The Day War Broke Out Read online

  From the Brighton and Hove Herald dated 24 March 1928:

  FAMILY IN A CONDEMNED HOUSE

  A Scandal to Brighton

  Sensational disclosures of the conditions in which a family of six have been living in a condemned house in Oxford Court off Oxford Street were made at an inquest at the Brighton Town Hall on Thursday.

  The Borough Coroner was inquiring into the death from laryngitis and measles of a child aged three years and seven months. She was Irene Esme, the daughter of Arthur Cecil Leighton, a furniture porter, of 3 Oxford Court, who is now out of work and in receipt of a ‘dole’ of £1.

  The Coroner said: ‘I have visited a good many poor homes but I must say I have never visited a place as terrible as this house. It is extraordinary that a town like Brighton should have three cottages without any sanitation except an open closet and there should be no water. The property ought to be pulled down, there is no question of that. I don’t know who the landlord is, but I don’t think he ought to take rent for them.’

  Leighton said that he paid 6 shillings a week rent for two rooms, one upstairs and one down. There was no closet in the house. There was a closet attached to a house three doors away; this closet has a water tap outside. Three houses have to use this closet and the public can use it as well as there is no door to it. He added that the house was condemned two years ago but he had been unable to obtain other accommodation. The bedroom used by the family measures 12 feet long, 8 feet wide, 7 feet high.

  Replying to the Coroner, Leighton said that a nurse from the Health Department had expressed herself satisfied with the condition of the children. There was nothing wrong with the children until about a week ago. The eldest girl then showed a few spots on her face and was sent home from school because she had a cold. He did not send for the doctor. On Saturday last he found that the other three children had colds. They were kept in bed, given extra nourishment and rubbed with oil.

  On the following Saturday he noticed that the girl Irene was not so well and had difficulty breathing. On Monday she was worse and a doctor was sent for. Dr Fraser, who was called, said he should inform the health authorities. Later the Medical Officer of Health arrived but the child was then dead. The other children were sent to the sanatorium.

  The Medical Officer said that when he was called to the house he saw that it was in a deplorable state.

  ‘I went upstairs and found three children lying in the bed. They were obviously ill. The eldest of the three was desperately ill and dying. I was of the opinion that she was suffering from laryngitis and measles.

  ‘Between two and three o’clock in the afternoon I found the child lying dead beside the youngest child and the second child appeared to be worse.’

  The brand-new local authority housing built in London in the 1930s was not entirely the result of slum clearance – only a small proportion of the new housing came under that category. The then London County Council (LCC) built over 89,000 new homes in the years between the wars.

  In 1924, the LCC decided to establish a number of new housing estates for working-class families in what were previously rural areas outside London. Known as ‘cottage estates’, these were planned to provide housing ‘fit for heroes’ in the wake of the First World War. One of them, the Watling Estate, in London’s Burnt Oak area, was designed to provide new homes for families from inner London areas. It was finally completed by the mid-1930s.

  At the time the Watling Estate was completed, however, there was little other than the new housing, with few shops or facilities, making it a difficult option for families accustomed to all the conveniences and shops of the inner London areas. Many new residents, despite the opportunity to live in a green areas in vastly better housing, did not stay on the estate. Additionally, the ‘snobbocracy’ – as the local paper described the residents in surrounding areas – did not relish a working-class estate in the area. As with the new council estates outside Brighton, too, many families found they could not pay the rent and were subsequently evicted. Rents on the estate varied from less than 4 shillings 2d for a two-room flat £1 3 shillings 8d for a five-room home – almost double the inner-city rents previously paid.

  By the end of the 1930s, however, the Watling Estate’s population was 19,000, nearly half of whom were under eighteen, living in households where most breadwinners worked in skilled or semi-skilled labour, transport or clerical work. In 1937, half of the men on the estate were earning between £3 and £4 a week.

  ‘IS THIS ALL OURS?’

  May Millbank lived on the Watling Estate in the 1930s:

  I was seven when we moved from King’s Cross to Watling, that was back in May 1937. I had never been to the country before and so I had no idea what it would be like. We were told the house was situated near a park and Father said there was plenty of grass. I would dream about parks with grass and roundabouts and swings. I’d seen grass in picture books, but I didn’t know what it really was so I had to imagine.

  We moved to Watling in an old coal van – my father had to help the coalman do some deliveries to get the money for it. It was pouring with rain the day we moved. Mum was in the front of the lorry and the furniture, along with us kids and Dad, was in the back, under a tarpaulin. The journey was about an hour and we was like wet rats when we arrived.

  As we were brought into the house we thought, ‘Is this all ours?’

  I remember saying to my father, ‘Where are all the other people?’

  We looked out of a window and my brother, two years younger than me, said: ‘What’s that over there?’ He couldn’t make out what the green was or what the flowers in the garden were and I was glad he asked because I wasn’t sure if the flowers were also called ‘grass’.

  Pat Cryer grew up in a typical 1930s semi in Edgware, Middlesex. Her father retained meticulous accounts and paperwork, leaving Pat with a detailed record of receipts and other household paperwork from the 1930s.

  ‘My father paid £835 for 9, Brook Avenue, Edgware, Middlesex, in 1938. He put down £200 in cash as a deposit and used a mortgage with the then Abbey Road Building Society.’

  The monthly repayments were £4 each month for the three-bedroom semi with front and back gardens.

  My grandparents thought my father was taking on too much. They said that if anything went wrong in the house, it would have to be paid out of his own pocket. But this did not deter him.

  The layout of such a new house would be familiar to anyone who has lived or is still living in a thirties semi in a city suburb. These houses varied from estate to estate, with different styles, i.e. Jacobean-, Georgian- or Tudor-style homes.

  Nineteen-thirties house front doors usually had three panels at the bottom and a large glass window at the top, with brass knockers and house numbers on the front. The front door opens to a hallway, from which there are stairs to the upper floor, two doors into the living rooms and at the end of the hall, a door into a kitchen. Upstairs consists of a landing, two bedrooms, plus a smaller box bedroom and a bathroom sited above the kitchen. There is also a sizeable loft above the upper floor.

  Room sizes varied; some 1930s houses had chalet-type roofs, meaning smaller loft areas. Some windows – which were single-glazed in those days – were attractive rounded bays, some square and others had no bay at all, though bay windows tended to be a big feature of 1930s homes – in a way, a mark of home ownership.

  Houses tended to be smaller in the less affluent new estates but they were all to a similar general pattern, inside and out.

  Inside the hallway, the owners would usually place a hat stand and a small table for letters or other post. New linoleum (also known as ‘lino’) flooring in the house gave the impression of tiling – but without the cost.

  Kitchens painted in cream or duck-egg blue were fashionable to complement the large ceramic sink and new gas cooker. Interior doors were often also painted in the same colours to match the kitchen.

  Living rooms had chintz curtains, with throws over the 1930s three-piece
suite. Oak and mahogany tables were fashionable too, though the cheaper plywood tended to be more common.

  One of the biggest complaints about these family suburban semis came from those living in the estates with smaller houses. The semis had a shared side entrance with the house next door. Gardens were quite small too on this type of estate, so in later post-war years, with car ownership growing, many families opted to build a garage in the back-garden area.

  Inside the 1938 house, Pat Cryer remembers floors covered with lino: ‘The hall was dark brown linoleum in a marble pattern, my mother would polish it until it shone.’

  The other floor coverings were also dark brown apart from the front bedroom, which was pale green, brighter than the other rooms. Pat still has her father’s estimate for the cost of new lino: £12 17 shillings for all floor coverings, apart from the front room.

  The bathroom and lavatory floors in their house were black and white lino tiles, with matching black and white ceramic wall tiles – a very typical 1930s bathroom.

  ‘My mother Florence used to call the lino “oil cloth”. This was a heavy-duty cloth to create a wipe-over surface, which would have been the norm in Victorian terraces where she grew up. Oil cloth and lino were very similar,’ says Pat. Coal was essentially the only form of heating in these new houses. Gas fires were lit very rarely. A boiler in the kitchen heated all the water, making the kitchen very cosy. The boiler was fed on coke.

  Insurance for the contents of the Brook Avenue semi from the Prudential Assurance Company for a ‘hearth and home’ policy totalled £1,500 in July 1938.

  Transport, of course, played a crucial role in the development of the new housing estates and suburbs, with their rows of semis. Many new houses were built alongside the arterial roads that led into and out of the large cities – ribbon development – but while car ownership in the thirties was very low by today’s standards (just over three million private cars and motorcycles on the roads in 1938), the development of the new suburbs owed much to easy access to public transport, the trolley buses, trams and coaches now travelling on the roads. The advantage of the house in Brook Avenue was that it was a seven-minute walk from Edgware tube station – which had already benefited from the extension of the underground Northern Line to Edgware in 1924.

  As for the onset of war for families like Pat’s, who had only recently started paying off their mortgage commitment, all mortgage repayments were briefly suspended in 1939 for those families where men were joining the armed forces. After war was officially declared, a Government Hardship Committee offered help for people who couldn’t afford to pay their rents or mortgages and this, along with building societies opting to suspend capital payments (so that mortgagees paid interest only for a period of time), or to lengthen mortgage terms for those either on active service or whose livelihood or income was affected by the war, helped most of the new home-buyers to avoid losing their properties.

  The rise in employment and wage levels during the war, with many women, of all ages, working long shifts in the factories to support the war effort, meant that thousands of mortgages were, in fact, paid off early – and repossession levels were very low.

  The ribbon development of new houses around the main roads outside the cities was a key planning issue. The Metropolitan Green Belt was first proposed by the Greater London Regional Planning Committee in 1935 in order to curb urban sprawl and keep some land permanently open. Yet it was not until 1947 that local authorities all over the country were permitted to include green-belt proposals in all their development plans.

  6

  WORKING LIFE

  BY THE LATE 1930s, WHILE LIVING STANDARDS WERE IMPROVING for those with work in the South and Midlands, the long-term effect of the leaner years of the 1920s and the early 1930s continued to keep unemployment levels high.

  Certainly, new jobs in the North were emerging. One good example is a former cotton mill in Blackburn, the Garden Street Mill. This became a gas-mask assembly plant in 1937, with a capacity to manufacture half a million gas masks a week.

  That same year, a new Royal Ordnance Factory making fuses for munitions opened nearby and another Blackburn company, Mullard’s in Little Harwood, became a mainstay of local employment for both sexes when the company started developing a plant making electronic components on a brand-new industrial estate. Initially, the plant manufactured radio valves, but by the end of 1938, further expansion brought large-scale production of electronic components, especially for military systems.

  War changed Britain’s job market. Unemployment in the UK was over 10 per cent in 1939, but by 1941, with so many men enlisted in the armed forces or working in reserved occupations, there was an official shortage of two million workers.

  Millions of pairs of hands were urgently needed for paid jobs in the armaments and munitions factories across the country. Some of these factories had to be built from scratch, in semi-secret locations, many others were set up in requisitioned buildings: everyone in them worked round the clock, producing everything the country needed to support the war effort. Tanks, planes, guns, bullets, bombs, parachutes, uniforms . . . these factory workers became crucial in helping to build up the country’s defences.

  Given the choice of going into the armed forces, the Land Army or opting for factory work late in 1941 (when conscription for women was finally introduced), a new breed of young, unmarried, working-class women – many still in their teens, some who had never had jobs before – began working in the factories.

  The shifts would be long and the routine often relentless, yet their weekly pay packet was a big improvement on what they had previously earned if they had already been working in service or at a shop counter.

  Shopkeepers in the 1930s sought to reduce labour costs by recruiting large numbers of young people on low wages. By 1931, two in five shop assistants were under twenty-one. By the mid-1930s, 10 per cent of the country’s young wage-earners were working as shop assistants. School-leavers could also find work in low-paid jobs, for instance as errand boys or as live-out domestic workers.

  Domestic work ‘in service’ in big houses and on country estates had been on the decline since the First World War. By 1931, only 5 per cent of households in England and Wales could boast resident domestic help, and attempts to encourage younger women into service in the 1920s (with organised homecraft courses) fell flat. There were still upper- and middle-class households willing to keep one or two low-paid, live-out servants as part of their household running costs, but by then, most younger women preferred the option of shop or factory work, even if the pay was low, rather than living in the somewhat restrictive situation of being a live-in servant with all its attendant rules.

  Jobs for women in the ‘new’ industries – for instance, the production lines in the big factories producing the new mass-manufactured consumer goods like toys, clothing and domestic appliances – also had a positive impact on the labour market for young people, as did new legislation. The Factories Acts of 1937 and 1938 limited juvenile hours of work to nine hours a day, and a total of forty-four hours a week.

  Essentially, it was the retail and service industries that provided much of the employment for young people. As cities and big towns expanded alongside increasing transport options in the later part of the 1930s, so too did the numbers of shops and department stores, all needing unskilled workers to serve the ever-growing numbers of shoppers. The department stores, more upmarket emporiums, tended to offer higher wages than the smaller shops.

  High-street retail names familiar in Britain even today, like Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Selfridges, Boots and the Co-op, had been in existence before 1930. Like the manufacturing industries, they too underwent a great deal of expansion in the decade before the Second World War. Additionally, the 1930s housing boom, as outlined in the previous chapter, provided a big boost in employment levels, doubling the numbers of unskilled working men needed as labourers and providing greater job opportunities for skilled specialist
s like glaziers, electricians, plasterers, tilers, plumbers and carpenters.

  Overall, the impact of all this gives a quite different picture of a country that had previously languished in the throes of the Depression era. It was the beginning – albeit in a class-divided nation that was still a very unequal society – of the consumer world of the present day.

  As the writer J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) observed as he travelled around England in the late 1930s:

  This is the England of arterial and bypass roads and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools and everything given away for cigarette coupons . . .

  This more affluent, consumer-led society with its attendant glamour is also reflected in the day-to-day working environment of fifteen-year-old Bert Hollick. Bert’s first job in 1935, working on the railway network on the lowest rung of the pecking order, was at a time when a twelve-to fourteen-hour working day was still commonplace. His starting wage was just £2 a week, providing a luxury service to travellers on the Pullman car Brighton Belle, the famous London-to-Brighton rail service (UK Pullman trains were mainline luxury railway services operating with first-class coaches and a steward service on board).

  Bert’s description of life as a Pullman attendant from his first day onwards provides a fascinating insight: ‘I was employed by the Pullman Company and during my four years on the railway as an attendant, I travelled thousands of miles on the various routes run by the then Southern Railway.’

  On his first day, Bert reported to the company’s office at Brighton station and was issued with a pass allowing him to travel anywhere on the Southern Region. He then had to report to the Pullman head office at Victoria station, where he was measured for his uniform, a dark blue jacket with gold braiding around the lapels and cuffs, and gold buttons. The trousers were dark blue with a blue stripe down each outer leg, plus a similar-coloured peaked cap with gold braid on the peak and a band with PULLMAN CAR CO. around it. He was provided with a new uniform every year; the peaked cap was always worn inside or outside the car. ‘My salary was £2 a week plus tips, on average 3d or 6d a time. All the tips were pooled and the attendant in charge would share them out.’