Mary Tabor discusses giving out keys to new homes [Text only]

Interviewer: Was there any particular time that you gave the keys out or days, or was it just whenever the house was ready…?

Mary: I think it was, they used to come over on Wednesday and we gave them out on Thursday on Friday. Sometimes we would let the house we were told it would be ready and would be handed over, but then the keys were given out to the gas board or the electricity board and they hadn’t come back and there was a panic because we hadn’t got the keys and the people were going to come down.

Sometimes they couldn’t get it beforehand they actually had it on the Saturday, but on the whole they had it and then they moved probably on Saturday because this is the sort of day for moving, isn’t it. And their tenancy would begin on the Monday but we would let them have the keys, I think it probably was Friday so they could go out and, of course previous to that they’d been let or allowed to go in to measure up and that sort of thing. We tried of course to give them, have you seen a tenant’s handbook?

Well this was, I mean this was to give them useful information to begin with. Because I felt it was terribly important that a new tenant should have the handbook the same time as they had the keys or before because it was when you first moved in that you needed it rather than later on. Then we had, I’m going from a different, we had welcome parties, not quite sure, we must have started that when Roebuck were coming over because the first one I think was at the estate office and it was fine and partly outside