Homes, Happiness, and Heartlessness

An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle

Just now I’m in the middle of a difficult moment in the housing market, which has made me reflect on the central place of homes (and therefore the broader framework of housing) in all our lives. Houses provide us with shelter; but homes help to shape our lived experiences. In my own lifetime I have shared in the experience of both the housing have-nots, and the housing haves: I know what it is like on both sides of the fence. And despite so many social improvements over the past century, it seems to me that the housing have-nots remain a disturbingly large group in our society.

The well-known saying above is of particular import to the near-medieval experiences of my own family. From the beginning of the 20^th century to the mid-1930s my Irish immigrant grandfather, Tom Minogue, worked for a peer of the realm, Lord Mowbray and Stourton. His home, naturally, was a castle, at Allerton Mauleverer (in Yorkshire, not far from York). It is considered now as a prime example of Victorian gothic, though it always seemed an ugly sort of pile to me. (See photo at the beginning of the post). My grandad, equally naturally, lived in a small, tied cottage (pictured below) just down the road from the castle. He and Granny brought up a family of 12 children in this cottage, without benefit of electricity or running water. At this time a ‘tied’ cottage was tied to the job: if you lost the job, you could be summarily evicted.

My father was born in this cottage and told that he and his brothers often had to sleep head to toe in one large bed. But this was, by his own later written account, a happy home life which he left behind at the age of 13.  Dad also records that he met and courted one of the maids at the castle, Josephine Simpson, a miner’s daughter from Wallsend-on-Tyne. This was an unlikely match bringing together both the urban and rural strands of the British working class, but it was a loving if somewhat tempestuous relationship, (all the tempestuousness on my mother’s side). And in 1937, now married, they welcomed me into it.

I was on the scene unexpectedly early, premature by some four weeks, and weighing 5 lbs. My first home was Halfway Houses (CLICK for rather grim Google map view) half way between the market town of  Knaresborough and a village called Goldsborough. We lived in one side of the semi-detached cottages. On the other side lived my Granny and Grandad Minogue, who after 28 years’ service on the Allerton estate had been sacked by the incoming 25^th Lord Mowbray. My Mum too had been dismissed, along with many other servants, but in her case, she was glad to escape the intrusive personal restrictions of domestic service. She was equally restive about the restrictions of farm life in tied cottages, causing us from this juncture to lead a peripatetic exploration of various parts of Yorkshire. We’ll come back to Allerton Park again later, as she and Dad did.

Mean bosses and mean houses

Nun Appleton

My own first memories of this agricultural life were on another estate, at Nun Appleton near York, held by Sir Benjamin Dawson, well-heeled scion of a Bradford textile mill-owner. Dad was a specialist Horseman: in 1939, heavy horses outnumbered tractors by 30 to1, and when we moved to our new home, we did so on a horse-drawn farm wagon with the few sticks of furniture Mum and Dad possessed. Our tiny cottage, (see picture), also  without running water or electricity, backed on to a smelly fold yard where cattle spent the winter: one of them escaped and trampled on my fairly new sister, Maureen; fortunately she escaped serious injury.

Politics put an end to this particular home. Dad acted as a local election agent in 1945 for Bert Hazell in the constituency of Barkston Ash. They spoke out in well-attended meetings about the bad practices of big farmers like Dad’s own Tory employer (who heckled from the front row at one Labour meeting chaired by Dad). Bert failed by only 116 votes to oust the Tory shipping magnate who had traditionally held the seat with a large majority.  An enraged Sir Benjamin sought a mean-minded revenge by putting Dad to breaking stones all alone in the estate park, instead of using his skilled horsemanship. Mum and Dad looked at each other: time to move on.

Wensleydale

They fetched up in Wensleydale, in a village called Thornton Steward. At the age of seven I was still a sickly child after my premature birth, and was not helped by living in a grim old, dark, leaky, stone cottage (see photo above). In winter I would lie in bed watching water run down the inside walls, though it didn’t run out of taps. When I ventured out to the local primary school I was beaten up by the local kids, disdained as an incomer. This was too much for Mum, so we were soon off again but back to the familiar Plain of York, to the hamlet of Ellenthorpe, near Boroughbridge, and close to the old Roman route to the North, later the Great North Road, and now the A1(M).

Ellenthorpe

Our cottage here in 1946, Ivy Nook, had a pleasant garden with plum trees, and from my bedroom I could look out to the Hambledon Hills, and the White Horse of Kilburn. But yet again, here was a house without electricity or gas, no running water or bathroom, a dark and forbidding outside lavatory in the backyard, water hand-pumped from a nearby spring. Lighting came from candles and paraffin lamps. These were conditions all too common for farm labourers in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1944, 30% of English rural dwellings had no mains water supply and in 1947 almost 50% had no bathroom (the photo above is a bit misleading because the now modernised cottage has had a whole new half added to it since we lived there.)

I recall at the age of ten helping my mother to squeeze dripping sheets, washed in a primitive boiler, through a mangle. Since my new younger sister Sally had been born in the snowdrifts of early 1947, washing and drying clothes for three children and two adults in these conditions must have been a nightmare. We were often freezing cold, and Mum used to warm our beds with bricks heated in the kitchen oven and wrapped in a piece of blanket.

I now had to cope with my fourth primary school in four years. I could be very sensitive when teased at school about the patches on my much-darned short trousers, but amazingly, I was a happy boy, banished first thing at weekends with a packet of jam sandwiches, and admonished not to return until teatime. I roamed the fields and riverbanks to my heart’s content, and learned from visits to my mother’s native Tyneside how much luckier I was than my urban cousins, living in a much grimmer environment. My memories of my Mum and Dad at this house are less happy, for they often had arguments about money, or of course the absence of it. As a small child I hated to lie in my bed listening to the quarrels of these much-loved parents. Yet I have just read in my father’s diary that they were very happy at that time, enjoying their family life and their garden. So it was possible to be poor but unhappy, and poor but happy, all at the same time.

Allerton Park Again, Same Mean Master Again

Our next move was a surprise, taking us back to the Allerton Park where Mum and Dad had first met. The erratic Lord Mowbray put Dad in charge of the estate’s Home Farm, with an increased income; and in 1951 we had our first ever home with running water, electricity, bathroom and indoor lavatory. We even had our first ever telephone: Mum was in transports of delight. Now at grammar school, as was my sister Maureen, I no longer felt worries about my patched bottom.

But the ‘mean master’ syndrome struck again. When livestock began to go missing from the fields, an angry Lord Mowbray blamed Dad. Dad could do angry too, and after a stand up row, His Lordship, the one who 15 years earlier had precipitately sacked my upright Grandfather, now precipitately sacked the upright son. This meant eviction from our tied house. Dad was known and respected throughout the district and soon found work (and a house) elsewhere, but on a much reduced income as an ordinary farm labourer again. Eventually, it transpired that the shady goings on were almost certainly down to Lord Mowbray’s Agent, who was quietly moved on. Lord Mowbray sent his son Charles to offer Dad his job back, but he refused, writing in his diary that “I should never have gone back there and I’m sorry that I did.” Mum mainly lamented the loss of her lovely white telephone. As for me I was glad to leave behind the farm barn-based vermin; one morning I awoke to find a mouse sitting on my chest!

Yorkshire Village Life

These ups and downs meant that I had so far been present and mostly correct at four primary schools and two grammar schools. Fortunately, I could now at least stay at the same school, King James’ Grammar School Knaresborough. Our latest house, called Vicarage Farm, was in the village of Roecliffe, a mile or so from the familiar Boroughbridge and its equally familiar Great North Road. This was the first time we lived for any length of time in a proper village with a proper community. Our house was large but extremely cold in winter, coal fires the only source of heating and cooking. I had the not unusual experience in those days of waking to see ice on the inside of my bedroom window. In later years, Roecliffe would be considerably gentrified, and our house would be bought up for more than a £1 million by a well-known Leeds United footballer. The photo shows an extremely handsome conversion, much to my mother’s disgust.

Well before then I had left ‘the Grammar’, having won a place to read History at Caius College Cambridge, but obliged to do National Service first, in the RAF. I’ll not bother to show the series of unprepossessing huts and barracks I inhabited for two years.

Rooms at the Top

In the Cambridge Village

My next home for three years (1959-62) was Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College. At that time the College was a mix of public school and grammar school men, public school predominating, with their own divide between aristocratic offspring and merely upper middle class (no women, of course, until the 1980s). As Alan Bennett has commented: “we grammar school boys were the interlopers”. But most of my grammar school contemporaries were middle class: manual working class entrants to Cambridge at this time were less than one per cent of the total; while the representation of the children of farm labourers was too small to be recorded. I was all too aware of my still marked Yorkshire accent, and aware too that the upper crust members of the college treated people like me with a sort of frostily polite disdain. At an initial dinner it took me some while to realise that when they talked about ‘my people’ they were referring to their own families: I had a whole new language to learn. But I would also learn that not all public school men were of that ilk, some of them becoming lifelong friends.

I was fortunate to be able to live in the College for the whole three years, in a cosy set of 3 rooms (bedroom, sitting room, and tiny kitchen) though you still had to tramp down below to freezing cold cellars for the other mod cons.

The photo shows the Gate of Honour at Caius through which those graduating would pass on their way to the Senate House behind to receive their degrees. These were grand surroundings for a rural Yorkshire boy, and gave me a taste for more of the same… hopes that, astonishingly (to me) would be realised

In the Whitehall Village

1n 1962 I left Cambridge. Like most of my fellow students this meant graduating to the bright lights of London, many to jobs in the City and in Whitehall.  As a new recruit to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, opposite 10 Downing Street, I was soon transported into one of the best addresses in London. This came about when I was appointed to be Resident Clerk for the Commonwealth Relations Office, a sort of Duty Officer’s position. This position came with a capacious flat in the splendid Foreign Office building designed in the nineteenth century by Sir George Gilbert Scott. My front windows looked out over St James’s Park down to Buckingham Palace; the side window opened on to a large balcony from which we could watch the Trooping of the Colour, always the occasion for a party. And see above the wonderful staircase leading up to my flat. Mum climbed those stairs once and must have felt that the efforts she and Dad had made to push me up in the world had been vindicated; no outside lavatories here, though the plumbing was probably Victorian.

A year or so on I moved on from this post, and into a house share with a Cambridge friend in the wonderful mediaeval Gatehouse to St Bartholomew’s church (see picture below), next door to Bart’s Hospital and opposite the then Smithfield Market, thought to be the original starting place for my constant friend, the Great North Road: I seemed to have come full circle.

100 Years of housing and homelessness: two steps forward and one step back

This brief run-through of the housing experiences of one person and his family throws light on one of the great divides in British social policy: the haves and the have-nots. Unusually for the time, I lived on both sides of the divide, a divide created and shaped by other divides: in income, in health, in education, and in employment. All of these types of inequality tend to produce a social imbalance where the same lowest sector of the population are to be found at the bottom of each heap of inequality: the income heap, the property heap, the health heap, the education heap. The sea change wrought by the Labour Party’s 1945 electoral victory, its landmark creation of the welfare state and National Health Service, and its embrace of nationalised industries in which working people could protect their incomes through trade unions, reduced these inequalities for a time. But as the century wore on, the triumph of Thatcherite attitudes and politics spearheaded a relentless campaign to reduce the welfare state and weaken the labour unions associated with public services.

Thatcher and her cohorts marched firmly into social territory, principally through the destruction of public housing for low income people (council houses ), with the so called ‘right to buy’ policy. This would lead seamlessly to the ‘buy to let’ property speculators who now disfigure and profit from our boom and bust housing market. Little has been done to rein in and manage an over-heated rental sector. Taken together with a labour market that is increasingly characterised by casualised labour contracts and low pay, and a dysfunctional social benefits system, one inevitable result is a rise in poverty and homelessness.

Homelessness and Heartlessness

In the past, one of the leading markers of poverty and inequality was in poor and insecure housing. My own parents, as described earlier, were often at the mercy of heartless rural employers, because their home was dependent on their job. If for whatever reason they lost the job, they could in earlier times be evicted with only two weeks’ notice. A similar situation existed in urban settings, where families were extremely vulnerable if they were unable to pay their rents. These vulnerabilities were not new, as poignantly illustrated by the paintings by Hubert von Herkomer 1849-1914, above, and by L S Lowry, below.) Often housing in urban areas was desperately unhealthy, with high rates of infant mortality, as revealed by descriptions of Jarrow in the 1930s. And I recall my shock, discovering at the Peoples Museum in Edinburgh that in the early1960s half of the Edinburgh housing stock still had outside lavatories.

At least these people had homes, however mean and ill-resourced they might be, and there would also have been in the nineteenth and early twentieth century significant numbers of the homeless. We get glimpses of this in, for example, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London; and destitution in London is comprehensively described in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (note: a Guardian leader on 1st March 2023 lamenting “destitution, a word with Victorian associations is increasingly common in Britain.”

But homelessness as a category in our present towns and cities seems altogether more demeaning. This is particularly so when we again see the return of substantial rough sleeping about which housing charities are expressing alarm. The government seems to have lost interest in the target set for reducing rough sleeping; as the charity Crisis commented “government does have a commitment to end rough sleeping but the kind of action needed … the political leadership isn’t happening … the target won’t be met without a huge shift in what the government are doing.” It may well be that in a time of relative general prosperity, the existence of homeless people produces a sense of social guilt. We may not wish to explore this as a moral issue, but neither are we comfortable about people lying in front of us in the street, insistently calling on us to notice their discomfort and deprivation. So we also expect our politicians to remove these blots on our landscape, and this presents them in turn with challenges they seem loth to face, or solutions they prefer not to pay for. The result in the last two decades has been ‘government by pledge’, a tactic done to death by the Cameron and Johnson administrations: pledges to build more homes, pledges to cut back immigration, pledges to build more hospitals and recruit more doctors and nurses. These pledges are scarcely ever met, are never supported by planned implementation, or resources of money or manpower: and hovering over all, the specious and meaningless promise to ‘take back control’.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in housing policy, which has worked out well for the middle classes, and has filled the boots of large building corporations and property speculators, but is dysfunctional for that lowest poor third of our population. This is no longer a question of the ‘property-owning democracy’ at a time when the average house costs nine times average earnings, when there are 1.2 m people on local waiting lists in England. Scarcely any social housing (the equivalent of the old council houses) is being built. Governments come and go, make pledges about how many houses they will build, then the pledges come and go, and nothing is done. Between the impossible heights reached by the private housing market and the now precipitous rises in the rental market (20% in a year in Manchester), huge cracks are appearing in the social fabric, through which increasing numbers of people are in danger of falling. For low-income people, this is exacerbated by the refusal of the government to end the three-year freeze on housing benefits, despite inflation. Homelessness and rough sleeping are again grimly rising. As John Harris presciently points out: ‘one of the most basic human needs -a secure home-is now way beyond the reach of millions of people, including many we might once have thought of as affluent’ (John Harris: House prices are crumbling. Our faith in home ownership is too. Guardian Journal 6 March 2023).

Harris looks to a Labour replacement of a series of dreadful Tory governments to have some hope of more effective housing policies, but really, we are all complicit in a moral failure here, for as a society we are quite unwilling to provide the resources needed to help and protect the very many people who need help and protection. In short, far too many of us are unwilling to pay our share of the taxes so much needed to provide those protections and sustain decent and effective public services. The wealthy classes are even worse, straining every financial and legal sinew to avoid or evade tax. That unwillingness, the worst and most pernicious legacy of Thatcherism, will constrain Labour governments too. Such heartlessness will lead to more homelessness in our time unless we can refashion a moral perspective in our politics, and in relation to the wider society to which we all unavoidably belong. We need to do something more than look away while we step over the bodies in our streets. 

Note  Some of the  earlier material in this blog is drawn from my memoir Shifting Classes in Twentieth Century Britain: From Village Street To Downing Street YouCaxton Publications 2020, also available through Amazon