Now that Housing has taken a foremost place among the questions of
national importance, it is recognized that the standard of good housing
cannot be attained unless accompanied by skilled management. From 1864,
when Miss Hill began her work, house property may be said to have been
managed on the two systems already indicated. The one—the more
general—followed by men qualified by the Examinations held for Surveyors
and Estate Agents. The other followed by women qualified by a high
standard of education and by special training in Social Economics. The
training of the men has been thorough on technical, financial and legal
lines, if too stereotyped and narrow in outlook. The training of the
women has not been thorough enough on the technical side, and has
therefore, perhaps, over-emphasized the social side. In the opinion of
the Sub-Committee an attempt should be made to combine the two courses.
New houses, tenanted as they are mostly by the better class of tenants,
may be easily managed; but where tenants dispossessed from old houses
are provided for in modern dwellings, the need is evident for a highly
trained manager who will add to his or her business and technical
knowledge an educated interest in social conditions and problems. A
point in favour of women’s management comes in here. Many of the
incoming housekeepers have had no experience in using new fittings.
There have been cases in which the tenants have been unable, through
lack of knowledge, to clean their porcelain-surfaced or painted bath or
their earthenware sink, and have been quite at a loss in the matter of
their close-ranged flues. Where women managers have been at work
instruction has been given and quick deterioration of appliances
avoided. In many towns the congestion and overcrowding has been so great
that it has been difficult even for families with regular incomes and a
tradition of good housekeeping and homemaking to maintain their
standard. Where unemployment has made the income uncertain there has
certainly been a lowering of the standard. When such families go into
the new houses they need the help of a skilled and tactful adviser if
they are to become once more makers of happy and comfortable homes. It
must be remembered that the past has left to the towns of to-day a
heritage of slums which collect the products of all our social errors
and are a breeding-ground for every known social evil. Even as the worst
forms of disease require the skill of the cleverest physician, so such
properties call for the most highly trained management. From the
examples the Committee have had before them they find that such
properties have only been successfully dealt with under the Octavia Hill
System, and so far only by women.
The London University now grants a Degree in Estate Management, and a
College of Estate Management will shortly be opened in London which will
prepare for this Degree. The Sub-Committee have examined the Course laid
down for the Degree and recommend that steps be taken to obtain some
recognition of the special need for the management of working-class
property in its provisions. The College will be open to women as well as
to men, and it would be well if some alternative or special section of
the Course could be arranged to meet this need. The lines along which
training should develop have already been indicated under Managers’
qualifications. These might easily be arranged in the future at the
College and on Estates approved by the College or other authority, if
the good will of that authority can be obtained.
The best course of training would probably be one which combined the
kind of studies arranged at the Household Science Department at King’s
College, the London School of Economics and the College of Estate
Management. All these institutions are linked up to the University of
London, and they would doubtless be willing to co-operate in this
matter.