The "to those that hath shall be given" principle (Matthew 13: 12) is seldom nudged to one side. But this is what happened in the aftermath of the 1939-45 war. People who would otherwise have been left permanently homeless found themselves living in temporary homes. For those who were stuck in dingy basement flats or marooned in ex-army barracks the offer of a key to a prefab was like manna from heaven.
In May 1944 a newly unveiled prefab started to make a public exhibition of itself in the Tate Gallery. Tens of thousands of prefabs were soon being connected to water mains and electricity cables up and down the country. There was even some wild, science fiction-style futuristic talk of having them connected to telephone lines!
Britain's prefabs were fighters from the word go, not least because the aluminium in their walls and roofs had been taken from war planes. Cities which had been bombed the most like Coventry and Hull were given the most prefabs. Not far from the front of the queue for the new prefabs came cities like Bristol and Bath.
The central aim of the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was to provide "a temporary solution to the post-war housing shortage." Not everyone wanted a solution to be found for the post-war housing shortage. After all, while should aluminium be wated on plebs and peasants at a time when country houses had leaks in their bow wings and crumbling porticos! Building prefab estates instead of restoring country estates was an afront to the enemies of aesthetic vandalism and cultural barbarism. No wonder Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh launched a ferocious counter attack. On March 13 1944 he wrote the following lines to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon:

"I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich people, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and these are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays."

No tears have been brought to anyone's eyes by a beautiful book about prefabs. Here was a 'Brideshead' that was neither visited or revisited or even noticed by the literary elite. No film or television producer would ever demean himself by setting up camp on a prefab estate. No artist of any acclaim would set up an easel here, no composer of music would dream of casting a look in their direction. Prefabs were ignored when they were around and forgotten after they had been
swept away. But here -on a crumbling ledge in a faint margin of memory - a hand is lifted to salute them!

Postscript: Evelyn Waugh's wife managed to get hold of three bananas for their children during the war. ('Yes, we do have some bananas!') Her beautiful high-born husband sat down in front of the children, peeled the bananas, poured cream and sugar on them, and than ate all three. When it came to bringing tears to people's eyes he was in a league of his own.