Homely or Homey?

While reading Alexander McCall Smith’s La’s Orchestra Saves the World, I came to this passage:

“He’s far from home,” said La. “And he’ll be fed up with living in the barracks and places like that. We need to make it look homely.”

Was this an error not caught by spell check? Or was this use of “homely” true to England during World War Il?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, using “homely” to mean “homelike” is obsolete. Was it obsolete in England in the 1940s?

Typo or not?