A Liverpool Exemplar - Ethel Singleton

Ethel Margaret Singleton, néeParker, was born on the 19th of April 1933. 

Between 1955 and 1960 Liverpool University had bought up property in the street she lived as part of its precinct-development plans, bought apparently without inspecting it, it was handed over to Liverpool Improved Houses Ltd to be managed until demolition in 1970. The University owned a total of 130 slum properties adjacent to the campus, in which families experienced appalling housing conditions. It had bought up streets of dilapidated Victorian terraces in advance of plans to extend the university campus. However it was struggling to rehouse the tenants and the housing association it employed to maintain the properties was failing to carry out repairs. Ethel Singleton lived in one of these streets at No.50 Melville Place with her husband and three children. In a three storey, 7-roomed house, the family lived in two rooms on the ground floor and slept in one bedroom on the first floor. The top floor was a wreck: walls crumbled when touched, with huge cracks in the walls, the back bedroom floorboards dipped perceptibly as the whole building leant outwards. Rain poured in through the roof. The street looked much like the rest of Liverpool 8, and, like much of the area, housed people living in squalid and insanitary conditions reeking of the Victorian age.

In October 1968, hundreds of tenants, spread across thirty six Abercromby streets, joined the Abercromby Tenants Association and began to withhold all of their rent in protest at their situation. The secretary of the tenants’ association was Ethel Singleton. News of the strike reached students at the University, who began to assist the campaign by leafleting and providing a room in the union for meetings. while the rent strike continued, there were meetings between student representatives and University officials. But the University's position remained unwavering: it was not directly responsible for the state of the properties – that was the job of the housing association employed by the University – and it had been assured that the City Council anticipated being able to rehouse all the families concerned within twelve months. Learning that the new Senate House in Oxford Street, situated just a stone's throw away, was to be officially opened by Princess Alexandra, the reaction of tenants and students was one of outrage. Resentment among the tenants about Senate House had been growing as they saw the expensive new administrative block being built on their doorstep, complaining that huge amounts of money were being spent on it whilst their homes rotted. Then, to add insult to injury, £5000 was being lavished on preparations for the royal visit. The tenants, supported by students and ATACC, the city-wide Tenants Coordinating Committee, decided to picket the royal opening.

On the 15th of May 1969 over a thousand tenants and students assembled outside Senate House as Princess Alexandra arrived to open the building. Later, the princess chose to visit nearby Vine Street. Across the entrance to the street was a banner with the words,' Come and visit the slums of Vine Street.' Ethel, then 35, said : "The Princess need not have come to talk to us about our grumbles, but she wanted to find out what the demonstration was all about. I explained that the demonstration and the banners we were carrying were nothing personal against her. She said she understood. Then we got down to talking about the conditions in our homes.When I told her there were no bathrooms, that we had to use outside toilets, and our only water supply was a cold tap, she was really taken aback. She asked how we bathed our children and I told her we did it in a tub in front of the fire." In June 1969 the ATA was successful and the council agreed to prioritise rehousing the tenants. Furthermore the unpaid rent was effectively waived, so participants in the strike had saved 9 months worth of rent. A year later, Jim and Ethel Singleton would feature in the documentary film-maker Nick Broomfield's first film, 'Who Cares?', made whilst he was a student at Essex University. 

The Singletons were re-housed and relocated to Kirkby just to find themselves in a similar situation. The Tower Hill estate, where she now resided, resembled where she lived in Aberbcromby: both neighbourhoods lacked basic infrastructure, both were enmeshed in the contradictions of capitalism, both forgotten by politicians. So she remained active politically with a rent strike organised by 3000 tenants in Kirkby against the Housing Finances Act, on October 9 1972. Here she featured again in Nick Broomfield's third film, 'Behind the Rent Strike' (1974), about this rent strike. Despite a series of attacks, ranging from eviction threats, bail lifters, court dates, fines, and arrests, the rent strike was eventually successful, reversing the Housing Finance Act and establishing rent caps. Ethel though was sceptical of the effect of such films as she told Nick, "The media is owned by the middle-class who put across what is in their best interests, so in actual fact I'm very sceptical about them ever changing the working-class position. Why are you making it (the film)? It's only personal self-satisfaction, that's all that it must be. How can you get the injustice of it all unless you actually feel deeply enough about it? And the only way to feel deeply enough about it is for it to be bloody well happening to you — and it's not happening to you, because at the end of the three months you know that you can go back home. We have this constant economic pressure on us all the time, of trying to make ends meet, of trying to give your kids the best that you can, and the best is very little, believe me. The process of it never changes. They live a constant illusion: all the time that somehow, someday they're gonna get out of it. Or maybe their children will do better than them. And that’s why there's that constant struggle by many parents to try and get their kids out. But it is just really an illusion, because our position never, ever changes. Never."

Remembering those days in 2009, Ethel said, "People got together and they formed groups to fight it in various areas, not just in Liverpool it was right across the country... and eventually because they got no joy they decided to go on a rent strike. They had no option but to do that."

After battling Alzheimers for a number of years, Ethel died peacefully in her sleep aged 81 on the 3rd of September 2014. She will be remembered for her organisational skill, her passion for improving the conditions of the working classes and for tackling the injustice that is the housing market. 

see also:-  http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/07/a-liverpool-exemplar-thomas-j-hughes.html