|These pages would be incomplete without at least a passing reference to
some of the many efforts which have already been made to deal with the
evils arising from the condition of things it has been my desire to
expose.
The mere charitable work going on I have not space to deal with. There
are night refuges, missions, and many excellent institutions due to
public and private enterprise in all the poorer quarters, all of which
in a manner more or less satisfactory afford relief to the inhabitants.
One good work, however, which I do not care to leave hiding its light
under a bushel is the home for factory-girls, managed by the Sisters of
St. John the Baptist, Clewer, and situated in Southwark.
Here, girls employed in the many factories of the neighbourhood during
the day can, if they are willing to submit to the rules, find a real
home for a small weekly payment, and escape the wretched and too often
vicious surroundings of the places in which their parents live.
With a full knowledge of all the temptation which besets the work-girls
who have to spend their leisure in these slums, none can doubt the good
work such institutions may do.
On the night of our visit we were conducted from basement to roof by one
of the Sisters; we saw the girls and heard their histories from their
own lips, and learnt how terrible was the sin and misery which had
forced them to look upon their vile homes with loathing, and how fierce
the temptation which beset them when left to themselves.
These girls are of the class which most deserve help; they work hard
at dangerous trades for their living, and they pay for their food and
board. What the charity does is to throw a certain home influence around
them, give them cleanliness and godliness, and preserve them to some
extent from the contamination of the streets--streets which are here
thronged at night with the worst types of humanity the great city can
show.
The story of the Mission is romantic. A lady, Mrs. Hun, was left a
young widow. After less than two years of married life her husband died
suddenly. She devoted herself to her only daughter, who grew up into
a beautiful girl. The morning after her first ball the young lady was
found dead in her bed. To assuage her grief and keep from breaking down
utterly, the bereaved mother determined to devote herself to charity.
The fearful condition of the young girls in this neighbourhood was
brought to her attention, and with her fortune and that of her dead
daughter she devoted herself to establishing a home for factory-girls.
Such is the short and simple story of how this excellent institution was
founded. How it is carried out, how the girls cling to the Home, and how
thoroughly they appreciate its comforts, any lady can see who cares to
take a trip as far as Union Street, Borough, and ring the bell of the
All Hallows' Mission-House.
The work which these girls have to do in return for a small wage is
generally of a dangerous character. Many of them literally snatch their
food from the jaws of death.
One girl in the Home was white and ill and weak, and her story may be
taken as a sample. She worked at the 'bronzing,' that is, a branch of
the chromo-lithography business, and it consists in applying a fluid,
which gives off a poisonous exhalation, to certain work. Bronzing enters
largely into the composition of those Christmas pictures which delight
us so much at the festive season, and which adorn the nursery of many a
happy, rosy-cheeked English child.
The law, recognising the dangerous nature of the work, says that the
girls doing it shall be allowed a pint of milk per day, the milk in some
way counteracting the effect of the poison the girls inhale. It will
hardly be believed that some of the best firms refuse to comply with the
regulation, and if the girls complain they are at once discharged.
Now, the wages paid are seven shillings per week. To keep at their
employment it is necessary that the workers take castor-oil daily, and
drink at least a pint of milk. They must either pay for these luxuries
out of their scanty earnings or go without, and eventually find their
way to the hospital.
Take another trade--the fur-pulling. The women and girls employed at
this are in some shops locked in the room with their work, and have to
eat their food there.
If you had ever seen a room crowded with girls pulling the fluff from
cats, rabbits, rats, and goodness knows what other animals, you would
appreciate the situation better. The fluff, the down, and the small
hairs smother everything, and are necessarily swallowed by the occupants
of the room, with pernicious effect. Yet it is the custom of some of
the men in the trade to force their employés to eat under such
circumstances--that is, to swallow their food thickly coated with the
hairs from which nothing can preserve it.
Why do not the women refuse? Because they would be discharged. There are
always hundreds ready and eager to take their places. The struggle for
bread is too fierce for the fighters to shrink from any torture in its
attainment.
With the dangers of the white-lead works, which employ a large number of
these families, most people are now familiar; at least, those who read
the inquests must be. In addition to the liability to lead-poisoning, in
many of these works the machinery is highly dangerous. In spite of the
Employers' Liability Act, the victims of machinery accidents--that is,
when they are women or children--rarely get compensation.
The hospitals are full of accidents from these causes; often the
negligence is that of a fellow-workman, but in at least half a dozen
cases I have investigated not one shilling of compensation has the
victim obtained.
Saw-mills, and places where steam and circular saws are used, employ a
large number of boys. If you were to give a tea-party to saw-mill boys,
the thing that would astonish you would be the difficulty of finding
half a dozen of your guests with the proper number of fingers.
I know one little lad who is employed at pulling out the planks which
have been pushed through the machine by men, and he has one hand now on
which only the thumb is left. Then there is the lemonade-bottling, which
is another industry largely employing the lads of poor neighbourhoods.
The bottles are liable to burst, and cases of maiming are almost of
daily occurrence. The bottlers are obliged to wear masks to protect
their faces, but their hands are bound to be exposed to the danger.
These are a few of the dangerous and unhealthy occupations by which the
poor live, and I have enumerated those largely practised by children.
I have done so to show how little we can wonder if for lack of a
protecting arm, or that parental love which is, alas! so rare a thing
in the very poor districts, these boys and girls yield to the first
temptation to go wrong, and instead of risking life and limb for a
paltry wage, take to those paths of vice which we have it on the highest
authority are always the most easy of access.
As we leave the home of the factory girls we come upon a scene which
illustrates the life outside. A big crowd of foul-mouthed, blackguardly
boys and girls, with a few men and women among them, are gathered round
two girls who are fighting fiercely. They have quarrelled, a bystander
tells us, in the adjacent public-house about a young man. He is
considered her legitimate property by one lady, and the said lady has
surprised him treating her rival to gin. Neither of the girls is more
than seventeen, I should say, yet they are fighting and blaspheming and
using words that make even myself and my collaborator shudder, used as
we are by this time to the defiled Saxon of the slums.
'Go it, Sal!' yells a female friend, and Sal goes it, and the boys
and girls stand round and enjoy the spectacle, and add their chorus of
blasphemy and indecency to the quarrel duet of the Madame Angots of the
gutter.
I had nearly forgotten an incident which occurred when we were in the
factory-girls' home, and which is not without its lesson as showing the
value even these girls attach to social position. One young lady was
introduced to us as having a sweetheart who always brought her home of
an evening with great punctuality. 'What is your sweetheart?' I asked.
'A boot-finisher,' was the answer. 'Where does he work--at what firm?'
'He works just by Fenchurch Street Station.' 'Is it a large
bootmaker's?' 'Well, it ain't exactly a bootmaker's; he's a shoeblack.'
I never heard a shoeblack called a boot-finisher before, but I think the
euphemism was allowable in a young lady who wished to exalt the
commercial status of her intended.
I alluded in a recent chapter to the costermongers as a large and worthy
class. Since that chapter was written I have explored a district which
is almost exclusively inhabited by them--a portion of St. Luke's. To
what I have already written let me add that until now I had not the
slightest conception that things were so bad as they really are. My
visit was early in the morning, before the men and women had gone out
with their loads. If you could have seen the condition of the rooms and
yards piled up with rotting vegetable refuse, and the way in which the
cabbages and the fruit were stowed for the night, and where they were
stowed, it would have cured such among you as are fond of a bargain at
the door from ever patronising a barrow again.
Out of the fetid one room where man and wife and family slept they
carried the stuff that then neighbours were to eat. It had passed the
night with them, and the green-stuff was decidedly faded and languid.
It was piled on the barrow, and then soused with dirty water, and so
wheeled away to be cried up and down the streets of London.
No wonder diseases are spread if from such poisoned, fever-breeding dens
as this the food is carried with all its impurity day after day to be
hawked from door to door!
I do not blame the costers. They must get where there is an open space
for their barrows handy, some bit of waste land where houses have been
condemned and pulled down. They stack their barrows here, taking off one
wheel and carrying it home, that their property may not be wheeled off
in the night. But areas with this waste land are limited, so up go the
prices, and the coster must pay. In Green Arbour Gourt, St. Luke's, I
came upon a man who was paying eight shillings a week for one miserable
room, and all round the district the very vilest accommodation fetches
something very near that figure.
Eight shillings a week for one room! Surely a class that can pay that
must be worth catering for even by the five per cent. philanthropists.
Some time ago there was a scheme to build a goods station in this
district, and before the Bill could be considered Parliment required a
labouring-class statement, that is, a statement of the number of poor
people who would be displaced.
On looking through the figures I find that to build this station about
3,000 poor people would have to be turned out of their homes.
It is the pulling down of area after area for the purpose of building
large warehouses and railway-stations, and that sort of thing, which is,
of course, at the root of the overcrowding. The accommodation becomes
more limited year after year, and the property built as dwelling-houses
under the Artisans' Dwellings Act does not, as I have pointed out
before, offer any accommodation to the class displaced.
In another district I made a discovery which I fancy must be unique. I
found a public-house which was a highway for traffic. You went out of a
street into a bar--you walked straight through and found yourself in
a network of courts behind. I found on inquiry that for years the
public-house had been used as a footpath, and I have no doubt it was
found highly convenient by ladies and gentlemen in a hurry to escape
observation.
In another district still I unearthed as sweet a little story as any of
the annals of jobbery can, I imagine, furnish. Let me tell it carefully,
for the law of libel is a fearful and wonderful thing, and I have no
desire that my publishers should eat their next Christmas dinner in
Holloway Gaol.
A big block of buildings, falling into decay, was for sale. A person
officially connected with the parish drew the attention of the sanitary
officers to them, and had them condemned as unfit for habitation.
Directly this was done the parish gentleman, in conjunction with a firm
of speculators, bought the property for a bagatelle--for old building
material, in fact. But the new proprietors didn't pull it down--not
they. They gave a coat of whitewash here and there, and let every single
room again directly at increased rentals, and every single room is full
of rent-payers now. The street of houses which was condemned five years
ago has been a little gold mine, and a handsome fortune has been made
out of it by the very people who insisted upon calling the attention of
the sanitary authorities to it.
It is needless to say that the same attention has never been solicited
since.
I should like to know how many more blocks of property--unfit for human
habitation--are held in the same way in London.
I fancy the revelations on this subject would be startling to a degree.
Yet amidst all these horrors and sufferings, working at dangerous
trades, housed in death-traps, neglected and persecuted, the poor manage
to live, and some of them to amuse themselves. How they amuse themselves
we shall shortly see.