Chapter III: Training

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.