I know it's not as bad as the photos shown, but I used to live in what had once been a fine Edwardian house in Scotland, which the landlord had let go to rack and ruin.
I obviously don't know the facts of your case, but I think we have to be a little bit careful of the attitude that landlords just "let their properties go to rack and ruin" and dig down a little deeper.
In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, many rented properties were owned by landlords who had no private pensions and had done what their parents and grandparents had done - invested their savings in rented housing that they expected to provide them with a retirement income.
It had worked for their parents and grandparents; but it didn't work for them.
Why not?
Two things - the Rent Acts, which gave their tenants the right to register a "fair rent" which could not be easily increased, and rampant inflation (which, let us not forget, hit 27% in 1974).
In the 1950s my grandfather invested in a block of four newly built maisonettes in Buckhurst Hill, which he doubtless expected to provide a healthy income in retirement (if you know Buckhurst Hill, it was 67 Palmerston Road). He died in the 1960s. In the 1970s, though, I remember the maisonettes being the bane of my grandmother's life. They were all "fair rented", and what remained of the rent after tax was an absolute pittance - scarcely enough to meet her landlord's routine repairing obligations, and she lived in abject terror of needing to replace the roof, since the income from the maisonettes was never going to pay for that.
And she was reasonably wealthy (my grandfather's estate, when he died in 1963, was valued at £52,000 odd).
Many landlords were less well placed than her, and found that having sunk their savings into property, the returns were scarcely enough to provide them with enough to live on. They didn't WANT to leave their houses to go to rack and ruin ... but they lacked the means to do anything else.
Yes, doubtless there WERE the occasional Rachmanns; but for the most part, I think that in many cases the landlords were victims of circumstances no less than their unfortunate tenants.
I found these photographs deeply moving - many of the children shown would be about my age (I was born in 1967) and it is a poignant reminder of how things were.
One thing really did jar, though ... one of the captions refers to a "buggy".
The photograph does NOT feature a buggy. It features a PUSHCHAIR. It was not until the 1980s that the word pushchair began to fall out of use, as new designs of pushchair began to appear which were dubbed "baby buggies" to make them appear swish and up-to-the-minute and must-have accessories. So much more modern than a staid old pushchair, don't you think? By the 90s, of course, "baby buggy" had been contracted to "buggy", and nobody ever spoke of a pushchair.
But in the 1960s and 1970s? It's a pushchair, every time.
