Dr Michael Lambert, Lancaster University
Housewife Caught Stealing Electricity
1949- Berlin, Germany: Ach du lieber! A West Berlin housewife has been caught with getting electricity illegally, instead of through a meter. Image via Getty images.
When the gasman came to Mrs ER’s[1] house in the Liverpool council overspill estate of Speke in Spring 1968, she and her three children aged 4, 3 and 18 months were in for a windfall. Aged 26 and separated from her husband, Mrs ER complained of life since she arrived on the estate from the inner city. Among other trials and tribulations, this included local youths causing trouble and breaking into gas and electricity meters. Despite these difficulties, her own meter was routinely ‘full with shillings’, allowing her to cook her treasured Sunday dinner for her family.[2] Having overpaid on her slot meter compared with usage, Mrs ER used the gasman’s immediate windfall to buy the latest records, including one by Andy Williams which she adored.[3] Such pleasures remained in place while her world fell apart, enabling Mrs ER a taste of the affluent society associated with postwar Britain otherwise denied through single motherhood and poverty.
Coin-operated slot meters were a household fixture for most working-class families in post-war Britain. More expensive than quarterly credit arrangements or direct payments at offices of the nationalised gas board, meters worked on coin weight and estimated usage. These required periodic insertion of shillings to maintain the household supply for cooking and heating. Depending on location, collections were made fortnightly or monthly by the gasman, with most families receiving windfalls during the warmer Spring and Summer through overpayment.[4] For respectable and affluent working-class Britain, the gasman’s arrival signalled an immediate rebate, usually cash in hand given on the spot.
A number of old-fashioned gas meters. By the 1950s and 1960s, coin-operated meters were common in homes allowing families to pay for gas as they used it, but the system was open to abuse. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
In affluent postwar Britain poverty was only ‘rediscovered’ during the 1960s, exposing the limits and failings of the welfare state and political consensus established during the late 1940s, which persisted until they collapsed during the mid-1970s.[5] Despite claims to the contrary, poverty had never disappeared. The case files of social workers, who grew in number and status over the same period, bulged with details about families who struggled to get by. Because it was deemed to have been conquered by the welfare state, poverty was increasingly conceptualised as an individual failing rather than a structural or social problem. Such families living in poverty and unable to improve their lot despite disproportionately consuming the time and resources of social workers were labelled as ‘problem families’. An imprecise label which lacked definition but obtained professional traction, ‘problem families’ had their details kept on registers and their lives discussed at coordinating committees of different social, welfare and health services convened to deal with them.[6] Ultimately, they confounded the neat functional separation of these services precisely because poverty, not pathology, was the issue.
‘How much time do family caseworkers spend trying to help families with financial problems?’ asked one such social worker in 1967. ‘From my experience on coordinating committees they seem to exist to cope with rent arrears and gas and light debts’[7]. The fuel poverty described for families unable to maintain the flow of coins into household meters or disconnected through debts were simply manifestations of poverty and the choices families made about what to prioritise. Budgeting rather than low income was usually blamed, as another social worker felt that ‘financial mismanagement is rife’.[8] Such judgments were invariably gendered, as ‘problem family’ meant ‘problem mother’ for all intents and purposes.[9]
Where these concerns recognisably became pathological or deviant was when meters, holding what many saw as their entitled future windfalls, were broken into and the money taken. In the eyes of social workers, coordinating committees and the wider welfare state apparatus, such behaviour was indicative of the’ problem family’: reflecting immediate gratification, poor household management, and parents giving an example to their children which – much like Mrs ER experienced in Speke – they would repeat as they grew up.
Fifties Kitchen And Dining Room Scene, Britain 1957. Image Via Getty Images. This image epitomises ‘affluence’ in 1950s Britain, which was not the reality for many working-class families who continued to experience hardship and poverty.
Exemplifying these concerns was a social work report on the BY family in 1964. Mrs BY was 29 years old and lived in a 3-bedroomed council house in Warrington with her husband, a labourer, and her five children aged 5, 4, 3, 2 and 4 months. They were referred to the children’s department by a health visitor ‘concerned about the cleanliness of the house and the children and the stat of the furnishings; level of childcare in general being very low’. Beneath these signs of household squalor was poverty, as the husband worked irregularly, being paid poorly through the unskilled nature of the work, with the only additional source of income being Family Allowance: a state benefit for children. This produced ‘extensive debts concerning rent, gas, electricity’ and three court fines ‘after father had broken into the gas and electricity meters and mother had made a false statement to the NAB [National Assistance Board]’.[10] Concerned for their future as a ‘problem family’, the relevant authorities ensured that the mother was sent to a rehabilitation centre to learn housekeeping and child care skills. Only having proven this would they consider discretionary financial support to keep the family together.
Social workers were not oblivious to the impossible dilemmas faced by ‘problem families’ whose lives and homes they traipsed through. ‘The family are living under appalling conditions’ wrote one social workers of the AJ family, living in a 3-bedroomed council house in Litherland and comprising Mrs AJ aged 23, her husband who worked in a dockside industry in Bootle, Merseyside, and their three children aged 4, 2 and 1. Yet the health visitor bemoaned that ‘Mrs AJ has no idea of budgeting’ with regular rent arrears paid by family and friends to avoid eviction and the house being ‘poorly furnished, in spite of furniture still being paid for on hire purchase’. Compounding the situation was the fact that Mrs AJ ‘has been cooking on the living room open fire’. Here, the realities of families living in fuel poverty are evident, with subsequent studies published by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) showing recourse to ‘unsafe’ methods was not unique to the AJ family.[11] ‘The gas meter was taken away because halfpennies had been inserted in place of shillings’ given their similar size and weights, making them a far cheaper substitute to maintain to supply. ‘Mrs AJ was unable to pay the required amount owing’ when the gasman arrived, showing a degree of pragmatic humanity in the face of such evident poverty.[12] Although this compassion could not stop inevitable intervention.
A family in the Oldham area of Greater Manchester in 1962. The family, with five young children shared one bedroom and had one kitchen and one living room and had access to communal toilets. Some families living in poor condition were labelled as ‘problem families’ by social workers and targeted mothers for training as better homeworkers, rather than addressing the financial problems and poor housing. Image via Getty images.
Not all instances of meter thefts were to make what little money families had stretch further to maintain heating, eating and an otherwise precarious existence. The Baker family, according to a social work research study on ‘problem families’, used stolen meter funds for a family holiday which, much like Mrs ER, was about accessing the anticipated windfall and expected norms of participating in social life and leisure.[13]
Problematically for the Baker family, they were ‘too well known locally’ and word of their activities spread among statutory and voluntary organisations once back from holiday who, in turn, refused to help clear debts as part of welfare support or social work interventions when thrown into financial crisis. This was a source of longstanding resentment for senior officials in coordinating committees. They found themselves frequently using growing portions of their budgets for loans – which often became grants by default when repayment proved impossible – to families to clear debts or enable reconnection following meter thefts at the request of frontline junior workers.[14] Centralised state practices were far less forgiving, embedding conditionality and enforced collection into their process. Debt recovery for the NAB was made through smaller benefit payments until outstanding balances had been met, along with blacklisting from discretionary, emergency grants. This was especially the case for single mothers, with the ensuing grinding poverty caused by lower payments serving as a deterrent for those whom the state thought might become dependent on their paternalism in place of fathers.[15] Upholding the coercive, punitive logics of the state remained paramount over supportive and redistribute aspects of welfare to alleviate poverty.
Yet meter thefts were not the preserve of a pathological minority, as social work assessments could easily lead historians to believe. A contemporary sociological study of inner city Liverpool found its working-class residents considered such actions legitimate, both in terms of coping with immediate need and accessing a windfall earlier.[16] This has been borne out in later oral histories, with ‘property theft [being] regarded by both parents and children as the customary right of the working-class community’, especially those involving ‘the reappropriation of food and fuel supply’.[17] Whilst satisfying immediate needs to prevent absolute poverty, they also enabled participation in wider society associated with relative poverty as in the case of the Baker family. Managing limited household income was not the straightforward, frugal balancing act imagined by middle class social workers. Instead, it meant living with the reality of a lot of month being left at the end of the money.[18]
These everyday strategies of working-class life highlight two enduring trends for historians. Firstly, the enduring experience of poverty meant families and households developed what Olwen Hufton terms an economy of makeshifts to get by each day, week, month and year.[19] Secondly, that such activities have been subject to creeping criminalisation, turning custom and culture into deviant behaviours that uphold the power of the existing economic order as elucidated by Peter Linebaugh.[20] For working-class families in postwar Britain, the coming of the gasman arrived in the long shadows of these historic struggles.
Further Reading
Hesketh, Joseph L. (1975) Fuel debts: social problems in centrally heated council housing. Manchester: Manchester and Salford Family Welfare Association.
Jones, David (1950) Family Service Units for problem families. Eugenics Review, 41(4): 171-179.
Kerr, Madeleine (1966) The people of Ship Street. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lambert, Michael (2025) Coal in the bath: poverty, modernity and the welfare state in postwar Britain. In: Joseph Harley and Vicky Holmes (eds.) Objects of poverty in Britain since 1700. London: Bloomsbury.
Lister, Ruth (1972) The administration of the wage stop. London: Child Poverty Action Group.
Philp, A. Fred (1963) Family failure: a study of 129 families with multiple problems. London: Faber and Faber.
Starkey, Pat (2000) The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England. Women’s History Review, 9(3): 539-557.
Streather, J. and Weir, S. (1974) Social insecurity: single mothers on benefit. London: Child Poverty Action Group.
[1] The closure periods of social work files used in this blog means that when mothers are included their names are compressed to initials and identifying details kept to a minimum for research purposes only. For a full discussion see: Michael Lambert, ‘“Problem families” and the welfare state in North West England, 1943-74’, unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2017, pp. xxi-xxii.
[2] Lancashire Archives, Preston: DDX 2302/acc. 9037/box 22/[no case number], Mrs ER to Warden, 13 July 1968.
[3] Lancashire Archives, Preston: DDX 2302/acc. 9037/box 22/[no case number], Mrs ER to Warden, 11 May 1968.
[4] Joseph L. Hesketh, Fuel debts: social problems in centrally heated council housing. (Manchester: Manchester and Salford Family Welfare Association, 1975), pp. 35-47.
[5] Rodney Lowe, ‘The rediscovery of poverty and the creation of the Child Poverty Action Group, 1962-1968’, Contemporary Record, 9:3 (1995), pp. 602-611.
[6] Michael Lambert, ‘“Problem families” and the post-war welfare state in the North West of England, 1943-74’, unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University, 2017, pp. 115-196.
[7] T. G. Rankin, ‘Debts and family casework’, Case Conference, 14:1 (1967), p. 22.
[8] David Jones, ‘Family Service Units for problem families’, Eugenics Review, 41:4 (1950), p. 171.
[9] Pat Starkey, ‘The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England’, Women’s History Review, 9:3 (2000), p. 544.
[10] Lancashire Archives, Preston: DDX 2302/acc. 9037/box 18/case number 3238, CCO report on Mrs BY, 12 June 1964
[11] Ruth Lister, The administration of the wage stop (London: Child Poverty Action Group, 1972), p. 6
[12] Lancashire Archives, Preston: DDX 2302/acc. 9037/box 11/case number 3151, HV report on Mrs AJ, 6 March 1963.
[13] A. Fred Philp, Family failure: a study of 129 families with multiple problems (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 238.
[14] Raymond J. Donaldson, Off the cuff: reminiscences of my half century career in public health (Richmond: Murray Print, 2000), p. 77.
[15] J. Streather and S. Weir, Social insecurity: single mothers on benefit (London: Child Poverty Action Group, 1974), p. 39
[16] Madeleine Kerr, The people of Ship Street (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 119.
[17] Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or rebels? An oral history of working-class childhood and youth, 1889-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 151.
[18]Kathryn Edin, There’s a lot of month left at the end of the money: how welfare recipients make ends meet in Chicago (New York: Garland, 1993)
[19] Olwen Hufton, The poor of eighteenth-century France, 1750-1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)
[20] Peter Linebaugh, The London hanged: crime and civil society in the eighteenth century (London: Version, 2006).
Care or Criminality? 