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! " # ! " # $ ! % " ! %# & $ ' % " % % ! $ ' % # !% % $ ()* +! ,! $ ! !"!"#$% "& &' !"!"#$% "& &' () *() ! " # $ !% ! & $ ' ' ($ ' # % % ) %* %' $ ' + " % & ' ! # $, ( $ - . ! "- ( % . % % % % $ $ $ - - - - // $$$ 0 1"1"#23." "0" )*4/ +) * !5 !& 6!7%66898& % ) - 2 : ! * & (#+, -./0 /- ;9<89"0" )*4/ +) "3 " & 9<89 CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 3 Chapter Two Rent Strike Sources: Review 13 Part One: Housing: the Politics of Consensus 14 Part Two: the Nation on Rent Strike 24 Part Three: the Merseyside Dimension 36 Chapter Three Rent Strike History: Methods 48 Chapter Four 1968-1969: AMovement in the Making 68 Chapter Five ‘We’ve Got An Open Air Loo, Have You?’ The Campaign for Real Homes 1969-1971 94 Chapter Six Fair Rent is Bent! Tenants Take on the Government 145 Chapter Seven Breaking the Law: Tower Hill Fights On 184 Chapter Eight: Conclusion 225 References 240 Appendix Chronology of Resistance 247 Acknowledgements Grateful thanks are extended to the team of academic supervisors and advisors, Dr Michael Lavalette and Dr Karen Evans, for their patience, guidance and enthusiastic belief in the ideals of the book and to colleagues Dr Gabe Mythen and Dr Steph Petrie for the additional comment and support they provided. In particular I wish to extend my deep personal gratitude to Professor Steven Miles, whose determined and unrelenting supervision over the final months, as the deadline for submission of the work approached, rejuvenated both the work and the researcher’s flagging confidence. Thanks are extended equally to the personalities whose reminiscences of the period, as well as the information and opinion they contributed, emboldened the integrity of the final product, in particular James Singleton, Ethel Singleton and Kathleen Kenwright. It is, however, to the love and support of my partner, the extraordinary Barbara Bryan, that I owe both the dream and the achievement. 2 CHAPTER ONE Introduction This research will examine a series of significant events in the history of housing struggles on Merseyside. Never subject previously to academic scrutiny, the housing protests of the period will be critically assessed through the hidden history of the people involved. An underlying intention of this study is therefore to validate the significance of local people’s experiences which constitute a lost element of the history of the local labour movement. In a reflection of the marginal nature of these events, many of the accounts featured here are of necessity drawn from information sources outside the political mainstream. In undertaking a study of a less well known or understood form of workers struggle, the research is concerned to identify from the data the characteristics that distinguish workers struggles centred on the home from those centred on the workplace and the impact of those qualities upon the culture of working class struggle more generally. By listening to the voices of the participants of the Merseyside rent strikes (whilst recognising the methodological difficulties that this inevitably entails) the research attempts to understand the political tenor of the causes that drove these protests and the quality and significance of their place as working class political experiences. The context in which this research places itself is a context in which the above experiences have almost without exception been considered to be ‘marginal’ in nature. While the era 1968-1973 has spawned a body of work on protest politics, Harman (1988) has written the only significant history focused primarily upon the labour struggles of the period. Of those works that examine the politics of housing during the 1960s and 1970s, the work of Sklair (1975) and Lowe (1986) is exceptional in focusing upon tenant rather than worker resistance to free market policies. With the exception of Lipsky (1970), ethnographic studies of workers in struggle have tended also to focus directly or in detail on resistance in the workplace rather than in the home communities. A number of accounts of individual strikes have been written, but only one general history of the tenants’ movement (Grayson 1996). In academia, labour struggles in which workers refuse 3 to pay the rent on their homes rather than withdraw their labour from the workplace remain a great under-explored arena of political life; they are marginal within a discourse, the history of labour, which is itself a separated, distinct specialism. Yet, as the data uncovered here will show clearly, housing struggles were as normal a part of working class life on Merseyside during the period, and as substantial a part of working class political experience, as industrial struggles. In entering the living spaces of working class families, it is the ambition of this study to develop our understanding of labour resistance beyond the limitations imposed by its marginal place. In order that this may be achieved to its fullest extent, and to understand the development of the movement as a whole, much of the narrative of the strikes and protests is presented chronologically. Sklair (1975), Lowe (1986) and also Grayson (1996), note the strong links of many rent strike leaders and activists to the labour movement; while it may be less well known as a part of the whole labour experience, the tenants movement boasts a ‘social and cultural milieu’ that is ‘overwhelmingly working class’ says Lowe (1986, p83). All three, however, refer to the role of local conditions, and the separateness of local action groups, as factors limiting the political impact nationally of rent strike activity. Rent strikes are a form of protest organised often in localities, and sometimes in response to highly localised conditions. Like Lowe’s study of the 1967 Sheffield rent strike and Sklair’s study of the 1972-1973 rent strike against Fair Rents, this study focuses upon a series of events taking place in a confined space, confined in this case by locality of issues or events or of organisation. Without doubt, locality is a factor in the relative remoteness of the rent strike within the histories of labour and from the discourses of social policy analysis. It lies also at the heart of the conundrum that is the tenants’ movement. While housing struggles are a form of resistance rooted in the traditions of labour struggle, rent strikes happen where national or media attention is least likely to be focused; inside local communities, targeting local issues and drawing support from women and those less integrated into the organised forms of struggle. All studies of rent strikes are studies therefore of marginal people. Yet, in their relative autonomy, disconnected in their roots from political hierarchies, lies the germ of a more radical politics, connected organically to the vital issues 4 in housing and in social policy. In seeking out, from a variety of grassroots sources, the authentic voices of rent striking tenants, this study explores the confusing and controversial issues at the heart of community-based struggle, organised from the margins of political life. In contrasting approaches to the Clyde rent strike of 1915, that forced the wartime government to introduce for the first time, national rent control legislation, Damer (1980) and Castells (1983), agree upon one important reason for the singular success in this instance of the strike instrument. It lay, they suggest, in the strong organisational connections of the rent strikers to related labour struggles on the Clyde and to conditions affecting much of the country, in particular rising unemployment and the exploitation of cheap labour in industrial areas. In studying rent striking tenants, we are striving to understand a group of people whose actions are connected closely to core debates in social policy, and themes in working class history, but whose experience is recorded at the margins and not in the centre. Throughout this study, I will return to this issue. In examining the contextual background, the opening ‘review’ chapter will explain the paradox at the heart of the movement historically. Since the Second World War, the causes of major rent strikes may be seen in policy developments at national level, in particular the shift away from rent control and the inclination in urban regeneration to relocate established urban communities to rural industrial estates. While strongly connected to major developments in social planning, the strikes functioned in relative isolation from each other and from the political sphere. In three parts, social policy, the tenants movement historically and finally the Merseyside dimension, the review will ‘connect’ the strikes on Merseyside to the conditions, and political traditions that influenced and guided them. Rent strikes are acts of high social meaning but conducted in small communities beyond the centres of great power, by marginal people. In these three areas of connection, the relevance of the strikes to the outside political world will be explored.