ABSTRACT
In the Great War, the entire machine of government cranked up to take every ounce of labour and production it could muster into the massive war effort. Building came to a standstill and acute shortages quickly surfaced, particularly in Glasgow, where shipbuilding had boomed because of the naval threat from Germany and where overcrowding was double the London level. Landlords, squeezed before the war by local taxation and drop in demand, faced the tempting prospect of rapid rent rises. Workersmany of them, for the first time, women-were, however, vital to the survival of the nation, stripped of almost all its young men on the war front. Widespread unrest over rent rises led to rent strikes. The government passed the 1915 Act, introducing tight rent controls virtually across the board for the first time. The 1915 rent controls were singled out as the act that most clearly shaped twentieth-century Britain into the ‘fundamentally stable, unprotesting, unenterprising and conservative society of the late twentieth century’ (Thompson 1990).
