refined and odoriferous thoroughfare known as Leman Street, Whitechapel,
there is situated a large, fine building, with entrances commanding two
streets, and a summit that towers very nobly among the adjacent roofs.
Once upon a time the Royal Brunswick Theatre stood where that house now
stands, and vestiges of the old structure still linger in the form of
some pillars or columns at the main entrance, and various underground
avenues, in whose atmosphere, despite forty years of very strong marine
flavouring, there seems to lurk to this hour a kind of ghostly smell of
ancient orange-peel. The house is known far and wide as the Well Street
Home for Sailors, and I once accepted an invitation from the manager to
overhaul the premises, and judge for myself to what extent the Home
improves upon the comforts and privileges the sailor flatters himself he
may obtain at a common seamen’s boarding or lodging house. I must own
that I approached the place with a certain amount of foregone prejudice.
Establishments known as Harbours of Refuge, Seaman’s Sheet Anchor, Ports
of Call, and the like, all mariners who will not sham piety for the sake
of a coat, or a plug of tobacco, or a meal of bread and meat will keep
to windward of. Jack objects to this kind of classification. He
dislikes to be dealt with as something apart from the ordinary run of
mortals; to be preached to in language which the minister may fondly
imagine to be the dialect of the sea; to have tracts doled out to him in
the form of marine allegories, as if he could comprehend no other
allusions to life and death, and sin and virtue, than those which
referred to heaving billows and storm-driven barks and broken tackle;
and when ashore, to make one of a flock of seamen, to meet nobody but
seamen, to go to prayers in a church filled with seamen;--to be treated,
indeed, as if he ought to carry a badge or number on his back, as if his
whole class were socially tabooed. So, thinking this Well Street Home to
have something of the old unpleasant and ill-judging form of charity
mixed up in its composition, and considerably disturbed in mind by the
first four lines of its forty-seventh annual report, I entered the Dock
Street entrance, never doubting but that I should meet with plenty of
features to account for the sailor’s preference for the grimy, frowsy,
and squalid lodging-houses, of which there were some dozens in the
neighbourhood.
I found myself in a very large hall filled with seamen. There was
perhaps hardly a nationality that was not represented. Englishmen and
Scandinavians were plentiful; but in numerous places were black and
yellow skins, the sight of which carried the mind thousands of miles
east and south, and brought up visions of skies different indeed from
the brown heavens which were careering in gloomy folds over the
chimney-pots visible through the windows. In a few moments I was joined
by the manager, and we proceeded to inspect the premises. In a manner it
was like surveying St. Paul’s Cathedral. Big as the building looked
outside, it seemed four times as large again when I began to roam about
it. Room led into room, wing conducted into wing, until methought
Whitechapel itself might seem to lack area enough for the accommodation
of this most ramified and capacious interior. Behind a glass front stood
a porter wading through several huge piles of letters in search of those
expected by some dozen men, who eagerly waited while he looked.
“The correspondence here must be enormous,” said I, “judging by those
samples.”
“It is enormous,” answered the manager. “Thousands upon thousands of
letters and telegrams are received and distributed in the course of the
year.”
We entered a large room with a circular counter in it, behind which were
several clerks hard at work over their ledgers, while a number of seamen
were drawing or paying in money.
“This is the bank,” said the manager; “here we receive such moneys as
the men choose to deposit, and credit them with the wages which they
have to receive from the ships they have been discharged from. Here,
too, we cash their allotment notes, and what we do in that way you may
guess by looking at that long box there, that is full of allotment notes
which are maturing at various dates.”
“But,” said I, “I thought the allotment note was only made payable to a
relative or to a savings-bank. This is not a savings-bank?”
“Oh,” he exclaimed drily, “there are two kinds of allotment notes. One
is, as you say, payable only to a relative or a savings-bank; the other
is an illegal document, sanctioned by the Board of Trade, February,
1868--here it is in the corner: you see their imprimatur?” said he,
handing me one of the notes.
“What is the meaning of this,” said I, “at the bottom of the
note?--‘Caution.--The Merchant Shipping Act does not provide summary
remedy in the case of this note.’”
“Only a confession that a blunder was made,” he answered, “when the Act
was passed. The advance note was said to encourage crimping; accordingly
the allotment note was substituted. The seaman protested, as he found
the note practically useless. Instead of rescinding or modifying the
Act, an illegal concession was made by the issue of notes payable to
anybody, like the old advance note. The issue is sanctioned by the Board
of Trade, who compromise with their official conscience by giving the
holder of the note to understand that he cannot recover upon the note by
summary remedy. The old advance note was made payable three days after
the man had sailed in the ship; in the present note the shipowner
protects himself by making the note payable fifteen days, or in some
instances thirty days, after the man has sailed. This may not increase
the risk, but the delay in payment causes the holder to charge a heavier
rate of interest for cashing the note, so that practically the Act
leaves the sailor as much at the mercy of the boarding-house keeper as
he was in the days of the advance note. We have hitherto charged nothing
for cashing these notes; but we shall have to do so in self-protection,
for we are perpetually losing money by them, and the law, which
sanctions their issue, yet deprives the holder of all means of
recovering on them.”
So much for British maritime legislation, thought I. Here are people,
willing to pay the sailor the amount his note is worth without any
deduction whatever, obliged to own that they can no longer act in this
liberal manner, because the law prevents them from dealing with the
dishonest clients who rob them! Will the day never come when the hidden
part of our gigantic marine interests will be capably represented in the
House of Commons?
“And pray,” said I to the manager, “where are your bedrooms?”
He led me a short distance, and presently we came to a stand at the
bottom of what I may call a shaft of galleries of a very curious
skeleton-like appearance. The highest tier was probably about seventy
feet. Every fibrine-looking gallery or platform ran the whole length of
the wing, and was flanked on either hand with rows of little bulkheaded
rooms called cabins, all of them numbered, and every one containing an
exceedingly comfortable wire-wove spring mattress, slung by a species of
metal triangle from the ceiling. I found that there were three of these
gallery shafts situated in wings of the building, and capable of
comfortably accommodating and bedding between five and six hundred
persons. One of those gigantic ranges of cabins, dedicated to the late
Admiral Hope, struck me as exceedingly handsome and curious. The lower
berths here are devoted to the mates and captains. They are large, airy,
superbly ventilated; but these are the characteristics of all the
cabins. At one end of this fine division is a marble tablet inscribed to
Admiral Hope, with handsomely carved coloured flags on either side. To
see these cabins, the manner in which they are poised one above another,
the stairs leading up to them, the delicate tracery of the platforms,
and observe the seamen coming out of their rooms and descending the
steps fifty and sixty feet above your head, is to get a new theory of
human existence. I never saw anything more comfortable, more clever,
more strange. I mounted to one of these galleries with the manager, and
seeing a cabin door open put my head in. The place was in gloom, and I
was about to withdraw, when to my astonishment I observed what looked
like two little half-moons glimmering in the dusk. I stared, and was
amazed to find a negro lying upon a chest, reading. I saw the whites of
his eyes the moment he rolled them up to look at me, but the rest of him
being black was not to be discerned at once. I asked him what he was
reading.
“The Bible,” said he, showing the book.
He was newly arrived at Hull from Barbadoes, he said, and had come to
London to look for a berth as steward aboard a ship bound to the West
Indies. He was a handsomely spoken, well-mannered young fellow,
pronouncing his words with the finish of a man of culture.
We next visited the dining-room. This was a great department with rows
of tables stretched along it, all covered with white linen and
hospitably furnished with good glass and cutlery. At a large centre
heating contrivance stood a carver flourishing an immense knife over a
big pile of joints of roast beef. Sirloins, ribs, topsides, were mixed
up, but the manager said that did not matter, as there would be little
enough to be seen of them presently. A number of waiters ran in and out,
setting dishes of potatoes, vegetables, puddings, bowls of soup, and
such matters, on the table, and it needed nothing but a loving cup and a
flourish of trumpets to make the thing look like a civic feast.
Presently a bell was beaten, the seamen came tumbling in, and in a trice
every table was crowded, and all hands eating their hardest.
“There is plenty of independence here, apparently,” said I, looking
round at the rows of “shell-backs”--and I appreciated the term when I
marked the taut curve of their shoulders--working away with spoons and
knives and forks.
“Independence!” exclaimed the manager. “Why, no hotel confers more
privileges. We are in reality a club. We were originally called a Home,
and have stuck to the name; but I think it would be better had we borne
the title of Club, for there is something in the sound of a home that
savours of charity, and charity is a thing most seamen object to.”
“What are your charges?”
“Fifteen shillings a week to the men, and eighteen shillings to mates,
who eat in a room to themselves.”
“Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed, “that you give these men a bedroom
apiece and feed them after the fashion I now see for fifteen shillings a
week?”
“Yes,” said he, smiling at my surprise. “And we go a little further even
than that; for if a sailor arrives here without clothes or means, we
dress him and put money in his pocket, and repay ourselves by deducting
the amount, without a farthing of extra charge, from the allotment note
he receives from the ship in which, in numerous instances, we procure
him a berth.”
“And may the men do as they like here?”
“As if they were in their own house. We close at half-past twelve; but
there is a night porter, and a man is admitted at any hour.”
“So that, practically, this is nothing but a first-class hotel worked at
a cost that enables the very poorest seamen to use it?”
“Exactly. Our sole object is to provide the sailor with a comfortable
home while he is on shore, help him in every way that he will allow, and
so keep him clear of the boarding-house people--the wretched men and
still more wretched women--who prey upon him, drug him with vile drinks,
cruelly rob him, and often turn him adrift with scarcely a stitch on his
back. Come, sir; more remains to be seen.”
He took me downstairs into a ready-made clothing shop belonging to the
Home.
“The tailors in the neighbourhood,” said he, laughing, “more especially
those who pay women commission to bring sailors to their shops, don’t
love us for this invasion of their rights or wrongs; for our charge for
clothes is very little above the price they cost us, and a man may get
here for two pounds ten a suit he would have to pay eight or nine
guineas for to a boarding-house tailor. I may say the same thing of the
bar we have opened. There were some murmurs at first among the
directors; but, sir, we found lemonade and coffee would not do. They
drove the sailors to the public-houses; for the men would have their
glass, and if they could not get it here they would go to low places for
it. Jack must be treated sensibly, as a man with brains. To stop his
grog at sea is one thing, but to put him upon cold water ashore is
merely to drive him to those who live by plundering him. The result of
opening a bar here has been to extinguish half the public-houses in the
neighbourhood, and you may believe me when I say that our people know
their business too well to suffer any approach to intemperance in this
Home.”
“Well,” said I, “I came here expecting to find a lot of false and
mischievous sentiment mixed up in the administration of the place. I see
that Jack’s character is understood among you. You treat him as a
rational man, and he respects you for it. No wonder the same people
return again and again.”
“There is no need for a man to do anything here he does not like,” said
the manager. “We have serious, sober, steady fellows among us; for them
there are prayers morning and evening, and all may attend who will. But
there is no obligation to be present. So at church--yonder it is, close
to the Home, you see--we muster a good congregation; but there is no
compulsion. Whatever can be done to reclaim those who need it, to help
to set men right, to teach them to lift up their thoughts, we attempt;
but there is no forcing of religion--nothing to induce hypocrisy on the
one hand, nor to excite aversion on the other. We say, ‘My lads, here
are your opportunities, take them if you will; but take them or leave
them, we wish to do our duty by you, to make your lives ashore happy and
comfortable, to keep you to windward of the low and nauseous snares
which are everywhere set about for you, to come between your simplicity
and the acts of the miscreants who find their account in your easy-going
natures.’ That is about the amount of our theory,” said the manager;
“and if we are not greatly successful, it is because the job we have set
ourselves to perform is a very, very large one.”
From the dining-room we went to the basement, where I was shown a number
of capital bath-rooms, fitted with a plentiful supply of hot and cold
water; a laundry and drying-rooms; store-rooms filled with joints of
meat, loaves of bread baked on the establishment, white as milk and of a
flavour that made one think of farmhouses and Mrs. Poyser; sacks of
flour, potatoes, and other things of that kind; and an immense kitchen,
with a wonderful array of ovens and boilers for cooking by steam;
everything as polished and bright as a new bell, and not the smallest
feature anywhere discernible that did not exhibit the completest signs
of anxious and attentive supervision. This Well Street building may be
called a Home, and in a sense may answer to that character, but in
reality it is nothing but a fine, admirably managed marine hotel or
club, filled with bedrooms a good deal more comfortable than many a one
in a hotel that a man has had to pay five or six shillings a night for;
providing liberal meals in the shape of breakfast, dinner, tea, and
supper, and furnishing the seaman with all the comforts of a first-rate
club for the extraordinary moderate charge of fifteen shillings a week.
What does such an institution replace--or rather what is it designed to
replace? I suppose there is no part of the sailor’s shore doings more
talked about and less understood than the life he leads at the greasy
little boarding-house kept by a crimp or a tailor, or, worse still, by
old women and abandoned daughters. I stood gazing at one of these
houses--a broken-down bit of a hole, with an evil, swaggering look in
the posture of its door, and with dirty, stained white blinds in the
windows--and thought what a wonderful, dreadful book might be made of
the scenes that had taken place in it. A sailor-man was at my side, and
I fell into a short talk with him.
“Do you regularly stop at the club?” I asked.
“Yes; it is my home whenever I am in London. I have used it for years,
and so have scores of the men you see.”
“A pity all sailors are not equally alive to their own interests,” said
I. “Here they are made really comfortable for a few shillings a week;
money is advanced to them, clothes furnished to them at cost price, a
hundred little comforts placed within their reach, and friends are at
hand to help them to a berth if they find difficulty in getting a ship.”
“Perfectly true,” said my companion.
“What attraction beyond the privileges and happiness a residence in this
club-house offers can they discover,” said I, pointing to the miserable
little boarding-house we confronted, “in such a den as that?”
“Most of the men you find in such places are forced into them,” replied
the man. “All about here is filled with touts and runners and their
bullies. Sailors are watched coming ashore. They may want to put up at
this Home; but the boarding-house runners are at hand to tumble ’em into
cabs, drink is given them, the girls--and such girls!--are called in to
help, and if the men are obstinate they are fallen upon and beaten; and,
to such an extent is this kind of intimidation carried on, that, however
anxious a man may be to rescue a shipmate from the hands of those
rascals, he’ll think twice before he does it, for so sure as he attempts
to interfere and bring a man to this Home, so sure is he of being fallen
upon and half killed when he’s alone and the night’s come. There’s not a
policeman hereabouts but is full of stories of such work.”
“And what, pray, is the sailor’s life in the low sort of lodging-house?”
“A vile debauch, as a rule, caused by the temptation thrust upon him. It
would be difficult to make respectable people understand how he’s
robbed. I knew a man who was brought to one of these dens and asked to
‘shout’--that is, to stand a drink all round. He did so, and was made
drunk. Next day he was charged for eight ‘shouts,’ the people swearing
he had ordered the liquor, and that it was not their fault if he was too
intoxicated to remember. That’s only one sample. Abandoned women are
kept in the pay of the slop tailors to bring seamen to their shops and
press them to buy, and a single purchase at such places is enough to
ruin a poor man. There are, no doubt, respectable boarding-houses, but
they are few and far between; the most of them are kept by rascally men
and women, who, taking the sailor as a simple-hearted fellow, fresh from
a spell of salt water, and willing for a bit of a frisk, ply him until
they have peeled him, and then kick him out. It was not long ago that a
pencil-scrawl was brought to this Home. It had been chucked out of a
lodging-house window by a man to a friend who was passing. It stated
that the people of the house had stolen all the writer’s clothes, and it
begged the manager to send up a suit that the man might get away.”
“Such things must be known to sailors?” said I.
“Ay,” he replied, “and a good deal more.”
“And yet many of them persist in putting up at those haunts?”
“I can’t account for it,” said he. “Here’s such a chance as any
gentleman with plenty of money in his pocket might be glad to take; and
yet there are sailors who’ll carry their bags or chests to the
lodging-houses, as certainly knowing that they are going there to be
robbed of all they have as that their feet are upon dry ground.”
I have only ventured to write down a very little part of what I was told
about these lodging-houses. I will not pretend to be ignorant of much of
the inner life of those places; but I own that some of the stories
related to me filled me with horror and astonishment that such deeds
should still be doing in this enlightened age of marine progress. But is
it not strange that so truly valuable an institution as this Well Street
Home, which counts bishops, marquises, admirals, and captains in
abundance among its directors, should be deliberately neglected, and
even viewed hostilely, by the Board of Trade, whose efforts to promote
the interests of the sailor it helps to a degree no one would credit
without close and careful investigation of its theory and practice? Why,
for instance, should the Board of Trade decline to licence a
shipping-master in connection with this Home? Surely the directorate
should abundantly guarantee the character of the duties such an official
would discharge. What conceivable object can the Board of Trade have in
objecting to the Home endeavouring, by legal means, to obtain employment
on board ship for the numerous highly respectable men who use the
institution, and who must often want help to obtain a berth? The Home
asks for no State help; it is self-supporting; it has extinguished a
number of low public-houses and crimps’ haunts in its neighbourhood; it
is doing a great work; and no man who values the sailor can read the
list of gentlemen whose names are associated with it without an emotion
of gratitude to them for the generous, wise and humane part they are
playing. Surely it is the duty of the State to co-operate with the
endeavours which the working of this Home exemplifies, and to omit
nothing that may tend to lighten the labours of its exemplary officials
and advance the truly national purpose for which it was originally
established.
_THE PERILS OF HUMANITY._
“Sir,” said a middle-aged master of a merchantman to me a few days
since, laying down his pipe in order to grope with both hands at once in
his waistcoat-pockets, “I should very much like,” said he, looking now
at one hand and now at another as he produced a number of odds and ends
before lighting upon the things he wanted, “to have your opinion upon
some documents which I cut out of a morning newspaper, and must have
stowed away somewhere with such uncommon carefulness, that dash my wig
if I know where I’ve put ’em!”
I waited whilst he groped and slapped himself, and explored a
weather-beaten pocket-book. Finally returning again to his waistcoat, he
produced with an air of triumph three newspaper cuttings, which, after
putting on a pair of spectacles to read them first himself, he handed to
me one at a time.
One was headed “Thanks.” The writer said that he considered it a portion
of his duty to publicly express his deep gratitude and that of his
surviving shipmates to Captain Townshend and the crew of the barque _M.
J. Foley_, “who not only rescued us from a miserable death by frost and
starvation, but did everything in their power, by the kindest possible
treatment and self-sacrifice, to mitigate our intense suffering and
supply our many wants.” The writer added that nautical men would fully
appreciate the meaning of the addition of nineteen persons to a small
crew in the winter-time; “but in this case my men were well fed, and we
were sorry to be the means of every one being put on a limited supply of
water.” The writer of this letter, brimful of honest, sailorly thanks,
signed himself, “Abraham Evans, chief officer of the late _Bath City_
(s).”
My friend the shipmaster kept his gaze attentively fixed upon me whilst
I read this newspaper extract, and on my putting it down called out,
“Kindly now cast your eye over this document,” and handed me a second
cutting.
This was headed “_Elba_, brig,” and was a request to be allowed to thank
Captain Jacob Backer, of the Norwegian barque _Sarpen_, for rescuing the
eight men who signed the letter “from our water-logged vessel, when only
2 lbs. of putrid meat stood between us and starvation. He gave us food,
clothing, medicine, and every attendance, and was most ably seconded by
his kind-hearted crew; and in the seven days we were on board his vessel
he made us in a great measure forget the privations we had undergone.”
The third extract was of a similar character, signed by three survivors
of a crew of fourteen souls.
“Well, sir,” said the shipmaster, as I handed him back the third and
last cutting, “what do you think of these documents?”
I replied that they were expressions of gratitude honourable to the
saved and to the savers, and that it was a pity such illustrations of
the humanity and gratitude of seamen did not obtain more publicity than
was generally given them, as not only was there nothing nobler in the
world than the marine stories which the letters he had given me to read
touchingly testified to, but that the interest of the sailor could never
be better served than by landsmen again and again dwelling upon the
bitter perils of his vocation, and upon the scores of illustrations of
the magnanimity and generosity of his simple heart.