EVERY MAN HIS OWN BUILDER.
THOSE who are familiar with the writings of that greatly gifted writer, the late G. W. Steevens, will remember that, as a war correspondent in the Soudan campaign which ended with Omdurman, he found himself at an early stage in the proceedings in a difficult predicament. It was essential that he should get to the front at once, but through some mistake, or owing to orders issued by those in authority, he could get nothing to ride, and there was no train to take him. The desert stretched before him. " Why shouldn't I walk P" he asked himself. He did walk. In something of the same spirit, possibly, he who has been confronted over and over again with the difficulty of getting a cottage built cheaply and well may ask himself, " Why should I not build it myself?" And though that may seem at first sight a question to which there may be a hundred answers, all of
them a little contemptuous, there is as a fact only one answer. That is a question as regards time.
An extremely interesting and stimulating little book has just been published by Mr. G. Gordon Samson, entitled "Every Man His Own Builder" (Crosby Lockwood and Son, 5s. net), which deals in a thoroughly practical way with this particular aspect of the housing question. Mr. Gordon Samson, it may be well to point out for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with his record, is no mere visionary. He has built or arranged for the building of hundreds of houses. He is a grandson of Joseph Johnson Miles, one of the original founders, with the late Sir Sidney Waterlow, of the "Improved Industrial Dwellings Company " of London, which many years ago started its admirable work of re-housing the poorer classes of London, and gained in doing so the com- plimentary nickname of "Philanthropy and Five per Cent." Mr. Samson applied the principles of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company to the problem of de-slumming Cape Town, and though at first he received more advice than subscriptions for the company he formed, he was soon able to get to work with a small capital, and paid so handsome a dividend that the success of his project was at once assured, and be ended by providing Cape Town with hundreds of cottages and tenements which escaped without a single case of plague when the terrible visita- tion of 1900 and 1901 was raging in the poor districts round them—a remarkable testimony to the soundness of his building. So much for his practical record. If, next, it is suggested that a building company could do what a single man cannot, Mr. Samson provides a simple answer in the case of a Swedish carpenter whom he sent to do some work in a cottage of his own some nine miles from Cape Town. He had decided to add some rooms to the building and to make a farmhouse of it, and when he suggested to the Swede that he should try to do the whole of the work himself, the offer was accepted at once. Mr. Samson thereupon " set out" the new rooms, and proceeded to teach the man how to lay the founda- tions. He then discovered that the Swedish carpenter knew all about foundation-laying, and also, when it came to the question of brickwork and plastering, that he knew just as much about both; in fact, that there was no job of plain, straightforward building that he could not tackle. Mr. Samson learnt on inquiry that although the man had been born in Sweden, his father had emigrated to America, and there, as a farmer who had built his own house, had learnt " to do everything." He had gained his knowledge merely by watching his father. He stayed with Mr. Samson for eighteen months. "During that time he added the following rooms to the house : A large dining-room about 21ft. 6in. long by about 15ft. broad ; is bed- room, 15ft. by 10ft.; a kitchen, 15ft. by 9ft.; a workshop, 20ft. by 12ft.; two more bedrooms, each 12ft. by 9ft.; and another bedroom, 16ft. by 9ft.; a small pantry, and a greenhouse, 12ft. by 8ft.—quite a fair-sized house altogether. He also built a two-stalled stable and a rough coach-house about lift. square. In addition to all this he made a good deal of furniture for the house, framed at least thirty pictures, made up seventy-five beehives, broke up one and a half acres of rough veld land and cropped it with oats, planted several trees, and did many odd jobs. Remember, also, that he had to make all his own bricks and excavate the trenches for the foundations ; all the assistance he received (and this only for about nine months of the whole time) being that of a young, rather lazy, and quite raw nigger boy, who helped him with the rough work of btickmaking and so forth ; so that for much of the time he had also to feed and clean the horse and attend to the chickens and other farm work, and often to go to town nine miles away to fetch materials." With this example in his memory, Mr. Samson asks the simple question whether, with so many hours per week to give to the work, apart from the hours which they must necessarily give to the farm, a group of farm labourers could not in time build their own cottages without incurring the expenses of architect, builder, and builders' labour. There, again, anyone who has had much to do with English country- men, and who knows what a large reserve lies behind the limits and the possibilities of their daily round of work, could only find one answer—it would be just a question of time. The same type of man learns to do these things in a new country ; he could learn to do them in his own. Suppose a landlord made a sporting offer to a chosen number of labourers to supply them with so much land, with working plans and
drawings for cottages, and with building materials ; suppose he then put before them a possible scheme of purchase by in- stalments, and then left them to their own devices, what would be the odds that in their spare time they would not somehow between them get the cottages built P Possibly the experiment might not be regarded with favour by the local builder, but if that were so, it would be the best possible comment on the situation.
After all, what is there in building a house which calls for faculties and perceptions which do not belong in some measure to the averagely intelligent human being ? If you begin with the cutting of trenches, that is a matter of digging, using a spirit-level, and making concrete ; after that comes brickwork and the use of a plumb-line, and then with some such simple structure as weather-boarding on a timber frame, there is really not much more than schoolboy's carpentering on a larger and more important scale, when it will not do to make mistakes, or at all events to leave them uncorrected. The putting on of a roof and the understanding of the purposes of collars and struts is doubtless not a business to be learnt offhand, nor, as to simpler processes, does a man become a bricklayer or a tiler, certainly not a skilled plasterer, in a few hours. But there is nothing in the simpler processes of building which lies beyond the capacities of the average man to the degree in which first-rate cabinet work, for instance, lies beyond the capabilities of the average school- boy carpenter. A given number of average Englishmen, if they were put to it, could build a house with just the same amount of time and trouble and expenditure of effort in learning new processes as they devote to their ordinary daily business. It merely happens that as a fact they do not build Louses. To take a last example of effort and result being forthcoming when necessary, the case of Englishmen might be contrasted with that of Irishmen. If you travel in the far west of Ireland and observe the huts and cottages, you will find that most of them are put up, not by firms of builders sending their workmen to do so much per day during fixed hours; they have been built by the men who live in them. Nor are they merely the poorest and smallest buildings which are put up in this way. The writer knows of a fishing lodge on the shores of an Irish lough which was originally built by its owner, and has twice been added to, till it is quite a consider- able structure; but all the building, which, as regards the walls, is faced stone, has been done by men whom in the summer you meet as boatmen and gillies, rowing you about the lough for hours together, and regarding sport in fishing or shooting as without doubt the most desirable thing in the world—next, of course, to owning their own small plot of land. They would build the extra rooms needed for the lodge in the winter, " when there would be time." There is always time in that pleasant country. But there are also always builders. The material for walls is permanently on the spot, of course, since you cannot grow potatoes without removing so many tons of stone. That reduces the cost of building to smaller proportions than are possible in England; but the cost of labour in the case of a man building for himself remains the same in both countries. Only in England he does not build.
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