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After the end of World War II, Belfast had the worst housing and highest infant mortality in the UK. Its local council (Belfast Corporation) was dominated by private developers and landlords, with a vested interest in deterring social housing. By 1953 Belfast was a city of overcrowded slums and rampant tuberculosis, thriving on overcrowding and 23,000 families were languishing on the Corporation housing waiting list.
Amidst this blizzard of petty officialdom and lack of provision, a remarkable group of working-class women acted as 'fixers', helping the working poor to regulate their own lives. Chief among them was Annie Copeland, who became the go-to figure for housing advice in the city and was later the subject of a much-publicised corruption investigation.
Through Copeland's life, and the lives of many 'fixers' like her, award-winning historian Marianne Elliott offers an engaging and revealing portrait of pre-Troubles Belfast. The book builds on the remarkable documentation of the 1953 housing corruption scandal, which exposed Copeland, a working-class Protestant woman in East Belfast, as taking bribes from largely Catholic people in West Belfast to help them secure scarce council housing. At its heart is a court drama, where a sympathetic judge and legal fraternity gave a platform to highly articulate working people to deflate the pomposity and prejudices of the political functionaries who held power over people's lives.
The result is a timely book that sheds new light onto a wide range of themes, including the history of the National Health Service, gender, class, poverty, and bureaucracy in post-war Ireland.
