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ROUND ABOUT A POUND A WEEK
ROUND ABOUT
A POUND A WEEK
BY
MRS. PEMBER REEVES
[Illustration]
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.
1913
TO MY FELLOW-WORKER E. C. L.
PREFACE
I am glad to take this opportunity to acknowledge the use I have made
of a manuscript written by Mrs. Charlotte Wilson, Hon. Secretary of the
Fabian Women’s Group. The manuscript was founded on a lecture, entitled
“The Economic Disintegration of the Family,” delivered by Mrs. Wilson
to the Fabian Society in June, 1909. Not only ideas contained in the
lecture, but also some of the wording of the manuscript, have been used
in the last two chapters.
I wish also to thank Dr. Ethel Bentham for the invaluable professional
service rendered by her during the five years of the investigation.
M. S. REEVES.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE DISTRICT 1
II. THE PEOPLE 8
III. HOUSING 21
IV. FURNITURE—SLEEPING ACCOMMODATION—EQUIPMENT
FOR COOKING AND BATHING 46
V. THRIFT 66
VI. BUDGETS 75
VII. FOOD: CHIEF ARTICLES OF DIET 94
VIII. BUYING, STORING, AND CARING FOR FOOD 104
IX. ACTUAL MENUS OF SEVERAL WORKING MEN’S
FAMILIES 113
X. AMOUNT SPENT A HEAD ON FOOD—PER
WEEK, PER DAY 132
XI. THE POOR AND MARRIAGE 146
XII. MOTHERS’ DAYS 159
XIII. THE CHILDREN 176
XIV. THE PEOPLE WHO ARE OUT OF WORK 195
XV. THE STANDARD OF COMFORT 211
XVI. THE STATE AS GUARDIAN 223
ROUND ABOUT A POUND A WEEK
CHAPTER I
THE DISTRICT
Take a tram from Victoria to Vauxhall Station. Get out under the railway
arch which faces Vauxhall Bridge, and there you will find Kennington
Lane. The railway arch roofs in a din which reduces the roar of trains
continually passing overhead to a vibrating, muffled rumble. From either
end of the arch comes a close procession of trams, motor-buses, brewers’
drays, coal-lorries, carts filled with unspeakable material for glue
factory and tannery, motor-cars, coster-barrows, and people. It is a
stopping-place for tramcars and motor-buses; therefore little knots of
agitated persons continually collect on both pathways, and dive between
the vehicles and descending passengers in order to board the particular
bus or tram they desire. At rhythmic intervals all traffic through the
arch is suspended to allow a flood of trams, buses, drays, and vans, to
surge and rattle and bang across the opening of the archway which faces
the river.
At the opposite end there is no cross-current. The trams slide away to
the right towards the Oval. In front is Kennington Lane, and to the left,
at right angles, a narrow street connects with Vauxhall Walk, leading
farther on into Lambeth Walk, both locally better known as The Walk. Such
is the western gateway to the district stretching north to Lambeth Road,
south to Lansdowne Road, and east to Walworth Road, where live the people
whose lives form the subject of this book.
They are not the poorest people of the district. Far from it! They are,
putting aside the tradesmen whose shops line the big thoroughfares such
as Kennington Road or Kennington Park Road, some of the more enviable and
settled inhabitants of this part of the world. The poorest people—the
river-side casual, the workhouse in-and-out, the bar-room loafer—are
anxiously ignored by these respectable persons whose work is permanent,
as permanency goes in Lambeth, and whose wages range from 18s. to 30s. a
week.
They generally are somebody’s labourer, mate, or handyman. Painters’
labourers, plumbers’ labourers, builders’ handymen, dustmen’s mates,
printers’ labourers, potters’ labourers, trouncers for carmen, are
common amongst them. Or they may be fish-fryers, tailors’ pressers,
feather-cleaners’ assistants, railway-carriage washers, employees of
dust contractors, carmen for Borough Council contractors, or packers
of various descriptions. They are respectable men in full work, at a
more or less top wage, young, with families still increasing, and they
will be lucky if they are never worse off than they now are. Their
wives are quiet, decent, “keep themselves-to-themselves” kind of women,
and the children are the most punctual and regular scholars, the most
clean-headed children of the poorer schools in Kennington and Lambeth.
The streets they live in are monotonously and drearily decent, lying
back from the main arteries, and with little traffic other than a stray
barrel-organ, a coal-lorry selling by the hundredweight sack, or a
taxi-cab going to or from its driver’s dinner at home. At certain hours
in the day—before morning school, at midday, and after four o’clock—these
narrow streets become full of screaming, running, shouting children.
Early in the morning men come from every door and pass out of sight. At
different times during the evening the same men straggle home again.
At all other hours the street is quiet and desperately dull. Less
ultra-respectable neighbourhoods may have a certain picturesqueness, or
give a sense of community of interest or of careless comradeship, with
their untidy women chatting in the doorways and their unoccupied men
lounging at the street corners; but in these superior streets a kind of
dull aloofness seems to be the order of the day.
The inhabitants keep themselves to themselves, and watch the doings of
the other people from behind window curtains, knowing perfectly that
every incoming and outgoing of their own is also jealously recorded by
critical eyes up and down the street. A sympathetic stranger walking the
length of one of these thoroughfares feels the atmosphere of criticism.
The rent-collector, the insurance agent, the coalman, may pass the time
of day with worn women in the doorways, but a friendly smile from the
stranger receives no response. A weekly caller becomes the abashed object
of intense interest on the part of everybody in the street, from the
curious glances of the greengrocer’s lady at the corner to the appraising
stare of the fat little baker who always manages to be on his doorstep
across the road. And everywhere along the street is the visitor conscious
of eyes which disappear from behind veiled windows. This consciousness
accentuates the dispiriting outlook.
The houses are outwardly decent—two stories of grimy brick. The roadway
is narrow, but on the whole well kept, and on the pavement outside
many doors there is to be noticed, in a greater or less condition of
freshness, a semicircle of hearthstone, which has for its radius the
length of the housewife’s arm as she kneels on the step. In some streets
little paved alley-ways lead behind the front row of houses, and twist
and turn among still smaller dwellings at the back—dwellings where
the front door leads downwards into a room instead of upwards into a
passage. Districts of this kind cover dreary acres—the same little
two-story house, with or without an inconceivably drearier basement,
with the same kind of baker’s shop at the corner faced by the same kind
of greengrocer’s shop opposite. The ugly, constantly-recurring school
buildings are a relief to the spirit oppressed by the awful monotony.
The people who live in these places are not really more like one another
than the people who live in Belgrave Square or South Kensington.
But there is no mixture of rich and poor, no startling contrast, no
crossing-sweeper and no super-taxpayer, and the first impression is that
of uniformity. As a matter of fact, the characteristics of Mrs. Smith of
Kennington and the characteristics of Mrs. Brown who lives next door are
more easily to be differentiated by a stranger in the street than are the
characteristics of Mrs. Smythe of Bayswater from those of Mrs. Browne who
occupies the house next to her.
Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Brown, though they may never be seen by the
passer-by, are able to imprint their personality on the street because
their ways are open, and meant to be open, to all whom it may concern.
Mrs. Smith likes red ochre at her door, in spite of the children’s boots
messing it all over the floor. Moreover, she likes to cover the big
flagstone in front of the door, and two lesser stones, one on each side;
she makes the edges coincide with the cracks, and produces a two-winged
effect of deep importance. It is likely that Mrs. Smith’s mother lived
in a village where not to do your doorstep thus was a social sin, where
perhaps there was but one flagstone, and Mrs. Smith in her childhood was
accustomed to square edges.
Mrs. Brown “can’t abide that nasty stuff,” and uses good hearthstone, as
her mother taught her to do. Mrs. Brown prefers also the semi-circular
sweep of the arm which secures the rounded edge and curved effect which
satisfy her sense of propriety and usualness.
Mrs. Smith has a geranium in a pot in her front window, and the lace
curtains which shield her privacy behind it are starched and blued
according to some severe precedent ignored by the other ladies of the
neighbourhood.
Mrs. Brown goes in for a scheme of window decoration which shows the dirt
less. She has a row of red and yellow cocoa tins to make a bright effect.
The merest outsider calling for the first time on Mrs. Smith knows her
beforehand for the decent, cleanly soul she is, and only wonders whether
the struggle of life has worn her temper to fiddle-strings or whether
some optimistic strain in her nature still allows her to hope on. The
same outsider looking at Mrs. Brown’s front door and window would realize
her to be one who puts a good face on things, and, if it happened to
be the right time of a day which was not washing-day, probably would
expect, after the proper ceremonial had been gone through, to be asked in
to sit behind the cocoa tins.
Who could tell anything half so interesting from the front doors of Mrs.
Smythe and Mrs. Browne of Bayswater? Who could tell, on meeting each of
these ladies face to face, more than her official age and the probable
state of her husband’s purse?
The children of the street are equally different from one another both
in character and appearance, and are often startlingly good-looking.
They have shrill voices, clumsy clothes, the look of being small for
their age, and they are liable to be comfortably dirty, but there the
characteristics they have in common cease. They may be wonderfully
fair, with delicate skins and pale hair; they may have red hair, with
snub-nosed, freckled faces; or they may be dark and intense, with long,
thick eyelashes and slender, lithe bodies. Some are apathetic, some are
restless. They are often intelligent; but while some are able to bring
their intelligence to bear on their daily life, others seem quite unable
to do so. They are abnormally noisy. Had they been well housed, well fed,
well clothed, and well tended, from birth, what kind of raw material
would they have shown themselves to be?