Family Britain, 1951-1957 (9 page)

‘Message from Churchill to come out to Chartwell,’ Harold Macmillan recorded in his diary for the day after the Tories had returned to power. ‘Found him in a most pleasant and rather tearful mood. He asked me to “build the houses for the people”. What an assignment! . . . Churchill says it is a gamble – make or mar my political career. But every humble home will bless my name, if I succeed.’ Macmillan, having hoped for greater things, was initially reluctant to accept the job, but, once he became Minister of Housing, rapidly got stuck in. It proved, in terms of fulfilling the much-vaunted Tory pledge to build 300,000 houses a year, a remarkable success story. Churchill overrode all Treasury objections to the concentration of scarce resources on housing; Ernest Marples, ‘a cocky and talkative accountant who had built up a fortune with a construction company’ (to quote Anthony Sampson), was a relentlessly hard-working junior minister; Sir Percy Mills, a Birmingham industrialist, was brought in as an adviser and quickly established ten Regional Housing Production Boards; and Macmillan himself combined determination (however deceptively languid), pragmatism and a flair for helpful publicity. Typical of the pragmatism was his decision to rely heavily for the time being on housebuilding by local authorities, with their subsidies even being raised, while starting to encourage more private building than Labour had permitted. The flair for PR was epitomised in a widely publicised speech at Nottingham in January, less than three months into the job. ‘I will see that the order book is kept full,’ he promised the building industry. ‘There will be no arbitrary limitation by an arbitrary programme of 175,000 or 200,000 or any other figure of houses a year. There is no restriction; no rigid ceiling; no artificial limit. And the quicker you build, the more there will be to build. The more you finish, the more you get.’ A gratified Macmillan recorded afterwards how ‘a very large audience in the Albert Hall accepted the speech with much enthusiasm’, while next morning was even better: ‘A wonderful press! We have really hit the headlines. On the whole, a very friendly reception. The
Manchester Guardian
a bit sniffy . . .’

The push for 300,000 came, however, at a price. ‘The people need more homes,’ Macmillan declared in a booklet,
Houses 1952
, published by his ministry during his first few months. ‘They need them quickly. This is the most urgent of all social services. For the home is the basis of the family, just as the family is the basis of the nation. We have to try to meet their needs at a time of great economic difficulty. For we have to expand in a period of general restriction. This surely means that we must try to build the greatest possible number of houses out of the available labour and materials.’ In practice, this meant smaller houses, with the ministry setting out revised guidelines for local authorities that involved reductions of up to 100 square feet on minimum floor areas. The litany by one housing historian – ‘the omission of cupboards in bedrooms, smaller kitchens, and entrance halls reduced to a lobby in which there was space for neither coats nor prams’ – gives a good idea of the consequences for what was now officially dubbed ‘The People’s House’. It is true that standards had been becoming less generous towards the end of the Labour government, but it was under Macmillan that they seriously tightened. ‘If we can reduce the size of houses to rabbit hutches of course we can build more houses,’ grumbled Bevan, who during his five years as minister had refused to compromise on space standards, and clearly he had a point. But for Macmillan it was not a difficult choice. ‘Drove through Leicester to a little village called Desford,’ he noted the day after his Nottingham speech. ‘Here had descended (like locusts) a host of photographers, BBC men, television, news-reel reporters and the like – all to see me open 2 houses – the first built to the new simplified design.’8

Macmillan’s politically ambitious, top-down, numbers-driven approach would have profound implications in the context of a continuing acute housing shortage, but what really mattered for many thousands of people was getting into a new house or flat and starting to enjoy appreciably better amenities (indoor lavatory, a bathroom, hot and cold running water, more privacy, often a garden) than they had had before. ‘As one of the 15–16,000 on West Ham’s waiting list, I say give us somewhere to live, house, flat or prefab, anything, so long as it has four walls and a roof, and we can call it our own,’ was how W. R. England of Plaistow put it to the local paper in April 1952. ‘But we want these places now – not in 25–50 years!’ A huge migration was by this time already well under way – away from the often slum-ridden or blitzed inner cities and out to existing suburbs, newly developed suburbs or even beyond. ‘The largest part of this migration was voluntary,’ declares its historian, Mark Clapson, according to whom ‘the majority of people who moved were working-class couples with children, or couples who were just about to have them’. He adds that ‘within the working classes this voluntarism was most strongly located within the younger and relatively wealthier’.

The most symbolically resonant part of the migration was to the twelve New Towns designated since 1946, though in fact by the end of 1951 only 3,126 dwellings had actually been completed. The first New Town was Stevenage, whose youthful pioneers would in time look back with some wonder on the dusty, muddy experience:

We had no floor coverings except in the bathroom, and a hearth rug before the open fire in the living room, and every evening I polished the Marley tiles in the living room, hall and kitchen. This may lead you to suppose that I was a houseproud housewife. No way! While I was grateful to have a home of our own after five years of living in other peoples’, and proud of our achievements in home-making, it was sheer necessity that caused me to do housework in the evening . . . We had no gardens, no roads, no pavements or footpaths, no telephones, no shop nearer than the Old Town, and no car and we were surrounded by construction. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture the outlandish conditions in which we lived. Fortunately that first summer was dry . . .
(Thelma Sultzbach, a GI bride with a two-year-old daughter, arrived May 1951)

Well we gradually got a bit straight, and I got into some sort of routine. We got to know our neighbours who were all quite friendly. There were still a lot of unfinished houses all around us, but they gradually became occupied. Footpaths were laid. A pillar box was installed in Rockingham Way. The first time I went to post a letter I had to clamber over a pile of bricks to get to the pillar box.
(Marjorie MacLeod, two small children and expecting a third, previously living with in-laws in New Southgate, November 1951)

The day we moved in, the footpath at the front of the house wasn’t complete, there was a gap, and the furniture removers walked down two planks; there was mud everywhere. I got down on my knees, and I scrubbed the place from top to bottom. I was finishing the last bit around the corner of the brown tiles, Anne stood there at the bottom of the stairs – looking up (she did not know I was there as she could not hear me) and she said: ‘What a beautiful house but how in the name of God am I ever going to clean it!’
(Mick Cotter, previously living in Hornsey with pregnant wife and two small children, February 1952)

I was thrilled with the home, it was really lovely – to think I had my own sink, my own bathroom, two toilets, one up and one down. I felt I was on holiday for months and months; the children thought it was great. There was a green dell at the side of us, and they just ran round and round. They felt free.
(Anne Luhman, moving from a Tottenham flat without running water, June 1952)

‘To us it was an exciting time,’ recalled Huw and Connie Rees, who with their new baby had left a requisitioned flat in Hackney for a new house in Stevenage in September 1952. It was a time that included ‘a vision of the future, a prospect of being able to live in ideal surroundings, a healthy environment for children and full employment locally’. Or, as they also put it more prosaically, and perhaps realistically, the people who moved to Stevenage New Town ‘wanted no more than the basic right of a home of their own, somewhere to live and to bring up their children in a decent environment’.9

Economic self-sufficiency was crucial to the thinking behind the New Towns – in Stevenage, for example, one usually could not get a house without the nomination of a local employer – and in October 1951 there was a revealing case study, scrutinised by the writer Roy Lewis, when an entire firm, Sunvic Controls, moved from ‘a warren of workshops’ in Covent Garden to a spanking-new factory in the industrial estate of Harlow New Town. The firm’s employees were given the option of coming too, and, after an exploratory coach trip to Harlow, more than two-thirds decided to take it and in the process uproot their lives. From some there was positive enthusiasm for the move, especially at the prospect of significantly improved housing conditions, but from others there was more reluctant acquiescence, mainly motivated by not wanting to let go of a good, paternalistic employer. ‘It’s what you’d expect,’ one told Lewis after the coach trip:

The sort of thing the planning boys dream up, but which doesn’t work out. Social classes all mixed up, for example: nobody likes that, you know, people like to keep to their own class, in practice. Then, there’s no privacy – think of it,
front gardens in common
. And the back gardens divided only by wire, so your neighbour knows all about you. And to think of it on washing-day.
And
there’s going to be a community centre. Yes, it’s not a joke, there really is. A community centre! Planners are nuts on palliness. Go? Oh,
of course
I shall go!

Lewis visited Harlow in January 1952 to see how the newcomers in their three-bedroom houses were getting on: ‘ “I wouldn’t go back for anything,” was the comment of all those who remembered the single room, the in-laws, the days of inadequate accommodation. “I’ve not been back to London since we moved,” added one housewife, “and I don’t want to go.” “It would seem a backward step,” said another.’ As for the inevitable complaints he heard, some were likely to be addressed earlier than others:

The mud – that will be stabilised. The lack of street lighting – that will be remedied in time. Some wives who don’t go to the factory find, even with children, that a labour-saving house leaves them with more time than they know what to do with. These ladies do feel the need of the cinema already. More than that, however, they feel the need of shops. Old Harlow supplies the rations – but life, they find, without acres of suburban shop frontage, lacks a vital quality: they must window-shop, and they want the shops they know. C & A was mentioned wistfully. Epping and Stortford do not satisfy them: they want a strip of Oxford Street; this must remain a dream till Harlow has its planned civic centre . . .

Even so, Lewis noted with satisfaction that many of the women had already started to develop a social life – ‘Friendships are springing up with next-door neighbours; TV parties are arranged’ – and concluded optimistically that whereas ‘to give people a new suburb is to give them nothing but “housing”, to give them a new town is to give them and their children a chance to be free and independent men and women learning and teaching the central lessons of civic life’. Not that Lewis himself proposed to share in the adventure, living as he did in a ‘genuine early Victorian’ house in Notting Hill – albeit (as his author’s note cheerfully if insincerely added) ‘with every inconvenience which makes you wish you lived in a Harlow house!’

Of course, despite Lewis’s passing put-down, it was for the new suburbs that most of the outward migration was destined. These included the extensive and (at this stage) predominantly mixed-development, low-rise Bell Green and Tile Hill council estates starting to take shape in the early 1950s on the outskirts of Coventry, where the Labour-run local authority openly defied Macmillan by announcing in December 1951 that it would be sticking to its ratio of only one licence in five for private building, whereas the minister wanted that sector to receive up to 50 per cent of licence allocations. Bell Green never enjoyed a particularly good press – not least on account of its bleak, windswept, almost treeless appearance – but the Tile Hill Neighbourhood Unit was for several years something of a showpiece. The direct brainchild of the visionary City Architect Donald Gibson, it would, declared an admiring
Coventry Standard
in August 1951, ‘ultimately comprise a self-contained township on the outskirts of the old city’, with the paper adding that ‘great care has been taken to enclose in this town within a city a cross-section of the whole community’. In order to speed up the rate of completions, Gibson and his deputy, Fred Pooley (who actually lived on the Tile Hill estate), reached an agreement with the building firm George Wimpey by which most of the new houses and flats, in Bell Green as well as Tile Hill, were built along the ‘no fines’ system, involving a coarse cement mixture poured into moulds. This in practice meant a somewhat monotonous surfeit of ‘colour-washed’ concrete (with a tendency to dampness) and grey, pebble-dashed frontages, though whether this mattered to the first generation of residents is doubtful.10