London. There is nothing about this parish in the Guide-books; nobody
goes to see it. Why should they? There is nothing to see. Yet it is
not without its romantic touches. Once there was here a cross--the
Ratcliff Cross--but nobody knows what it was, when it was erected, why
it was erected, or when it was pulled down. The oldest inhabitant now
at Ratcliff remembers that there was a cross here--the name survived
until the other day, attached to a little street, but that is now
gone. It is mentioned in Dryden. And on the Queen's Accession, in
1837, she was proclaimed, among other places, at Ratcliff Cross--but
why, no one knows. Once the Shipwrights' Company had their hall here;
it stood among gardens where the scent of the gillyflower and the
stock mingled with the scent of the tar from the neighbouring
rope-yard and boat-building yard. In the old days, many were the
feasts which the jolly shipwrights held in their hall after service at
St. Dunstan's, Stepney. The hall is now pulled down, and the Company,
which is one of the smallest, worth an income of less than a thousand,
has never built another. Then there are the Ratcliff Stairs--rather
dirty and dilapidated to look at, but, at half-tide, affording the
best view one can get anywhere of the Pool and the shipping. In the
good old days of the scuffle-hunters and the heavy horsemen, the view
of the thousand ships moored in their long lines with the narrow
passage between was splendid. History has deigned to speak of Ratcliff
Stairs. 'Twas by these steps that the gallant Willoughby embarked for
his fatal voyage; with flags flying and the discharge of guns he
sailed past Greenwich, hoping that the King would come forth to see
him pass. Alas! the young King lay a-dying, and Willoughby himself was
sailing off to meet his death.
The parish contains four good houses, all of which, I believe, are
marked in Roque's map of 1745.
One of these is now the vicarage of the new church. It is a large,
solid, and substantial house, built early in the last century, when as
yet the light horsemen and lumpers were no nearer than Wapping. The
walls of the dining-room are painted with Italian landscapes, to which
belongs a romance. The paintings were executed by a young Italian
artist. For the sake of convenience he was allowed by the merchant who
then lived here, and employed him, to stay in the house. Now the
merchant had a daughter, and she was fair. The artist was a goodly
youth, and inflammable; as the poet says, their eyes met; presently,
as the poet goes on, their lips met; then the merchant found out what
was going on, and ordered the young man, with good old British
determination, out of the house. The young man retired to his room,
presumably to pack up his things. But he did not go out of the house;
instead of that, he hanged himself in his room. His ghost, naturally,
continued to remain in the house, and has been seen by many. Why he
has not long ago joined the ghost of the young lady is not clear
unless that, like many ghosts, his chief pleasure is in keeping as
miserable as he possibly can.
The second large house of the parish is apparently of the same date,
but the broad garden in which it formerly stood has been built over
with mean tenement houses. Nothing is known about it; at present
certain Roman Catholic sisters live in it, and carry on some kind of
work.
The third great house is one of the few surviving specimens of the
merchant's warehouse and residence in one. It is now an old and
tumbledown place. Its ancient history I know not. What rich and costly
bales were hoisted into this warehouse; what goods lay here waiting to
be carried down the Stairs, and so on board ship in the Pool; what
fortunes were made and lost here one knows not. Its ancient history is
gone and lost, but it has a modern history. Here a certain man began,
in a small way, a work which has grown to be great; here he spent and
was spent; here he gave his life for the work, which was for the
children of the poor. He was a young physician; he saw in this squalid
and crowded neighbourhood the lives of the children needlessly
sacrificed by the thousand for the want of a hospital; to be taken ill
in the wretched room where the whole family lived was to die; the
nearest hospital was two miles away. The young physician had but
slender means, but he had a stout heart. He found this house empty,
its rent a song. He took it, put in half a dozen beds, constituted
himself the physician and his wife the nurse, and opened the
Children's Hospital. Very soon the rooms became wards; the wards
became crowded with children; the one nurse was multiplied by twenty;
the one physician by six. Very soon, too, the physician lay upon his
death-bed, killed by the work. But the Children's Hospital was
founded, and now it stands, not far off, a stately building with one
of its wards--the Heckford Ward--named after the physician who gave
his own life to save the children. When the house ceased to be a
hospital it was taken by a Mr. Dawson, who was the first to start here
a club for the very rough lads. He, too, gave his life for the cause,
for the illness which killed him was due to overwork and neglect.
Devotion and death are therefore associated with this old house.
The fourth large house is now degraded to a common lodging-house. But
it has still its fine old staircase.
The Parish of St. James's, Ratcliff, consists of an irregular patch of
ground having the river on the south, and the Commercial Road, one of
the great arteries of London, on the north. It contains about seven
thousand people, of whom some three thousand are Irish Catholics. It
includes a number of small, mean, and squalid streets; there is not
anywhere in the great city a collection of streets smaller or meaner.
The people live in tenement-houses, very often one family for every
room--in one street, for instance, of fifty houses, there are one
hundred and thirty families. The men are nearly all
dock-labourers--the descendants of the scuffle-hunters, whose
traditions still survive, perhaps, in an unconquerable hatred of
government. The women and girls are shirt-makers, tailoresses,
jam-makers, biscuit-makers, match-makers, and rope-makers.
In this parish the only gentlefolk are the clergy and the ladies
working in the parish for the Church; there are no substantial
shopkeepers, no private residents, no lawyer, no doctor, no
professional people of any kind; there are thirty-six public-houses,
or one to every hundred adults, so that if each spends on an average
only two shillings a week, the weekly takings of each are ten pounds.
Till lately there were forty-six, but ten have been suppressed; there
are no places of public entertainment, there are no books, there are
hardly any papers except some of those Irish papers whose continued
sufferance gives the lie to their own everlasting charges of English
tyranny. Most significant of all, there are no Dissenting chapels,
with one remarkable exception. Fifteen chapels in the three parishes
of Ratcliff, Shadwell, and St. George's have been closed during the
last twenty years. Does this mean conversion to the Anglican Church?
Not exactly; it means, first, that the people have become too poor to
maintain a chapel, and next, that they have become too poor to think
of religion. So long as an Englishman's head is above the grinding
misery, he exercises, as he should, a free and independent choice of
creeds, thereby vindicating and assorting his liberties. Here there is
no chapel, therefore no one thinks; they lie like sheep; of death and
its possibilities no one heeds; they live from day to day; when they
are young they believe they will be always young; when they are old,
so far as they know, they have been always old.
The people being such as they are--so poor, so hopeless, so
ignorant--what is done for them? How are they helped upward? How are
they driven, pushed, shoved, pulled, to prevent them from sinking
still lower? For they are not at the lowest depths; they are not
criminals; up to their lights they are honest; that poor fellow who
stands with his hands ready--all he has got in the wide world--only
his hands--no trade, no craft, no skill--will give you a good day's
work if you engage him; he will not steal things; he will drink more
than he should with the money you give him; he will knock his wife
down if she angers him; but he is not a criminal. That step has yet to
be taken; he will not take it; but his children may, and unless they
are prevented they certainly will. For the London-born child very soon
learns the meaning of the Easy Way and the Primrose Path. We have to
do with the people ignorant, drunken, helpless, always at the point of
destitution, their whole thoughts as much concentrated upon the
difficulty of the daily bread as ever were those of their ancestor who
roamed about the Middlesex Forest and hunted the bear with a club, and
shot the wild goose with a flint-headed arrow.
First there is the Church work; that is to say, the various agencies
and machinery directed by the Vicar. It may be new to some readers,
especially to Americans, to learn how much of the time and thoughts of
our Anglican beneficed clergymen are wanted for things not directly
religious. The church, a plain and unpretending edifice, built in the
year 1838, is served by the Vicar and two curates. There are daily
services, and on Sundays an early celebration. The average attendance
at the Sunday morning mid-day service is about one hundred; in the
evening it is generally double that number. They are all adults. For
the children another service is held in the Mission Room, The average
attendance at the Sunday-schools and Bible-classes is about three
hundred and fifty, and would be more if the Vicar had a larger staff
of teachers, of whom, however, there are forty-two. The whole number
of men and women engaged in organized work connected with the Church
is about one hundred and twenty-six. Some of them are ladies from the
other end of London, but most belong to the parish itself; in the
choir, for instance, are found a barber, a postman, a caretaker, and
one or two small shopkeepers, all living in the parish, When we
remember that Ratcliff is not what is called a 'show' parish, that the
newspapers never talk about it, and that rich people never hear of it,
this indicates a very considerable support to Church work.
In addition to the church proper there is the 'Mission Chapel,' where
other services are held. One day in the week there is a sale of
clothes at very low prices. They are sold rather than given, because
if the women have paid a few pence for them they are less willing to
pawn them than if they had received them for nothing. In the Mission
Chapel are held classes for young girls and services for children.
The churchyard, like so many of the London churchyards, has been
converted into a recreation ground, where there are trees and
flower-beds, and benches for old and young.
Outside the Church, but yet connected with it, there is, first, the
Girls' Club. The girls of Ratcliff are all working-girls; as might be
expected, a rough and wild company, as untrained as colts, yet open to
kindly and considerate treatment. Their first yearning is for finery;
give them a high hat with a flaring ostrich feather, a plush jacket,
and a 'fringe,' and they are happy. There are seventy-five of these
girls; they use their club every evening, and they have various
classes, though it cannot be said that they are desirous of learning
anything. Needlework, especially, they dislike; they dance, sing, have
musical drill, and read a little. Five ladies who work for the church
and for the club live in the club-house, and other ladies come to lend
assistance. When we consider what the homes and the companions of
these girls are, what kind of men will be their husbands, and that
they are to become mothers of the next generation, it seems as if one
could not possibly attempt a more useful achievement than their
civilization. Above all, this club stands in the way of the greatest
curse of East London--the boy and girl marriage. For the elder women
there are Mothers' Meetings, at which two hundred attend every week;
and there are branches of the Societies for Nursing and Helping
Married Women. For general purposes there is a Parish Sick and
Distress Fund; a fund for giving dinners to poor children; there is a
frequent distribution of fruit, vegetables, and flowers, sent up by
people from the country. And for the children there is a large room
which they can use as a play-room from four o'clock till half-past
seven. Here they are at least warm; were it not for this room they
would have to run about the cold streets; here they have games and
pictures and toys. In connection with the work for the girls, help is
given by the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants,
which takes charge of a good many of the girls.
For the men there is one of the institutions called a Tee-To-Tum Club,
which has a grand café open to everybody all day long; the members
manage the club themselves; they have a concert once a week, a
dramatic performance once a week, a gymnastic display once a week; on
Sunday they have a lecture or an address, with a discussion after it;
and they have smaller clubs attached for football, cricket, rowing,
and swimming.
For the younger lads there is another club, of one hundred and sixty
members; they also have their gymnasium, their football, cricket, and
swimming clubs; their classes for carpentry, wood-carving, singing,
and shorthand; their savings' bank, their sick club, and their
library.
Only the better class of lads belong to this club. But there is a
lower set, those who lounge about the streets at night, and take to
gambling and betting. For these boys the children's play-room is
opened in the evening; here they read, talk, box, and play bagstelle,
draughts, and dominoes, These lads are as rough as can be found, yet
on the whole they give very little trouble.
Another important institution is the Country Holiday; this is
accomplished by saving. It means, while it lasts, an expenditure of
five shillings a week; sometimes the lads are taken to the seaside and
live in a barn; sometimes the girls are sent to a village and placed
about in cottages. A great number of the girls and lads go off every
year a-hopping in Kent.
Add to these the temperance societies, and we seem to complete the
organized work of the Church. It must, however, be remembered that
this work is not confined to those who attend the services or are
Anglican in name. The clergy and the ladies who help them go about the
whole parish from house to house; they know all the people in every
house, to whatever creed they belong; their visits are looked for as a
kind of right; they are not insulted even by the roughest; they are
trusted by all; as they go along the streets the children run after
them and hang upon their dress; if a strange man is walking with one
of these ladies, they catch at his hands and pull at his
coat-tails--we judge of a man, you see, by his companions. All this
machinery seems costly. It is, of course, far beyond the slender
resources of the parish. It demands, however, no more than £850 a
year, of which £310 is found by different societies and the sum of
£540 has to be raised somehow.
There are, it has been stated, no more than seven thousand people in
this parish, of whom nearly half belong to the Church of Rome. It
would therefore almost seem as if every man, woman, and child in the
place must be brought under the influence of all this work. In a sense
all the people do feel the influence of the Church, whether they are
Anglicans or not. The parish system, as you have seen, provides
everything; for the men, clubs; for the women, nursing in sickness,
friendly counsel always, help in trouble; the girls are brought
together and kept out of mischief and encouraged in self-respect by
ladies who understand what they want and how they look at things, the
grown lads are taken from the streets, and, with the younger boys, are
taught arts and crafts, and are trained in manly exercises just as if
they were boys of Eton and Harrow. The Church services, which used to
be everything, are now only a part of the parish work. The clergy are
at once servants of the altar, preachers, teachers, almoners, leaders
in all kinds of societies and clubs, and providers of amusements and
recreation. The people look on, hold out their hands, receive, at
first indifferently--but presently, one by one, awaken to a new sense.
As they receive they cannot choose but to discover that these ladies
have given up their luxurious homes and the life of ease in order to
work among them. They also discover that these young gentlemen who
'run' the dubs, teach the boys gymnastics, boxing, drawing, carving,
and the rest, give up for this all their evenings--the flower of the
day in the flower of life. What for? What do they get for it? Not in
this parish only, but in every parish the same kind of thing goes on
and spreads daily. This--observe--is the last step _but one_ of
charity. For the progress of charity is as follows: First, there is
the pitiful dole to the beggar; then the bequest to monk and
monastery; then the founding of the almshouse and the parish charity;
then the Easter and the Christmas offerings; then the gift to the
almoner; then the cheque to a society; next--latest and best--personal
service among the poor. This is both flower and fruit of charity. One
thing only remains. And before long this thing also shall come to pass
as well.
Those who live in the dens and witness these things done daily must be
stocks and stones if they were not moved by them. They are not stocks
and stones; they are actually, though slowly, moved by them; the old
hatred of the Church--you may find it expressed in the working man's
papers of fifty years ago--is dying out rapidly in our great towns;
the brawling is better, even the drinking is diminishing. And there is
another--perhaps an unexpected--result. Not only are the poor turning
to the Church which befriends them, the Church which they used to
deride, but the clergy are turning to the poor; there are many for
whom the condition of the people is above all other earthly
considerations. If that great conflict--long predicted--of capital and
labour ever takes place, it is safe to prophecy that the Church will
not desert the poor.
Apart from the Church what machinery is at work? First, because there
are so many Catholics in the place, one must think of them. It is,
however, difficult to ascertain the Catholic agencies at work among
these people. The people are told that they must go to mass; Roman
Catholic sisters give dinners to children; there is the Roman League
of the Cross--a temperance association; I think that the Catholics are
in great measure left to the charities of the Anglicans, so long as
these do not try to convert the Romans.
The Salvation Army people attempt nothing--absolutely nothing in this
parish. There are at present neither Baptist, nor Wesleyan, nor
Independent chapels in the place. A few years ago, on the appearance
of the book called the 'Bitter Cry of Outcast London,' an attempt was
made by the last-named body; they found an old chapel belonging to the
Congregationalists, with an endowment of £80 a year, which they turned
into a mission-hall, and carried on with spirit for two years mission
work in the place; they soon obtained large funds, which they seem to
have lavished with more zeal than discretion. Presently their money
was all gone and they could get no more; then the chapel was turned
into a night-shelter. Next It was burned to the ground. It is now
rebuilt and is again a night-shelter. There is, however, an historic
monument in the parish with which remains a survival of former
activity. It is a Quaker meeting-house which dates back to 1667. It
stands within its walls, quiet and decorous; there are the chapel, the
ante-room, and the burial-ground. The congregation still meet, reduced
to fifty; they still hold their Sunday-school; and not far off one of
the fraternity carries on a Crêche which takes care of seventy or
eighty babies, and is blessed every day by as many mothers.
Considering all these agencies--how they are at work day after day,
never resting, never ceasing, never relaxing their hold, always
compelling the people more and more within the circle of their
influence; how they incline the hearts of the children to better
things and show them how to win these better things--one wonders that
the whole parish is not already clad in white robes and sitting with
harp and crown. On the other hand, walking down London Street,
Ratcliff, looking at the foul houses, hearing the foul language,
seeing the poor women with black eyes, watching the multitudinous
children in the mud, one wonders whether even these agencies are
enough to stem the tide and to prevent this mass of people from
falling lower and lower still into the hell of savagery. This parish
is one of the poorest in London; it is one of the least known; it is
one of the least visited. Explorers of slums seldom come here; it is
not fashionably miserable. Yet all these fine things are done here,
and as in this parish so in every other. It is continually stated as a
mere commonplace--one may see the thing advanced everywhere, in
'thoughtful' papers, in leading articles--that the Church of Rome
alone can produce its self-sacrificing martyrs, its lives of pure
devotion. Then what of these parish-workers of the Church of England?
What of that young physician who worked himself to death for the
children? What of the young men--not one here and there but in
dozens--who give up all that young men mostly love for the sake of
laborious nights among rough and rude lads? What of the gentlewomen
who pass long years--give up their youth, their beauty, and their
strength--among girls and women whose language is at first like a blow
to them? What of the clergy themselves, always, all day long, living
in the midst of the very poor--hardly paid, always giving out of their
poverty, forgotten in their obscurity, far from any chance of
promotion, too hard-worked to read or study, dropped out of all the
old scholarly circles? Nay, my brothers, we cannot allow to the Church
of Rome all the unselfish men and women. Father Damien is one of us as
well. I have met him--I know him by sight--he lives and has long
lived, in Riverside London.
ST. KATHERINE'S BY THE TOWER
On the 30th day of October, in the year of grace one thousand eight
hundred and twenty-five, there was gathered together a congregation to
assist at the mournfullest service ever heard in any church. The place
was the Precinct of St. Katherine's, the church was that known as St.
Katherine's by the Tower--the most ancient and venerable church in the
whole of East London--a city which now has but two ancient churches
left, those of Bow and of Stepney, without counting the old tower of
Hackney.
Suppose it was advertised that the last and the farewell service,
before the demolition of the Abbey, would be held at Westminster on a
certain day; that after the service the old church would be pulled
down; that some of the monuments would be removed, the rest destroyed;
that the bones of the illustrious dead would be carted away and
scattered, and that the site would be occupied by warehouses used for
commercial purposes. One can picture the frantic rage and despair with
which the news would everywhere be received; one can imagine the
stirring of the hearts of all those who to every part of the world
inherit the Anglo-Saxon speech, one can hear the sobbing and the
wailing which accompany the last anthem, the last sermon, the last
prayer.