Stow Road, Ixworth: ‘Thingoe’s Follies’ UPDATE

Tags

Ixworth, Pre-1914, Rural council housing

Another repost! I think it’s a post worth a re-visit in its own right (or it may be interesting to new readers of the blog) but I’m also able to include some new photographs and a brief chronological update.

They called them ‘Thingoe’s Follies’ – the eight homes built on Stow Road in Ixworth, Suffolk, which formed the first council housing built (in 1894) in the English countryside. And so they were if the attempt to provide decent homes for some of the poorest in England – the agricultural working class of the day – was folly.

Four of the Stow Road council houses

In reality, they are a site of struggle.  Depending on your perspective, it’s a story of rural class struggle, pitting an oppressed labouring poor against the entrenched Tory landowning class which ruled village England before the Great War. Or you might see in it an enlightened Toryism – more Downton than Tolpuddle – that remembered traditions of noblesse oblige and adapted the local state to its purpose. Most dramatically, it could be taken to mark the rise of modern Liberalism, a radicalism mobilised by and personified in the unlikely figure of the village’s new vicar, FD Perrott, who believed that his care of souls extended to the tortured bodies of his poor parishioners.

‘A Cottage with Sunflowers’ at Peaslake, Surrey, by Helen Allingham. Undated, probably 1890s, made available through Wikimedia Commons

In telling it, we can begin by forgetting any notions of pastoral idyll we might entertain: (1)

You pass through our quiet villages and you see old cottages covered with honeysuckle, roses, and ivy; you think how beautiful! how restful!  But you little imagine what sad decay and misery the outer beauty covers.

British agriculture was suffering an unprecedented depression (largely caused by grain imports from the opening of the American Mid-West) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  The rural population was falling – fuelling the growth of the cities which has been the main concern of this blog – but conditions for those who remained were often abysmal, as bad as any in the cities.  In Ixworth, with a population of about 850 in 1901: (2)

There is a row of houses, the total number of inhabitants is forty-four, and there are three closets for their use. In one house, consisting of two rooms, there are ten in family… Doors are very bad, and the walls tumbling down.  When it rains much, the water runs from the back kitchen into the sitting-room, and forms a pool in the centre.

Such conditions were shocking to Perrott who arrived in the parish in 1888, finding that ‘the Church had scarcely anything to do with the people and the people scarcely anything to do with the Church’.

St Mary’s Ixworth: Perrott’s church © Wikimedia Commons

One of his first acts was to help form – at a time when agricultural trades unionism was a growing though embattled force in the country – the Ixworth Agricultural Labourers’ Association.  The Association surveyed local housing needs – both the sorry condition of existing homes and the desperate need for new – and petitioned the local Rural Sanitary Authority (the Thingoe Board of Guardians at this time) to take action under the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act.

The Sanitary Authority responded by evicting existing tenants under Part II of the Act addressing unfit accommodation.  Perrott and the Association mobilised – ‘meeting after meeting was held’ – to halt these evictions (which would only exacerbate a local housing shortage) and press for action under Part III of the Act, permitting the building of new homes.  Reluctantly, the Authority asked the Local Government Board to organise a local inquiry which could compel – if the need for proven – the County Council to grant the permission Thingoe needed to adopt Part III.  (This laborious procedure was a major reason for rural authorities’ inaction on housing – and also a fine pretext for it.)

High Street, Ixworth, Suffolk © Andrew Hill and made available through a Creative Commons licence

The Inquiry was chaired by Lord Francis Hervey, the local Conservative MP with – before you leap to conclusions – great care and sympathy. (3)  He concluded the case was clearly proven and went further in arguing, against those who railed at the expense to rate-payers: (4)

A certain number of families will be removed from unwholesome lodgings, devoid of proper conveniences, to healthy dwellings with a sufficiency of garden ground; and it is reasonable to suppose that there will not only be less poverty arising from sickness, but that there will be also an addition to the family resources from the sedulous cultivation of the soil, in both cases with results favourable to the ratepayers…Upon economical grounds alone, therefore, the putting in force of Part III of the Act is capable of being justified; but it is impossible to forget that we are in presence of other considerations, social and moral, which, though not susceptible of being gauged by money values, are intrinsically of still higher importance.

There (with just a little archaism) you have the economic and ethical case for council housing – as true now as then – made by a Tory aristocrat.

This contemporary image shows the allotment space to the side of the homes still being put to good use.

Still, the question of finance remained.  Hervey had assumed the expense would be borne by the wider district rather than the parish of Ixworth. The Sanitary Authority seized on this alleged unfairness to its ratepayers to secure a second inquiry, ostensibly to tackle the question of funding but in practice used to re-open the entire question.

Perrott’s response was fierce; he attacked the Sanitary Authority: (5)

They were not and had not shown themselves to be guardians of the poor. They had simply been guardians of the rates…They had not treated this case as a poor man’s one but as only as one touching their own pockets… Could there be a body in England so fatuous?

Perrott – by now dubbed the Radical Vicar of Ixworth – also clashed with the local lord of the manor, Captain RN Cartwright, an opponent of the new housing and owner of three quarters of the parish’s 1700 acres and 14 of its run-down cottages.  He had earlier attacked Cartwright for evicting an elderly widow in order to house an estate worker. The rhetorical flourish of Perrott’s published address to the Labourers’ Association had a clearly local resonance: (6)

Under the shadow of the luxurious ‘Hall’, at the gate of the tenant-farmer’s comfortable homestead, the labourer (upon whose work both live) drags out a hard life, compelled with wife and children to find shelter and make ‘home’  under a roof beneath which neither squire nor farmer would stable their very cattle.

The inquiry, under Colonel Frederick Pocklington, was convened at 3pm in a deliberate attempt to exclude local workers – though a newspaper report records (after its list of the local great and the good) that ‘a few labourers stood at the back’. (7)  It overturned the result of the first inquiry.

At this point, Hervey returned to the field.  He secured legal opinion that – as no new evidence had been adduced – Pocklington’s decision was invalid.  The verdict of the first inquiry decision stood – the Thingoe Sanitary Authority was compelled to build. Elections to the Authority in 1892 returned a reforming majority and Perrott (as chair) served for one meeting to secure the housing’s final go-ahead.

A contemporary image of the eight council homes on Stow Road

After all that sound and fury, the results might seem disappointing.  Eight cottages, designed by Mr F Whitmore, Suffolk County Surveyor, were built on four acres of land at a cost of £1700.  They comprised four semi-detached, two-storey houses with a single-storey extension at the rear, housing kitchen, washhouse and lavatory.

With its homes let at £5 5s a year and an additional charge for their large, allotment-style, gardens, financed on a short thirty-year loan, the scheme was not a financial success and the houses proved too expensive for the poorest of the local people for whom they were originally intended.

A side view with a glimpse of the rear extension.

But they were the first fruits of a hard-fought struggle by which the rural working-class would escape a reigning near-feudalism.  By 1900, just six rural district councils (the new bodies of local government established in 1894) had adopted part III of the 1890 Act and Thingoe’s eight cottages remained its sole concrete fruits.  A 1900 Act, intended to support council housing in the countryside by allowing county councils to build where district councils refused and formally giving parish councils the right to petition for action, had little impact.

Still, Ixworth was a harbinger though, in practice, it would be a new post-war politics that made the difference.  The 1936 Housing Act, providing rural councils with a subsidy of up to 80 per cent for the construction of agricultural labourers’ cottages, was crucial. By 1939, 159,000 council houses had been built by England’s rural district councils. (8)

These and their successors were to become a vital component of village life. They are now, sad to say, under unprecedented threat from the Conservative Government’s extension of Right to Buy to Housing Association properties and we’ll need a new generation of middle-class reformers and working-class activists to defend them. (9)

The Reverend Perrott left Thingoe in the year of victory, 1892, and resigned from the priesthood four years late.  Re-qualified as a barrister, he remained active for some years as a campaigner for housing reform and, as Frank Duerdin Perrott, the unsuccessful Liberal candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Clapham in the 1900 General Election.  He died in 1936, bequeathing funds to support parapsychological research at his alma mater, Trinity College, in Cambridge. (10)

As for the ‘village Hampdens’ of the Labourers’ Association, I can provide neither names nor details.  The houses remain their monument, one pair, no’s 1 and 2 Stow Road, are now Grade II listed – a reminder of the struggle of working people to secure decent housing and its continued necessity.

Update

Visiting the 1894 homes, it was good to see the story of council housing brought closer-to-date with an attractive post-1945 development immediately behind on Peacock Rise –  some modern semi-detached homes from the 1960s (?) and some of the bungalows for elderly people found so often in our villages.

Sources

(1) Jane Escombe, quoted in Moritz Kaufmann, The Housing of the Working Classes and of the Poor (1907)

(2) George Francis Millin, Life in Our Villages (1891)

(3) Lord Francis Hervey (1846 –1931), educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; a barrister and Conservative MP from 1874-80 and 1885-92.  However, he had also served for three years from 1876 on the London School Board as a member for Finsbury and this perhaps gave him a better understanding of working-class conditions.  He went on to become head of the Civil Service.

(4) Quoted in William Walter Crotch, The Cottage Homes of Old England (1908) – the fullest guide to the intricacies of the process.

(5) ‘The Ixworth Labourers’ Association’, Bury Free Press, 19 December 1891

(6) ‘The Vicar of Ixworth on the Ixworth Houses’, The Bury and Norwich Post and Suffolk Standard, 6 October 1891

(7) ‘The Ixworth Housing’, Bury Free Press, 26 September 1891

(8) Trevor Wild, Village England: A Social History of the Countryside (2004)

(9) Andrew Motion, ‘Forget Shoreditch: It’s our rural villages most at risk from gentrification’, Daily Telegraph, 26 October 2015. The Rural Housing Alliance published Affordable Rural Housing: A practical guide for parish councils in December 2014.

(10) Perrott became a committee member of the London Reform Union and published three pamphlets in 1900 – The Demand for Fair Rent Courts, Overcrowded London and the less snappily titled but descriptive The Housing of the Working-Classes Act, 1890. An Account of the Solitary Instance of the Putting Part III of the Act Into Operation in an English Village where the Labourers Were Rack-rented and Overcrowded in Dilapidated and Insanitary Dwellings

Advertisements

Nissen-Petren Houses: ‘Not obnoxious and the people would be delighted to pay an economic rent’ UPDATE

Tags

1920s, Non-traditional, Rural council housing

I don’t usually re-post old blogs but I’m pleased to add here some interesting information and insight provided by Mark Swenarton. 

If you’ve travelled along the A303 in Somerset, you may have noticed, like many thousands of others since the mid-1920s, a rather strange sight to the north of the village of West Camel. Amidst the green rolling English countryside, four chimneyed semi-circular red roofs add a touch of rolling exoticism.  They look like a domesticated version of the army Nissen huts familiar to older generations and that, indeed, is pretty much what they are. This is their story; the story of one of the most unusual attempts to provide the cheap and decent council housing our country has needed.

West Camel

The four pairs of semi-detached homes in West Camel were erected in 1925. Their prototype was developed by Lieutenant Colonel Peter Nissen of the 29th Company Royal Engineers some nine years earlier in April 1916 in the midst of the Great War whose execution demanded such economic and easily assembled buildings to house its personnel and services on an enormous scale.  Production began four months later and by war’s end some 100,000 of these eponymous Nissen huts had been erected. (1)

The end of the war saw an unprecedented commitment to provide ‘homes for heroes’ for those whose sacrifice had secured victory but the idealism and financial generosity of the 1919 Housing Act was short-lived – quashed by austerity measures imposed in 1921. And while new Housing Acts passed in 1923 and 1924 were intended to boost council housing, shortages of traditional building materials and skilled labour continued to hinder its construction.  The search for new cheaper and labour-efficient methods was on and in 1925 the Ministry of Health (also responsible for housing) allocated £34,000 to support the building of demonstration homes using non-traditional methods in 86 local authorities across the country. (2)

Ten councils were already pioneering such efforts.  A bewildering variety of systems was on offer though broadly differentiated by those using steel, timber or pre-cast concrete factory-made components for on-site assembly and those using pre-cast or in-situ concrete components manufactured on-site.  (3)

The Somerset houses were designed by John Petter and Percy J Warren, a local architectural practice appointed Borough Architects to Yeovil Town Council in 1911.  The obvious debt to Nissen was acknowledged in their formation of Nissen-Petren Houses Ltd – a company established to market their new design to local authorities – with Nissen on the board of directors, alongside Sir Ernest Petter, a Yeovil industrialist and founder of Westland.  (Petren was a compound of Petter and Warren as you’ve probably worked out.)

My thanks to Mark Swenarton whose investigations have added further important context here:

One of the foremost promoters of non-traditional methods was Neville Chamberlain who served briefly as Minister of Health and Housing in 1923 during Bonar Law’s short-lived government and again in Stanley Baldwin’s government of 1924-29.  The clauses promoting non-traditional construction in Labour’s 1924 Housing Act (the Wheatley Act) were inserted purely at Chamberlain’s instigation.

For Chamberlain, part of the appeal of new methods was that they cut out the union-controlled building trades and put the unions and the public into opposed camps (in contrast to Wheatley’s programme, which had placed them on the same side).  Non-traditional methods were also a central plank in the housing policy of the ‘New Conservatives’ in the party’s 1924 election manifesto.

Chamberlain’s particular ally was the armaments manufacturer Lord Weir and, in fact, though Chamberlain did not state this publicly, his initiative was centred on the timber-framed, steel-clad ‘Weir House’ whose components were manufactured in Weir’s Glasgow shipyards.

Sir Ernest Petter was very much a local counterpart to Weir and probably the driving force behind the West Country initiative. Westland had manufactured over 1000 planes for the Government during the First World War and Petter believed he could produce 100,000 houses a year using the Nissen system!

In 1927, Westland got a large order for its new Wapiti biplane which may explain Petter’s loss of interest in the housing proposals.  Chamberlain himself lost interest in the new methods as their problems (not least cost) became apparent.  But he had, in the meantime, overseen the expansion of the Building Research Station and its move to Garston near Watford where it remains today.

Mark discusses Chamberlain’s espousal of non-traditional methods more fully in chapter 11, ‘Houses of Paper and Brown Cardboard’ in his book Building the New Jerusalem:  Architecture, Housing, and Politics, 1900-1930.

Times advert, 7 April 1925

The Nissen-Petren homes were steel-framed houses, obviously so given their dominant feature – the semi-circular steel ribbed roof (covered with ‘Robertsons’ Asbestos Protected Metal’) bolted on to concrete foundations – with, in this first iteration, pre-cast concrete cavity walls. The company’s advert in The Times proclaims the advantages of this revolutionary and unusual design – it required only half the skilled labour needed to build traditional brick-built homes and could be erected in half the time.  Another benefit: the early erection of the roof enabled ‘the work of filling in the walls and building the fireplaces and chimney backs to be proceeded with independently of weather conditions’. The estimated cost of construction, at £350, was reckoned £100 less than that of traditional housing. (4)

Goldcroft, Yeovil

The first two of the Nissen-Petren houses, commissioned by Yeovil Town Council, were erected on Goldcroft in the town in 1925 and the Council’s pride in its pioneering role was amplified when it was visited ‘by a large and distinguished company’ including ‘representatives of the War Office, the Air Ministry, various municipalities and members of the London Press’ in March. The delegation was conveyed by car to the Borough Restaurant where it was addressed by Sir Ernest Petter who stated his hope that the experimental houses ‘would prove to be the solution of the housing problem of the country’. (5)

There were cavils about the appearance of the new homes (to which we’ll return) but these were swept aside by the Mayor:

when the model of the new houses was first shown to the Council many of them were not enamoured of them but they felt that there was something far more important in Yeovil than mere outward appearance of the houses.  The great problem which confronted the local authorities today was to build a house, the rent of which the ordinary wage-earner could afford to pay.

In those terms, their estimated rents – at 5s (25p) a week plus rates and reckoned to be well within the reach of the average working man – were a critical advantage.

Howell Hill, West Camel

The same point was argued strongly by the chairman of Yeovil Rural District Council, JG Vaux, and, given the low wages of the rural working class, was judged even more important. (Yeovil Town Council was an urban district council; the surrounding countryside was administered by its rural counterpart):

Whatever their appearance, they were better than some of the brick hovels existing today.  If they could put up 200 of these houses they would be able to demolish some of the hovels in their district. He believed that with regard to the dome-shaped roofs they had been just a little prejudiced against them and that if a number were erected away from the brick houses that people would soon get used to them.

The semi-detached Goldcroft houses were non-parlour homes with a living room, bedroom, scullery, bathroom, larder and coal store on the ground floor and two bedrooms and two box-rooms on the upper floor. Despite this rather unconventional layout, they were judged (by one observer at least) as ‘cosy and comfortable’:

The rooms are wide and airy, being well lit and properly ventilated. It would seem to the layman that the new roof far from restricting inside space, has allowed of more room.

Later, the tenants themselves were said to be ‘very satisfied with the accommodation provided’. (6)

Higher Bullen, Barwick

This then was an optimistic period for the promoters of Nissen-Petren housing in a context where they appeared to offer a genuine solution to a very real need.  Yeovil Rural District Council followed up its initial interest with a decision in April to invite tenders for six Nissen-Petren parlour houses in Barwick, four (two parlour and two non-parlour) in South Petherton and six non-parlour in West Camel. But only after a ‘heated discussion’.  One member had declared himself personally ‘very much against these things’ (‘I call them “things”’) and there were allegations of water leakage in some of the houses built to date. (7)

Fairhouse Road, Barwick

A compromise ensued in the next meeting in which the Council agreed to proceed only where desired by the local parish councils.  Some remained enthusiastic. Barwick ‘urged the erection of houses in that district with the utmost speed’, knowing that ‘it was impossible for an agricultural labourer to pay a rent of 8s or 9s a week’ that traditional homes cost. West Camel now asked for eight Nissen-Petren homes and South Petherton said it could take more. But Montacute refused them and, one month later, Ash requested brick or stone houses in preference to Nissen-Petren. (8)

Ryme Intrinseca

A pair of Nissen-Petren houses was also built in the beautifully named north Dorset village of Ryme Intrinseca –  it features in a John Betjeman poem – by (I assume) Sherborne Rural District Council but clearly taking its inspiration from Yeovil six miles to the north.  In their idyllic setting, Lilac Cottage and the Lilacs look quite bucolic and the facing of the concrete cavity walls has a patina of age not dissimilar to that of adjacent cottages in local stone.

Frog Lane, Bampton (Google Streetview)

Interest in the new homes had spread further, however.  Petter and Warren’s design had been worked up in conjunction with DJ Dean, the Surveyor for Bampton Urban District Council in Devon and that council built a block of three semi-detached Nissen-Petren houses in Frog Street. The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, in which the Palace of Engineering (overseen by Sir Ernest Petter) featured seven prototype new homes including a model of the Nissen-Petren houses, was still running and the locals apparently nicknamed them Wembley Terrace, a name which has stuck unofficially. (Or perhaps, more likely, it was a reference to the twin domes of the then new Wembley Stadium.)

A subcommittee of the adjacent Tiverton Rural District Council visited Yeovil and returned ‘favourably impressed’ though Mr New, the chair of the Council, felt it incumbent to ask ‘the members to set aside prejudice’ – ‘the houses were not obnoxious and the people would be delighted to occupy them and pay an economic rent’.  That might sound a little like damning with faint praise but a tender for 16 Nissen-Petren houses in Uffculme was accepted for a contract price of £5000 in December 1925.

At £312 each, that was low but problems of water percolation were reported in the new homes in the course of erection in 1927. (9)  The local contractors erecting them stated that had followed the specifications set by the Nissen-Petren Company (to whom they paid royalties) and the Company claimed this was the first time they had had a complaint (though, as we’ve seen, water seepage was reported in the Yeovil Rural District). Presumably, a damp course inserted took care of the immediate problems but the houses themselves have, to the best of my knowledge, subsequently been demolished.

Edward Road, Queenborough (Google Streetview)

Meanwhile, councils beyond the West Country were expressing an interest in the potential of the new homes. Ipswich appears not to have taken this further but a delegation of two councillors and the Borough Surveyor from Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey (who had visited Yeovil in May 1925) were, having investigated a number of other options, keen to proceed.  It was agreed to build three semi-detached ‘specimen houses’ on Edward Road, numbers 6-8 and 10-12 as parlour houses, and 2-4 as non-parlour. On this occasion the external walls were constructed of roughcast brickwork. (10)

The final authority to investigate the Nissen-Petren houses was Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex where an initial tender was accepted for homes on the Sidley estate and a further tender for 36 homes in the new Buxton Drive housing scheme in July 1927.  A final tender from Nissen-Petren Houses Ltd – but not the lowest – was received in September 1928.

By this time, things were going downhill for the enterprise.   The final bill for the Goldcroft houses in Yeovil was received in September 1925 and came to the grand total of £1028 – over £513 per house and more expensive than conventionally built homes of the time.  The architects waived their fees and the builder accepted a £100 loss but – despite reassurances that costs would be lower in larger future schemes with consequent economies of scale – that was essentially the end of the experiment.  The Council congratulated itself on its initiative but licked its wounds. (11)

Nissen-Petren Houses Ltd was wound up in September 1928 and a bankruptcy notice issued in 1930. (12)  I’m not clear that any of the Bexhill houses were built – I can find no further record of them. Does anyone know?

That is almost the end of the story so far as Nissen housing in Yeovil is concerned but for two quirky codas.  In 1946, in the midst of an unprecedented housing shortage, a wave of squatting spread like wildfire across the country. By October an estimated 1038 military camps had been commandeered as emergency homes by almost 40,000 activists.  Two of these unlikely radicals were – as named by contemporary press reports – Mrs Frank Ward (her husband was a dustman for Yeovil Town Council) and Mrs Kenneth Bowley (whose husband was serving with the RAF in Egypt); each had a three-year old child. They jointly occupied ‘the better of two Nissen huts off Eliott’s Drive’, a local site for barrage balloons, cleaned them out, hung curtains and got the stove going. (13)

Goldcroft, Yeovil

Finally, to return to the Nissen-Petren houses proper, many are now listed, beginning with 172 and 174 Goldcroft in Yeovil in October 1983 despite their being described at the time by local councillors fighting their preservation as ‘eyesores, abysmal and shocking’. (14) Those in Barwick, Ryme Intrinseca and Bampton are also listed; those in South Petherton had been previously demolished.  The pair in Queenborough survive without protection for the time being.  (15)

Of around 4.5m new homes built in Britain between the wars, it’s estimated that not more than 250,000 were of non-traditional construction.  Most of these, despite their unconventional construction, mimicked a more or less traditional form.  The Nissen-Petren houses, of which there were around 24 in the Yeovil district and not more than 50 nationally, stand out.  Their distinctive appearance wasn’t always well liked but many survive to provide an eccentric addition to some of our towns and villages and an arresting footnote to our wider housing history.

Sources

My thanks to all those people who responded to an earlier Twitter exchange on Nissen-Petren homes.  The ‘Nissen-Petren Houses’ are also discussed by Bob Osborne in his A-to-Z of Yeovil’s History and Yeovil in Fifty Buildings.

(1) ‘FWJ McCosh, Nissen, Peter Norman (1871–1930)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (September 2004) [Subscription needed]

(2) ‘Steel Houses’, The Times, 18 June, 1925

(3) Harry Harrison, Stephen Mullin, Barry Reeves and Alan Stevens, Non-Traditional Houses. Identifying Non-Traditional Houses in the UK 1918-1975

(4) Nissen-Petren Advert, The Times, 7 April 1925 and ‘Steel Houses at Yeovil’, The Times, 11 March 1925

(5) ‘The Nissen-Petren House’, Western Chronicle, 13 March 1925. Quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(6) ‘Nissen Houses’, The Times, 29 May, 1925

(7) ‘The “Nissen-Petren” Houses. Heated Discussion by RDC’, Western Chronicle, 24 April 1925

(8) ‘The “Nissen-Petren” Houses’, Western Chronicle, 22 May 1925 and ‘Yeovil Rural District Council’, Western Chronicle, 17 July 1925

(9) ‘Housing in Tiverton Area’, Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 1 May 1925, ‘Tiverton Rural District Council’, Western Times, 11 December 1925 and ‘Complaint Concerning New Buildings Being Erected’, Western Times, 4 February 1927

(10) Susie Barson, Jonathan Clarke, Geraint Franklin and Joanna Smith, Queenborough, Isle of Sheppey, Kent Historic Area Appraisal (Research Department Report Series no 39/2006, English Heritage)

(11) ‘The Nissen-Petren Houses Houses’, Western Chronicle, 25 September 1925

(12)  The Times, 17 August 1928 and The Times, 11 September 1930

(13) ‘Families in Army Huts. Squatters in the West Country’, Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 17 August 1946

(14) ‘Nissen Huts Not Needed’, Building Design, no 677, 17 February 1984

(15) You can read the Historic England listing details for these buildings on their website.

The Newlyn Clearances, part II: ‘the modest homes that make a nation’

Tags

1930s, Newlyn

Last week’s post provided the background to the clearance of Newlyn’s slums and described the modest council estate built to replace them. Far more dramatic events ensued as the broader scope of Penzance Borough Council’s intentions became clearer. The five-day public inquiry into its plans in July 1937 was the locus of a housing protest which briefly gripped the nation.

The Rosebud at Westminster, October 1937

There were, to begin with, perhaps justified complaints that the Council had been less than open about its plans.  The clearance orders had been passed by the Council without it having seen the wider proposals of Borough Surveyor Frank Latham.  Latham’s wish to widen the harbourside road through the village (and the demolition of homes not deemed unfit this required) drew further criticism and the sardonic observation that the regular traffic to Mousehole comprised merely a local bus.

Duke Street, Newlyn

The most vocal complaint centred on the issue of compensation.  Owners of homes officially designated as unfit for human habitation and subject to demolition (marked pink on council plans) received only their site value. Homes marked grey on the plans (to be cleared to allow rational reconstruction), on the other hand, were not classified as slums and their owners were to be compensated by their full market value. This difficult demarcation proved controversial in both respects.

The meat of the ensuing struggle was contained in the legalistic wranglings which resulted but its emotional heart lay elsewhere.  That was provided in the beguiling image of simple Cornish fisherfolk battling bureaucratic and unfeeling modernity.  Newlyn was its ideal site.

Stanhope Forbes: Home-Along: Evening (Newlyn Harbour, 1910) © Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

One major factor in this was the presence of an artists’ colony, active in the village since the 1880s. Stanhope Forbes, the grand old man of local artists, regarded: (1)

the idea of demolishing any part of our priceless village as a piece of sheer vandalism and folly. To me and thousands of holidaymakers the prospect of new and ugly buildings will be ghastly.

Local artists such as Geoffrey Garnier played a leading role in the Newlyn Housing Committee formed to oppose the clearances; Phyllis Gotch (the Marquise de Verdières since her 1922 marriage) was the daughter of two Newlyn-based artists and the instigator of some of the campaign’s more imaginative protests.  Her letter to the Manchester Guardian (complete with an ‘authentic’ local voice) is worthy of lengthy quotation and captures some of its most romantic imagery: (2)

Newlyn, by an astonishing order of the Penzance Town Council under the Slum Clearance Act, is to be swept away. Her cobbled streets, where Perkin Warbeck strode in his glory, her ancient manors and moulded ceilings, her secret lifts and smugglers’ passages are all to go…

Many of the houses are owned by the inhabitants, who are of a fine and independent spirit, scorning outside help if they can possibly help themselves, and facing hardship with dumb and gallant courage…

A deputation came to me to-day. The spokesman was a grand, old fisherman. God-fearing and wise. He said:

Miss Phyllis, for we shall always call ee that, we’ve been thinking that if you was to tell England and Scotland and Wales and the people over to Ireland what was happening to we, how the homes we’ve laboured for are being took away, and how there be’nt no money to pay lawyers to help us. Surely there’d be some as would plead for us, some as would say ‘This must not be?’

A petition of Newlyn women to the new Queen played on some of the same tropes in its plea ‘to the first lady in the land, our kind and beautiful Queen’ who would know ‘so well what the love of home means and…understand above all what the Celtic people feel about the soil on which their forefathers have dwelt for centuries’. (3)

‘Life class at Newlyn’, Picture Post, 15 October 1938

It’s altogether tempting, in this context, to see elite manipulation at play in such presentation but that would merely add another patronising depiction to a more complex, multi-layered story.  It ignores, as Tim Martindale argues, the ‘extent to which members of the fishing community of Newlyn actively participated and performed in the construction of their representation’, the socially embedded role of local artists, and a powerful sense of Cornish identity among local residents. (4)

This was wonderful stuff for a national (indeed international) press looking, then as now, for human interest stories to tug their readers’ heart strings.  Punch took up the baton and took a side-swipe in its doggerel at Penzance, the villain of the piece: (3)

Each to his own. Penzance may sleep,
Swaddled in palms and sanitation
So Newlyn (and the country) keep
The modest homes that make a nation;
If not, both reason and romance
(if England study either school in)
Tell us we might not miss Penzance
But cannot do away with Newlyn

PZ87 Rosebud in Westminster, an early colour image by Charles Hoyland © Margaret Perry Collection

All this provided the context for the campaigners’ most inspired and theatrical protest – the voyage of the 50-foot Newlyn lugger, Rosebud in October 1937 to Westminster and a meeting with the Minister of Health and Housing, Sir Kingsley Wood.  The skipper Cecil Richards, a Newlyn fisherman and a resident of one of the condemned homes, and his crew were met by local MP Alec Beechman. His speech avoided controversy but Billy ‘Bosun’ Roberts made it clear that the ‘Cornish boys [were] here to fight for their homes!’

The crew of The Rosebud with Alex Beechman MP

Then, in the words of Pennsylvania’s Reading Eagle, ‘the grizzled fishermen…cap in hand’ met Wood and told the Minister ‘how much they loved their picturesque cottage homes, how unhappy they would be in the new houses “over the hill”.’ (5)  Wood, clearly an early master of PR, provided the deputation with a Cornish cream tea and a thoroughly sympathetic hearing.  His verdict would come two weeks later but, for the time being, the Cornishmen were impressed by his apparent honesty and understanding.

Coverage from the Daily Express, 18 October 1937

For all the resonance and power of this campaign, opinions in the village were divided. We saw Reverend George Richards’ opinion of the new council homes on the Gwavas Estate last week – he had described them as ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’.  A Daily Mirror article contrasted pictures of the old village and the new estate under the headline ‘What Would You Rather See?’.

But such attitudes angered many in the village. ‘A Tenant’ who called into the offices of the Cornish Evening Telegraph described his family’s experience of living in a one-up, one-down cottage with a single bedroom, a solitary, rapidly filled bucket which served as a toilet, and a washbasin shared with three other households. He commented caustically that ‘the most militant in defence of the old village already lived up the hill’ and reckoned:

eighty percent of the working people of Newlyn welcome the building of the new houses and are longing for the day when they will have a chance to live in them.

Gender and generational differences emerged.  Some women – as wives and mothers – seemed to favour new and better-equipped homes as their husbands, out at work and relieved of domestic duties, defended the old.  A petition from ‘Younger Residents of Newlyn’ urged the Minister to sanction the clearances and expedite an early move to more sanitary accommodation. Its advocates were outspoken:

We say that Newlyn is no longer a fishing village – granted a few elderly men and a few out-of-date boats…they will soon disappear. The sons of these men are not going fishing. No sir, they are finding employment in Penzance and elsewhere.  We say that far too much has been made of a small grievance which the few fishermen might have, for after all they represent a very small minority in Newlyn.

That petition was signed by some 400 people; a rival petition protesting ‘the wholesale destruction of our village [and the] ruthless appropriation of private property’ attracted 1093 local signatures.  You can make your own judgement on the balance of forces in play.

Chywoone Avenue, Gwavas Estate

To be fair to the Newlyn Housing Committee, they were clear that defence of the old homes did not require opposition to the new and it avoided criticism of the new estate. Still, in what was a compelling narrative, it became natural to juxtapose the two.

The Newlyn Housing Committee also commissioned Professor Stanley Adshead (a leading architect and planner and the designer of significant council housing developments in Norwich, Stepney and Brighton amongst others) to review the clearance scheme. He took an advanced position in opposing its road widening element (‘Is it not conceivable that reduction in the size of the cart is better than improvement in the strength of the horse?’) and concluded firmly that the Housing Acts should be amended ‘to make special provision for dealing with cottages and villages possessing historic interest and peculiar charm’.  In the present, however, all hinged on Sir Kingsley Wood.

Wood pronounced in November 1937 in a letter to Penzance Borough Council. In the rush to headlines, the press initially greeted a victory for the protesters.  One block of homes was to be saved, some frontages preserved, and he called on the Council to: (6)

to rehouse the fishermen and the older people near the harbour and to cooperate with all those who would help them secure a redevelopment which will meet the legitimate interests of those affected and also preserve the amenities of the village.

Navy Inn Court

In a follow-up letter to the Council in December, he commended its cooperation with the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and RIBA and the priority given to rehousing fishermen and the elderly at Navy Inn Court. (7)

It was a masterly political response. Woods had saved only 23 of the homes slated for demolition; he had transferred 54 from ‘pink’ to ‘grey’ thereby ensuring more generous compensation, and he offered more cash to those whose homes were still condemned as ‘unfit’.

Chapel Street, Newlyn

The Fragdan, Newlyn

Disillusion soon set in among the campaigners but the battle was essentially over and it was, in the end, a qualified victory for their cause. A guerrilla war, fought over legal issues of designation and compensation, delayed clearance. The Council, wary of the storm it had created, was, in any case, in no hurry to proceed. Only 58 demolitions had taken place by 1940, some more in 1943, and larger clearances in 1951 and 1955. By 1974, 130 of the homes originally condemned still stood and many were now part of a conservation district. Times had changed.

The harbour, Newlyn, 2018

For one, those younger residents were wrong about Newlyn’s fishing industry – in 2016 it was the largest fishing port in England in terms of quantity of landings. It remains a busy, bustling harbour and, not far away, lie the narrow lanes and traditional cottages beloved of tourist Cornwall – now with all mod cons and, presumably, a great many of them occupied as second homes or holiday lets.

Rosebud Court and plaque

As a visitor myself, it seems impossible to lament their survival and the failure of the rational modernism once threatened.  But their current situation highlights housing realities, both interwar and contemporary. There are rightly a number of monuments in Newlyn to the Rosebud and the struggle it represented. Ironically, one of these, Rosebud Court, is social housing; a block of four flats completed for the Penwith Housing Association in 2000.  And, above the old village, the Gwavas Estate continues to offer the decent and affordable housing that – with over 900 on local waiting lists – private enterprise seems incapable of providing. The Newlyn clearance saga, often romanticised as the struggle of the ‘little man’ against faceless modernity, offers complex lessons.

Sources

(1) ‘The Newlyn Slum Clearance Scheme. RAs Fight to Save a Village’, Cornishman, 22 October 1936

(2) The Marquise de Verdières, ‘Letters to The Editor: Slum-Clearance in Cornwall’, The Manchester Guardian, 18 October 1937

(3) Quoted in Michael Sagar-Fenton, The Rosebud and the Newlyn Clearances (Truran, 2003). Other detail is drawn from the same source which offers the most comprehensive coverage of the extended saga.

(3) Punch, 27 October 1937. Quoted in Michael Sagar-Fenton.

(4) Tim Martindale, ‘Livelihoods, Craft and Heritage: Transmissions of Knowledge in Cornish Fishing Villages’, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London 2012

(5) ‘Britain Gets Rid of Slums. Five Year Clearance Programme Meets Some Protest in England’, Reading Eagle, 28 November 1937

(6) ‘Cottages at Newlyn’, The Times, 4 November 1937

(7) ‘Rehousing at Newlyn’, The Times, 28 December 1937

The Newlyn Clearances, part I: the Gwavas Estate – ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’

Tags

1930s, Newlyn

The 1930s’ Gwavas council estate on the hill above the fishing village of Newlyn in Cornwall doesn’t look anything out of the ordinary but it was to play its part – alongside the controversial slum clearances which accompanied it – in one of the most resonant housing protests of the interwar period.  Matters came to a head when a Newlyn lugger, the Rosebud, and its local crew sailed up the Thames to Westminster in October 1937 to demand an end to the demolition of their traditional village homes. This was romantically portrayed as a protest of the ‘little man’, epitomised in the press images of Cornish fisherfolk, against modernising bureaucrats. As ever in reality, matters were a little more complex.

An example of the romanticised imagery that attracted artists to Newlyn

Newlyn’s role as a fishing port dates at least to the 1400s but it’s been a chequered history. If you watch Poldark, you’ll know the significance of the pilchard catch but it waxed and waned.  The port was boosted by the completion of the Tamar Bridge in 1859 (and a direct rail connection to the capital) but the village was a quaint, rather backward backwater when first ‘discovered’ by the artists Walter Langley and Stanhope Forbes in the early 1880s. By 1887, there were 27 artists living in the village. Its place as an artistic centre of the en plein air movement (a form which stressed working directly in nature and subject matter drawn from rural life) was cemented by Forbes’ foundation of the Newlyn School of Art in 1899.

Stanhope Forbes, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885)

In fact, the village was changing.  Large new piers to expand the port were constructed in 1887 and 1888. And there were riots in 1896 as local, staunchly Methodist, fishermen protested against rivals from the north landing fish in the port on a Sunday.  Tradition and modernity were already vying as one of the Newlyn artists, Norman Garstin, noted as early as 1909: (1)

The Newlyn of today and that of the first artist settlers twenty-five years ago are two quite different places. When Mr Stanhope Forbes painted his fish sale there was no harbour; today there is a spacious one, which large as it is, [is] crowded with fishing boats, steamers, sailing vessels and craft of all descriptions. All this has brought a life and animation that no one would have dreamt of a quarter of a century ago.

The artists, of course, loved Newlyn for its ‘old world’ charm but some of those picturesque cottages were clearly unfit for human habitation. Paul Urban District Council condemned 18 homes in Newlyn in March 1915 and in 1920 a ‘lady inspector’ found 30 unfit houses and two unhealthy areas in the district. One of these was the birthplace of the working-class radical William Lovett which was demolished in 1921. (2)

Newlyn Street scene, 1890, water shoot to the rear left  © Penlee Gallery

Paul was by no means an activist authority.  Matters were to come to head after 1934 when Newlyn (alongside Mousehole, Paul village, Sheffield and Heamore) came within the newly extended borders of the Borough of Penzance.  It was said – it was certainly felt by many in Newlyn – that Penzance had little regard for its smaller, poorer neighbour but housing conditions in the village spoke for themselves.  Most Newlyn homes had neither running water nor sewerage.  Water was drawn from the many ‘shoots’ in the village; toilet facilities often consisted of an Elsan bucket emptied ‘over cliff’ at night. (3)

Penzance’s Medical Officer of Health, Richard Lawry, made his first foray into Newlyn in 1935. The first clearance order followed with little controversy.  The former Navy Inn now comprised flats accommodating some 29 people. It and neighbouring properties in Factory Row and Factory Square were decanted by 1937 and cleared by 1939. Navy Inn Court, comprising 32 one- and two-bed flats) and Bowjey Court were built on the cleared sites.

In his official report to the Council in the following year, Lawry stated he had visited 100 houses in the village, nearly all of which he judged unfit for human habitation. This time sensing possible controversy, he requested back-up on a follow-up visit and was duly accompanied by an alderman and two councillors.

St Peter’s Square, since demolished

The first tranche of compulsory purchase orders under the 1936 Housing Act for the properties deemed slums duly followed – for Lower Green Street, Fore Street, Vaccination Court (the name itself is a reminder of cholera epidemics which hit Newlyn in 1832 – when over 100 people died – and 1873), St Peters Hill in 1936, and Fore Street, Gwavas Road, Boase St and North Corner in 1937.

Chapel Street, 1937

In total, some 350 properties were earmarked for demolition in the original orders. Not all were slums. Those marked in pink were and their owners were offered site value only in compensation; neighbouring properties (marked grey) whose clearance was administratively necessary were offered market price.  Around 6.75 acres of the old village were affected including areas to be cleared for a proposed road widening scheme at the harbour’s edge.  A five-day official inquiry into the proposals began in Penzance in July 1937.

Meanwhile, the Borough was moving ahead with the construction of an estate of ‘workmen’s dwellings’ to replace those homes scheduled for clearance.  Twenty acres of land had been acquired on a greenfield site above the village, enough the Borough Surveyor, Frank Latham, estimated to accommodate some 250 homes at 12 per acre. In the event, 242 were built on the new Gwavas Estate by local contractors at a cost of £95,380.

Higher Gwavas Road, showing the steep ascent to the estate

There were some complaints about the location. It’s a stiff 350 feet climb up the hill to the Estate. Alderman Treganza objected that ‘they were taking people 79 and 80 years of age to the top of Paul Hill. How were they going to get there!’  A comment from the audience in the council chamber on the ‘good air there’ only drew his riposte that it would ‘take an aeroplane to get them there’. (4)

Chywoone Avenue, Gwavas Estate

The homes themselves – block-built and characteristically rendered in local style – were solid and laid out, along curving roads and crescents, in a miniature version of the garden suburb style favoured in its time.  Some disliked their appearance. The Reverend George Richards had condemned them as ‘among the monstrosities being condemned by architectural experts’ at the earlier public inquiry.

But they came with toilets, bathrooms, hot water – the basic facilities so conspicuously lacking in the cottages of old Newlyn. The first residents (from Navy Inn Court and Factory Row) moved in just before Christmas, 1937, and the estate was substantially complete by May 1938. For many of the new residents this was a huge and welcome improvement in their standard of living.  Still, there were some complaints.

Chywoone Crescent, Gwavas Estate

The climb up to the estate was, naturally, one of these, alongside the high bus fares paid by those who required transport. Typically, the rents were significantly higher, sometimes double, than those charged in the old cottages – over 8 shillings (40 pence) in some of the larger houses.  Tenancy regulations which banned trades or business in the new council homes were also a problem to some who had supplemented their income with needlework, net-mending, laundry work and so on.

The biggest grievance – for the 124 potential residents who signed a petition to the Council in March 1937, at least – was the decision to install gas cookers rather than the Cornish cooking ranges which they favoured.  (These cast iron ranges provided heating as well as an oven and stove top.)  The Council stood firm that the new facilities – ‘provided for the convenience and comfort of those who would have to live in the houses’ – would prove more economical though some residents were to complain about cold and damp in the new homes. (5)

This, of course, is only half the story.  Dramatic events were unfolding down in the village as the clearance process moved on and the estate itself was drawn into that controversy.  We’ll examine all this in next week’s post.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Stef Russell, Cornwall & Scilly Urban Survey, Historic Characterisation for Regeneration: Newlyn (Cornwall Archaeological Unit, October 2003)

(2) Joanne Mattingly, Penwith Project: Housing Issues 1914-34

(3) Michael Sagar-Fenton, The Rosebud and the Newlyn Clearances (Truran, 2003). Much following detail is drawn from the same source which offers the most comprehensive coverage of the extended saga.

(4) ‘Penzance Town Council. £95,380 Housing Scheme for Newlyn’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 16 January 1936

(5) ‘Penzance Town Council. Reduction of 8d in the Rates’, The Cornishman and Cornish Telegraph, 11 March 1937