Welsh Journals

The Aberdare Housing Scandal, 1919-1922 Anthony Mor-O 'Brien Ever since Edwin Chadwick showed that deaths from cholera were highest in slum areas, social thinkers began to apply themselves to the problem of housing. Indeed, by the latter part of the nineteenth cen- tury Government legislation had even been introduced for the improvement of sanitation and the abatement of nuisances. In effect, slum clearance had now emerged as a matter calling for inter- vention by the State[l]. On the other hand, it was still taken as natural that individual private enterprise should be left to provide enough houses for the working class. Not until the years immediately preceding the First World War did State interest in building houses (as opposed to regulating slums) lead to the noteworthy Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909, which granted local authorities the op- portunity to plan and build cheap dwelling houses in their own dis- tricts. Little was actually achieved, however. "At the most," to quote Bentley B. Gilbert, "perhaps 5 per cent of the British popula- tion lived in houses let to them by public authorities, and official figures show that only about 11,000 houses were built between 1909 and 1915[2]. In the early months of the First World War, even so, general expectations of a rapid victory seemed to justify the slogan' 'business as usual." Pre-war domestic issues, such as the growing demand for more council houses, thus retained a high place on some people's agenda of social priorities. The National Housing and Town Plan- ning Council, as an instance, managed to organize a major con- ference at Cardiff in January 1915. Significantly, however, certain local authorities, in spite of a traditional concern with municipal housing, no longer felt obliged to appoint representatives for the conference. Mountain Ash U.D.C., for example, while deploring the scarcity of workmen's dwellings in the region, declined to send delegates [3], clearly because councillors already had far too many