After Elsy

Five years ago Elsy Florence Eva Borders, London housewife, was enraged when her new house, like many another product of Britain's depression building boom, began to leak, creak and crumble. Last year she stopped making mortgage payments to the building society, and when the society sued, personally fought Britain's legal heavyweights to a standstill. "Portia" Borders became the heroine of thousands of Britons who pay high rents for grimy kennels or find their shiny new houses falling apart. Many of them have been making it tough for landlords as increasing numbers of "Tenants' Defence Leagues" have demanded lower rents, better plumbing, repairs. If the owner is stubborn, he has a hard time collecting his rent.

Behind electrically-charged door knockers and boarded-up back doors, manning pails of slops at upstairs windows, 70,000 embattled striking families are currently prepared to fight eviction. In the case of tenancies covered by the Rent Acts, passed during the War to prevent profiteering, the strikers sometimes have a good legal case and have even recovered back rent paid in excess of the law. More often the strike is completely illegal, but that does not make the landlords much happier. Last month when 83 police smashed through a strikers' barricade in Stepney, East End London borough, and evicted five families, Tenant Defence detachments promptly reinstated them. Boasts Father John Groser, Church of England leader of the Stepney strike: "Many landlords have watched the straws in the wind and capitulated to just demands. Those who refuse, we are forced to fight--and we haven't lost a case yet."

Leaders of the local defense leagues are spunky housewives, energetic Communists, clergymen with social consciences like Father Groser. Fortnight ago on the 100th anniversary of the great working class Chartist Convention that scared early Victorians silly by demanding such reforms as universal suffrage and annual Parliaments, representatives of the 200,000 members of the booming Federation of Tenants' and Residents' Associations met for its first national convention. Birmingham, scene of a recent victorious strike by 46,000 families living in a municipal tenements, was the convention city.

Purpose of the meeting was to weld the scattered defense leagues into a national pressure group with a program of slum clearance, Government rent control, increased legal responsibilities for landlords. Although the Labor Party lawyers' Haldane Club supplies it with free legal advice, no political party except the Communist has yet taken official notice of the Federation.

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