%0 Journal Article
%T ‘As snug as a bug in a rug’: post-war housing, homes and coal fires
%A Lynda Nead
%D 2018
%V Special Issue: The Material Culture of Energy
%N Spring 2018
%K advertising
%K coal fire
%K commonwealth
%K family
%K heating
%K homes
%K journalism
%K nation
%K post-war Britain
%X This article examines the layers of meaning and value attached to the image of the open coal fireside in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Although the open fire has a much longer economic, social and cultural history, it is argued here that after 1945 it took on new, emergent meanings that tapped into pressing contemporary debates concerning the nature of the modern British nation, the home and the family. Whilst writers often evoked the experience of the open fire as a timeless comfort, addressing basic human needs, the fireside of post-war British journalism and illustration was a very modern thing indeed, able to express specific debates arising from the requirements of reconstruction and modernisation. The almost folkloric associations of the open fire made it harder in the 1950s to legislate against domestic smoke than it was to regulate industrial pollution. Vested interests drew on the powerful rhetoric of the coal fire to combat the smoke pollution reports of the early 1950s and the growing inevitability of legislation. The coal fire was part of a post-war chain of being that started with the domestic hearth and progressed to the nuclear family, the self-contained home, the nation, and ultimately to the Commonwealth.
%Z The phrase was used in ‘“Blitz” and “Blight”’, Picture Post, 14 July 1945, p 26. There is an extensive literature on housing and planning in the post-war period; amongst the most helpful and detailed are: Hasegawa, 1992; Tiratsoo, 2000; Bullock, 2002; Larkham and Nasr, eds, 2004; Flinn, 2012; Clapson and Larkham, eds, 2013.

%Z For an excellent account of British debates about domestic heating and pollution in the first half of the twentieth century see Mosley, 2007. For a useful history of the electric fire see Wyatt, 2007, and on oil heating in post-war Britain see Cartwright.

%Z Boiler and radiator manufacturers advertised new designs in both specialist and general press; see for example National Smoke Abatement Society, 1952, p 38; 1959, p 7; Architectural Review, 1955, p lx.

%Z Mr Therm was named after the unit of energy that appeared on gas bills. See Stephen Mosley, 2016, p 204. Also ‘Mr Therm Goes into the Cinema Business’, 1954, p 1010.

%Z On domestic coal fires and smoke in the nineteenth century see Brimblecombe, 1988; Mosley, 2003; and Thorsheim, 2006. On the home as a metaphor for the nation in wartime see Lant, 1996.

%Z The argument that the gas fire could never stimulate the visual imagination was also put in ‘Focal Point’, The Times, 1946. The suggestion that the Conservative government agreed to a committee to inquire into air pollution as a way of curbing the power of the National Union of Mineworkers is made, for example, by Roy Parker, 2005, p 18. See http://www.icbh.ac.uk/witness/hygiene/smoke.

%Z Ovaltine is a milk-based drink, containing barley, malt and cocoa. In 1953 the brand had been boosted when Sir Edmund Hillary had drunk Ovaltine during his Everest climb.

%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/post-war-housing-homes/
%J Science Museum Group Journal