24 The Housing of the Afiricultural Labourer. 



boots alone will act as a strong inducement to the good house- 

 wife to give him his meals in the scullery, and she can do so 

 the more easily, as a small cooking stove is generally provided 

 there. This may seem a small point, but it is one of much 

 importance in the cottager's eyes. Even if the scullery be not 

 used entirel.y as a living room there will be a desire to keep the 

 larger room as clean as possible, and this desire seems worthy 

 of all encouragement. To quote a leader-writer in Country 

 Life (October 18th, 1913) :— " When the British housewife 

 finds her belongings crowded into a narrow space which the 

 children keep untidy, when nothing she can do will make the 

 place look homelike and nice, she would not be human if she 

 did not incline to fall into the ways of a slattern. . . . The 

 interior of the house is the woman's domain, and it never will 

 be completely home iintil she is as proud of the inside as the 

 man is of the outside." 



From these considerations it will be seen that there is 

 great temptation for the cottager to use the scullery almost 

 entirely as a living room, and little inducement to use the 

 larger room except during the two or three evening hours 

 when the day's work is done, and in summer, when the family 

 probably prefers to be out of doors, there is little occasion for 

 its use even then. So the cooking range is adorned with 

 filigree paper, the ornaments are displayed to the best advan- 

 tage, and the room becomes a parlour, which, except on 

 Sundays, is seldom used otherwise than as a passage to the 

 staircase or larder. 



The remedy for this state of things recommended b.y the 

 Departmental Committee is that the scullery should be made 

 small and uncomfortable to live in : — " When no parlour is 

 provided, care must be taken that the scullery is not so arranged 

 that the family can use it as a living room ; while it should 

 permit of as much as possible of the work being done there, 

 it should not be large enough to tempt the occupiers to keep 

 the living room shut up as a parlour for occasional use only." 



Mr. Lawrence Weaver in his notes on the CuiDitry Life 

 competition writes to the same effect : — " In cottages where 

 there is no parlour it is very desirable that sculleries should 

 be so planned as to discourage their use as living rooms. The 

 tendency of cottage tenants is to cling to the idea of a best 

 room where their household gods may be pi-operly displayed. 

 There are too many cottages in this country where the kitchen 

 living-room is not used for living in, and this is all to the bad. 

 The best room in the house is sacrificed to a sentiment, and 

 the family crowds into a small, inconvenient and inevitably 

 dirty sculler}'. It is foi- this reason that large and comfortable 

 sculleries are a mistake. Cottagers should be compelled l)y the 



