Unwin’s garden cottages became the prototype for Lloyd George’s homes for heroes including those on the biggest housing estate in the world: Becontree, Essex. ibid.
It was this man – Lancelot Keay – who introduced the modern flat into the lexicon of council housing. ibid.
Government subsidies were available for the building of flats on sites where slums had been razed to the ground. The epic scale of the estates that emerged astonished contemporaries and enthralled their new inhabitants. ibid.
In 1945 following a Labour landslide the minister for health Nye Bevan oversaw the creation of a welfare state in which public housing would be as universal as health and education. ibid.
In 1946 Stevenage became the first of the nation’s designated new towns built to relieve inner-city population problem. ibid.
The Parker-Morris Report: Homes for today and tomorrow. ibid.
The street in the sky ... Lifts took homes higher than ever; new factory-style building methods produced flats quickly and inexpensively. And government subsidies were offered for high density developments; the taller the tower the higher the handout. ibid.
Eleven years in which the high-rise experiment had collapsed. The decline began when many of the rapidly built tower blocks that shot up from the 1950s were exposed as cheap and shoddy. By 1967 the government had withdrawn its subsidy for tower blocks. ibid.
When Margaret Thatcher swept to power in 1979 the building of council estates came to an abrupt halt. In 1980 she introduced a right to buy scheme. ibid.
It was that sense of permanence that gave so many British people ... a reason to have an investment in their homes, in their estates, in their neighbourhoods. ibid.
Now, guys, we’re about to enter a warehouse environment. Now I must warn you that some of the people in here will be working class, so there may be arse cleavage. So just find a partner, hold hands. Don’t talk to anyone though. Office UK s2e3: Party, Tim, BBC 2002
Bert White was a frail-looking, weedy pale-faced boy, fifteen years of age and about four feet nine inches in height. His trousers were part of a suit that he had once worn for best, but that was so long ago that they had become too small for him, fitting rather tightly and scarcely reaching the top of his patched and broken hobnailed boots. The knees and the bottoms of the legs of his trousers had been patched with square pieces of cloth, several shades darker than the original fabric, and these patches were now all in rags. His coat was several sizes too large for him and hung about him like a dirty ragged sack. He was a pitiable spectacle of neglect and wretchedness as he sat there on an upturned pail, eating his bread and cheese with fingers that, like his clothing, were grimed with paint and dirt. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
No wonder the rich despised them and looked upon them as dirt. They were despicable. They were dirt. They admitted it and gloried in it. ibid.
He employed a great number of girls and young women who were supposed to be learning dressmaking, mantle-making or millinery. These were all indentured apprentices, some of whom had paid premiums of from five to ten pounds. They were ‘bound’ for three years. For the first two they received no wages: the third year they got a shilling or eighteenpence a week. At the end of the third year they usually got the sack, unless they were willing to stay on as improvers at from three shillings to four and sixpence per week.
They worked from half-past eight in the morning till eight at night, with an interval of an hour for dinner, and at half-past four they ceased work for fifteen minutes for tea. This was provided by the firm – half a pint for each girl, but they had to bring their own milk and sugar and bread and butter.
Few of these girls ever learned their trades properly. ibid.
It seemed as if they regarded their own children with a kind of contempt, as being only fit to grow up to be the servants of the children of such people as Rushton and Sweater. But it must be remembered that they had been taught self-contempt when they were children. In the so-called ‘Christian’ schools they attended then they were taught to ‘order themselves lowly and reverently towards their betters’, and they were now actually sending their own children to learn the same degrading lessons in their turn! They had a vast amount of consideration for their betters, and for the children of their betters, but very little for their own children, for each other, or for themselves. ibid.
For seats, two pairs of steps laid on their sides parallel to each other, about eight feet apart and at right angles to the fireplace, with the long plank placed across; and the upturned pails and the drawers of the dresser. The floor unswept and littered with dirt, scraps of paper, bits of plaster, pieces of lead pipe and dried mud; and in the midst the steaming bucket of stewed tea and the collection of cracked cups, jam-jars and condensed milk tins. And on the seats in their shabby and in some cases ragged clothing sitting and eating their coarse food and cracking jokes. ibid.
‘This is a bloody life, ain’t it?’ Harlow said, bitterly. ‘Workin’ our guts out like a lot of slaves for the benefit of other people, and then as soon as they’ve done with you, you’re chucked aside like a dirty rag.’ ibid.
With some firms it is customary to call out the names of the men and pay them in order of seniority or ability, but there was no such system here; the man who got to the aperture first was paid first, and so on. The result was that there was always a miniature ‘Battle of Life’, the men pushing and struggling against each other as if their lives depended upon their being paid by a certain time. ibid.
As he grows older he will have to be content with even less; and all the time he holds his employment at the caprice and by favour of his masters, who regard him merely as a piece of mechanism that enables them to accumulate money – a thing which they are justified in casting aside as soon as it becomes unprofitable. And the working-man must not only be an efficient money-making machine, but he must also be the servile subject of his masters. ibid.
They had been so busy running after work, and working for the benefit of others, that they had overlooked the fact that they were only earning a bare living for themselves and now, after forty years’ hard labour, the old man was clothed in rags and on the verge of destitution. ibid.
This made 40 hours a week, so that those who were paid sevenpence an hour earned £1.3.4. Those who got sixpence-halfpenny drew £1.1.8. Those whose wages were fivepence an hour were paid the princely sum of 16/8d, for their week’s hard labour, and those whose rate was fourpence-halfpenny ‘picked up’ 15/-. ibid.
He is a Free man. He is the Heir of all the Ages. He enjoys perfect Liberty. He has the right to choose freely which he will do – Submit or Starve. Eat dirt, or eat nothing. ibid.
Who advocates taking all the money in the country and sharing it out equally? ibid.
Most of the people who do nothing get the best of everything. More than three-quarters of the time of the working classes is spent in producing the things used by the wealthy. ibid.
‘This systematic robbery has been going on for generations, the value of the accumulated loot is enormous, and all of it, all the wealth at present in the possession of the rich, is rightly the property of the working class – it has been stolen from them by means of the Money Trick ...’ ibid.
This is how the working classes are robbed. Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles. ibid.
Owen listened with contempt and anger. Here was a man who grumbled at the present state of things, yet took no trouble to think for himself and try to alter them, and who at the first chance would vote for the perpetuation of the System which produced his misery. ibid.
‘There was still plenty of ’em left. [laughter] So long as the workin’ class was satisfied to die orf – let ’em die orf! It was a free country. [applause] … If they wasn’t satisfied, they would stick up for themselves!’ ibid. Councillor Grinder
More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or abnormal nervousness; rickets and mental dullness. The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance upon those who are responsible for it. ibid.
The real fans of football come from the working class. Now they cannot afford to come and watch the game. Eric Cantona
‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.’ Plutocracy I: Political Repression in the USA, Jay Gould, 19th century American railroad developer, 2015
Each mining town was a feudal dominion with the company acting as lord and master … The laws were the company’s rules. ibid.
1907: The most deadly mine disaster in US history occurred when an explosion killed 361 men and boys in a West Virginia coal mine. ibid.
Accidents in American mines were double that of Germany, three times more than England. ibid.
‘Freedom from industrial feudalism … freedom from the terrorism inflicted by hired gunmen … and the struggle for liberties promised in the Bill of Rights.’ ibid. 2003 American Labor History Theme Study
In 1912 coal miners in Kanawha Country in West Virginia issued a list of demands including a shorter workday, the right to organise, recognition of a worker’s constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, an end to the blacklisting of union organisers, and alternatives to company stores. The requested pay raise would have cost the company fifteen cents per miner per day. Instead of negotiating, the company hired a private militia to break the strike. ibid.
[Mother] Jones had been declared the Most Dangerous Woman in America. ibid.
Union organisers were blacklisted and beaten. ibid.
The West Virginian mine wars were part of a broader conflict between the forces of labor and the forces of capital. A struggle that claimed the lives of thousands of American workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thousands more were beaten, maimed, imprisoned, tortured and sent to early graves due to poor working conditions and dismal safety standards. ibid.