The cost of furniture and furnishings, 1938 - 1940 England

In July 1938 my parents married and set up home 9 Brook Avenue, Edgware, Middlesex on the northern edge of London's suburbia. My father had bought the house in the previous April.

Remarkably, some of their documents from that time have survived, and provide tantalising insights into the prices of household items at the time. They are also a resource for calculating rates of inflation between then and now.

Essentially these prices are pre-war, ie before the onset of World War Two. Although some of the items were purchased afterwards, the real impact of the war was yet to hit.

receipts for furniture and furnishings

A document dated 30th June 1938, just over a week before my parents were married, shows that they went up to central London for their furniture. The receipt  documented the following prices:

	Joco oak hall seat	£2-	12-	6
	3 piece suit in tapestry	£15	-5-	0
	Bookcase in oak	£3-	3-	0
	Fireside chairs, @ 2 gns	£4-	4-	0
	Fireside chair		12-	0
	Jaco oak book table	£1-	5-	0
	Dining room suite	£10-	10-	0
	Jaco bedroom suite	£15-	15-	0
	4'6" bed	£2-	12-	6
	4'6" 106/53g with spiral comb	£2-	8-	0
	4'6" green platform	£2-	2-	0
	4'6" spring interior	£3-	10-	6
	4'6" wool overlay	£1-	7-	0
	Bentwood chair		6-	0
	3'2" kitchen table	£1-	0-	0
	Kerb		14-	9

I was told that my uncle had been to the London outlet and recommended the three piece suite, and that my mother asked my father to buy it to please her brother. Yet she knew it was not what she wanted. Accordingly the family lived with an uncomfortable, then modern-looking, three piece suite for the next 40 years. By chance I have a picture of one of the chairs, which is clearly uncomfortable. The pale wood would not have been my mother's taste as she favoured the dark wood, described in the receipt as 'Jaco', presumably short for Jacobean.

I can make sense of most of the items listed. The kitchen table I remember as white wood which had to be scrubbed with a scrubbing brush just as my mother's mother used to do. (Some years later in the 1950s it was covered with a plastic laminate.) The 'bentwood' chair was a bedroom chair, and the kerb went in front of the coal fire to keep in the dirt. Yet I am at a loss to understand the miscellaneous bed items - the spiral comb and the green platform.

In 1940 my parents had to buy some more sheets for their bed. Probably they had been existing on sheets given as wedding presents or the receipts have not survived. Again it was the Oustons' shop that my parents patronised. A pair of double sheets cost less than a pound - 13s/11d. They would have been pure cotton as there were no artificial fibres in general use at that time.

In 1940 that my mother bought one of her most prized possessions - again from the local furniture shop, Oustons. It was a carved wooden wall clock, costing £1-5-0. My mother said that when Mr Ouston came to hang the clock, he said that if it he had seen it in place he would have charged more. Apparently the clock was made by his father or grandfather. World War Two must have already started, and Oustons shortly closed down.

This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.

The 1940s and 1950s are also written as the 1940's and 1950's