The Dursley Housing Scheme, 1912, Part II: ‘No Better Housing Scheme’

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Dursley, Pre-1914

I’m very pleased to host this second post by Chas Townley, a follow-up to his article last week which looked at the background to Dursley’s pre-war housing scheme. Chas is a Labour District Councillor on Stroud District Council, a ‘no overall control; authority in Gloucestershire. He is currently chair of the Housing Committee. Chas has formerly worked in housing for both councils and housing associations and previously managed the Supporting People Programme in a unitary council. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing.  He is a local historian and genealogist and has written on a variety of subjects including Chartism, Cooperatives, land clubs and building societies, and the Poor Law and pre-NHS health provision.

Returning to Dursley and our 38 first houses, the decision to investigate providing housing started in January 1912 as a result of a circular letter from the Government which offered meetings with officials to assist the council. They also had information from Cirencester Urban District Council, which was already seeking to build houses with rents of 4 shillings a week. Dursley Rural District Council (RDC) members considered this to be far too much rent for ‘the workmen they were concerned about in the area’ – as the rents of those to be evicted from their closed hovels had very low rents. (1)

The plaque marking the opening of the new scheme in Lower Poole Road

Despite such early negativity discussions proceeded and a news report of the Dursley Annual Parish Meeting addressed by Mr Sidney Bloodworth, Chairman of the Dursley Parochial Committee (DPC) and Vice-Chairman of the RDC presented a narrative on why they were looking to build council housing.

It is worth explaining the membership of the DPC which was a Dursley RDC committee consisting of all parish councillors and any RDC members representing the Parish of Dursley. I have come across this form of committee in several researches and it appears to have been a normal method of delegating purely local matters for action. Sadly, as they appear to have operated on an ad hoc basis their records have rarely made it into the official archives. In this case my account is based on occasional newspaper reports.

Bloodworth reports the dilemma that the RDC faced following the Housing and Planning act which ‘demanded the closing of houses which were declared unfit for human habitation’ and that the District Council ‘wanted to be assured that there was somewhere else for them to go’. It is stated that the condemned houses were let at a shilling or 1 shilling and 6d per week (5p to 7.5p). It was admitted that it was impossible to build at anything like that rental ‘without being a burden on the rates’.

They had approached the owner of a site on the Uley Road and ended up conducting discussions with Mr Vizard through his drawing room window overlooking the site with him posing the question pointing at the land ‘Now, if this was your house would you like to sell that field?’ Consequently, he was not prepared to sell at any price. The idea of compulsorily purchasing the site had been gone into but it transpired that compensation would have had to be paid for the devaluation in the house overlooking the site.  Another site was now under consideration and it was hoped to reach agreement with the two owners but it would be necessary to remove a rubbish tip.

Sir Ashton Lister, Managing Director of R A Lister & Co and later Liberal MP for Stroud, 1918-1922

An argument against funding the housing was advanced suggesting that the ‘firm that imported the labour which overcrowded the town should provide the dwellings and the Parochial Committee should ask them.’ Counter-arguments claimed that workers should not have to live in houses provided by their employer.

Later in the debate Sir Ashton Lister spoke on behalf of the engineering firm stating they were not the only employer in the town and that ‘if the town did not think the building would be in the interest of the town, then they should not endorse the scheme’. In the discussion he commented that the firm had erected 64 houses and bought 20. Lister also believed there was a need for a further 50 houses in the town.

Houses in the completed scheme on Upper Poole Road

Despite the passion and heat of the debate the meeting was brought to a close with a unanimous decision to request the DPC to prepare a scheme. (2)

By July an Inspector from the Local Government Board visited the town and was accompanied by a large group of local councillors and inspected some housing sites, the preferred site in two separate ownerships of a Mrs Poole and Bristol Corporation – hence the scheme being in Upper Poole Road.

This contemporary map shows the two sites eventually chosen for the scheme.

Agreement had been reached with Mrs Poole but Bristol Corporation were reported to want a ‘ridiculously high value’ on their land. The inspector was shown a variety of other sites including the garden of the workhouse. The report concludes by noting ‘the opinion of the Inspector was that there were two possible sites to choose from’ which are understood to be the Upper Poole Road site and the land they could not purchase at any price. (3)

It now transpired from an enquiry from a member of the House of Lords that the compulsory purchase powers could not be used to obtain the land from Bristol Corporation and John Burns had written that the Rural District Council had been advised to consider a smaller scheme or a slightly different site. (4)

Lower Poole Road

Later than month, a press report referring to the DPC as the Dursley Housing Committee noted that they wanted to persevere with the Poole Cottages scheme and would enter further negotiations with Bristol Corporation. It is suspected that these were fruitless and the scheme was designed to fit the land available, but ironically four or five years later Bristol flogged off the whole of their Dursley land holdings by auction. (5)

It was reported in November 1912 that 150 architects had applied for particulars of the design competition. The rent was not to exceed 4 shillings and 6d (22.5p) and the accommodation was specified as being one living room, three bedrooms, kitchen, scullery with bath and also larder, etc. (6)

Upper Poole Road

Later in the month Arthur Probyn, a 46 year-old architect and surveyor from Gloucester, was announced as the winner. It transpired later that his was one of 40 designs submitted. (7)  From newspaper reports, Probyn undertook works for various organisations mainly in Gloucester including the Gloucester Cooperative Society, the Gloucester Royal Infirmary (at their original Southgate Street premises) and he was one of seven architects engaged on the Tuffley housing scheme in 1920. He was also architect for a school hall for Dursley Tabernacle completed in 1914 and perhaps this scheme meant he was a known quantity. (8)

When it came to the official Board of Health loan sanction inquiry held in March 1913 before the same Inspector who had considered the appropriateness of the site chosen there were no formal objectors. However, Mr Loxton, a member of the Rural District Council who had provided critical challenge to the project, explained some of the deficiencies that had been considered to exist in the scheme including whether the site was sufficient for the number of houses and whether the scheme could be built within the estimated costs.

Upper Poole Road

When the tenders came in in August 1913, all of the tenders exceeded the original estimates. As is often the case, the cheapest from S Williams & Sons of Bristol at £7030 did not represent good value as it excluded the cost of roads and drains. W J B Halls Gloucester £8050 was the next lowest with the highest of seven including being nearly £10,000. One bid had been from Lister & Co, suggesting they had their own building team. It is interesting to note that the actual tender costs all appeared in the newspaper, transparency indeed! Even with Halls’ tender the consequence was to increase both the loan for the scheme and the proposed rent from 4s 6d to as high as 6 shillings.

Given the high level of democracy attached to the scheme, a parish meeting was held to ascertain the views of ratepayers and this is reported at length in the Gloucester Journal. Much of the debate focused on the rental costs with, for example, Arthur Shand arguing that the ‘rent was too high for the working man of Dursley’ and Mr A S Adams suggesting ‘the council would be catering for an entirely different class of people to that which was originally intended’. There were some voices that the Council should abandon the scheme.

Upper Poole Road

The result was that the DPC was asked to go away and find a way to build the houses for rents of 4s 6d, which was way off the original concern felt by Council members back in January 1912 – perhaps showing that the council by inclusion had taken the community with them. It is notable that, despite the contentious nature of the meeting, it was unanimous in thanking DPC ‘for their labours on behalf of the working men of the town’. (9)

In the face of community protest, which wanted low rents, local industrialist Sir Ashton Lister, owner of an expanding engineering factory and later a Liberal MP, dipped his hand in his pocket and gave £500 on condition rents were 5 shillings a week. (10)  Was this an act of ‘charity’ that his Party in Parliament condemned or enlightened self-interest – perhaps the latter as he had already supported the provision of housing by his company.  Consequently, when the matter came before the fortnightly meeting of the District Council, it was agreed to make application for an increased loan of £7852 to enable the housing scheme to be built. (11)

The contract which was let to Halls of Gloucester provided for the first block of four houses to be completed by 31 January 1914 and then two houses to be handed over every two weeks until the scheme was completed. An attempt was made to invite John Burns MP, President of the Local Government Board, to inaugurate the housing scheme but he advised the Council he was unable to attend. (12)

Upper Poole Road

If you do your maths that means the last two were due to be handed over on 26 September 1914 but completion of the scheme wasn’t reported until January 1915, suggesting that there were some delay in completing the scheme. The newspaper columnist was able to report, ‘It has been stated on good authority that no better housing scheme has been formulated under the Housing and Planning Act anywhere in the country.’ (13)

To be frank, as the 38 houses had been shoehorned into the available land with 28 on one site between Upper Poole Road and Lower Poole Road and the remaining ten a short distance further up Upper Poole Road, it was not an adventurous design. It does not have the smart landscaping of later developments like the Circle in Uplands Stroud but this collection of eight terraces of four houses along with three pairs of semis, all built in very solid red brick, was a well-designed scheme with large windows to provide plenty of light.

An early post-war scheme, built in the 1920s. The Circle, Uplands Stroud. The Gloucestershire and England cricketer Jack Russell learned to play the game on the green.

As such it is perhaps a story of opportunity and chance that Dursley was one of a handful of Districts in Gloucestershire to have built council housing before the war. In fairness, the actual numbers built were pretty small but it is important to recognise the widespread way in which councils of all complexions had started to develop the aspiration that they could respond to local needs by increasing the supply of homes for the working class.

I’m not such a curmudgeon that I don’t think we shouldn’t celebrate Lloyd George’s Homes Fit for Heroes or the sea change achieved by Addison’s 1919 Act. But we also need to celebrate the heavy lifting of John Burns and the pre-war campaigners that created the environment in which building local democratically-controlled council housing was accepted as the obvious policy choice for a post-war Government to encourage.

Chas Townley (chas.h.townley@gmail.com)

Sources

(1) Gloucestershire Chronicle, 6 January 1912

(2) ‘The Housing Question in Dursley’, Gloucester Journal, 16 March 1912, p3 

(3) ‘Dursley: The Housing Question’, Gloucester Citizen, 24 July 1912, p3 

(4) ‘Dursley Housing Scheme Local Government Board’s Suggestion’, Gloucester Citizen, 8 August 1912,  p5  

(5) ‘Dursley: Dursley District Council’, Gloucestershire Chronicle, 31 August 1912′  p2 

(6) ‘General News: Dursley Housing Scheme’, Gloucestershire Echo, 5 November 1912, p3 

(7) Gloucester Journal, 1 February 1913,  p11

(8) ‘Gloucester’s New Houses: Some Rapidly Nearing Completion’, Gloucestershire Chronicle, 4 September 1920, p6. Also Cheltenham Chronicle, 8 July 1914

(9) ‘Dursley Housing Scheme Parishioners Disapprove’, Gloucester Journal, 23 August 1913, p11 

(10) ‘Timely Gift of Sir A Lister Dursley Housing Scheme Rescued’, Cheltenham Chronicle, 6 September 1913, p7 

(11)’Dursley Guardians and District Council’, Gloucester Journal, 6 September 1913, p11 and also ‘Sir A Lister and Dursley Housing’, Evesham Standard & West Midland Observer, 27 September 1913, p6 

(12) Gloucester Journal, 21 February 1914, p10

(13) Berkeley Vale Gleanings: Dursley Housing Scheme’, Cheltenham Chronicle, 9 January 1915, p3  

The Dursley Housing Scheme, 1912, Part I: Housing Reform before the First World War

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Dursley, Pre-1914

I’m delighted to host this article by Chas Townley which is not only a fascinating account of some early council housing in Dursley, Gloucestershire but a significant contribution to the debate around the significance of a pre-war spurt in council house construction pre-dating the 1919 Housing Act. This first post examines the background to the scheme; the follow-up will examine the scheme in detail.

Chas is a Labour District Councillor on Stroud District Council, a ‘no overall control’ authority in Gloucestershire. He is currently chair of the Housing Committee. Chas has formerly worked in housing for both councils and housing associations and previously managed the Supporting People Programme in a unitary council. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing.  He is a local historian and genealogist and has written on a variety of subjects including Chartism, Cooperatives, land clubs and building societies, and the Poor Law and pre-NHS health provision.

I have the privilege to be Chair of Housing at Stroud District Council which this year has been a housing provider for 105 years, despite still only being 45 years old!  This arises from the construction of 38 working class cottages by Dursley Rural District Council, one of seven pre-1974 rural and urban districts which served our patch. (1)

While it remains a housing provider the council has not built at scale since schemes were planned in the late 1970s, although we have delivered a programme of new council homes over the last five or six years, mainly to replace defective housing or utilise sites in Council ownership. We aspire to more but this isn’t the place to write about the future.

Dursley at around the time of the First World War

As a local historian, I am presently trying to piece together the motives that drove at least four of our predecessors to actively contemplate housing schemes in their areas in the Edwardian era. In addition to the Dursley scheme, two other sites at Wotton-under-Edge and Stroud had been purchased already and active discussions were taking place elsewhere, before the skids were put on further progress by the chaos of war in August 1914.

While at first glance the Stroud District is very much a rural area with stunning landscapes in the Cotswolds and the world-renowned Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands on the Severn Estuary, it has an industrial heritage to compete with places like Ironbridge or the Black Country. Maybe I’m just a little biased but we have a fantastic industrial heritage story.

The Budding lawnmower patent © Museum in the Park, Stroud (2972/2)

Near Stroud, Edwin Budding invented the lawnmower, developed from machinery in the cloth industry. If that wasn’t enough, he also gave us the adjustable spanner; What good toolbox is without one of those?

Two coopers outside the Lister Churn works © Museum in the Park, Stroud (1975.131)

In the south of the District, the growth of Dursley had been greatly influenced by the development of RA Lister and Co as a major engineering company famed for its diesel engines which started life as an agricultural implements company in 1867. Sadly what little remains – not even based in Dursley – is a minuscule reminder of the past successes of its enterprise and innovation.

Much of the industry was linked to the woollen industry and our council offices are a converted mill – as is the headquarters of Renishaw, a world leading engineering and scientific company. The last remaining cloth firm, once famed for its scarlet for military uniforms, remains in production producing vibrant yellow and green for tennis and snooker.

And perhaps it is worth remembering that the industrialisation of the weaving industry was the start of a long tradition of active trade unions defending the rights and working conditions of employees.

Collectivism also extended to strong support for the Cooperative movement and some towns and villages at one time boasted 50 percent participation. The main society in the area, the Cainscross and Ebley, in addition to renting out cottages also supported home ownership. Fifty loans had been granted, mostly in the Dursley area, perhaps indicating this was an area with enormous housing demand, but this activity was small fry – the neighbouring Gloucester society claimed to have given out 700 loans! (2)

Bramwell Hudson, photographed in 1912 as General Manager of the Cainscross and Ebley Cooperative Society

The links of industrialists to our predecessor councils are well known but it is worth remembering that our councils represented all shades of opinion – as they do today. Bramwell Hudson, the inspirational general manager of the Coop for much of the early years began his sixteen-year stint as Chairman of Stroud RDC on his retirement from the Coop in 1928.

Margaret Hills, photographed as a suffragist speaker and campaigner in Manchester, 1909

And, of course, we find amongst the women on our councils Margaret Hills, who learnt her political craft in the suffrage movement. She too was inspirational and could hold a packed Manchester Free Trade Hall audience in the palm of her hand. As Stroud UDC Chair of Housing, she developed housing for older people back in the early 1930s.

While this article is relatively early thoughts on our predecessors’ initiative, I am convinced they were responding to a housing crisis which is probably of as great an impact as we face today; Gloucestershire’s inspirational community action was not some isolated action but part of a national response to a growing crisis. For example, in the 1917 debate about whether Gloucester City should support an initial 200 dwelling post-war scheme, in response to Government requests, Councillor Fielding (a partner in the now lamented Fielding and Platt Company) highlighted a successful housing scheme undertaken by Hereford City Council. (3)

The Government Minister who created the impetus for action was John Burns, a trade unionist who served as President of the Local Government Board from 1905 until 1914 when he was moved to another Ministry. As a pacifist, he inevitably resigned from Government on Britain entering the Great War and never again played an active part in national politics.

John Burns MP, President of the Local Government Board, c1911

Burns’ influence on housing policy and the wider ‘activist’ role for local government before the Great War is underrated. In part, this is because he did not make the transition to the Labour Party and remained as a radical in the Liberal Party. On the other hand, there are significant anti-Semitic character flaws which do not make for comfortable reading today.

In the period before Burns there had been considerable complacency about poor housing conditions. When Rider Haggard (Yes, he of King Solomon’s Mines) visited Gloucestershire as part of national agricultural survey in 1901, he interviewed Dr Martin, the Medical Officer of Health for a combined area covering three councils in the Stroud area. Haggard reported that: (4)

The cottages were fair with good gardens, and there were few cases of overcrowding; still he had been obliged to condemn some of them.

Martin’s own Medical Officer of Health reports for this period are similar in tone with a degree of blame on tenants for poor conditions. (5)

Burns, through the Housing and Planning Act 1909 (which our Dr Martin had claimed ‘was one of the most important public health Acts of recent years’), instigated systematic inspection of housing conditions in the whole area of each District. This had been actively opposed by one of the local government associations of the day and one of Dr Martin’s employers, Stroud Rural District Council, joined the campaign to oppose this as they thought it was an unneeded imposition on the council and there was nothing to see here.

The personal interest in housing reform of John Burns is illustrated by this signed copy of an influential book of the time.

Systematic inspection had instant results. In Bristol over 1000 unfit properties were found in the first year, many were improved but 110 were closed, an astonishing increase on the average of just twenty in previous years. Perhaps, a lesson from history as to why we need to rediscover the zeal for high levels of inspections of housing standards? (6)

While it is difficult to be certain of the numbers in Gloucestershire rural districts the language used in annual reports of the Medical Officers of Health significantly changed to one of heightened concern with poor housing conditions and a failing housing market, with carefully crafted polite encouragements to members to act, usually based on external evidence. (7)

Such appointments were precarious before one of Burns’ reforms as they served at the (dis)pleasure of the council, often relying on annual reappointment. In Gloucestershire one such victim was Dr Thomas Bond who was sacked by Sodbury Rural District Council in 1905. He retained the confidence of other employers and had the temerity to write about his grievous injustice publicly. His cause was taken up nationally and eventually he was reinstated following Government action. (8)

Within Stroud area there is also strong evidence of political campaigns by Liberals, Conservatives and the relatively new Labour and Trades Council to advocate for council housing in the period from 1910 onwards rising with intensity to copy Dursley and also Cirencester. (9)

In the Stroud Rural District, under pressure of campaigning, surveys had identified an urgent need for additional lower cost housing in five of seventeen parishes. In the case of the village of Minchinhampton, the cause was blamed on the number of properties owned by ‘weekenders’ who then remodelled cottage properties to their needs – apparently at the expense of local manual workers. The impact of second homes remains of concern today across many rural areas like the Cotswolds. (10)

An odd feature of Rural Districts was the allocation of some costs as ‘special expenses’ rated on specific areas of the District – usually but not always a whole parish. This approach resulted in cost shunting the risk of deficits on specific housing schemes to relatively small groups of ratepayers. Consequently, schemes were limited to parishes that were prepared to meet the additional rate costs.

Frank Gwynne Evans, was the Stroud Constituency Liberal prospective parliamentary candidate for the impending 1915 General Election (which never took place due to the war). As a member of Stroud RDC and he argued that if the cost was spread across the district the amount would be ‘infinitesimal and would be repaid in short time by the relief of the poor rate, chronic rheumatism and consumption’. Such arguments as this for collective sharing of costs led to the creation of the Housing Revenue Account as the blessing and curse that we enjoy today.

On a national scale the support for council housing led to several attempts to provide better finance systems, including a recognition for the need for government grants to local authorities, rather than permissions to borrow on the security of the rates.

There are of course interesting modern ironies of positions then taken.  The debate on the Housing of the Working Classes Bill 1912, a private member’s bill sponsored by a Conservative MP, advocated subsidised rents, national grants, transfer of functions to county councils and a significant degree of central control. It was opposed in debate by a succession of Liberals who derided subsidies as ‘charity rents’. In one case a member arguing they would ‘destroy private enterprise altogether’. There were also references of returning to the dependency created by the old poor law some eighty years before. (11)

Some of the Conservative MPs argued that the level of new council housing building was too low to replace the houses lost under the compulsory inspection of housing conditions. In part this appears to be part of a strategy to question the justification of focusing on increasing standards at a time of housing shortage as well as trying to embarrass the Liberal Government for their failure to meet needs.

The relatively small number of Labour members described as occupying seats ‘below the gangway’ – which has been the traditional home of minor parties for generations – supported municipal housing with a passion and perhaps an ideological zeal. George Lansbury in his contribution stated ‘quite cheerfully I shall go into the [Tory] Lobby in support of the second reading.’ And, of course, the reason there are no female voices in this debate is that women were still fighting to be admitted to our legislature.

That bill, like so many private members’ bills even today, suffered the indignity of not making progress as the Liberal Government of the day refused to support a money bill, leading to its demise. A question I know not how to answer is whether, if progress had been made, would the Griffith-Boscawen Act have been a notable housing act? Perhaps it was bound to fail?

A taster for next week’s post: some of Dursley’s completed housing on Lower Poole Road

Next week’s post, however, will examine the successful scheme commenced in Dursley before the First World War.

Chas Townley (chas.h.townley@gmail.com)

Sources

(1) These are the Urban Districts of Stroud and Nailsworth and the Rural Districts of Stroud and Dursley and parts of the Thornbury and Gloucester Rural Districts. Additionally, a 1991 boundary review transferred Hillesley and Tresham formerly in in the Sodbury Rural District from the Northavon District to Stroud.

(2) Unpublished research by Chas Townley on Cainscross and Ebley Cooperative Society based on society records at Gloucestershire Archives (D2754/2)

(3) ‘Gloucester City Council: The Housing Question’, Gloucester Journal, 29 September 1917 p7. This proposal eventually became the original scheme of 200 post-war homes built in Tuffley in the south of Gloucester. 

(4) Rider Haggard, Rural England: Being an account of agricultural and social researches carried out in the years 1901 & 1902 (Longmans, London 1902)

(5) See for example Dr H Martin, MOH Annual Report to Stroud UDC 1909 where he considers the condition of working class housing is generally good and notes “but of necessity in so large a town a certain number of houses are in an unsatisfactory state owing to neglect on the part of either the owners or the occupiers”. Wellcome Archive

(6) Dr DS Davies, Bristol City Council, Medical Officer of Health Annual Report 1912. Available online at the Wellcome Library

(7) Dr O Andrews,  Medical Officer of Health Annual Report 1913;  West Gloucestershire United Districts Housing and Planning Conference Report p14. Online at Welcome Library

(8) Dr Bond, letter concerning Chipping Sodbury Council and Dr Bond

(9) Petition to Stroud RDC by Stroud Trades and Labour Council reported in ‘Housing Problem in Stroud District Special Committee’s Report’, Cheltenham Echo, 24 April 1914, p3. Also Stroud  Conservative Workingmen’s Debating Society considered a paper on building council housing at one of their regular meetings in 1913.

(10) ‘Housing Problem in Stroud District  Special Committee’s Report’, Cheltenham Echo 24 April 1914, p3 

(11) Housing of the Working Classes Bill Second Reading Debate, Hansard Vol 35 Col 1414-1494, 15 March 1912.