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Abstract
During the 1930s the British building industry and building society movement waged an aggressive campaign to sell the idea of home ownership to a new mass market. A number of sophisticated marketing strategies were employed to transform the popular image of a mortgage from ‘a millstone round your neck’ to a key element of a new, suburbanized, aspirational lifestyle. Despite opportunistic behaviour by some developers, the spectacular success of this campaign both contributed to the fastest rate of growth in working-class owner-occupation during the twentieth century and had a substantial impact on consumption patterns for families that moved to the new estates.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by ESRC grant no. RES-000-22-0152. I wish to thank Alan Crisp, Judy Giles, Len Holden, Steve Humphries, Audrey Kaye, Stuart Mitchell, Duncan Nimmo, Chris Pond, Chris Reid, George Speight, Pat Thane, Laura Ugolini, Fatima Cardias Williams, Lesley Whitworth, and the anonymous referees for their help and advice. Thanks are also due to the staff of Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre; Bodleian Library; Borthwick Institute; British Library of Economic and Political Science Archive; Building Societies Association Archive; Coventry Local Studies Library; Coventry Record Office; East Midlands Oral History Archive; Essex Record Office; Gunnersbury Park Museum; Mass Observation Archive; Museum of London Archive; National Archives; National Sound Archive; North Kingston Centre; Northampton Record Office; Nottingham Local Studies Library; Nuffield College, Oxford, Archives; Ruskin College, Oxford, Library Archives; Southampton Oral History Project; University of Bangor Archives; Watford Reference Library; and York City Archives for their valuable assistance. Any errors are my own.
Notes
Pre-decimal UK currency: £1 = 20s (shillings); 1s = 12d (old pence) = £0.05p (new pence).
1. Motor vehicle hire purchase terms generally involved a minimum deposit of 25 per cent and a maximum repayment term of around two years.
2. Excluding a few accounts where it was unclear whether the property was newly developed.
3. The survey aimed to provide a representative collection of expenditure budgets for UK working-class households. It covered manual wage-earners, and non-manual workers with salaries not exceeding £250 a year, with the exception of the long-term unemployed. A total of 10,762 sets of four weekly budgets were compiled, at quarterly intervals from October 1937, of which 8,905 covered non-agricultural households. For the most comprehensive report on the survey's findings see National Archives (Citation1949).
4. The dates of marriage and house moves are generally only known to the nearest year. One owner-occupier who purchased a house (originally jointly with his brother) before marriage is treated as having moved there on marriage.
5. Engineering workers are probably over-represented in the sample, as a number of major engineering centres had particularly good oral history records.
6. Three building workers and three workers in building-related trades (two carpenters and a self-employed plumber). The sample also included two ‘white collar’ workers – a clerk and the manager of a small shop. The shop manager earned less than £3 a week at around the time of the house purchase, while the clerk earned only £3 5s from his clerical work (his income being supplemented by his wife continuing to work after marriage – unlike most families in the sample – as a dressmaker, and from money he earned at weekends in a jazz band). These workers thus earned less than many factory workers, and lived on estates where such workers were also resident. Remaining workers in the sample comprised a river man and a horse driver.
7. Rents for three bedroom parlour council houses built by Liverpool Corporation under the 1930 and 1935 housing acts were around 16.5 shillings a week, while rents for parlour houses on the London County Council's Becontree and Watling estates were substantially higher (McKenna, Citation1986, p. 370; Young, Citation1934, p. 157; Durant, Citation1939, p. 121; for mortgage instalments see Speight, 2000b, p. 30).
8. This information is available for 33 accounts.
9. Coventry Record Office, 1647/1/36, female born 1913; Museum of London Archive, material collected for Weightman and Humphries (Citation1984), letter from, and transcript of interview with, G.R. Matthews.
10. This included advertising aimed at depositors as well as borrowers.
11. New Ideal Homesteads' annual turnover varied from around £92,000–£345,000 over 1932–1937 (Furnell, Citation1989, pp. 12–15).
12. Museum of London Archive, material collected for Weightman and Humphries (Citation1984), letter from, and transcript of interview with, G.R. Matthews.
13. Ibid., unpublished memoir by Ivy Willis, c.1980s, plus project interview with Ivy Willis.
14. Ibid., by Ivy Willis, c.1980s, plus interview with Ivy Willis.
15. Ibid., interview with Ken Milne.
16. Scott, “Visible and Invisible Walls”; Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship, 162.
17. While it was cheaper to buy than to rent a modern suburban house, most renters did not live in such houses, but in older terraced or back-to-back properties, often subject to rent control, for which rents were substantially lower.
18. Ideally, furniture and clothing expenditure would have been shown separately. However the bulky and infrequent nature of these expenditures, together with the limited sample size and the fact that the sample is restricted to a single week, prevents the derivation of meaningful data. Around half of all furniture expenditure for the 477 renting households is accounted by less than 3 per cent of families. Similarly, 51.6 per cent of adult clothing expenditure by renting households is accounted for by 3.1 per cent of families. Given that the table divides purchasers into categories with sample sizes of 26–28, reliable comparisons could not therefore be made.
19. Hire purchase contracts were often taken out with the finance house rather than the retailer, who technically acted as their agent.
20. For example, Constance Wearing and her husband purchased a house in Ealing in 1935 for £575, which had been empty for three months. The houses on the estate had been built seven years earlier, to be sold at £750 (Gunnersbury Park Museum, Oral History Archive, OH24).