Part 1: The house as a tool of our overseer's

When the oppressors don't get the last word

 

There are basically two types of history. Type 1 is the history written by the victors. Type 2 is the history passed down around the kitchen table or at the pub. Neither type I nor type 2 is inherently true or false. Although either can be either. For the record, this history comes from the kitchen table.

My history is presented from the understanding that everything is interconnected and interdependent. I absolutely believe in the butterfly effect. For those who don't know the butterfly effect basically means that a small effort in one place can have a major effect in another. And that every effort has an effect, somewhere.

From time immemorial there have been people and organizations who have used the butterfly effect to create the world they needed. Today the people of influence have been given the name 'the transnational capitalist class'.

This is not a shady group of people smoking cigars and meeting in backrooms. These are people of immense wealth and corporate influence who manage to control politicians and courts. Because of that control, they can make things happen throughout the world. Usually, what they make happen maintains or increases their wealth. Which, as far as I can tell, is their main purpose in life.

One of their areas of expertise is how to use housing to control the population. Which is why I start this series looking at the housing that was available to my grandparents, my parents, and me and how it influenced our lives.

Form follows function. In this case the function was to create housing for the people that would make the people good citizens for the transnational capitalist class.

The first house belonged to my grandparents. The second house is the one my parents bought. The 3rd house is the junior lighthouse keepers house on Ivory Island which I lived in for four years.

                     My grandparents house

In the picture below, the house we are in front of is my grandma and grandpa Hamilton's house. As the gods would have it, across the alley and one house to the left lived my grandma and grandpa Waddington. Their house was of the same style as the house we're sitting in front of.

This isn't surprising because my grandparents on both sides, came from the British Isles and when they came over in the early 1900s clans and extended family were the norm. The interior of grandma Hamilton's house was an unfinished basement, a beautiful very comfortable main floor, with glass doors between the living room and dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Climbing up very steep stairs to the top floor you found yourself with a room to your left and your right which could be used for storage or for bedrooms.

At one point my parents and grandparents decided that we would move in with my Hamilton grandparents. At that point the basement was finished as a living area for our family with a small workshop for my grandfather. That meant that we had a small kitchen, our own toilet, a small living room with a fold out couch for my parents to sleep on, separate bedroom for Bruce and me. And a little nook, half room with just enough room for a crib.

We all shared the bathtub on the main floor. My memory may be faulty, but I'm pretty sure we got the run of the house. And there was a large backyard with a garage that was both playground and a place of mystery. But there was no doubt that there was one dominant male in the house and that was my grandfather. And he was controlled by my grandmother.

This was a house that you did not buy and turn over in a quick sale. This was a house that you put down roots with. That you were able to help your children with. That allowed you to maintain your extended family. When my grandparents bought this house they were looking to the future. They wanted to build something for themselves and their family and their grandchildren that would last through the generations.

It's not a coincidence that this was also the time just after World War One. The transnational capitalist class needed to move the workforce from any number of countries into Canada and the States because they were about the only two countries that weren't decimated by the war. This was going to be the power base of the transnational cap of the list class, and they needed a workforce that they could trust.

That's me on the right on the tricycle and my elder brother is the young man on the left we have two of our friends with us

Time had moved on. The roaring 20s gave way to The Dirty 30s. The Dirty 30s led directly into World War 2. When World War 2 ended the transnational capitalist class needed find a way to create a stable, reasonably contented workforce.

Part of their solution was the housing that was created for the returning soldiers and their soon-to-be expanding families. To maintain cohesion the new type of house would carry over some of the old type of house. It would have an unfinished basement. The kitchen was still designed to be used for a family that was more than mere consumers. And although the yard was noticeably smaller, the yard could still be used to grow vegetables, hang laundry, build a garage, and be a safe place for the children to play.

Now it's time to take a look at the type of house my parents bought.

      This is the exact 2-bedroom bungalow type that was built After World        War 2 for service veterans, and it was built one city block above where        my parents House of the same design was.

Sometime in the late 1950s or maybe 1960, my parents bought the house I think of as our house. Decades had passed since my grandparents had bought their house. The roaring 20s, The Dirty 30s, and World War Two had all come and gone. The transnational capitalist class still had the same problem. How to create and maintain a stable workforce so that they could continue to build their wealth. The world had changed too much for the old answers to still apply. But not so much that the transnational capitalist class needed to reinvent the wheel.

Nothing demonstrates this quite so effectively as the difference between the house my grandparents bought and the one my parents bought.

If you take a quick peek below, you'll see, not my parents' house, but an identical house from one block up the street we lived on. The first thing you'll notice is that it's only a one-story house with a basement. There are no extra rooms on the top floor. It's also in a very much smaller yard.

Some things remained the same. There was only one bathroom, and it had a bathtub, not a shower. The basement was still unfinished. Even though the backyard was smaller, you could still plant a garden. If you didn't mind a small garden you could put in a garage, and the children still had a safe place to play and there was still room to hang out your laundry on a sunny day.

In the kitchen, there was a flour bin that would have held close to 20 lbs of flour. There was a cooking stove with a good-sized oven, 4 burners, and an electric griddle that when you plugged it in, you could cook pancakes, plus bacon and eggs for four people all at once. And in the unfinished basement one of the last vestiges of the life of my grandparents, there was a cold cellar.

This was a house that was created for a family with children, with one parent who went to work, and one parent who stayed home, to look after the family.

Take another look at the picture below, you'll notice that the house has large cement stairs that go up to the front door. What you can't see is that underneath the stairs is the walk-in cold storage cellar. When you walk down the stairs into the basement, and walk forward to the front of the house, you could open the door and find yourself in the cold cellar underneath the stairs.

The cold storage cellar was included in the house because for generations if not centuries, it was the norm that the stay-at-home parent would be canning and saving foodstuff from the summer. Which, of course, was the whole reason for a backyard. You had an area to grow what people used to call a victory garden, as well as a place to hang your clothesline, and for your children to play in while you kept an eye on them.

Families, or at least so the theory went, we're more than consumers. They were producers.

Now it's time to move to a house that's very important in my life and shows how the powers that be took a basic tool and found ways to modify it for specific circumstances

          The house that I'm concerned with in this part of the article is the 5              structure from the left it's behind the boardwalk and has a direct                  line of sight to the big house at the front of the island.

There's one more house that I want to look at. You might be expecting it's the first house that I bought, but you'd be wrong. It is however the 1st house that I really felt at home in as an adult. And this house was the House of the junior lighthouse keeper on Ivory Island light station. I was the junior lighthouse keeper there for four years.

In the picture of ivory island light station starting from the left is a workshop, the two-story senior keeper's house, two or three outbuildings, and then behind the boardwalk with nothing that you can see between it and the senior keeper's house is the junior keeper's house. It's not hard to tell that it was designed at about the same time my parents house was.

What makes this house important for this presentation is not that I felt comfortable in it. What makes it significant is that like my parents first house, this house was built in the 1950s. At this time the Canadian government was modernizing many of the lighthouses that they owned. And they built them in the same style as the house that my parents bought.

Still and all they didn't build the junior light housekeeper's house as an exact copy of what you could buy in Vancouver. They modified the houses to fit the cultural context of a lighthouse.

• The basement was split in half. 1/2 was a spare room and a place for the hot water heater the furnace and storage. The other half was a massive water tank. This water tank came with a sand filter to purify the water that was collected from the roof.
• They also changed how they built the main floor of the house. Instead of two by fours or two by eights the main joist were 12 by 12 Timbers. These Timbers were then connected to the basement floor by very strong steel posts about 3 inches (ca. 8 cm) thick. The idea was that in a really bad hurricane, or if a tsunami hit, everybody could retreat into the junior keeper's basement and while the upper house might get washed away, nothing was going to get through to the basement.
• finally, they removed all the little extras that were found in the house in Vancouver. Like a nice fireplace or a hardwood floor that would entice people to settle in and not move on. I can't prove it, but I'm convinced that they did it because they knew that the junior keepers were always going to be on the move. Either moving back to the mainland because they couldn't handle living on a light station. Or moving to other lights so that eventually they could become the senior lighthouse keeper.

The same basic style. A big Bay window to look out. The stove in the kitchen was big enough to feed your family and a work crew all at the same time with some ease. There were two bedrooms upstairs one on either side of the bathroom. The bathroom didn't have a shower, but it did have a bathtub so that on those cold nights you could get warmed up or on bad days you could ease your sore muscles. The same but with significant changes for the very different culture of the lighthouse.

In the second presentation of this series, I'm going to pass along a bit of history that an elder shared with me at his kitchen table while I was living in a small Indian village on the West Coast of Canada. This history is definitely history written by the people, not by the academics.

Brian