Between 1945 and 1949 around 160,000 rectangular prefabs were assembled into place. At the peak of the Great Prefab Boom a new one was going up every twelve minutes! It has to be acknowledged that the kudos of renting a prefab went to some people's heads. Some residents saw themselves as a kind of reserve aristocracy in waiting. (The size of the British aristocracy at this time - 157,000 households - was about the same as the prefab population.) So if the Duke and Duchess of Somerset keeled over the Bollards at prefab number four would be ready to take their place. A sense of being one of the elect stayed with prefab dwellers until the end.
The reputation of Aneurin Bevan (Member of Parliament for Tredegar/Ebbw Vale from 1929 to 1960) plummeted when - in a speech launching the National Health Service in 1948 -he
described the Tories as "lower than vermin." An even greater blow to his reputation came when after he described prefabs as "chicken huts" and "rabbit hutches." The author of In Place Of Fear (1952) seemed to have little inking that the prefabs had come In Place Of Fear. Perhaps Bevan simply wanted prefabs to be bigger and of a higher quality, but his words acted as a blow to prefab dwellers' amour-propre.
When Admiralty civil servants were moved from London to Bath it was on the strict Bevanite understanding that none of them would end up having to live in a prefab. A reporter from the Bath & Wilting discovered that a number of them were renting out the houses they owned in London at the same time as they were renting spacious council houses in Twiverton. He was told that on no account should this be made public. (How many dark secrets have been kept by the Bath & Wiltings of Britains's local press!)
Harold Wilson, a future Labour Prime Minister, said he had given up reading Das Kapital (1867) after finishing finishing the first chapter. At least he would have read the book's preface which tells readers there is no "royal road" to science. And there is no "royal road" to understanding the Zen Of Prefab Life. Hundreds of evenings have to be spent staring into the embers of the coal fire and watching reflected slivers of moonlight flicker dance on the sitting-room wall before one gains an appreciation of the spiritually expansive nature of these pale and compact architectural forms. The weight of Bevan's workload and the unrelenting attacks to which he was subjected meant that this truth remained hidden from him.
Another pity of those times is that George Orwell never got round to writing The Great Prefab Novel. What a mistake he made in spending his final days in the bleak winter of 1950 marooned in an isolated cottage on the windswept Scottish island of Jura. If only he had been recuperating his health on our prefab estate in Twiverton and mulling things over in the comfort of the My Full Moon. Yet there is a forgotten prefab dimension to Orwell's last book (published in 1949). The message of 1984 is just how impoverished life would be if the small pockets of freedom symbolised by prefabs were to vanish away.