Ancestors At Work
Felix Rowe takes a look at the new breed of property owners that rose out of the Industrial Revolution
Did your forebears rent out property to tenants?
The idea of landlords harks back to the wealthy aristocratic landowners and landed gentry of history, who inherited vast agricultural estates. For centuries, a largely rural society followed the three-tier model of landowner, tenant farmer and labourer. Land ownership was the exclusive reserve of the privileged few.
The onset of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new breed of smaller-scale urban landlords and landladies, who might have a spare room to let out, or perhaps even several properties, to supplement their income. Their ascent was facilitated by the growth of towns and cities, and the resultant spread of suburbia. Industry generated capital for investment and new jobs in urban centres, while railways created a mobile workforce in need of lodgings.
Victorian Britain was an age of expansion. The population almost doubled in the first half of the 19th century, and millions of new homes were created. As the working class endured often increasingly abhorrent conditions in densely populated cities, a new wealthy middle class escaped the smog to roomy villas in the leafy suburbs. With home ownership barely a pipe dream for many, the private landlord became a significant figure in most people’s lives.
Landlords are invariably depicted in popular culture as unscrupulous baddies, ever raising the rent and forcing tenants to live in a squalor that they have little hope of escaping.
One of Charles Dickens’ depictions is the illiterate alcoholic, Krook, who runs a lodging house in Bleak House. He is presented as greedy and sinister, with breath like a dragon, and is known to spy on his tenants. Krook suffers a sorry fate (some might say gets his comeuppance) when he dies of spontaneous combustion.
A recurring claim is that landlords acted as a barrier to home ownership, using predatory practices to keep tenants down at heel. Traditionally, Monday was rent day, a weekly doomsday for many families struggling to make ends meet – roughly a third of one’s typical income in Edwardian Britain was swallowed by rent, and tenants were often in arrears. As historian David Englander grimly puts it in Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838–1918, “A bond of debt united landlord and tenant, an umbilical cord shaped like a noose.”
Lords Of The Slums
But is this villainous image wholly justified? Certainly, there were slumlords who abetted it. Within living memory, Peter Rachman (1919–1962) became so notorious that the term ‘Rachmanism’ is a byword for exploitation. However, some tenants could be equally brutal. In a newspaper report from 1900, a clearly shaken landlady recalled that her occupants “have pretty well torn the place to pieces... They locked me up in a room and threatened to murder me.”
On the other hand, there are many examples of amicable relationships between tenant and property owner. In 1867, Miss Burdett Coutts, of Bethnal Green in East London, was lauded for advancing her tenants’ fortunes, “in obtaining the benefit of citizenship, and having defrayed all pecuniary expenses attached to our being put upon the electoral roll, and entitling us to a vote”.
Likewise, David Berry, a 19thcentury Scottish landowner on a notably larger scale who settled in Australia, was honoured with a monument in Berry, New South Wales, praising him as “a kind and considerate landlord and true friend of the people”.
For the average smallscale property owner, renting out lodgings wasn’t their sole occupation or their principal means of earning a living, but a supplementary activity to provide extra income from surplus accommodation. As Roy and Lesley Adkins’ Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England highlights, lodgers were a necessary evil for one middleclass clergyman in 1809. He
‘Some entrepreneurs rented out purpose-built tenements and lodging houses’
The current membership of the National Landlords Association reported that his wife “often reminds me that I couldn’t have this & that without foreigners, and, now & then, threatens to put me on coarse fare and short allowance, when we have none of these inmates”.
However, a growing number of entrepreneurs operated on a more industrialised scale, renting out purpose-built tenements and lodging houses. A Victorian portfolio of six to eight rented dwellings wasn’t uncommon.
There would have been some crossover between residential and commercial property, with many people owning a building with a ground-floor shop and apartments above.
Often, although not always, these new buildings were designed and constructed with scant regard for the occupants’ health and safety, particularly in poorer city districts. Since land leases had only a 21-year lifespan in London’s growing suburbs, there was little incentive to invest in homes built to last. Capitalising on the demand for housing, the less scrupulous quickly threw up shoddily built slum dwellings on former marshland, with walls only half a brick thick and liable to collapse. Provisions for basic sanitation in many homes were poor, or completely non- existent. Neighbourhoods were densely populated and many dwellings housed two or more families in cramped confines, meaning that disease often spread quickly.
Again, Dickens furnishes us with more detail of Victorian Britain in Little Dorrit. Mr Rugg, the landlord to Mr Pancks, is also an attorney, highlighting the social standing of someone who might be in a position to rent out property to others. What’s more,
Pancks himself is a rent collector on behalf of someone who owns several rented properties, and is characterised by a show of benevolence belying his greed.
Women In Charge
Landladies weren’t uncommon, either. Many women inherited property, or were gifted it so that they could support themselves. Adkins and Adkins provide a snapshot of life in 1808 for a governess named Nelly Weeton. Weeton rented out a house she had inherited to a watchmaker
– a respectable tenant who, she was assured, would keep up his annual rent of eight guineas. She drew up an agreement for him “to leave the house in as good repair as he finds it; to pay half a year’s rent on entering it”. In turn, this income would help sustain her in cheaper rented accommodation.
Landlords and landladies gradually became more organised with the introduction of property owners’ associations on a national level around the 1880s. Despite largely muted attempts to reform living standards – most significantly the 1875 Public Health Act – it would take global conflict to improve the condition of many tenants. The First World War shone a stark light on social inequalities back home, and spurred the famous promise of “homes fit for heroes”. The nationwide construction of council housing from the 1920s to the 1980s notably diminished the status and prevalence of the private landlord.