John Betjeman was much taken with the railways and in the Metropolitan Railway, Bakers Street Station Buffet he noted that,
“They felt so sure on their electric trip,
That youth and Progress were in partnership”
And so it was to be. Others saw it was a time of terrible changes, the devils decade thought David Thomson (note 1) but he also thought it was a time of considerable prosperity, much happiness, even some profoundly creative activity. I feel that the house of the time too GAVE prosperity, happiness and was an object of profound creative activity. It fashioned taste, styles of living, family size, social activities, it accelerated the growth of industries and the service sector and its uniformity allowed the expression of individuality within the security and anonymity of the home; outside the house, its occupies could appear to be conventional and conforming but within they had the power of expression.
I use the words gave and fashioned to emphasis that the houses and the estates were more than passive recipients of the taste and styles of the times; they influenced and enlarged upon certain attitudes in society of the time. I wish to explore the extent to which the house and, just as importantly, the estate on which it was established, contributed to the art and society of the times. If it reflected trends, moulded them or just made them. Just how much people were affected by the house and estate on which they lived; was it a general trend or specific to certain houses and estates, how long did it last, did World War 11 end this as with many other things?
Socially, the new houses were a mighty crucible, melting and softening much old rigidity. Shared experiences, great collective sacrifices all helped to strengthen a tide of egalitarian sentiment which rose out of the ambiguous end of the last war in 1918. Home ownership was part of the new resolve which was born, from the deprivation of war, for a better society wherein none should be without all the necessities of life, and where an opportunity to work and live in decent surroundings should be open to all citizens. This was not a political movement; it did not have leaders or a manifesto. Many visionaries who had fought for such things, there was, however, a deep feeling that the basic right to good housing was essential to every citizen.
Now the political left in the form of he Labour Party and Lloyd George took up the banner but the swell of public opinion was already ahead of them. As Wilde notes, (note 2a) “the emotions of man are stirred more quickly than mans intelligence”. There was at the time a sense of national purpose, rediscovered in war, now victory could serve the ends of social justice. New houses would first and foremost give peoples, mainly working people, and decent homes in which to be free from the burdens of disease, smells, and close living conditions. It would also via the house building activity, Keynes predicted, increase prosperity but, more importantly, in a way not conceived at the time, provide a vast canvas for many to make their mark.
For the people and homes being built in the late 1920s and 1930s were in the main unregulated so great had been the explosion of the new houses. Unregulated, they needed, “Community, Identity and Stability” (note3) and with a campaigning zeal many in government sought to regulate with four and five year plans (note 5a). Statues as diverse as Education Acts to enlarge grammar schools, the Employment Act, Special Areas Act. For here was for the first time in living memory a chance to regulate, influence and determine the destinies of the new settlers in the new land of suburbia.
Within older cities it is difficult for government to build an infra-structure where it can provide facilities to provide for people. Now the clinics, schools and social centres could be built in the new suburbs. Amazingly the Town Planning Acts did not come into play until 1945 so there could be little overall planning in this time just the hope that market forces and local planning would achieve the building of the desired facilities. The planning was benign not enforced. The booming of the suburbs resulted to the late Planning Acts. The volume of the new building is difficult to image now.
The hosing problem was huge as slum clearance had hardly been tackled at all during the time after 1918. Catching up with the deficiencies in the absolute number of houses needed was a large enough task. During the 1920s only 11,000 slum houses had been demolished (note 5b). In addition the newness of the estates built in the 20s and those constructed in the 30s contrasted with the older homes and exacerbated the differences. For no matter how much statistics pointed to a general increase in real income, there was no doubt that, as the uneasy social conscience discovered, many families in the 1930s were still ill-fed, ill-cared for when sickness struck. In the older cities Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness (note 4) were too common and thee were pressures to eradicate these ills.
There was a desire to make houses available, bright new homes with a convenient kitchen, bathroom, internal w.c, third bedroom, and a garden where flowers and vegetables could be grown and children could play away from the dirt of a Victorian city. This meant not only a new building but a new way of life, with proper separation of eating and living rooms, bedrooms for all members of the family, an end for children sleeping with their parents, an end to renting and landlords, thus satisfying the deep needs of ownership, of security and control of one’s destiny and the conferred respectability of home owner which at the time was limited to a very few people.
The values of the new suburbanites were no doubt often petty and uncultivated, snobbish and competitive, dominated by a narrow concern for home and family which often blunted their awareness of the alarming economic and political problems of the time (note 5c). Many see this narrow, blinkered attitude as the very quintessence of British society. Both then and now, this is perhaps a generalisation, but then for many the new small houses gave further expression to it.
“The Englishman’s house still shows the Englishman’s mastery of the art of living a private life”. (note 5)
The ideal type of home required in the 20s and 30s was a light and airy country cottage with individually.
“the cottage homes of England,
by thousands on her plains,
they are smiling o’er the silver brook
and round the hamlets fanes”
(note 6)
which would contrast with the dull monotony of terraces in the large industrial cities? It would be near all facilities, well served with transport and convenient for places of work. Such an ideal until the building of the estates was impossible, except for a few in the privileged few. Like other consumer products of the time, such as cars or kitchen products, the cost of hand-making individual goods was too proportionally high compared with the cost of living. Hence housing had to be mass produced to be cheap enough to be affordable by the lower paid.
The estates and the new factories made the worker now a consumer on a big scale. So the human and social desires for new housing had to have a catalyst before they were fulfilled.
Several aspects helped; real income rose about 1% during the interwar years, not much, yet the point is that it did not grow stimulating demand. The CEGB had completed the electrification of most of the nation by 1935 and had established standardization current. Also production rose from17.7 to 34 billion KW and the cost to industry and the domestic user was reduced (note 7).
Interest rates were around 2% for most of the 1930s and credit was easy to obtain. (note 7b) Industrial issues on the Stock market increased three times in the period giving a more active capital market for construction companies and building-supply groups, (there was also an embargo placed upon overseas capital issues by the Stock Exchange). Due to the general depression, the prices of primary products and raw material for construction and building products. A strong pound against certain foreign currencies meant, that for example, timber was cheap if imported from Sweden or Russia and roofing tiles from Belgium. (note 7a) Steam transport reached it most efficient level during the 1930s and the railway reached its widest at about 13,000 miles (compared with about 7,000 miles now). The idea originally in the Addison Acts (note 8) of giving subsidies to those who built cheaper houses, which was significantly the private builder as well as local authorities, was enlarged by the Chamberlain Housing Act of 1932 and the Wheatley Act of 1934 (note 8) all helped to prime the pump of domestic house building. The Greenwood Act of 1932 gave subsidies for slum clearance but it abolished all other subsidies so that private builders could compete with municipal housing providers. All these Acts coupled with the expansion in building societies the largest building boom in Britain’s history, and in is turn led many to think the he movement could contribute to political stability in a time of unrest and unemployment. A leader in the Daily Telegraph in June 1933 said, “Today the number of households whose good fortune it is to be in so enviable position (i.e. home owner) grows consistently and rapidly. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this silent revolution on he habits and outlook of the population.” This thesis will show just how extensive the revolution was. So for whatever reasons, as Thomson puts it, the “spirit of the thirties was on an inclined plane” It was a seminal time in economics, physics, architecture, transport (jet engines and rocket propulsion) when it appeared to many that man could really conquer nature to produce machines to work for men with still the lingering English wish that, “men should come first and that machines should come a long way afterwards “(note 9) But first they needed fit houses and good homes.
HOUSING THE MULTITUDE
The soldiers’ dream in 1918 was expressed in the dust jacket of The Home I Want by Richard Reiss which shows a returning soldier seeking to escape from the decaying 19th Century industrial city with landlord owned houses to the garden suburb. So the flight to the suburbs was on, made possible by the improved transport facilities and supported by new industries. The tone of the countryside was beautifully conjured up by William Cowper who wrote a lot of the copy for the advertisements in Metro-land (I am not sure whether the words of the 18th Century poet were adapted by the writer of Metro-land or if there was a copywriter of this mane or using a non de plume) His images are rural and romantic, the winding road, the gardens, the cottage style house with lattice windows, dormer and sham half-timbering.
But why build in the countryside? The need for fit housing and good homes could have been satisfied by demolishing poor old houses in inner cities, but the multiplicity of ownership and complications of re-housing displaced families was countered by the ease of building on green fields. There were limited planning controls before the Acts of 1947 and 1948 and restrictive covenants, which ran with the land, served to exercise some restraints. Hence a builder/developer if he could find land to buy (and after decades of low growth and limited demand for agriculture produce there were many land owners willing to sell at premiums of 50% to the price of agricultural land and to defer the sale proceeds or grant mortgages) preferred to buy agricultural land.
Having bought the land, the only limitations were the size of the bank loan the builder could arrange (the grants system mentioned above were helpful) the availability of drainage, and supply of services such as and electricity and water. So the development of the suburbs began in a wild unregulated manner. I was wild speculation, and unskilled and under-capitalised builders were common. No thought was given to co-ordination between adjoining estates, compatibility of designs or linking industry with homes. I am reminded of the developments seen in Portugal today where three are often a glut of homes, buildings are left unfinished where the builder has failed; developments occurred remote from shops and transport. Many suburbs must have been like this during the 1930s when often supply surged ahead of demand.
So what was built and how? In the main semis in response to the demand (note 10), although house over £1,000 in sale price tended to be detached and a few bungalows. Those were most frequently found in areas of low site value at the edge of the new suburbs, and although having some attractions to the elderly and disabled coupled with being easy to maintain, they were not altogether popular. However the chalet, a bungalow with a room in the roof space was more in demand, perhaps because it catered for the conventional wish to sleep above ground level. So, the majority of middle and working class suburbia was semi-detached with a few bungalows, chalets and terraces or four and six units all catering for the average family. Indeed, it is difficult to design a modest house with good proportions and not end up with two double and one single room over a living area giving adequate sitting and eating space. For the smaller household, single people, elderly childless couples, the maisonette became popular rather than the flat. Maisonettes were advertised from the turn of the century onwards and were originally known as half-houses (note 11). They did in the 1930s have the general appearance of being a semi, thus complying with the conceived demand.
I believe that it is crucial to discover why builders/developers built, in the main semis. They could have constructed dwellings in many other forms, they would have seen what was being built in Europe and America and it was certainly not semis. I also do not think that the reason was linked to an enhancement the profit margin for the builder. The speculative builder was no innovator in design, building technique, materials or anything else. He broadly followed existing trends, often local ones, building in the only way that a highly traditional and conservative industry knew. In the main for houses up to £1,000 very little choice was offered in design or extras, and yet houses sold. Having spoken to many builders/developers of the time and estate agents it is obvious that there was no great master plan. They saw the semis of the 1920s had been popular although none of the estates had been built to the density and volume of the 1930s. No market research was entailed. They built a few houses and if they sold they built a few more of the same or amended design. In a Darwinian fashion the most successful designs flourished and were duplicated a far as possible without producing monotonous rows of houses. Thus they changed the countryside, but in an equally final way they changed the manner of living for those who inhabited the new homes. The city dwellers who thought they were to become country folk were to be turned into suburbanites, a new race altogether.
A typical advertisement for a house would go something like” the estate possesses everything that could be done for a comfortable and well ordered life” (note 11) In fact, the new houses had very little in the way of fitted conveniences. They were dry and free from rising damp, wind and water proof, light and airy although with poor windows (many were too drafty). Also provided were gas and electricity (note 12), bathroom, internal w.c, indirect boilers to warm the kitchen, burn waste and heat the water, and gardens to give playing space, which when coupled with high fences also gave that much prized possession, privacy. For what most people who came to these new homes had lacked before was private space. Older houses, with typically two rooms per floor had, for all but the rich, washing facilities in the room where the boiler was, the scullery. Doors and walls in most of the houses at the time were as thin as the builder could supply. Lathe and plaster construction to walls and ceiling gives very little sound insulation. So, all in all, the new homesteaders were buying houses which were a quantum leap from those they were currently living in, often as tenants. (note 13) There were many additions which could have been provided, such as cupboards, wardrobes, carpets, wallpaper, refrigerators, shelves, landscape gardens and extras power points. But even with houses on the very upper market Wentworth Estate in Surrey, discussed later, very little could be found in the way of extras.
The old example of ‘real’ extras were on the Rice Brothers houses in Watford, see appendix, which resulted from a visit which the developer made to America to see the building industry there. The expensive houses, over £1,500, were built using better materials, bigger sectioned joinery, well seasoned timber and not the cheap, moist unseasoned Russian timber readily available and bakelite switches. They also supplied outside store rooms with electricity, running water and taps to water the garden. (notes 14 and 14a)
One of the most important aspects of the new dwellings was that it created a need for new consumer goods for homes devoid of such things. Most of the new occupiers had moved into the homes from shared accommodation which was often poorly furnished. Hire Purchase arrangements were very common and the door-to-door salesman was soon to be found on the new estates selling vacuum cleaners, bicycles and household goods. Thus demand was created for consumer durables which could now be used to keep the new home clean, warm, making cooking easier and helps with the washing of clothes. The Ideal Home catalogues are full of gadgets in the 1930s which interestingly were often worked by paraffin, gas or clockwork. The advertisement for the All-British non-electric vacuum cleaner, see end, was typical. These goods were in the main produced in England although small novelty goods and also some very expensive ones were imported from America where the consume boom had started earlier.
As the majority of factories for such goods like the estates were in the South of England the growth in prosperity was restricted. One of the most dominant characteristics of the major regions of the UK was the fact that industrial composition varied widely from region to region. One reason why the Northern and Western regions suffered more in the 1930s was because they were dependant upon stagnating industries with a corresponding lack of demand for new housing. The type of industry which had a high concentration in the South East did not appear to be there because of the non-availability of raw materials, the absence of linked industries or the non-availability of skilled labour. The usual explanation of the tendency of those largely concerned with producing consumer goods industries to cluster around London is the attraction of the large market which the metropolis provided. There were large markets elsewhere in the UK, but as Sir Malcolm Stewart, the First Commissioner for the Special Areas, said “much of the growth of Greater London is not based upon strictly economic factors; psychology plays an important pat in the matter” For what ever reason, Greater London absorbed 35% of the increase in national population between 1931 and 1937. The relocation of new industries took place more as a result of the establishment of new firms rather than the geographic transfer from existing ones. In this sense there was no drift of industries to the South. Perhaps new factories needed to be away from the physical and mental depression of the old industries in the North which Priestly records in English Journey (1933), (note 16). The excitement of a new style of living may well have been confined to the South of England for Priestly records the depressed areas as being almost like islands on which people had no hope of escape, people whose horizons were limited to the end of their street.
To test this theory I spoke to three old residents on the Gentwood Road estate in Liverpool, a working class estate where the houses sold for £4000 when they were built in 1935. The houses were rented or sold in about equal proportions. There was less a sense of moving into a modern Britain, a consume age, with these folk, just a desire to et away from the poor living conditions of the past. They appeared to be slower in obtaining the consume goods that were common with many of the people on the working class estate who I interviewed in Hayes in Middlesex. Perhaps it was because the majority of industries in Hayes were producing consumer goods and therefore people could buy them cheaply so they could be identified with their place of work. Wage levels were about the same so that probably was not an issue. In addition, those in Gentwood could not remember any desires to visit the South nor did they feel any envy for what was going on there. (note 17) I checked the local newspapers in Newcastle for the weeks before the Ideal Home Exhibitions 1934-1938 to see if there had been any special rail deal to London for the exhibition but could find none. Neither were here any advertisements for products to be shown in the exhibition. There were however advertisements placed by department stores for goods as “exhibited in London at the Ideal Home Exhibition” but that was it. So the South of England appeared o be drifting away into a position where its attitudes were being influenced by a new consume world and an awareness that here in green fields homes, jobs and a future was being created without any hindrance from the past or reference to the grim presence of depressed people and decaying industries in other parts of Britain.
Part of the past was religion, for even though churches and chapels were sometimes allocated sites in new estates the density of churches on new estates is not very high compared with the older centres. Church/chapel membership fell slightly during the period, from the 1920s and probably on the estates more than in other places, for the builder/developers did not feel the need to build churches as did some Victorian speculative builders. However, the membership of the Catholic church increased perhaps as a result of the building boom attracting workers from Ireland (note 18) Although the ubiquitous ‘tin chapel’ or parish hall proceeded the construction of permanent buildings, often after Wold War 11, the churches place in society was often being taken by associations of rate-payers, organisations of sport clubs, whist drives and bar facilities. These assumed some of the community function of the churches. If the estate dweller was less interested in the church, then he or she was also less likely to be concerned with the bigotry which existed in Britain against the Jews and the Catholics. It was interesting to note that the language of elderly people I interviewed still contained enormous prejudice against other races and religions when I directed their conversations that way. These were probably relics of earlier times. Priestley, in English Journey does not appear over friendly towards the Jews and in a wonderful line from Sayers detective novel of the early 1930s she describes the “oily Jew sliding across the dance floor to nigger music” Such prejudices were, in the main to disappear as new home owners were to meet members of other races/religions as next door neighbours, friends of their children or work mates.
There were no ghettoes on the new estates as far as I can discover nor trades or professions held to be best left to ‘them’. He Irish were perhaps an exception. They were appearing in larger numbers than any other group and were sending their children to Catholic schools. However they mixed in well on the estates and I can find no lasting prejudices against them. Modern estates were also no place for old superstitions, of demons or fairies which my cousins living in old houses in London still found among the older people living there. The new estates were a place for new ideas. I can still remember my grandmother being put in her place by my mother when she tried to impose Glasgow inner city ways onto my mother’s new suburban attitudes. Religious intolerance imported from the Gorbals did not last long in suburban Hayes. I found theses attitudes appear to be common in all the estates although it has to be said that people on the upper-class estates were more likely to be intolerant of neighbours if they were felt to be from the wrong class rather than religious ethnic groups. Indeed there were two coloured families on the Wentworth Estate in the 1930s who were rich Indians attached to the Sandhurst College, but they were of the right class to cause little offence to their neighbours.
Another new attitude which had arisen in the early part of the century and which blossomed with the estates being pushed out from the cities was the pursuit of nature. The front cover of John Stevenson’s book, British Society 1914-45, with the painting by Tucker called ‘Hiking’ some how sums up the naivety and simplicity of the approach adopted. It implied the pleasure of country life, simple pleasures which some how equated, in he mind of the artist, to buying a new house in the county. Never mind that most of the new homes were on vast estates but I suppose they were closer to open fields than the older house in the big cities. At this time large numbers of ramblers, cycle clubs and nature clubs were formed. Even seven nudist colonies were formed in the first five years of the 1930s. Youth hostels and the Scouting movement made considerable gains in membership. There were said to be 10 million cyclists in 1922. A new bicycle cost less than £4.00 or 9s7p a month and a net work of cafes, hostels and cheap hotels sprung up organised by the Cyclist Touring Club whereby a week’s holiday could be had for £2.50. Cycling became not just a way for the estate dweller to get to work, but a way of holidaying. I am reminded of photographs on “turning out time” at the new factories which looks like Peking factories in the early 1990s before cars and motor bike became more common in both societies. With the expansion of road traffic of all types and the relative lack of road awareness by the new estate dwellers, who were now able to travel further and faster than hey could have done just a few years earlier, came traffic accidents; seven thousand killed in 1933, two-thirds of whom wee pedestrians or pedal cyclists. Road safety training through posters and wireless broadcasts, the Highway Code and road safety drills at schools especially schools on the new states were introduced. This was because of the widespread layout and distances from schools and shops particularly put estate children at risk compared with inner-city children with more local schools and corner shops.
So the estate way of life affected and changed the way in which people lived and their homes fashioned and expanded desires to live in a new way. In looking at the new way I felt it was relevant to look at three examples of different estates in the South of England, to examine the structure and layout, design and pricing of houses and the changes which each estate made, if any, to those who lived there. The estates were set in the three main social classes which existed in England and occupied by what Masterson called the Conquerors, the Suburbans and the Multitude.
I had originally planned to give each of them equal coverage. However, after conducting interviews and reading local newspapers of the time I was drawn to the conclusion that there was more to be gained by concentrating on the working class estate rather than the middle or upper class ones. For it was they, the working classes, who had had their lives changed the most. The middle class occupiers would have moved into the new house from a home which would have been considered by any member of the working classes as very comfortable.
Nevertheless, the main volume of the population, then as now, has the status of working class and it was to them that the greatest changes occurred. Consequently, from an initial concept of three equal discussions on the estates chosen I have decided that it is wiser to focus on the working class estate in Hayes Middlesex rather than the middle class estate at Cassio Park Watford or the Wentworth estate in Surrey.
The first of the estates is the Wentworth Estate, situated to the South of the A30 and roughly between Staines and Sunningdale. It comprises an area of about 400 acres and was developed in the 1920s and 1930s by a local builder called Tarrent until he went into liquidation in the late 20s and the company was bought by Lindsey Parkinson a civil engineering group from the North of England. Around four hundred houses were built together with 14 miles of road and 150 lamp posts. The houses were sold from £3,000 upwards and the majority, from the records I have seen, were occupied by military men and judges. Then and now, the centre of attraction was the golf club at the weekends and the railway station during the week. The houses were well designed in a traditional style and planned for a future where maids and gardeners were as easy and cheap to come by as they were then, The dwellers had little contact with each other except at the gold club, which even gave the servants working on the estate the use of one of its social rooms for their own events once a month. The phrase “we never really knew our neighbours but only saw them at the Club for bride or golf” ran through the conversation I had with the residents of this estate.
The Community appeared to quicken its way of life from that which it had enjoyed prior to arriving at Wentworth, but the close community of church, doctor, post-office of the Miss Marple type, was missed by those that had known it for it did not exist here. The homes were built using good quality materials, hardwood doors, large hallways and attractive decorative features were to be found throughout the houses. Oversized timbers were to be found in the roof spaces but there were few electricity points, no insulation and only basis kitchens but gardeners toilets, stores and maids rooms. Those with told memories told me that there were few appliances.
Perhaps having help was one reason, but the occupiers which Wentworth attracted did not appear to be concerned about attracting the trappings of a consumer society. The impact of commercialisation, “the American way” had passed them by. The impact that these particular estate dwellers had on society as a whole would have been limited. They were not large enough as a group to influence taste or create a market.
The Cassio Estate of about seven hundred houses was developed on land owned by the Earls of Essex and situated just to the North of Watford. It adjoins a large park, Cassio Park, and is served by the Metropolitan Line. The estate was developed by several builders but I concentrated my research on those who lived in homes built by Kenneth Rice and Co for I had considerable information relating to these houses. (see bibliography)
The Cassio houses were priced about £1,000 and were attractive, well designed homes built for a modern middle class market. The estate layout had many “Walks” and “Wayes” although there were long drives which formed the boundaries of developers’ plots. The age of the purchasers was often older than those who bought the working class houses, a large number were teachers and civil servants who were attracted to the estate. There was a marked tendency for few women to work on the estate and those that did had jobs in offices or in nursing. Older residents remember the streams of “dailies” that came to Cassio every day, so much so that a bus at about 8.30am would make an unauthorised stop at the entrance to the estate to save the ladies walking from a regular stop. I could not find any original purchasers to interview perhaps because the middle classes were still as upwardly mobile as they are today.
The new home owners were very anxious to furnish their homes with taste and Warings and Gillows opened a new shop in Watford to provide such furnishings. Consume goods were yearned for an acquired as soon as possible. The middle-classes had a high disposable income which was growing. Inflation was low, credit easy, and comparatively cheap. The Central Statistical Office shows that in he period 1924-1938 manual and skilled craftsmen did not see any rises in their income whereas teachers, civil servants and manages did increase their gross incomes during the same period. (I believe that local shortages would have increased rates locally for manual workers) So with consumer goods available and easy to buy the middle-classes were able to acquire vacuum cleaners, £4 19. 6p, Wonder Wringers £3 10 0p a Morris 10 £172 etc. I have worked out that the average income for a family on the Cassio Estate was in the order of £8 per week and the expenditure, say £2 for food, rates and repayments £1.10s, travel £1 say 43% of income leaving plenty of funds for consume items. A home could be furnished for £50 or 15sh a week over two years. This was the major impact that estates like Cassio created. They gave direct employment and indirect through consuming the goods produced by the working classes and gave the lower paid a visible goal which their children might aim for. For at that time the working classes were more fatalistically attached, certainly if compared with the position after 1945, to the class they ‘belonged to’, although they wanted more for their children. Another major impact upon society by the middle class estates was in the start-up and support of social clubs, sporting associations, Rotary, Oddfellows, Masonic Lodges,
The local papers in Watford were full of the ‘doings’ of such social clubs whereas the Hayes papers serving a predominantly working class readership did not give such matters so much attention. In ten years from 1925 the Watford area formed seventeen Oddfellows Lodges and their group annual meeting in 1935 commanded 36 column inches in the Watford Gazette. Round Table came to Watford in 1936 but did not have a group in Hayes until after 1945. The growth of Masonic lodges in nearby Middlesex, for which records are available, shows that of the two hundred and seventy lodges now in existence, ten were formed in the first decade of the century, eight in the next, thirty in the next and forty in the period 1940-50. The main growth was in the 1930s. Even the youth of the middle classes were ‘joiners’, the Teddy Tail League which boasted its own secret codes and signs was started by the Daily Mail in 1935 and collected 250,000 members in eleven weeks. If one accepts that such clubs and associations were not just for the middle-classes it is justified to say that their members are more likely to be drawn from that social grouping than any others. Being on an estate of people of similar status made it easier to identify and facilitate the formation of such clubs.
The last case study and the one which I have found to be the most rewarding refers to a working class estate situated in Hayes, Middlesex. In the 1930s it might have been considered the high-tech centre of England, the Slough of its time. It had excellent transport facilities, being between the new Western Avenue and the Bath Road and served by a new road to be called the Uxbridge Road which ran from London to Uxbridge and was used by trams, later trolley busses and by the Metropolitan and central lines. It was also on the main Paddington to Bristol railway line and the rand Union Canal ran through its centre. Its industries were at the forefront of technology some of which were HMV, Kraft Foods, Nestles, Fairy Aviation and Associated Foods.
There were many housing estates built, mainly for sale by developers and two large residential complexes developed by the local authority and the London County Council. I have chosen to look at an estate of five hundred homes built from 1932 onwards by Nash Limited on about 100 acres of land bought from Watney Coombe, the brewers and used to grow barley. To the east of the estate was an area of land bought by Frank Taylor, Taylor Woodrow, who was a small Blackpool based builder. He developed a large number of, what were and still remains, little homes which look like Northern terraced houses. He also built twenty four shops and the Corinth Cinema. The houses were advertised as honestly built by Northern craftsmen and sold for as little as £290.
The houses built by Nash were sold at between £495 and £600 and were all two and three bed roomed ‘semis’ with various bay types and options to include French doors, separate kitchens etc. The houses were well built by the standards of the time with sufficient space between them for a garage and good sized back garden of 70 feet or so. They could be bought for a £25 deposit and a weekly payment of about 15s 0p. By 1938 about 1,300,000 similar borrowers had taken advantage of a buyers market to move into similar new homes. In the main they were acquired by young couples from London although couples from all over the United Kingdom were also to buy homes here.
The new occupiers could rely upon the wage earner bringing home say, £3 10s to £4.00 per week and it was usual for the wife to be able to get an unskilled job at £2 per week and possibly as much as £4 in an office as a top secretary. Even at the lower levels this was enough to buy two bicycles, perhaps a motor bike, kitchen stove, tub with wringer, carpets and pay for regular milk and bread deliveries. (note 25) This attractive acquisitive way of life must, in the end, mean that material things take precedence over having children which were becoming consumer durables. The 1930 working class house in the new suburb had a more dominating influence upon society than a rented home in an old city. The social and economic attitudes towards the nuclear family and concept of “home” as being an economic factor, the idea of living a self-contained existence and yet at the same time as being a “joiner”, the notion of being an earner and a spender on goods for the home and not just on beer and Woodbines and betting, these were all trends in society which were strongly developing and nowhere more so than on the working class estates such as these ones in Hayes. The Nash houses formed good homes for the operation of the domestic ethic, for the establishment of a life style which gave comfort to the tidy, self-contained man/woman at piece with himself/herself. Someone who knew his neighbours yet who enjoyed the social anonymity of an estate. Someone who ignored the lack of social and cultural amenities and accepted the fact that single family dwelling was a compensation for the reduced area of kinship and family contact in the more densely populated area in which he/she had probably lived before. Those who lived in the Nash houses said they had changed and developed more in five years than they had ever imagined possible.
SUMMARY
As it is difficult to prove the extent to which the house of the 1930s influenced the Art and Society of the times, I have chosen to begin my summing up by outlining, in a counterfactual manner, those aspects of society which would PROBABLY have developed in a different manner if the estates and houses of the time had NOT been developed as they were.
The schedule below is not meant to be exhaustive but it does show the very clear partnership between modern estate housing, new technological industries with non-paternal management, and outward, demanding, independent attitudes from the new home makers.
Firstly, there would have been no workforce for the new industries. The new industrial entrepreneurs appeared reluctant to build in the inner city areas, although, perhaps, if the estates had not been built they would have had to have been built in older centres.
Lack of smaller families, for the consumerism on the estates, clinics where advice on contraception was available and perhaps lack of pressure from parents who would be living away from the estates, all contributed to the increasing trend to smaller families. The birth rate was falling all during the early part of the 20th Century from 28 births per 1,000 in 1900 to 15 per 1,000 in 1936 (British Society 1914-45 page 148), but the birth rates on the estates was thought to be even lower than in the country as a whole. (note 21 & 21a). Even with a falling birth rate the older houses of the inner cities would have become over crowded and perhaps conditions would have led to unrest and most certainly there would have been more sickness and lack of facilities to maintain the health of the nation through the many new hospitals. Even more important was the building of small clinics adjoining the new estates.
The older style factories and paternalistic employers would have prolonged many bad aspects of British industrial practice; for example the difficulties of workers moving from job to job, the limited roles available for women in older industries (textiles apart), the further entrenchment of the worker/boss attitudes which ended to break down in the new work-places.
Electricity would probably have been more expensive due to lack of demand. It may even have been that the CEBC grid would not have been connected throughout England as the high cost and inconvenience of wiring up older houses and the lack of consumer goods would have stunted demand; associated industries such as coal would also have suffered. The CEBG really is one of the success stories of the 1930s with a history of many firsts. Like the nuclear power industry of today it may have been a political response to the miners strike, an efficient national grid was a powerful economic and strategic weapon in he hands of government to be used against pressure from the miners.
With electricity came radios and other electrical goods he development and application of which proved so valuable in World War 11. The radio was a necessity in the modern home often far away from established amusements of the pub, cinema and theatre; not so in an older house where the noise might have been considered a nuisance. (note 22)
There would have been a limit to which banks and building societies would have grown without the home ownership boom and the suburban shopping parades in which to open branches. Other credit organisations too would have suffered as the consumer boom was for the main supported by the availability of cheap credit offered by the stores, trading cheque companies, “tally men” and manufacturers such as a Hoover which offered terms for their products. This type of shopping on credit is much overlooked by researchers but formed a most important part of the consumer boom. Most lower paid house holds had accounts with credit drapers until access to credit cards in the 1970 put an end to most of these activities.
There would have been a lack of demand for consumer goods due to established attitudes of older households. A set of saucepans, a broom and a few hooks for cups were often all Victorian working class families had in their kitchens (note 20). All of the consumer industries from furniture makers to carpet weavers would not have been able to grow at the rate they did if it had not been for the new houses. The rapid growth in the size of retail chains where multiples became common. Boots had 200 shops in 1900 and 1,180 in 1938 and marks and Spencer 140 shops in 1927 and 230 much larger units in 1938. Priestley said that Woolworths could almost be a symbol for the New England, “its cheapness is both its strength and its weakness, it achieves the famous equality of opportunity, being cheap it is accessible.” (English Journey page 376)
The retail development plus improved wage levels and shorter working hours must have been the result of the expansion of the suburbs and the awareness of consumer goods for the population remained much the same during the 1930s. It is relevant to note the interdependence between the consumer demand and the growth of new industries for motor vehicles and tyres, rayon and chemicals, radios and plastics went together. The consumerism extended to the construction industry for the demand was for homes not factories and more cars were built than lorries.
Modes of transport would have been affected both in the private and public sectors, it is true that cars were now being sold at prices which put them in the reach of some, but motor cycles and bicycles were cheap and ideal for the suburban dweller. Electric trolley busses, trams and the underground would not have been utilised if not for the estate dweller. With mobility came holidays, new roads, traffic codes, the RAC and AA, ease of finding and changing jobs. These were not just facts of the thirties but factors which point to the way that because the estates were there, the people were able to utilise the new transport modes available, with all the subsequent consequences.
Traditional entertainment such as the church, music halls, pubs, would have seen their influence on society last longer and perhaps cinemas would not have taken on the role of amuser and image-former if the developing suburbs had not provided opportunities for picture houses to be developed cheaply, sometimes by developers themselves as an incentive to lure buyers to the new estates. (note 23)
Perhaps, most importantly of all without the new suburbs there would have been less of a chance for a clean break with the past, older attitudes would have continued to be entrenched on race, class and religious lines.
So, counterfactually, it can be demonstrated that there is a case for the estate dweller changing society and not just being moulded by it. The outward, demanding attitudes of the people looked very much to the future to give themselves and their children something better than they had gained from their past in the old cities dwelling in old houses. Three were changes in the 1930s, bitter years for some. The changes were real and irrevocable. A chronicler of the changes was the Beveridge Report published in 1942. This was prepared by many people who were dwellers of suburban houses from which they could see that Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness had been banished. The worst aspects of a ruined heavy industrial economy in the north and the contrast with the new light industries of the south are mirrored in the housing stocks of both areas. In the old, barely habitable houses which generated dull, drab, undernourished people while in the south “youth and progress were in partnership”.
In all this the house played an important part in changing the way people lived. Is size, location, newness, its emptiness with the need to fill with children and/or consumer durables. Its limited boundaries within a large society produced a solid and visible consume society and crystallised social attitudes.
Therefore, it may be difficult to prove just how much effect the new homes and attitudes had on society in the 1930s but it was evident how much effect the established attitudes originating from older cities and industrial centres was having on the way of life of the country. The classic books and some films of the 1930s radiate depression and hopelessness. Priestly in English Journey almost brings himself and his reader to tears when describing the indifference and neglect he found in such places as Jarrow.
Few new industries would survive if planted in such bitter ground or if grafted on to such roots as existed there and few chose to try. (note 24)
No, the brave new world of the suburbs was not “self-indulgent up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics” from a lecture to the Savage in Brave New World, but it was outward looking with an American can-do attitude. The new suburban England had its birthplace in America. It was the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories which look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, moor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, grey hound racing and dirt track and “everything given away for football coupons” as Priestly remarked. There certainly was a sense in the 1930s that as a result of the consumer capitalism, the products with which the new estates were furnished were utterly incapable of serving as a conductor of the same feelings in the way steam and wood do.
There was also a lack of community initially in the new estates, people looked inwards to the new home and cared less about the street as in Victorian times. This attitude created and encouraged thrift, it fostered a sense of security and self-dependence and sensibly deepens citizens consciousness of having a stake in the country and the influence is surely one which spreads from the individual to the community and links up all classes, it must contribute to national stability. Looking at the estates today, and indeed I write this after touring several square miles of Middlesex, all of which was developed in the 1930s, I feel that at the time the occupiers would have been crammed like battery hens. With advertising, films and other stimuli their desire for consumer goods would have been stimulated. The items promoted were then so new so exciting. The estate home was a successful example of mass marketing of dreams within a class society that prevented their realisation in anything but symbolic form. What mattered was not the abundance of consume goods but the ever present vision of such abundance, a vision which in the 20th Century has been embodied in images of America.
People did not want a machine for living so much as a vehicle for living out a fantasy, although as Corbusier added to his famous statement “the house was also a place for meditation and contemplation”; and this the state dweller grasped. No matter what the size and social position of the house most of the occupiers responded well to the chance of expanding their intellectual horizons as well as fulfilling their consume appetites. There were whole industries founded on a want of leisure or a want of happiness. For an important part of the history of any period is its philosophical thought. This is certainly true of the period since the 1930s which has seen important and revolutionary changes and developments which had their roots in the estates of the 1920s and 1930s. For them, the estate dwellers did influence the way society acted, thought and governed itself. Without the estate dweller emerging when he did, society would have lingered longer in the shadows of decaying Edwardian ways, unfit for the even greater changes which the end of the new war would bring in 1945.
notes page l
ART AND SOCIETY IN THE 30s AS REFLECTED AND CONDITIONED BY THE HOUSE OF THE TIME.
note 1,from The Metropolitan Railway Street Station Buffet by Betjeman
note 2,England in the Twentieth Century,Pelican page 176.
note 2a,”The sou1 of man under Socialism 19.
note 3,The World State’s motto, from BRAVE NEW WORLD, A. Huxley.
note 4,The Beveridge report,1942, identified these five giants”which stood in the way of progress.
note 5,from Gloags’THE ENGLISHMANS CASTLE’
note 5a MacMillan wrote in 1933 Reconstruction- a plea for a national policy”;Salter in 1932 published Recovery” a radical call for state planning and Woottons Plan or no plan”,1934,advocated a planned economy based on the success of the Soviet example.
note 5b,figures from Bowley,HOUSING AND THE STATE
note 5c,only 76% voted in the very important General Election of 1931.
note 6 Felicia Heman’s ‘THE COTTAGE HOMES OF
ENGLAND’(1830)
note 7, electric costs: home industry.
1925 3.815 0.995
1929 2.862 0.817
1935 1.921 0.659
1939 1.598 0.655
-prices in pence per kw; Landes,page 435
notes page2
note 7a,W.A.Mortons British Finance put building costs of a
3 bed,non parlour house as follows
1925 1931 1935 1938
per sq.ft: 11-0p 8-9p 7-lOp’ 9-2p
cost £440 £350 £320 £365
Peter Hall in REGIONAL PLANNING said prices and house prices which are always closely linked reached a low point related to wages never equalled before or since.” note 7b,the introduction of a cheap money programme in 1932 contrasted to the deflationary policies used between
1925-31.It was felt that cheap money would cause inflation and increase unemployment, but a year after introduction the Government regarded cheap money as “the indispensable background of trade recovery
note 8,Dr.Christopher Addison was the first Minister of Health, his Act gave a sum of £120-130 for any house built ,however it failed for various reasons to produce working class houses in the numbers required and indeed the average price of an” Addison house was £.1000.Wheatley,also a Minister of Health wished to give the construction industry an assured 15 year building programme raising the numbers built from 60,000 per year in 1924 to between 150,000 and 225,000 by 1940.
note 9,Priestley wrote these words in “Falling backwards down an Escalator in the NEW STATESMAN in Dec.1970 about the 1930s.
note 10, in ENGLISH JOURNEY, Priestley admits that much as he
deplores”semi’s’ admits that at Bournville “their tenants greatly prefer to be semi-detached”.page 91
note 11,research on maisonettes from A. A. Jacksons LONDON, various pages.
note 11,culled from several advertisments in METRO-LAND,published by Oldcastle Books from the original Metropolitan Railways Publicity Departments hand books, 1915-1932.
note 12, I have not found any examples of even the cheapest house without both gas and water-supplies. Gas companies often charged €10 per house to install a supply.
note 13,taken from my considerable experience as a Chartered Surveyor,I spent several years carrying out structural surveys on older houses in London. note 14, in all the advertisements I have looked in the course of this study which must amount to over 100 I have never seen any extras offered by builders nor did anyone mention such things when interviewed.
note 14a Government of British Columbia were advertising an attractive timber house for erection at a price of £350 in the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1936, I understand they sold one or two.
note 15 1931 Census showed that the number of family units had risen by almost 40%,the average number of children per family reflecting this fact had dropped from 5.3 in 1371 to 2.2 in 1931.
note 16,quotation is taken mainly from S.R.Dennison, LOCATION OF INDUSTRY AND THE DEPRESSED AREAS, 1939.
note 17 am aware that, the probability it that any people still, living on the Gentwood estate could be regarded as having failed in a consumer society. The fact of living in one place, such as this particular suburb of Liverpool for 50 years evidences a certain lack of ambition. Having said all that I still think that their attitudes were probably valid though perhaps frozen in time.
note 18, figures from Stevenson, BRITISH SOCIETY 1914-45
page 357.
note 19,from conversations with retired. Sgt.Mower who was. transfered to Hayes’ Police Station from Harringay, North London.
note 20,from personal observations
note 21,from BRITAIN IN .THENINETEEN THIRTIES,by Branson and Hinemann,page 180.
note 21a,Alan Jackson commented that if the laws on over-crowding had been enforced in London, 500,000 people would have been made homeless, page 25.
note 22,in ENGLISH JOURNEY, Priestley has a conversation with a man on a coach who remarks, all this electricity they’re putting in, and they all got to have fittings. Look at the wireless, the way prices have come down and the qualities gone up’, page 13.
note 23,Taylor Woodrow built the Corinth cinema and 24 shops with flats over adjoining an estate they developed at Hayes in
Middlesex.
note 24,Ford built their first plant in England in a depressed area, Trafford Park, Manchester where there was power available, but soon moved to Dagenham when the CEGB grid was completed. The nearby Barking power station had the world’s biggest transformer at the time.
Bibliography page l
1. PRIMARY SOURCES.
(a)unpublished….I have conducted interviews with residents on the three estates which formed my case studies. Only a very few residents had been there from the start and they were the ones I needed to interview. From these kind people I obtained the names of others who might be helpful such as milk delivery men, a bakers boy policeman, shop keepers. All their interviews contained overlapping evidence but with extensions or differing slants to certain aspects. I also spoke to three people who were to make me aware of the importance of the expansion of the retailing industry and the important part which the new estates played in this growth. One was a director of United Draperies Stores (now part of Hanson Trust) which had grown out of the 30s with a wide range of stores, tailoring shops and a very large ‘tally man’ business serving the estates. Another interesting man was a retired director of J.Lyons who dealt with the marketing of their products and who had examined whether they should follow the bakers and dairymen into the estates with mobile shops. The last source was a lady who had spent all her working life in a Department store and was able to trace the styles, prices and moods of customers on the estates during the 30s. As a Chartered Surveyor I have been able to gain access to unpublished records, plans etc of builders and developers of the 30s, where they still exist, and to talk to those in the industry who still remember the building of the estates. The private files of the Rice family were made available where they concerned the records of Kenneth Rice & Co. who developed several estates in the Watford area. The Cassio Estate, built by Rice, was used for one of my case studies. Kenneth Rice was unusual for a local builder in that he went on a fact finding tour of America. He came back with the understanding that he should concentrate on giving the housewife a good kitchen. Advertisements for Rice homes are shown at the end of this Bibliograph.
(b)published….;the libraries of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Royal Institution of British Architects have the members’ publications for the 30s.Reading the letters, advertisements and Law Reports provides much useful information. Watford library have copies of the WATFORD GAZETTE which were very helpful advertisements comments on the activities of clubs, societies, reports on the unemployed, the tone of editorial, all created the atmosphere I needed. Hayes library also had copies of the two local papers of the time. Newcastle City library was the source for local papers which I had checked to see if the Ideal Home Exhibition was reported on, if trips were advertised to it or if local stores promoted goods ‘as seen at the Ideal Home Exhibition’. The libraries of the Scouting movement and at Freemasons Hall were helpful and from them I could see the growth of Scouting and Freemasonry in the suburbs. Major Gen. P.Blunt, the Chairman of Angex Ltd. who stage the Ideal Home Exhibition was kind enough to allow me access
his personal copies of the catalogues for the Exhibition from which I was able to obtain much useful information often referred to in this work. As a matter of interest, as result of a fire, all other copies were destroyed and only one set remains to which Blunt does riot usually allow access. Copies from various pages from the catalogues
shown at the end of this Bibliograph.
The DAILY TELEGRAPH, DAILY MAIL,DAILY MIRROR of the 1930s all contain a wealth of advertisements, comments and letters from the estate dwellers..
The contemporary books of Wodehouse, Priestley and many
helped to recall the tone of the 30s.
A.Huxley: Brave new World.
Alan Jackson: Semi-Detached London.
H.Richardson Economic Recovery in Britain 1932-39.
John Parker: King of Fools.
P.Madgwick: Britain Since 1945.
R.Webb: Modern England..
D.Landes: The Unbound Prometheus.
J.Stevenson: British Society 1914-45.
S.Ellacott: A History of Everday Things in England
1914- 1968.
D.Childs: Britain since 1945,a political history.
J..Burnett A Social History of Housing 1815-1985.
0. Green : Metro-land.
JPriestley: English Journey.
N..Branson: Britain in the Nineteen Thirties.
T.Kemp: Historical Patterns of Industralization.
M.Wiener:English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
Spirit 1850-1980.
S.Gibbon: Britain 1945-1985.
SPollard: The Development of the British Economy 1914-1980.
D..Thomson:England in the Twentieth Century.