In July 1938 my parents married and set up home at
9 Brook Avenue, Edgware,
Middlesex on the northern edge of London's suburbia. Somewhat surprisingly some
of their documents from that time have survived, and provide tantalising
insights insides into the prices of household items at the time. They are also a
resource for calculating rates of inflation between then and now.
All the documents are in the old
£-s-d currency. There are
conversions to today's currency on the internet, but money has devalued so
much that only the pounds are really significant today. The number of shillings
indicate the fraction of a pound, where there were 20 shillings to a pound.
This page is
about the costs of running the home. Another page documents the
costs of setting
it up. Some of the documents are dated 1938, ie
the year before the onset of the Second World War, and others are from 1940 when the
war was already changing everything. It is impossible to know how much these later
documents reflect the shortages of resources and man-power due to the war or how
ways of doing things were simply still pre-war.
The cost of painting the outside of the house
All the documents show the phone numbers of the suppliers
with the old-style first three
letters of the area as the area code.
Painting the house was an extremely major job. There were no replacement
windows with plastic frames and no plastic gutters which would not need
painting.
Window frames were made of wood which needed an undercoat and two top coats
of paint against the weather, and the putty that held
the glass inside the frame normally had to be renewed and painted because it cracked
after a few years. Incidentally the paint built up with every repainting
job, and doors and windows tended to stick, sometimes so badly that they
would not open.
Gutters and drainpipes were made of iron which went rusty. My recollections are that the painting was much more for
protection than for cosmetic purposes because there was no way of completely
smoothing the rough and corroded surfaces before repainting.
So there was a lot of preparation work to be done, even before the
painting, and there was a lot to paint. Even then, the bill for painting our
house in May 1940 was only £16.11.6. Surprisingly my father did not choose a
local contractor, but one near his work in Golders Green. Even more
surprisingly, the contractor was prepared to travel from Finchley to Edgware
to carry out the work.
The cost of the plumber
Plumbers are usually emergency call outs, and their charges reflect this.
In September 1939, an Edgware plumber charged 5 shillings for coming out
to the house to 'make a new joint for sink waste'.
The cost of interior decorating
There is a receipt for internal decoration in the house in
Edmonton where my father
lived before he was married. In 1938 the costs were as follows:
Drawing room and living room:
strip walls (of old wallpaper), wash and
whitewash ceiling and drops and paper walls £2.10.0.
Sundries 19/9.
Heating - coal
Various bills and delivery notes for coal have survived, but they are
scrappy and undated. Their only significance is to verify that coal was
essentially the only form of heating - although I do remember gas fires that
were only ever lit on very rare occasions.
In particular the kitchen boiler which heated the water and made the
kitchen so very cosy, was fed on a form of coke.
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
