1920's British House Preserved

[danemodsandy]

If you're fascinated by the UK's houses of a certain age, as I am, you can't do better than the one shown in this Daily Mail article. It's a 1920s house essentially frozen in the year 1932, when the head of the family died, and the grief-stricken survivors decided to leave everything as it was during his lifetime, insofar as that was possible.

Our British friends will be quick to spot that the place isn't quite as much of a time warp as the Mail claims - there are canned (tinned) foods in the cupboards that are certainly much later than the '30s. Still, there's an amazing amount that is from the era.

The last family member moved out in '85, and the house was left to Britain's National Trust, a rare example of a middle-class house with historic value left intact.

Enjoy![this post was last edited: 7/12/2013-19:10]

The house that time forgot: Mother and sons keep family home frozen in the 1920s for 70 YEARS with original decoration, food and furniture

When grocer William Straw, of 7 Blyth Grove, Worksop, died in 1932, his grief-stricken family decided to leave their family house exactly as he knew it - now it offers a fascinating glimpse into suburban British family life in the 1920s.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[vintagekitchen]

Poor boys

Pretty amazing, but one has to wonder what the brothers ate, since apparently they didnt care for many of the things their mother had purchased, and left them to moulder in the cupboards all those years. Saw a few things like tinned pineapple and baked beans that were definitely late 70s, early 80s vintage. Also, how on earth did things not wear out? I know bachelors aren't necessarily hard on a house, but wallpaper fades and peels with age, brushes lose their bristles, saucepans and kettles wear through and develop pinholes, yet the house doesn't seem to contain any later time period replacements for any of those items. Curious..

As I said earlier, pretty amazing, but rather sad when one thinks of it. Some of us maintain period homes, but we aren't opposed to any and all modern comforts either. One wonders if they were happy, or sad lost souls, who spent their life carrying out their dead mother's wishes in preserving the house as a shrine to their father's memory. Really quite sad when one looks at it from a real life viewpoint, rather than as a historical find. Poor boys.

 

[fido]

My first house I bought in Scotland in 1997 was a bit like that and I did try to preserve some of the untouched features. For example, the hall was done with a paint finish made to look like wallpaper. The old lady next door remembered them doing that decoration of the hall during WW2. You could not buy wallpaper so they found any odd rolls left from other jobs, stuck it on back to front to act as lining paper, then painted. The kitchen still had the bricked in cast iron wash copper in one corner and the old earthenware sink with cold tap. There was no hot water system, inside toilet or bathroom. It still had the lead pipes for gas lighting but the lamps themselves had been removed. There was also a gas pipe with tap to an upstairs fireplace. I assume that was for a gas poker. The same fireplace had a bar set in the chimney for hanging cooking pots. I think a couple of the window frames dated back at least to the 1920s as they were identical to those of a drawing showing the house which was done at that time.

 

[launderess]

Food: Since one brother did go into town for work (to open the shop) food either could have been purchased (take away has existed in various forms even back in the 1900's) and brought home or the main meal of the day taken in town at pub or something.

Personally I wouldn't have touched those old can goods with a barge pole.

It is very important to remember without a modern electric fridge one's options for food storage and thus eating habits were different than today. Larders, iceboxes etc... were a step in the right direction but more often than not persons living then ate foods that we would consider slightly 'off". There wasn't the storage of leftovers we do today with cooked foods. You ate much of whatever on the day it was prepared and perhaps had whatever was left the next day even if it was put into a stew or something. Certainly by the second or third day things started to get "iffy".

As for things wearing out, well looking at those brushes some have seen better days. Shoes were often, repaired, resoled and or patched as they wore out to give them longer life.

The house seems to have been decorated in the same heavy brick a brac style carried over from the Victorian era. While common enough in the 1920's many today would find it claustrophobic and cluttered. Considering gas was used for lighting and the working fireplaces one spark or small fire probably would set the entire house ablaze.
One thing you'll notice is used newspapers everywhere. People back then "wasted or wanted not", so after the paper was read it could be used for thousands of things. Anything from wrapping things to placed under linen during childbirth to preserve the mattress.

What always amazed one when seeing these "older" homes when roaming/visiting in Europe or UK is how so many were without what even middle class homes considered mod cons in the 1920's or so.

Things such as indoor plumbing, central heating and hot water systems, fridges, plumbing concealed in walls rather than the outside of interior and exterior walls, and so forth.

 

[davetranter]

Not so unusual

When I was a young G.P.O. telephone engineer, I had the experience of installing a 'Lifeline' telephone in a house which had altered little since the 1920s. (This was about 1985) All the carpets were 'proper' woven square carpets. I think the lady did have a television set, but few other 'mod cons'....

My own house hasn't been decorated since 1985, so by the time I die my home may become a tourist attraction. ;-)

All best

Dave T

 

[davey7]

I have a great book at home called "The book of the Edwardian & interwar house" which talks about equipment, decorating and design, including plans, of houses of this era. This is a particularly nice one, I must say.

I was just reading an article about the immediate pre and post war period in English/British housing, and how, after the war, a lot of wealthier (eccentric, especially) households didn't have some mod cons (i.e. those who didn't believe in electricity, or didn't have refrigeration, etc. Their example was a charwoman who worked in a house immediately post-WWII (or early 50's) with coal range, gas lights, no refrigeration who went home to a council flat with central heating, electric oven and a fridge. It turned out that developer housing, and much council housing, was built to higher-spec, equipment wise, than a lot of older housing had been (obviously) which wasn't added in those houses quickly, which happens here as well, lots of things are easier to build in new than install retroactively.

Oh god, don't mention newspaper. The previous owner of my apartment used old newspapers to seal around on of the air conditioners and it ended up getting sucked into the fan and clogging the whole beast after getting soaked in the condensate tray! I've found old newspaper hiding in old electric boxes that went unused and between layers of coal tar pitch roofing as well. Not to mention as insulation.

 

[ronhic]

I think what many of us don't realise is just how expensive 'mod cons' were...

Even in the late 1960's, central heating, as an example, was extremely expensive in Australia. So much so, that it didn't start to become 'common' until the early 1980's in Canberra - the city with the highest median income, and highest education in the country.

Add to that, that it was originally fueled by heating oil rather than natural gas (which was not available in Australia until around 1985) and you have a very good reason to NOT have it with the oil crisis of the mid 1970's.

I can certainly remember just how frugal my parents were with our through-room oil heating when I was little and by the time gas became available in our street in 1988, it was costing them over $1000 a year for winter fuel...

 

[fido]

Paper

In my time warp house they seemed to use brown paper from parcels rather than newspaper. Some of the floors were covered in linoleum and the brown paper was used to stop it from sticking to the floorboards. Often the parcels came from the big shops in Aberdeen and were sent to the village by rail. The rail company stamps were still on some of the sheets of paper, I think the earliest one I found was dated 1918.