Wellington Urban District Council Offices
In 1919, the local agency responsible for fulfilling Lloyd George’s landslide election winning mandate of creating ‘a country fit for heroes to live in’ was Wellington Urban District Council. From its Walker Street offices, many era-defining schemes were launched but, increasingly, it was subject to many of the pressures being felt at national level.
Background
By the turn of the Twentieth Century, Wellington was the administrative centre for a wide area of east Shropshire. Nationally, the local government reforms of the mid-1890s created a two-tier system of urban and rural district councils that were based on opposite sides of Walker Street in 1919. At Edgbaston House, Wellington RDC had its headquarters, governing a large district to the north and west of the town. Over the road, the elected councillors of Wellington UDC were busy resuming a wide-ranging programme of municipal improvements that had been effectively curtailed by the privations of war. At the forefront of that effort was a man whose ubiquitous presence across nearly every major issue of the age made him perhaps the most notable Wellingtonian of his era.
Inventing the Future
John Wesley Clift was born in Leominster in 1857 but moved to Wellington as a young boy and was educated at the town’s Wesleyan schools. He eventually became the proprietor of the family business, the Excelsior Carriage Works in Tan Bank, where his skills as a gold medallist inventor were put to good use in patenting many innovations that are still on public record today. At the time of the First World War, he was also Chair of Wellington UDC and part way through an unbroken stint as a town councillor that would eventually span 46 years, only ending due to ill health two years before his death in 1939. During the conflict, Clift had been a vehement critic of the conditions in which some local residents were forced to live, describing the houses of some soldiers and their wives as a ‘disgrace to humanity’. At the time, party politics played little to no direct part in the election of officials who campaigned as independents. However, the post-war growth of the local Trades and Labour Council (which claimed to represent over 2000 local worker by September 1919) put renewed pressure on local politicians by actively encouraging its members to vote for men who were likely to keep their wartime promises. For Wesley Clift, though, a commitment to improving the lives of Wellingtonians appeared to go well beyond normal political conventions.
In his obituary, it was revealed that for many years Clift had kept a chart of the rise and fall of birth and death rates in Wellington, paying particular attention to infant mortality. Improving the life chances of the young in an era of so much devastation was a key theme of 1919 and Clift, as chair of the local Child Welfare Centre, was a key figure in improving local maternity services in the town after the war. As a cottage hospital trustee, member of the Workmen’s Hospital Committee and chair of the local Dispensary charity, he also took a direct role in ensuring continued access to healthcare for many poorer residents when the costs of medical treatment were becoming increasingly expensive. The fortunes of discharged and demobilised soldiers were also high on the agenda in 1919, and as a key figure in the local YMCA, Clift was instrumental in improving its services for ex-servicemen. At his own expense, he organised a ‘welcome home’ party for former Prisoners of War at the Wrekin Buildings, which were purchased by the YMCA in that year. He also led the Council’s programme of official peace celebrations in July and chaired the inaugural meeting of the League of Nations Citizens Committee on the first anniversary of the Armistice. However, Clift’s most notable contribution to Wellington’s Great War legacy was yet to come.
In the Public Weal
In late November, Clift wielded the spade at the sod cutting ceremony for Wellington UDC’s new estate at Urban Gardens, the first to be built under the new 1919 Housing Act. The Wellington Journal was on hand to provide an account of proceedings and used the opportunity to pay tribute to the figure who had worked tirelessly to sell the scheme to an often sceptical cast of council colleagues and irritable ratepayers:
“The honour very properly fell to Chairman of the Council, Mr JW Clift, they whom there is none among his confreres who has a wider knowledge of the subject, or who has greater interest in matters affecting the public weal”.
The ceremony, which appeared to take up the best part of a day, also included a trip to the council’s new borehole, which had been dug to improve the town’s erratic water supply. It was just one of a number of sanitary improvements affected by the local authority that also included removing a large number of the privies and cesspits that passed for a sewerage system in many homes around the town centre.
In a year where the cost of living rose continually, the wages paid to public workers also came into sharp relief as the national Government pursued a policy to stabilise the incomes of a wide sector of its workforce. In March, the local Trades Council claimed that, with the exception of Dawley, Wellington UDC was the only local authority in the ‘Birmingham Area’ not to recognise the union. In June, that policy aroused controversy when the council refused to sanction a Trades Council application for a 5 shilling weekly pay rise for its members. The councillors had encouraged the workmen to speak to them directly but, when they did, they were awarded only 3 shillings! At the same meeting, and under no obligation to do so, the council awarded its Clerk and Surveyor a £50 and £20 annual pay rise respectively with both officers, as the Journal observed, ‘being eulogised for the efficient way in which they discharged their duties’. As the economy gradually moved from war footing to the brink of recession, the council found it impossible to maintain its stance and by the end of 1919 wage rises for all its staff were effectively being waved through. In November, Councillor Marchant decided to ‘make a stand against the continual applications for increases in wages’, when one workman asked for an 8 shillings a week rise to put him on the same level as his colleagues. Tabling a motion to offer only 4 shillings ‘a workman’, he thought, ‘should consider it a privilege to be able to earn something extra to meet increased expenses’. In what can only be described as a sign of the changing times, he was unable to find a seconder.