The Wartime House: Home Life in Wartime Britain 1939-1945

INTRODUCTION

One of the greatest social revolutions of the last two centuries has been the massive and rapid expansion of what we would today call the middle classes. This group had its beginnings in the freemen of feudal England, the merchants and artisans, people whose skills and intelligence enabled them to rise above the ‘common’ people, without threatening the position of the ruling elite. The members of this group became the grease that allowed the wheels of society to turn smoothly. Those with ability and intelligence were plucked from the lowest rungs and put to good use in the evolving civil service, in the Church, and in commerce, running the country for those who ruled. This symbiotic relationship was nothing if not mercenary; the wealth created by the middle classes during the Industrial Revolution bought them marriages into the aristocracy, which by this time needed both money and fresh blood.

The middle classes excelled especially in the growing field of commerce, putting to good use the education that they valued so highly. So it was no coincidence that, as England became part of Great Britain, the middle classes spread throughout the towns and cities where most of that trade was conducted. This expansion was particularly obvious in the south-east of England, where much of the increasing Continental trade was based. Yet until the Industrial Revolution, the middle classes remained but a small sector of British society.

In 1867, the same year in which Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was published, Dudley Baxter’s book National Income of the United Kingdom quantified the size and distribution of the national income. As part of this process, Baxter attempted to sort the population into a number of groups or classes, creating a system that is still recognised today. He grouped the upper class with the upper middle class to make about half a per cent of the population. Next came the middle and lower middle classes, who together made up 20 per cent. Finally, skilled, ‘less skilled’ and unskilled labour, plus agricultural workers, made up the rest. So, by the second half of the nineteenth century, the middle classes had become a significant group and their numbers continued to rise.

But income was not the only identifying characteristic. Education was important, as was religion. Middle class morality, so despised by Alfred Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, was a definable set of values unique to the class. Retrospectively, it became synonymous with the values of the Victorians, and, as Dickens demonstrated time and again, the hypocrisy of a society which often paid little more than lip service to them. Its morality was rooted in a genteel lifestyle fuelled by salaries earned by predominantly clerical and professional workers.

With this new morality came a new way of life, unique to those living in the suburbs, totally alien to manual labourers living in the inner cities, or on farms for whom domestic life, with its earth closets, standpipes, slums, poverty and disease, had changed little since their grandparents’ time. In the twentieth century, the success of Suburbia was such that the enduring image of the inter-war period is of their cosy, semi-detached world.

This is the story of a typical British suburban house and the lives of those who might have inhabited it during the Second World War: it is representative of millions who, from their beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century, grew rapidly to become the dominant feature of twentieth-century British society.

ONE

THE SUBURBAN DREAM

THE BEGINNINGS OF SUBURBIA

The nineteenth century witnessed a huge expansion of Britain’s towns and cities. The Industrial Revolution had followed a distinct pattern: workers were packed into tenements that had been quickly thrown up around the factories. The lack of public transport and the long hours they worked meant that the people had to live near to their workplaces, and this gave rise to overcrowded slums, close to the smoke, grime and dirt created by these industries.

The towns grew quickly as the move from countryside to town gathered pace. In 1851 about half the population of England and Wales lived in urban areas; by 1901 this had risen to three-quarters, and by 1939 to four-fifths. At this time, Greater London alone encompassed one-fifth of the entire population of the two countries. The rate of expansion continued into the twentieth century. In 1900 London’s Charing Cross was about 8 miles from the countryside, north or south; by 1939 this had almost doubled to about 15 miles in a new outward surge.

As the population of workers in the slum areas of the industrial towns grew, those with higher paid positions who could afford transport lived on the outskirts of the town, or the suburban areas – the suburbs. Here they were on the edge of the countryside, and could enjoy fresh air and peaceful surroundings.

In 1898 Ebenezer Howard’s book Garden Cities of Tomorrow compared urban and rural living. His ‘Garden City’ concept combined the pleasant aspects of living in the country with the ability to work in the town, while keeping commuting time to an acceptable minimum. He proposed that a series of new towns be established around London, each surrounded by its own ‘Green Belt’ of land. With private funding, Howard began building at Letchworth in 1903, and Welwyn Garden City in 1920. His ideas were very popular, and were copied in such schemes as the Hampstead Garden Suburb, begun in 1907. His ideas and influence also contributed to the fashion for nostalgia in designs, with Elizabethan and other historic styles predominating.

AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOME IS . . .

The typical seven-room semi contained (average sizes are given): three bedrooms: 14 ft 6 in × 11 ft (4.35 m × 3.3 m); 13 ft × 11 ft 6 in (3.9 m × 3.5 m); and 8 ft × 7 ft 6 in (2.4 m × 2.25 m); a drawing-room: 14 ft 6 in × 12 ft 6 in (4.35 m × 3.75 m); a dining-room: 14 ft × 11 ft (4.2 m x 3.3 m); a kitchen or kitchenette: 10 ft × 7 ft 6 in (3 m x 2.25 m); and a bathroom, of a similar size to the kitchen.

The late Victorian and Edwardian suburbs had typically comprised rows of neat, brick-built terraced houses, but the ease of movement (and consequent expansion of the suburbs) provided by improved transport systems meant that houses could be built far less densely, with front and back gardens. This led to the shift away from terraced to detached, or at least semi-detached construction, and the inter-war suburb – the period during which growth was most marked – was typified by the three-bedroomed semi-detached house, or ‘semi’. The single family semi was a determined move from the typical Victorian tenement lifestyle, where many generations of the same family lived squashed together, everyone knowing everyone else’s business; the suburban semi, with its garden (front and back) and its (partial) insularity, was the embodiment of a desire for genteel privacy.

Initially, however, few could afford to move out to the suburbs; while the houses were not particularly expensive, they were still beyond the reach of the lowest paid. The cost of commuting also had to be considered. Transport in the form of the horse, with or without carriage, was pricey. Even the earliest horse-drawn omnibuses were relatively expensive, although the arrival of passenger trains, with their cheap, early morning, workman’s tickets eased the situation. These factors tended to make the suburbs the domain of the rapidly growing lower middle classes.

TRANSPORT

By the beginning of the twentieth century, public transport services were being rapidly improved, with the result that more people could live further away from their places of work. Allied to this was the move to shorter working hours, which gave people more time to be able to travel to and from work. These changes, in turn, created a new outward spurt of suburban house building.

Electric trams had been introduced at the turn of the century, and soon replaced the horse-drawn versions. Motor buses were also introduced; although at first they were noisy, smelly, and inclined to break down, by 1910 new models such as the London General Omnibus Company’s B type – sometimes called the ‘Old Bill’ – had solved most of the problems. The omnibus, which could cover new routes without needing new tracks or cables, became the preferred mode of transport for town dwellers, putting most of the tram companies out of business.

In the larger cities, where longer distances between the centre and the outskirts made travel by bus less viable, railways met the demand for public transport. The sheer size of London meant that the scale of the problem was far greater and needed a different solution. The first underground electric line had opened in London in 1890, then the Metropolitan and District Underground Railway Companies began replacing their steam trains with electric versions. In 1900 a new company, the Central London Railway, opened its first line, running from the Bank to Shepherd’s Bush. It proved a great success, carrying 100,000 passengers a day, and was followed by several others: the Bakerloo line in 1906 (Baker Street to Waterloo); the Piccadilly line, also in 1906 (Finsbury Park to Hammersmith); and the Hampstead line in 1907 (later integrated into the Northern line).

The Hampstead line is an excellent example of the symbiotic relationship between transport and housing development at the time. The line terminated at the cross-roads in Golders Green and for a short while the station was the only building in the area. But within months, builders were putting up houses all around it. Such was the demand for housing in these locations that house-builders themselves put money towards the cost of constructing stations.

After the First World War, the underground lines continued to expand, and in 1933 the various companies were brought together into the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB). Buses linked the stations to the new estates, allowing easy access to the centre from the suburbs, facilitating the movement outwards. Between 1921 and 1937 the population of outer London rose by 1,400,000, while that of central London fell by 400,000.

Underground posters encouraged this outward move, with many extolling the peace and beauty of suburban life. The first of these, ‘Golders Green’, produced in 1908, shows a neat timber-gabled house with an equally neat garden; a middle-class man in his shirtsleeves is watering his flowers, while his wife sits winding wool in a deck-chair on the lawn, with their young daughter at her feet.

The Metropolitan Railway produced an annual guidebook, Metro-land, from 1915, which described the country districts served by the line. One of the main sections, and the purpose of the booklet, was the ‘House Seekers’ section, with pages of advertisements for houses, usually newly built, in the area. The term ‘Metro-land’ became synonymous with districts north-west of London in Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, which were served by the line. The booklet continued to be issued until 1932, after which the Metropolitan line disappeared into the LPTB.

The road network too had seen expansion. By-passes, such as that at Kingston in Surrey and the North Circular Road, as well as new fast routes, such as the Western and Eastern Avenues, were signs that cities were becoming more accessible to the rapidly expanding car-owning public who could commute greater distances. Houses, factories and shops sprang up along these and other main roads because services (gas, water, electricity and sewage) were immediately accessible so there was no need for new and expensive pipework. This meant that houses could be built far more cheaply. However, ribbon development, as this became known, marred the whole point of these new roads, as what were supposed to be fast access roads became clogged with local traffic; ribbon development was prohibited by an Act of Parliament in 1935 but by then the damage had been done.

SOCIAL TRENDS

In 1909 C.F.G. Masterman, in The Condition of England, delineated the class structure in Britain as: the Conquerors; the Suburbans; and the Multitude. He described the Suburbans as ‘practically the product of the last half century’. Masterman’s description of suburban life was just as valid in 1939 (and, apart from its sexual stereotyping, is still recognisable today):

its male population is engaged in all its working hours in small, crowded offices, under artificial light, doing immense sums, adding up other men’s accounts, writing other men’s letters. It is sucked into the City at daybreak and scattered again as darkness falls. It finds itself towards evening in its own territory in the miles and miles of little red houses in little, silent streets, in number defying imagination. Each boasts its pleasant drawing room, its bow window, its little front garden, its high-sounding title – ‘Acacia Villa’ or ‘Camperdown Lodge’ – attesting unconquerable human aspiration.

The aspiration again stems from the Industrial Revolution. Previously, knowing one’s place and its immutability, set at birth, had been the cornerstone of society. During the Industrial Revolution, men like Richard Arkwright had literally gone from rags to immense riches and, in doing so, had taken on the trappings of traditional ‘Lord of the Manor’. Upward mobility became the aim of many, even on a modest scale. And upward mobility most easily defined itself in the manner exemplified by Arkwright and other successful magnates, who themselves took a traditional approach to displaying their success. Therefore, it is no coincidence that much suburban housing of the twenties and thirties had the feel of minor baronial halls, with their half-timbered finishes, their bow windows with stained glass and latticed panes, and their Gothic front doors. This feeling of rural selectivity was aided by the naming of roads as Drives, Lanes and Avenues. Indeed, many houses were marketed as ‘Baronial Halls’, or ‘Cosy Palaces’, and a big selling point was that ‘Every one different’, even though the differences were usually minuscule.

The numbers of those in ‘blackcoat’ jobs – in government offices, banks, trade and commerce – raced up, reaching 3 million in 1939. Besides these, there were the professionals, or salaried workers – lawyers, teachers, doctors, clergymen and so on – whose numbers doubled to 1½ million between 1911 and 1921. By the late thirties, most of these men were earning good salaries and could afford to pay for good houses. These new salary-workers swelled the ranks of the lower middle classes, who demonstrated this newly improved status by moving out of the city centres and into more genteel surroundings. To move from a terrace to a detached or semi-detached villa, and better still, from renting a property to buying one, was the ultimate way to show one’s transition from worker to professional. By 1939 over a quarter of all houses were owner occupied; a remarkable change in just four decades.

Yet this affluence did not remain exclusively the reserve of the middle class; the living standards of the working classes, especially the skilled craftsmen, foremen and supervisors, also gradually improved during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The average purchasing power of the working classes increased by almost 50 per cent. In 1900 the average wage for a skilled craftsman was about 37s. a week. By the end of 1919, wages had increased by about 120 per cent over pre-war levels, but the cost of living had increased by a similar amount, wiping out any advantages. Over the next ten years, both wages and the cost of living fell, with wages slightly ahead. By the early thirties, unemployment was high, reaching 22 per cent. Yet paradoxically, those still in full-time employment in 1933 had a purchasing power that had increased by over 10 per cent since 1930 – their wages had fallen but prices had fallen even more.

After 1933, the world began to ease its way out of the slump and the cost of living began to rise again and by the outbreak of the Second World War wages were 15 per cent higher in real terms than they had been in 1924. One result of this was that many of the better paid manual workers were able to make the move to suburbia; by 1939 over 30 per cent of all those taking out mortgages were wage earning as opposed to salaried workers.

This move towards house-ownership was completely new. Few Victorians owned the houses they lived in, mainly because renting made far more sense in a society which was far more economically mobile than today. Also, the size of a Victorian household could fluctuate wildly; a young family would expand rapidly. The average family had five or six children, and almost 20 per cent of families had ten or more. On the other hand, a family could, even more rapidly, shrink at a time when child mortality rates were high and epidemics of measles, chicken pox, diphtheria and other viruses could rage unchecked. Additionally, the typical Victorian family could be expected to care for aged, infirm, or less fortunate relatives, as even a cursory glance at Dickens’ works can tell us. Most of the advice to those looking for a home in the late nineteenth century recommended taking out a lease of no more than three years.

Before the First World War, the most prolific year for house building was 1906, when about 150,000 houses were constructed. The ever-increasing demands for manpower during the war meant house building effectively stopped; afterwards, in the election of December 1918, Lloyd George’s coalition promised soldiers that they would return to ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’, but the costs were huge. The war had created runaway inflation – in 1919 it cost four times as much to build a house than it had in 1914.

During the war, rent strikes by militant workers had led to the Government imposing a rent freeze on poorer dwellings. This was extended to all housing after the war in response to the acute shortage of houses for rent, and the consequent profiteering by landlords who realised they could charge ever higher rents. In responding to the necessity to keep available housing affordable, the Government found itself facing a worsening shortage that it could do little to remedy.

Before the war, it had been common for people to buy houses as a form of investment, either outright or as part of a syndicate. The owners would receive a regular income in the form of rent, and the capital (the house) could be realised (sold) fairly easily at any point. The best investments could be said to be ‘as safe as houses’, but rent freezes meant that they ceased to be such an attractive proposition, and few people were prepared to invest their money in them.

Not only were no new houses built for the four years of the war, but there appeared to be little hope of any more being built at all, especially at a time of rapidly spiralling costs for raw materials. The promises of Lloyd George started to ring hollow.

This was also a time when the rulers and governments of Europe had been shaken to their foundations by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which had resulted in the overthrow of one of the most powerful dynasties in Europe. The ruling classes of this country were not a little concerned at the prospect of men, trained and experienced in the use of arms, returning to find that their promised ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ were, in reality, the same stinking tenements and slums they had left behind.

Partly to pre-empt this, the British Government passed what was to become known as the Addison Act, after Dr Christopher Addison, the then Minister of Health. Under this act, for the