Elsy Florence Eva Borders, née Kreher, (14 January 1905 – 14 August 1971) was a campaigner for

building standards A building code (also building control or building regulations) is a set of rules that specify the standards for constructed objects such as buildings and non-building structures. Buildings must conform to the code to obtain planning permission ...

who led a large mortgage strike in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

in the 1930s.

Early life

Elsy Kreher was born in 1905, in Lambeth, the daughter of John Engelbert Kreher and Edith Eliza Morley Kreher. Her father was a waiter.

Career

In 1937, Elsy Borders and her husband withheld payments and sued the

building society A building society is a financial institution owned by its members as a mutual organization. Building societies offer banking and related financial services, especially savings and mortgage lending. Building societies exist in the United Kingdo ...

that held the mortgage on their newly built semi-detached house on the Coney Hall estate near

West Wickham West Wickham is an area of South East London, England, mainly within the London Borough of Bromley with some parts lying in the London Borough of Croydon. It lies south of Park Langley and Eden Park, west of Hayes and Coney Hall, north of ...

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, for misrepresenting the house's "slap-dash" workmanship. She studied law at the

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 millio ...

, in order to represent herself in court in 1938. "Not the least occasion for the notoriety of the Borders case," commented an American observer, "was the fact that Elsie Borders herself must be a picturesque character, the wife of a taxi-cab operator, who acted as her own counsel in the case and apparently her own press agent. She proved to be a good one in both cases." "'Portia' Borders became the heroine of thousands of Britons who pay high rents for grimy kennels or find their shiny new houses falling apart," explained ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine in 1939. She appealed the case up to the

House of Lords The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the Bicameralism, upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by Life peer, appointment, Hereditary peer, heredity or Lords Spiritual, official function. Like the ...

, but it was finally lost in 1941. In a related case, Borders successfully represented her husband in a

libel Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defini ...

case brought by the housing society. Elsy Borders was a member of the

Communist party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A ...

, and helped to form the Federation of Tenants’ and Residents’ Association (FTRA). They led a mortgage strike in

, joined by 3,000 home-owners. The FTRA held its first national convention in 1939, in Birmingham. That year, an amendment to the Building Societies Act, introduced by

Ellen Wilkinson Ellen Cicely Wilkinson (8 October 1891 – 6 February 1947) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Minister of Education from July 1945 until her death. Earlier in her career, as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Jarrow, s ...

, addressed some of the FTRA's concerns; however, the Act's final revision increased protections for the building societies.

Personal life

Elsy Kreher married James Walter (Jim) Borders in 1926; her husband was a London cabby. They had a daughter, Pamela, born in 1930. The couple jokingly called their house "Insanity", and themselves "the Borders of Insanity." The Borders moved away from London in 1940, and divorced in 1944. Elsy and her daughter moved to

Exeter Exeter () is a city in Devon, South West England. It is situated on the River Exe, approximately northeast of Plymouth and southwest of Bristol. In Roman Britain, Exeter was established as the base of Legio II Augusta under the personal comm ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. Elsy Borders died in 1971, aged 66 years, in Exeter.

References

External links

*Graham Stevenson (26 January 2011)
"Borders Elsy and Jim"
A blog post about the Borders case. *Mudlark121 (13 January 2018)
"Today in London housing history: Elsy Borders goes to court in West Wickham mortgage strike, 1938"
''Past Tense: London Radical Histories and Possibilities''. A blog post on Elsy Borders.
A 1938 news photograph of the Borders family
by Reg Warhurst, at Shutterstock. {{DEFAULTSORT:Borders, Elsy 1905 births 1971 deaths English activists English women activists People from Lambeth People from West Wickham