THRIFT
It is just that a short chapter should be devoted to the thrift of such
a class of wage-earners and their wives as are described here. It is a
common idea that there is no thrift among them. It would be better for
their children if this were true. As a matter of fact, sums varying
from 6d. a week to 1s. 6d., 1s. 8d., or even 2s., go out from incomes
which are so small that these sums represent, perhaps, from 2½ to 10
per cent. of the whole household allowance. The object of this thrift
is, unfortunately, not of the slightest benefit to the children of the
families concerned. The money is spent or saved or invested, whichever is
the proper term, on burial insurance. No living child is better fed or
better clothed because its parents, decent folk, scrape up a penny a week
to pay the insurance collector on its account. Rather is it less well fed
and less well clothed to the extent of 1d. a week—an appreciable amount
when it is, perhaps, one of eight persons living on £1 a week.
One of the criticisms levelled at these respectable, hard-working,
independent people is that they do like to squander money on funerals.
It is a view held by everyone who does not know the real circumstances.
It is also held by many who do know them, but who confuse the fact that
poor people show a great interest in one another’s funerals with the
erroneous idea that they could bury their dead for half the amount if
they liked. Sometimes, in the case of adult men, this may be so. When
alive, the man, perhaps, was a member of a society for burial benefit,
and at his death the club or society bury him with much pomp and
ceremony. In the case of the young children of people living on from 18s.
to 30s. a week, the parents do not squander money on funerals which might
be undertaken for half the price.
A working man and his wife who have a family are confronted with the
problem of burial at once. They are likely to lose one or more of their
children. The poorer they are, the more likely are they to lose them.
Shall they run the risk of burial by the parish, or shall they take Time
by the forelock and insure each child as it is born, at the rate of a
penny a week? If they decide not to insure, and they lose a child, the
question resolves itself into one of borrowing the sum necessary to pay
the funeral expenses, or of undergoing the disgrace of a pauper funeral.
The pauper funeral carries with it the pauperization of the father of
the child—a humiliation which adds disgrace to the natural grief of
the parents. More than that, they declare that the pauper funeral is
wanting in dignity and in respect to their dead. One woman expressed the
feeling of many more when she said she would as soon have the dust-cart
call for the body of her child as that “there Black Mariar.” This may
be sheer prejudice on the part of poor parents, but it is a prejudice
which richer parents—even the most educated and highly born of them—if
confronted with the same problem when burying their own children, would
fully share. Refusing, then, if uninsured, to accept the pauper burial,
with its consequent political and social degradation of a perfectly
respectable family, the parents try to borrow the money needed. Up and
down the street sums are collected in pence and sixpences, until the
price of a child’s funeral on the cheapest scale is secured. Funerals are
not run on credit; but the neighbours, who may be absolute strangers,
will contribute rather than suffer the degradation to pauperism of one
of themselves. For months afterwards the mother and remaining children
will eat less in order to pay back the money borrowed. The father of the
family cannot eat less. He is already eating as little as will enable
him to earn the family wage. To starve him would be bad economy. He must
fare as usual. The rest of the family can eat less without bothering
anybody—and do.
What is the sum necessary to stand between a working man and pauperdom
should he suffer the loss of a child? Inquiry among undertakers in
Lambeth and Kennington resulted in the discovery that a very young baby
could be buried by one undertaker for 18s., and by a dozen others for
20s. To this must be added the fee of 10s. to the cemetery paid by the
undertaker, which brought his charges up to 28s. or 30s. No firm could
be discovered who would do it for less. When a child’s body is too long
to go under the box-seat of the driver, the price of the funeral goes
up. A sort of age scale is roughly in action, which makes a funeral of a
child of three more expensive than that of a child of six months. Thirty
shillings, then, is the lowest sum to be faced by the grieving parents.
But how is a man whose whole weekly income may be but two-thirds of that
amount to produce at sight 30s. or more? Of course he cannot. Sheer dread
of the horrible problem drives his wife to pay out 10d., 11d., or 1s., a
week year after year—money which, as far as the welfare of the children
themselves go, might as well be thrown into the sea.
A penny a week paid from birth just barely pays the funeral expenses as
the child grows older. It does not completely pay them in early infancy.
Thirteen weekly pennies must be paid before any benefit is due, and the
first sum due is not sufficient; but it is a help. As each child must
be insured separately, the money paid for the child who does not die
is no relief when a death occurs. Insurance, whether State or other
insurance, is always a gamble, and people on £1 a week cannot afford a
gamble. A peculiar hardship attaches to burial insurance. A man may have
paid regularly for years, may fall out of work through illness or other
misfortune, and may lose all benefit. When out of work his children are
more likely to die, and he may have to suffer the disgrace of a pauper
funeral after five years or more of regular payment for burial insurance.
Great numbers of premature confinements occur among women who live the
lives these wives and mothers do. A premature confinement, if the child
breathes, means an uninsured funeral. True, an undertaker will sometimes
provide a coffin which he slips into another funeral, evade the cemetery
fee, and only charge 10s.; but even 10s. is a terrible sum to produce at
the moment. Great is the anxiety on the part of the mother to be able to
prove that her child was stillborn.
The three-year-old daughter of a carter out of work died of tuberculosis.
The father, whose policies had lapsed, borrowed the sum of £2 5s.
necessary to bury the child. The mother was four months paying the debt
off by reducing the food of herself and of the five other children. The
funeral cortège consisted of one vehicle, in which the little coffin went
under the driver’s seat. The parents and a neighbour sat in the back part
of the vehicle. They saw the child buried in a common grave with twelve
other coffins of all sizes. “We ’ad to keep a sharp eye out for Edie,”
they said; “she were so little she were almost ’id.”
The following is an account kept of the funeral of a child of six months
who died of infantile cholera in the deadly month of August, 1911. The
parents had insured her for 2d. a week, being unusually careful people.
The sum received was £2.
£ s. d.
Funeral 1 12 0
Death certificate 0 1 3
Gravediggers 0 2 0
Hearse attendants 0 2 0
Woman to lay her out 0 2 0
Insurance agent 0 1 0
Flowers 0 0 6
Black tie for father 0 1 0
--------
2 1 9
The child was buried in a common grave with three others. There is no
display and no extravagance in this list. The tips to the gravediggers,
hearse attendants, and insurance agent, were all urgently applied for,
though not in every case by the person who received the money. The cost
of the child’s illness had amounted to 10s., chiefly spent on special
food. The survivors lived on reduced rations for two weeks in order to
get square again. The father’s wage was 24s., every penny of which he
always handed over to his wife.
The usual amount paid for burial insurance is 1d. a week for each child,
2d. for the mother, and 3d. for the father, making 11d. a week for a
family with six children, though some over-cautious women make the sum
more.
Another form of thrift is some sort of paying-out club. Usually
payments of this kind come out of the father’s pocket-money, but a few
instances where the women made them came within the experience of the
investigators. One club was named a “didly club.” Its method seemed
to consist in each member paying a certain woman ¼d. the first week,
½d. the next week, ¾d. the next week, and so on, always adding ¼d. to
the previous payment. The money was to be divided at Christmas. It
was a mere way of saving, as no interest of any kind was to be paid.
Needless to relate, about October the woman to whom the money had been
paid disappeared. Stocking clubs, crockery clubs, and Christmas dinner
clubs, make short appearances in the budgets. They usually entail a
weekly payment of 3d. or 4d., and when the object—the children’s winter
stockings, the new plates, or the Christmas dinner—has been attained, the
payments cease.
One form of money transaction which is hardly regarded as justifiable
when poor people resort to it, but which at the same time is the
ordinary, laudable, business custom of rich men—namely, borrowing—is
carried on by the poor under very distressing conditions. When no friend
or friends can be found to help at a crisis, many a woman has been
driven—perhaps to pay the rent—to go to what she calls a lender. A few
shillings are borrowed—perhaps five or six. The terms are a penny a week
on every shilling borrowed, with, it may be, a kind of tip of half a
crown at the end when all the principle and interest has been paid off.
A woman borrowing 6s. pays 6d. a week in sheer interest—that is, £1 6s.
a year—without reducing her debt a penny. She is paying 433 per cent. on
her loan. She does not know the law, and she could not afford to invoke
its aid if she did know it. She goes on being bled because it is the
local accepted rate of a “lender.” Only one of the women whose budgets
appear in these pages has had recourse to this kind of borrowing, but the
custom is well known by them all.
Such is the passion for weekly regular payments among these women that,
had the Post Office initiated regular collection of pennies instead of
the industrial insurance companies doing so, either the Post Office
would now be in possession of the enormous accumulated capital of these
companies, or the people on 20s. a week would have been much better off.
The great bulk of the pennies so urgently needed for other purposes, and
paid for burial insurance, is never returned in any form whatsoever to
the people who pay them. The small proportion which does come to them is
swallowed up in a burial, and no one but the undertaker is the better
for it. As a form of thrift which shall help the future, or be a standby
if misfortune should befall, burial insurance is a calamitous blunder.
Yet the respectable poor man is forced to resort to it unless he is to
run the risk of being made a pauper by any bereavement which may happen
to him. It is a terrible object lesson in how not to manage. If the sum
of £11,000,000 a year stated to be paid in weekly pennies by the poor
to the industrial burial insurance companies were to be spent on better
house room and better food—if, in fact, the one great universal thrift of
the poor were not for death, but were for life—we should have a stronger
nation. The only real solution of this horrible problem would seem to be
the making of decent burial a free and honourable public service.