where they remain until 1935 and rise gradually to about 100 by the time the Second World War started. As an element in the overall price of the small house, labour was not as important as the cost of materials. It was shown that out of a price rise of twenty-seven pounds for a small non-parlour house in 1937 eight pounds is accounted for by material costs, three pounds by labour and the balance of sixteen pounds is the profit of the developer. This last element would have included overheads, reserves and an element for management salary (42). The Times article went on to say that the particular problems of the industry in competing with demands for materials were evidenced by the fact that the ‘Ministry of Health has noted that prices have been less keen and less finely quoted owing to uncertainty due to whether labour and materials would be available…contractors are quoting higher and higher because they do not want the business…rise in cost of timber accounts for 60 per cent of the increase in the cost of all materials’.
(29) Illustrated Carpenter and Builder (31 May 1935).
(30) Marian Bowley, The British Building Industry: Four Studies in Response and Resistance to Change (Cambridge, 1966),appendix table 5 and 8a. pp. 270 and 280.
(31) Interview with Frank Taylor in August 1994.
(32) The Dudley Report, p.27, paras 116-117.
(33) C. Grant (ed). Built to Last (London, 1992), p. 78.
(34) Marian Bowley, The British Building Industry: Four Studies in Response and Resistance to Change (Cambridge, 1966), p. 41.
(35) A. Jackson, Semi-detached London (London, 1991), p. 151.
(36) R. Coad, Laing (London, 1979), p. 76.
(37) A. Jackson, Semi-detached London (London, 1991), p. 60.
(38) Marian Bowley, Housing and the State 1919-1945 (London, 1966), p. 196.
(39) ibid., para 183.
(40) The figures are taken from R.Allen and B.Thomas The London Building Industry and its Labour Recruitment through Employment Exchanges, Economic Journal 47, (September,1937).p. 465.
(41) Economic Journal,49, (October, 1939), p. 425.
(42) The Times (6 July 1937). Leading article.