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Tenants Get Organised
[Tenants’
Associations], and their organisers, have often played quiet roles
and battled on with little recognition for the part they have played in
local areas. Occasionally, such as in the late Sixties and in the late
Eighties they have effectively united together in national or London-wide
campaigns, but tenant leaders have for the most part found themselves
battling on in isolation and without applause. On the whole, working class
activists led the Associations, and despite a lack of formal education
they exhibited a flare for leadership and organisational ability.
The first incarnation of the Harold Hill Tenants’ Association sprung
up with the prefabs in the late 1940’s. The issues raised on behalf
of members were typical of those to be found on a new estate such as Harold
Hill – the lack of transport for children schooled miles away and
the need for a nursery school. Other complaints aired were the lack of
pavements forcing children to walk in the road, and school meals that
often only had vegetables without the ration-quota meat.
Social events were an important aspect of the Tenants’ Association
organisation. A typical event was that organised in the autumn of 1949
at the Harold Wood War Memorial Hall. Over 100 people gathered to dance
to The Blue Ravens led by Ted Scott. The M.C. was the Association’s
secretary. At these events the kids of estate residents were always catered
for so that parents could enjoy a night out at the end of the week.
Much
of the work of any Tenants’ Association is often low key and outside
the glare of publicity. Occasionally, though, they do make the headlines,
as happened in May 1952 when nearly 200 children were involved in a ‘school
strike’.
Parents were unhappy at the free school bus being withdrawn from those
attending Heath Park Girls’ School and Pettits Lane Boys’
School. A meeting of mothers took place on the Tuesday in the field behind
the works canteen of C.C. French – a common meeting place for Harold
Hill tenants before the community centre. 100 women decided to form a
strike committee and sent a deputation to Chelmsford where the Essex Education
Committee was based. They visited the deputy education officer for Essex
and handed in a 650-names-strong petition but where disappointed when
he refused to reinstate the free transport.
After this the fathers became involved too and another deputation was
organised. This time it went to the House of Commons to see the Romford
M.P., Lt.-Col. J.C. Lockwood. He refused to see them.
By Friday the strike had spread with more parents pulling their children
out of school and 200 collected in the same field where Tuesday’s
meeting was held to decide upon their next move. A Parents’ Strike
Committee was formed with Mr. C. Grutt as secretary and Ben Cohen as press
officer, while tenants from nearby Theydon Bois estate came to offer advice
having themselves just recently undertaken similar action on the same
issue. The press officer read out the following statement to waiting journalists:
“First, the people have decided as a result of the meeting to stand together until free transport is provided. The whole action is concerned with the welfare and education of the children.
“On Thursday, Romford Trades Council passed a resolution giving us their support.
“Children who have to take a scholarship are going to school under protest, but they will come out when their examinations are finished.”
Every
morning hundreds of ‘striking’ kids would be lined up and
the registration taken. They waited by the same bus stop at the same time
for the transport necessary to get to school. The stand of the tenants’
was clear: Here are our children ready to go. Now send a bus to pick them
up.
They won the battle: the authorities caved in a month later and conceded
the need for free transport.
The Harold Hill Tenants’ Association was re-launched several times
between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, but it was to be permanently
launched in 1968 after the newly elected Tory majority on the Greater
London Council (the renamed and expanded London County Council) decided
to increase rents by 70 percent under the pretence of a budget deficit.
Harold Hill, like many places in London, responded by holding a demonstration
in which 200 people marched around Central Park [see
picture]. This was part of a London-wide campaign that accumulated
in 6,000 demonstrators marching to the Hampstead home of the Minister
for Housing, Tony Greenwood. Unsurprisingly, Greenwood reacted to this
by intervening and blocked the proposed GLC rises.
The new Association had two aims:
· To oppose present and future rent increases.
· To secure higher standards of estate management and repairs to, and maintenance of, maisonettes, flats and houses on the Harold Hill GLC estate.
From
this re-launch came a Tenants’ Association that lasted up until
the nineties, when it imploded with bitter infighting. It was, reputedly,
the largest T.A. in London by the turn of the eighties. Other activists
came to the fore during its existence, and in particular the Battling
Betty’s – Betty Strathern and Betty Whiting.
Mike Davies, a prominent activist in the eighties and nineties, remembers
how they gained their nickname:
‘…they were known as the Battling Betty’s because people used to go to them when they were in trouble. Betty Strathern was astute, very articulate and could put a letter together. When I was Chair of Housing I looked at her file and where as most tenants’ files are an inch thick, hers was a foot thick!’
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work is licenced under a
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