1934: An important year in Oxford’s history?
This blog post was written and researched by Peter Cann.
Peter Cann is the author of Little Edens, a play performed at MOX in 2023.
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Last year the Museum of Oxford hosted a production of a play, Little Edens. It was about a rent strike that took place in Florence Park, East Oxford, in 1934. It was a bitter dispute involving more than 500 tenants complaining about the conditions of the new estate and rents. It drew support from all quarters of the city, including Oxford University. The builder of the estate, a Tory councillor, evicted tenants who refused to pay their rent.
I am the author of the play and live on the estate. In researching and writing it I realised that change was in the air at that time. Britain was suffering from the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Millions were out of work in the industrial areas of the country, especially South Wales, Tyneside and Scotland. But there was work here in Oxford, at the new Morris car factory and the Pressed Steel factory next door that made the body parts for the cars. Thousands of unemployed workers made their way south, or east in the case of South Wales. Some walked and died in the attempt.
Many did indeed come from South Wales and settled in Florence Park. It became known as Little Wales or Little Rhondda. You will find references to the growing influence of the Welsh in the city in the museum. Perhaps their biggest influence was their trade union traditions, particularly if you had worked in the mines. Many who organised the rent strike were Welsh. There were members of the Labour party, including young Richard Crossman, Patrick Gordon Walker and Frank Pakenham, later better known as Lord Longford. But there were also some members of the Communist Party; the Russian Revolution had only happened 17 years before. In the 1930s, the Communist parties around the world had influence; that influence spread to intellectuals at the university as well as among the working class. Little was known about what Stalin was up to inside Russia at the time.
The other significant element of the rent strike was the role of the women. It was they who had to deal with the conditions of the houses. Though new, they were damp, prone to flooding, had ants crawling through the larders and so on. Children became ill with flu and bronchitis and the women were constantly having to keep clothes, bedding and curtains dry. When it came to call for a rent strike they were there, calling on other tenants to join it and keeping up morale.
It was a similar story in July 1934 when a major strike suddenly erupted at the Pressed Steel factory. It was the women that were at the fore. Though at first they had no union in the factory, the women were on the picket line encouraging other women and men to come out and within days more than 1,000 were out. It was a boiling hot summer and the conditions inside the factory were intolerable. A trade unionist was later to describe the conditions as like Dante’s Inferno. The place was dangerous and when, yet again, the night shift was short-changed in their wage packet, they walked out. They were out for 12 days, with often violent clashes on the picket line. At one point even the army was called in. The management did cave in and granted union recognition, better wages and conditions, though not all their demands were met. It did inspire other factories around the country to push for union recognition.
A Communist party member from London by the name of Abe Lazarus was to appear on the Oxford scene and he was to prove influential in that year. A fiery Cockney, only in his 20s, he arrived after successfully leading a strike in London at the Firestone tyre factory that earned him the nickname Bill Firestone. He took a very active part in the Pressed Steel Strike and in the Florence Park Rent Strike. He was also to feature in surely the most notorious event in Oxford’s 20th century history – the Cutteslowe Walls.
For those who have not seen Little Edens, there are references to the Pressed Steel Strike and the Cutteslowe Walls, which were put up in the December of the same year, 1934. The walls went up in Cutteslowe in North Oxford between the upper-class houses and the council houses. The news sent shock waves not just across the country but across the world. The walls were over 2 metres high and topped with spikes. Comparisons were made with German concentration camps. The original spikes are on display in the Museum. The builder of the private estate, a man by the name of Saxton, was as belligerent as Moss, the builder of Florence Park. The rent strikers of Florence Park held a joint rally with those from Cutteslowe, bringing more than a thousand to the Oxford Town Hall. After the First World War, Prime Minister Lloyd George had promised a land fit for heroes; that meant clearing the slums of the inner cities and building decent public housing. In Oxford, the slums of St Ebbes and other places were demolished and the occupants moved to new estates like Cutteslowe. Saxton wanted to keep slum dwellers out so up went the walls overnight. Years of legal dispute between Saxton and the council followed. There was a concerted effort to knock down the walls, in particular by Abe Lazarus. More than 2,000 people gathered one summer’s day in 1935 for a grand demolition. They were thwarted and the walls didn’t come down till 1959 – 25 years later. What a blight on the history of Oxford.
After writing Little Edens, I felt compelled to write plays about the Pressed Steel Strike and the Cutteslowe Walls. All three plays – Oxford’s Inferno, Little Edens and The Cutteslowe Walls – form The Oxford Trilogy. I hope you get the chance to see them. I am not a historian but in researching these three events I believe 1934 was one of the most pivotal in Oxford’s 20th century history. This year, being the 90th anniversary, it is fitting to mark them, to learn from them and pay tribute to those who took part in them.