1946 The day after Maggie Joy Blunt noticed the salt hoarder (see 17 September), a much more serious post-war shortage caught the attention of the Mass Observation diarists. This time it was housing. With so many of the country’s houses destroyed by bombing, and over three million servicemen being demobbed in the middle of a baby boom, there just weren’t enough houses to go round – at any price.
The great 1946 summer squat began in empty Nissen huts on abandoned army camps, a movement that quickly spread across the country. The government responded leniently, even offering to reconnect gas and electricity, providing the squatters would register as council tenants. Then in September some communist councillors led an occupation of five blocks of luxury apartments in Kensington, originally requisitioned for the war effort and not yet re-let. To this invasion of private property the government reacted furiously, blockading the buildings, arresting the five (elected) councillors and charging them with ‘conspiracy to trespass’. These events were widely reported, picked up by papers even in Australia and the US.
But the public backed the squatters. On this day Edie Rutherford, a South African-born housewife living in Sheffield, noted in her diary kept for Mass Observation:
How cautiously Bow Street [Magistrates’ Court] has dealt with the Communist squatters today. I should jolly well think so. Public opinion does count for something, and not all the populace are against the squatters. It is mostly the haves who are. The disclosure at court by the woman who had to take her child to hospital fifty times for rat bite was more than enough for everyone I should think.
Maggie Joy Blunt, while sceptical of their motives, could still approve of the communists’ campaign:
I think the Communists were right, whatever their ulterior motives may have been, to draw attention to the shocking housing conditions that many of the flat-squatters have had to put up with. Rat bites! Just think of it. It seems to me scandalous that a Labour Government couldn’t have done better for their own people in this last year.1
Housing minister Nye Bevan was also busy getting the NHS up and running – and this was just over a year after Labour won its landslide general election – so maybe it was a bit early to blame the government for letting down its supporters. Still, these diaries testify to a humane common judgement that can rise above prejudices of class or politics.
1 Simon Garfield, ed., Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain, London: Ebury Press, 2005, pp. 275–6.