FRESHFORD & DISTRICT LOCAL HISTORY SOCIETY

Aidrian Tenniswood was the speaker at the Society's November Meeting and gave an interesting talk on the history of the English cottage. He began with slides of Victorian and Edwardian paintings which portrayed the idealised version of the countryside and then went on to explain how far this was from the truth. By the end of the nineteenth century the better off were beginning to buy cottages as rural retreats but for very many of the local people, and particularly for the agricultural labourers the housing conditions were very bad. Many of the houses had thin mud walls and badly fitting windows and doors. Conditions were frequently insanitary and overcrowded. A poor law Commissioner reporting on a Dorset farm labourer's cottage found eleven people sleeping in the roof space ten foot square! This general situation was due to a number of factors -rising population, a depression in farming, low wages and a growing industrial society. There were however some bright spots in the depressing picture as some rich and benevolent landlords built model villages for their workers and although, perhaps, by to-day's standards eccentric with over paternalistic regulations such housing was a great improvement on most of the existing rural workers' cottages. In the 1930's the introduction of council housing helped solve the worst of the problems. Isla Tuck