From a Facebook post: –
Born in 1944, I was brought up in the centre of Stirling across from M&S and lived in one room with my younger sister and parents who rented the room from a relative. In that rented room, there was no bathroom, only a WC and we used to go down to another relative’s house in Bridgehaugh on Washing day and we went into the big boiler, after the washing was done, for our bath!
There was a shortage of social housing after the 2nd WW and it was not until 1953/54 when my brother was born that my parents had enough points on the Housing Waiting List to qualify for a Council House.1 They were allocated a flat roofed prefab in Adamson Place.
By comparison the prefab was a palace. My mother went from washing dishes in a basin and emptying slops in a pail to having two sinks a wash boiler, a refrigerator, I mean a real refrigerator, unbelievable, a gas cooker, a fire with a back boiler which heated our water, a bathroom and a separate WC, and outside we had a drying green a brick and tin roof hut and a vegetable garden and grass and flowers in the front garden. Did I mention we had a back and front door. This house was truly a palace in comparison to where we had lived.
1 Footnote.
After the war there was, as Jane says, a points system which governed your eligibility for “a Cooncil Hoose”. Also, as a result of the Government Housing Acts of the time, the new homes that were built to accommodate the housing shortage were required to have a “minimum number of rooms”. The result of these things was that those with the largest families accumulated the most points and were therefore front of the queue for housing.
The odd thing is that those that were controlling the creation of the housing stock were looking at that same list to decide what was necessary to build! That meant that single people and couples without a family were not catered for and very little of the new housing stock had less than three bedrooms. That is precisely what made the single storey 2 bedroom bungalow style prefab so popular among young families.
The house that Jane moved to with her Mother, Father and two siblings was nonetheless one of those two bedroom bungalow prefabs.
Cornton - Our Story 