“In the wake of the Armistice, the ‘homes fit for heroes’ campaign was adopted as the major weapon of the state in the ‘battle of opinion’ on which, it was believed, the future of the entire social order depended.” – (Mark Swenarton, Homes fit for Heroes, 1981, pg 67)
When we ask how Britain ended up with so much social housing, all sources available to the casual reader seem to tell versions of the same story. The most complete versions say that the poor health of the troops during WW1 made the government realise that it needed to improve the quality of housing, in order to ensure a steady supply of healthy recruits.±1
Others assign more benevolent reasons to the government’s decision, merely saying that the poor health of the troops “brought a new social attitude that focused the Government’s attention on a national responsibility to provide homes.”±2 The strong implication being that the government provided the homes because it was the morally right thing to do.
Other sources telling the story don’t bother with motivations. The British government decided to build the houses and who cares why?±3 ±4 ±5
The need for healthy troops does seem like a credible reason for a government to suddenly decide to build 500,000 homes for workers and their families, even where it had previously, and for a long time, resisted using public funds to house the working class. When we look at government records from the time, however, we find a government in panic, not about its ability to fight future wars, but by the possibility of being permanently overthrown by its own working class.
Before the War
The British government was traditionally staunchly against using public funds to build housing for the working class. Where it reluctantly did so, it always made sure to charge a market based rent. Ministers feared that doing otherwise would make the government permanently responsible for housing the poor, and saw it as much more desirable to leave housing to the free market.±7
That isn’t to say that the government was indifferent to how the poor were housed. Slums, jam packed with malnourished people, have always been a fertile ground for diseases to spread. Those disease outbreaks often escape into the wider city, and once the slums were known to spread diseases amongst the affluent, the rich made the health of the slums their concern, and that of the government.±8
Towards the end of the 19th century, the government implemented a policy of slum clearance. The Artizans and Labourers Dwellings Act (1868) [sic] made local authorities responsible for inspecting houses in their area, and for issuing repair or demolition orders to owners of unsanitary properties.±9 The unhygienic houses themselves were thought to be the cause of disease, and so replacing the most rundown slums was seen as a sensible precaution. In 1875, parliament granted local authorities the power to clear whole areas of slums at once.±10
A local authority is a local council.
The first improvements in the quality of working class housing came not from the government, but from private industry. Industrial capitalists had previously used company housing as a way to prevent strike action±11 but in 1887 the Lever Brothers decided to build their workers a better class of housing. At Port Sunlight, Lever drew on the traditions of the estate village of the country landowner and produced a spectacular re-creation of an old English village, complete with the picturesque trappings of half timbered elevations, village green and old English inn.±39
The brothers’ aims were both to improve productivity in their factory, by making the workers more content, and to improve industrial relations.They insisted that the move was driven by the profit motive, not philanthropy.±12
In 1895, the Cadbury Brothers established their own model village for their workers. Edward Cadbury was aware of the antagonistic relationship between owner and worker, and was seeking to minimise any problems that might arise from it.
“In any wages system there must be some element of driving,” he later wrote in 1914, “and the interests of employer and employed are never absolutely identical…It is not merely a question of preventing the workmen breaking rules and regulations, but of inducing them to take a positive interest in the welfare of the business.”±13
These projects were part of the first wave of the garden city movement, whose proponents sought to improve living conditions by transforming the residential environment. While different groups disagreed on the details and had differing motivations, all sought to give the slum dwellers back some of the wholesome life that their ancestors had experienced in rural England. Far from being crammed together like most working class houses, each comparatively spacious home in the Cadbury’s development would come with its own gardens.
The garden city movement appealed to a diverse range of people. Capitalists saw it as a way to increase profits, while some socialists saw it as a way to improve the quality of life of workers and their families.
The movement was slow to achieve concrete results, however. These were expensive projects, which often required an act of parliament to exempt them from restrictive planning regulations. As a result, only a handful of industrial capitalists and civil society groups built garden city projects in the years leading up to the war.
The Early War Years
In the years leading up to the war, local authorities frequently needed to build housing on a small scale, especially when the housing market went into its periodic slumps. Without new housing for tenants to move into, they wouldn’t have been able to demolish the old and unhygienic slum housing. Once it was engaged in the war, however, the central government got directly involved in housebuilding for the first time.
Within a week of war breaking out, the government passed The Housing (no. 2) Act of 1914. The act gave the Local Government Board and the Board of Agriculture access to a £4 million housebuilding fund, which they could either use to build houses themselves or to grant money to local authorities and civic groups.
The government feared that housebuilding would stop due to the outbreak of war, leading to mass unemployment in the building trades, and figured that since it would have to pay the workers to be unemployed, it might as well pay them to build houses.
“It is considered that in case there should be considerable distress through unemployment in this country,” Mr Herbert Samuel, President of the Local Government Board, said during a parliamentary discussion in August 1914, “that distress will very likely extend to the building trade, and that it would be absurd in such circumstances to spend great sums of public money in giving relief to persons out of work instead of setting them to work at their own trade to make good the deficiency in housing accommodation, which has long been admitted on all sides to prevail both in town and in country.”±14
The passing of this act was important, not because it led to much housebuilding – the Treasury put the kaibosh on that – but because a provision was built into the bill that the central government would pay ten percent of the building costs, to offset prices that had been increased by the war.±15 This established the principle that the central government should subsidise housebuilding where the war made costs abnormally high. That mindset would play a significant role in later events.
If The Housing (no. 2) Act proved to be largely unnecessary during the year it was valid, the central government couldn’t avoid being involved in housebuilding altogether. The government needed munitions to fight its war, and that meant building new munitions factories, whose thousands of workers needed housing.
Having used allegations of a shortage of munitions on the front line as a tool to topple the previous government, the new, Liberal government came into office in 1916 determined to remedy the situation. It expanded the workforce at the Royal Arsenal from 10,866 to 74,467. It also planned a new munitions factory in Gretna Green that would have between 10,000-15,000 workers, in an area built to accommodate only 4,500 people. For the sake of peaceful conditions in the factories, housing the influx of workers couldn’t be left to the free market.
For much of the building programs, the Treasury insisted that the Ministry of Munitions build only temporary accommodation.±16 But due to the rising price of timber and the need to prepare even temporary sites with plumbing and power, this often proved to be nearly as expensive as building permanent housing. For that reason, and under great pressure from the PM and the War Office, the Treasury agreed to finance permanent housing in areas where demand was predicted to outlast the war. Around 10,000 houses were built in connection with the munitions factories, across 38 sites.±17
More surprisingly, all those houses were built on garden city principles, designed to give their residents a semi-rural existence in comparatively spacious homes.±17 To what extent this was done to improve the productivity and contentment of the munitions workers, and to what extent to address post war social unrest, remains unclear. Just a year earlier, however, a rent strike of 25,000 working class families in Glasgow, a centre for munitions, had forced the government to put rent controls in place.±18 Clearly, the government was desperate to keep the munitions workers placated.
During the first two years of the war, the government had focused on housing only where it was an immediate problem. In 1916, however, it turned its attention to what the housing situation would be once the war was over.
Before the war, around 75,000 houses were built each year. By the end of 1916, that number was practically zero. All housebuilding and letting depended on the profit motive, but the limited supply of materials, caused by the war, had increased the cost of housebuilding by at least 100 percent.±19 Housebuilding had become unprofitable and the result was a severe and growing housing shortage.
Unrest Amongst the Workers
A panel hired by the government assessed that the shortage of materials was likely to persist for several years after the war, and that it would be up to the central government to ensure the houses were built.±20
“The cost of building at present is abnormally high, and…will still be high at the end of the war,” Seebhom Rowntree said in a report, produced for the Housing Panel of the Reconstruction Committee, in May 1917. “Until it becomes normal … no appreciable number [of houses] will be built unless action is taken by the Government. Aid to private enterprise would be politically unacceptable, the capacity of public utility societies was inadequate for the problem. Therefore housing must be provided by local authorities or by the State [i.e. central government] direct.”±20
Rowntree proposed that the government should implement time limits regarding applying for assistance and implementing housebuilding, to make sure that local authorities did the work promptly, while private builders were still priced out of the market. To this, Lord Sainsbury added that the government should be able to intervene and build houses itself where local authorities failed in their duty.
Despite the obvious need for new housing – Rowntree’s report put the estimate at 300,000 homes in England and Wales – the government was in no rush to implement the proposals. However, all wasn’t well within the country.
At the start of the war, the government had co-opted the unions, which agreed to a policy of no strike action. This didn’t stop workers from declaring their own ‘unofficial’ strikes, however, when unions failed to resolve disputes. In May 1917, engineers took part in the largest single strike of the war, involving 200,000 workers in forty-five towns and cities.±21
In response to growing strike action, the government commissioned an inquiry into the industrial unrest. The commission found that the soaring prices and unequal distribution of food±21 were key factors in the unrest, alongside the erosion of traditional labour privileges. But it also found that acute housing shortages were playing a role in the discontent. The Commissioners recommended that the government make an announcement about housing policy to quiet the public’s concerns,±22 which it appears to have done.
Yet, even though the War Cabinet was of the opinion that ‘for the vigorous prosecution of the war, a contented working-class was indispensable,’±23 the Treasury resisted committing itself to a concrete investment in housebuilding.
“It is quite impossible for Their Lordships to commit themselves at the present time to any figure…as regards the amount which it will be possible to advance to local authorities … for that purpose,” it said in a letter to the Local Government Board on November 17th 1917. “They regard it as premature to make any further announcement to local authorities as regards housing…”±24
The Treasury would change its tune by the end of the year, however, under pressure from the rest of the government, which sought to keep the war effort running smoothly.
On the same day in January 1918 that the PM, David Lloyd George, gave a speech about Britain’s noble aims in the war,±25 the Treasury finally agreed to propose a definite scheme to subsidise housebuilding.
“There was a mass effort of sending out speakers and putting on propaganda films, presenting idealistic war aims and beginning to talk about domestic reconstruction but there was also the sending out of spies to find socialist…plots”, says Dr Gregory, author of The Last Great War.±26
The Treasury scheme would see local authorities borrow money for housebuilding at the market rate, with the Treasury covering three quarters of their estimated deficits. After seven years, when house values would likely be normal again, the Treasury would switch to paying for three quarters of the costs above the market value of the properties. After consultation, it added a cap on the total amount that local authorities would have to pay in relation to their income.
By the time the Treasury was ready to put this proposal to the War Cabinet, the government was concerned enough about industrial unrest that it had set up the Committee on Civil Disturbance to further investigate the matter and provide fresh recommendations.
The Committee soon reported that the government’s plans to conscript engineers into the military could lead to a general strike. It recommended changing the law so that any strike instigators, along with any person who paid strikers, could be imprisoned.±27
Providing a different solution, a member of the five person War Cabinet, George Barnes, had recently reminded the cabinet that the “Deficiency of housing accommodation is one the most prolific causes of industrial unrest.” His memo reminded them that there was an estimated shortfall of 300,000 houses in England and Wales, with a further shortage of 110,000 in Scotland.±28
The War Cabinet decided to issue the Treasury’s offer to local authorities and see whether they would respond favourably.
By the terms of the offer issued, it’s clear that there was a battle going on within the government over the nature of the homes being built.
“…the aim should be to provide that in ordinary circumstances not more than 12 houses (or in agricultural areas, eight houses) should be placed on an acre of land wherever this is possible without materially increasing the cost of the scheme.”
Building only 12 houses per acre would put the new estates on garden city lines. For comparison, planning regulations in Liverpool in 1912 allowed up to 41 houses per acre. The new council houses would offer spacious living indeed. Yet, the weasel words in the offer, ‘wherever this is possible without materially increasing the cost of the scheme,’ betray the reluctance of some involved for the government to bear such costs.
As it would turn out, the scheme became unnecessary. Three days after the Treasury issued its offer, the German army launched its spring offensive. Faced with national defeat, misguided patriotism amongst the workers made a general strike highly unlikely for the time being.
Post War
In 1917, while the war still raged on, the Ministry of Reconstruction pointed out that the the weasel wording in the recent housebuilding proposal didn’t either compel local authorities to build immediately after the war, or guarantee that the treasury would provide the necessary funds.±29
“… their Lordships expressly wish that it be made quite clear that the precise date at which any schemes approved by the Board can be commenced must depend on circumstances which cannot at present be foreseen, and the financial position may be such that it may be necessary to give precedence to the more urgent cases even to the exclusion, for the time being, of the less urgent.” – Paragraph six of the Treasury proposal.±30
The Ministry of Reconstruction further pointed out that the rent controls the government had instituted in 1915, to stop war profiteering, would prevent private builders from building profitably, but that removing them would make housing unaffordable. Meanwhile, four million men would be returning from the war and there was already an acute shortage of housing. The danger this situation posed to the government wasn’t lost on the Ministry.
“It is at present a serious cause of unrest and, in the absence of any effective attempt to grapple with it, would, I believe, confront us with formidable dangers.”±31 – Memorandum from the Minister of Reconstruction, to the War Cabinet
The Ministry wasn’t overstating the case. Only a few months beforehand the October Revolution had swept the working class to power in Russia and its former colonies, Germany was in the middle of a socialist revolution, and revolution was in the air throughout Europe. As unlikely as it might sound now, there was open revolutionary organising in the UK.
The government received a Fortnightly Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom, and Morale Abroad. Here are some excerpts from the December 2nd 1918 report, three weeks after the armistice agreement that officially ended the war against Germany:
“My Liverpool correspondent says that there is a very general talk of revolution, not bloody revolution, and that the women say that they hope the revolution will not mean further killing, as they have already had enough of that during the war…
“… the cotton trade dispute may become very serious…feeling created among a quarter of a million people by what they consider the greed of the employers is playing into the hands of the extremists. As the ballot has resulted in a 97 percent vote to strike, the feeling must be very strong…
“…He comments upon the personal decline in loyalty to the king in Lancashire…
“…It is to be feared that in the event of serious labour disturbances the police in the large cities can’t be depended upon…The president of the Trades Council…a pacifist and revolutionary…is very active in fostering a close alliance between the Police Union and the extremists… Agitators among the police make no secret of their intention to side with labour during a strike. What will almost inevitably happen is that…the police will not actively join the strikers, but will quietly neglect to do their duty, and unless society is provided with some other means of keeping order there may easily be a seizure of public buildings and executive power by the strikers…
“…A report, not yet confirmed, has reached me that…red flags have been made for distribution in Barrow and Coventry… and that the Shop Stewards in these places intend to formulate a demand for a thirty-two hours’ week, a minimum wage of £6 for skilled and £5 for unskilled labour, with a time limit for acceptance, and that failing acceptance they will ‘down tools’ and proceed with the Revolutionary movement.
“…During the last fortnight the idea of direct action by the workers has certainly gained ground, especially in London. Among the advanced people there seems to be a quiet certainty that revolution is coming. One hears the remark being made openly and with conviction and even among steady going socialists the wildest rumours are beginning to circulate…
“A private letter from Miss Sylvia Pankhurst to a friend in Glasgow, which has come into my hands, concludes with the words: ‘I expect the Revolution soon, don’t you?'”±32
Less than two months later, the Cabinet received the following report about the unrest in Glasgow:
“The Secretary of State for Scotland said that…it would be a misnomer to call the unrest in Glasgow a strike – it was a Bolshevik rising. He would put the malcontents at 10,000 and this was an outside figure.”±33
By February, the underground rail workers were on strike, while the electricity workers and coal miners were also threatening strike action. Meanwhile, troops on both sides of the channel were mutinying.
“In January and February 1919 there took place in the British armed forces, principally at home, an extraordinary protest movement of strikes and demonstrations against their further retention in uniform, now that the war with Germany was ended. It had no parallel in history…
“…They were resolute but peaceful strikes and threats of strikes, like those of the organised workers around them. They were the actions of men living in the age, not of militant Puritanism or of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, but of modern large-scale industry and trade unionism. The soldiers who took part in them – nearly all coming from working-class families…
“…the strikes were successful, and in their success they had a profound effect on British history. Almost at once the Government of the day – though it was one which had just played a leading part with its Allies in defeating the most powerful enemy Britain had ever faced – recognised that it could not resist the soldiers’ demand for demobilisation…
“…accepting the soldiers’ demand meant at that moment accepting a decisive change in British foreign policy: namely, in the policy of intervention in Russia. And when the British Government ceased to lead in that enterprise, none of its Allies could do anything but follow, faced as they were with much more dangerous internal opposition…” – excerpt from the preface to The Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919 by Andrew Rothstein.+34
A quote from the diary of Britain’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, gives us a further glimpse into the government’s reasoning for agreeing to end the war:
“Cabinet meeting tonight… Lloyd George read two telegrams from the Tiger [Clemenceau]…The Tiger is afraid that Germany may collapse and Bolshevism gain control. Lloyd George asked me if I wanted that to happen or if I did not prefer an armistice. Without hesitation I replied ‘Armistice’. The whole cabinet agreed with me.”±35
The war was finally over but that left the British government with the problems that the Ministry of Reconstruction had been anticipating: nearly five million soldiers would be returning home to a country that was rife with revolutionary activity; the police were unreliable; and, for the first time in British history, the working class would be better trained and experienced in warfare than the troops meant to suppress them. Clearly, the government needed to take drastic action.
This is how the minutes record the PM, David Lloyd George, speaking in a Cabinet meeting on March 3rd 1919:
“In Europe we were now faced with very serious conditions. Russia had gone almost completely over to Bolshevism, and we had consoled ourselves with the thought that they were only a half-civilised race; but now even in Germany, whose people were without exception the best educated in Europe, prospects are very black.
“Bavaria was already in chaos, and the same fate might await Prussia. Spain seemed to be on the edge of upheaval. In a short time we might have three-quarters of Europe converted to Bolshevism. None would be left but France and Great Britain.
“He believed that Great Britain would hold out, but only if the people were given a sense of confidence—only if they were made to believe that things were being done for them. We had promised them reforms time and again, but little had been done. We must give them the conviction this time that we meant it, and we must give them that conviction quickly.”±36
The government passed The Housing and Town Planning Act on the 31st of July 1919. The act required local authorities to assess the housing needs of the working class in their area and regularly submit detailed plans for building necessary homes.±37
The government’s target was to build 500,000 homes in three years. Not just any homes, but high quality homes of the garden city variety. The homes would be spacious and modern, with gardens and indoor bathrooms. This, it believed, would provide work for many of the demobilised troops, as well as offering the working class as a whole a tempting inducement to accept the status quo.
Under the new scheme, the Treasury would reimburse local authorities the whole difference between the cost of building homes during this expensive period and the value of the homes seven years after the war’s end, when house prices would presumably have returned to normal. The cost to the Treasury would be enormous, on a scale it would have considered unthinkable in any other circumstances. But as Major Astor of the Local Government Board told parliament during a debate on the scheme:
“When we talk of expense and cost let us realise that everything is comparative, and let us measure the cost of our housing proposals by the cost of Bolshevism to the country and the cost of revolution. The money we propose to spend on housing is an insurance against Bolshevism and revolution. What is the cost to the country of industrial unrest and strikes? You have only to realise the conditions under which many men and women live to realise that unrest is fully justified.”±38
References:
±1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14380936.amp
+2 https://fet.uwe.ac.uk/conweb/house_ages/council_housing/print.htm
±3 https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns/story_of_social_housing
±4 https://www.structherm.co.uk/history-of-social-housing-in-the-uk/
±5 https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/a-history-of-council-housing-a-timeline-62359
±7 (PRO CAB 37/116 no. 58 (‘Rural land’ by W. Runciman, September 1913); as referenced in (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 41)
±8 (The Housing Question, Frederick Engels, 1872)
±9 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1868/130/enacted
±10 See Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 28)
±11 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 5-6)
±12 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 6)
±13 (TheSociological Review Vol. Vn. No. 2. April 1914, Some Principles Of Industrial Organisation, Edward Cadbury, page 107)
±14 (HC Deb 08 August 1914 vol 65 cc2208-122208)
±15 (Housing Loans Volume 68: debated on Tuesday 24 November 1914)
±16 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 51); refers to (PRO T132, Treasury to Ministry of Munitions, 15th of June 1915)
±17 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 51)
±18 https://www.rs21.org.uk/2015/06/12/1915-glasgow-rent-strike-how-workers-fought-and-won-over-housing/
±19 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 68)
±20 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 69); see also RECO 1/477 no. 2737
±21 (Britain’s Biggest Wartime Stoppage: TheOrigins of the Engineering Strike of May 1917, David Stevenson, page 1)
±22 (PP 1917-18 Cd 8696 xv Summary of the Reports of the Commission of Enquiry into Industrial Unrest by the Rt Hon. G. N. Barnes, page 6)
±23 PRO CAB 23/3 WC 190
±24 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 69); refering to contents of PRO T 128/
±25 https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/lloyd-george-british-war-aims-1918/
±26 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/59WkjNwHRykLWYQck9Sj8pt/how-close-was-britain-to-following-russia-in-revolution-in-1917
±27 PRO CAB 24/44 GT 3814
±28 PRO CAB 24/42 GT 3693
±29 (CAB 24/44/3 GT 3803, pdf page 3)
±30 (Paragraph 6 of the joint Local Government Board and Treasury proposal, reprinted in CAB 24/44/3 GT 3803, pdf page 2)
±31 (CAB 24/44/3 GT 3803, pdf page 4)
±32 (CAB 24/71/25 GT 6425)
±33 (CAB 23/9/10 WC 523, page 2)
±34 (The Soldiers’ Strikes of 1919, Andrew Rothstein, preface)
±35 (https://www.marxist.com/1919-britain-on-the-brink-of-revolution.htm; quoting Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson His Life And Diaries, November 9th)
±36 (PRO CAB 23/9 WC 539, 3rd March 1919, page 4-5)
±37 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1919/35/enacted
±38 (HC Deb 08 April 1919 vol 114 cc1889-956)
±39 (Homes fit for Heroes, Mark Swenarton, 1981, page 7)
