Back to index of Nerve 15 - Winter 2009

Revolting Tenants: The Great Abercromby Rent Strike of ‘69

By Kim Singleton

If you were there, you will know that during the late sixties and early seventies, the residential communities of inner Liverpool were broken up.

But, unless we took part, how much do we know of the people’s resistance? Who knows of the great rent strike in the Crown, Grove and Myrtle Streets, a part of Toxteth we called Abercromby?

By the late sixties, in the face of mounting financial losses caused by the impact on property values of the slum clearance programme, the University of Liverpool was struggling to rehouse its tenants and the housing association it employed to look after their interests had no money to carry out repairs.

In October 1968, hundreds of tenants, spread across thirty six Abercromby streets, joined the tiny Abercromby Tenants Association and began withholding all of their rent in protest at the impasse.

Within a few weeks, news of the strike reached the radical fringe at the University. Students helped ATA ‘hire’ a room in the union for its meetings and in December they published photographs of the tenant’s ‘slum’ homes in the student newspaper, the Guild Gazette.

Then, in May 1969, seven months into the strike, the University invited Princess Alexandra to open its new Senate House.

It invited the tenants association secretary, my mother, to attend the reception but ATA joined the students in a boycott of the event.

A week before the royal visit, a front page opinion in the Guild Gazette branded the University a ‘slum landlord’, broadcaster Jon Snow, then an undergraduate radical, caused a storm at Guild Council by demanding an audience with HRH and ATA’s threat to picket the opening ceremony made the front page of the Liverpool Weekly News.

As a nine year old, alongside my grandmother and sisters, I was one of hundreds of people who lined the streets of Abercromby on 15th May as the royal procession passed.

Alongside the placards of protest affixed to our homes, and to the hoardings erected by the council, we waved little flags of greeting. The banner outside our house said ‘we’ve got an open air loo, have you?’

With hundreds of students picketing the Senate House, my parents waited with their fellow strikers in nearby Vine Street. Outside no 111 my mother greeted Alexandra in a meeting set up by the association.

As she chatted to HRH about how many pans of boiled water it took to fill a tin bath, the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire stepped in to prevent the tour of the Parr family home.

At the end of a momentous day, the tenants returned to the University’s Mountford Hall where, on a telly rigged up by the students, they saw themselves on US television news described as a ‘peasants revolt’.

Following the Alexandra affair, the tenants were guaranteed rehousing by the council, and the strikers’ debt to the University was waived.

Three years later, many of the rehoused tenants, including my parents, were on rent strike again, this time against the Heath Government’s Housing Finance (Fair Rents) Act.

In victory, the Abercromby tenants couldn’t save their community or reverse the bigger pattern of rising ‘economic’ rents.

For the people of Abercromby, as it turned out, the great rent strike of ’69 was a final act of ‘old’ community.

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Comment left by Gerry Cordon on 14th January, 2010 at 15:03
Hi Kim I'm really pleased to have found this. I was the author of the Gazette feature that exposed the conditions in this property and knew your parents well, both in Abercromby and later after you moved to Kirkby. I've recently been researching these events for a blog that recounts the events surrounding the Proncess Alexandra protest - and the student occupation of Senate House a year later. It's here: http://senatehouseoccupation.wordpress.com/ You'll find my original article there. If you have any archive material relating to these events I would love to incorporate them. Cheers Gerry

Comment left by Paul Parr on 17th September, 2012 at 14:58
My name is Paul Parr. The house at 111 Vine Street that Princess Alexandra visited was My fathers family home. The lady in Gerry Cordons article, Mrs Jane Parr, was my Grandmother. I was born in Sefton General hospital, and lived my first months at my Grandparents house in Vine Street, before my parents got re-housed in Kirkby, where I grew up. I now live in Lincolnshire with my wife and daughter, who is Jane Parr's Great-Grandaughter, and lives a very diffrent lifestyle from that of the Abercromby residents!

Comment left by PamelaRoberts ( nee Parr) on 17th September, 2012 at 19:49
I was born Pamela Parr in 1962. I lived in the parlour of my grandparents Jane and Fred Parr's home 111 Vine Street, until re-housed to Kirkby early 1968. I was unaware of this historically significant event involving my own Nana Parr until today!I would love to hear more to share with my own children who are both in their 20s. Although now living in Oxfordshire, our hearts remain in Liverpool....

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