_Slums in the gilded West--"It's the place! It's ruin to us all"--Where
the children earn and the mothers drink--How the "till sneak"
works--Lynch law in London--A slump depression in the burglary trade_
|IN all great cities there are certain areas which bear an evil
reputation. On the principle that birds of a feather dock together, the
vicious and the criminal have a habit of seeking each other's society.
But though crime and vice are frequently associated, there is often a
sharp distinction to be drawn so far as certain quarters of London are
concerned.
In the heart of the West End, in the Royal Borough of Kensington itself,
there are whole streets in which the inhabitants are vicious, as we
understand the word as a label. Here the police are busy, but the
bulk of the charges brought against the women and the men are for
drunkenness, for disorderly conduct, for fighting and brawling. They
are principally night charges, for during the day you may wander the
neighbourhood and see little life in the streets that are notoriously
ill-famed.
There is one street that from end to end has not a single house in it
where there is not a broken window. These houses are packed with a low
type of humanity. Every house is a lodging-house, and many of them are
lodging-houses for women only.
In the daytime drunken, dissipated-looking women loll in the doorways or
thrust their tousled heads out of the upper windows. If you enter these
houses and go down into the common kitchen you will find scores of
women, young and middle-aged, sitting round the coke fires, listless,
often morose. Among them you will see now and again women with traces of
refinement, some whose features still bear the lingering traces of youth
and good looks.
But they are lost souls every one of them. There is not one among the
hundreds who crowd the notorious lodging-houses of this terrible guilt
garden of the West who is still making an effort to earn an honest
livelihood. Most of them are thieves when opportunity offers. They are
not professional thieves, but many of them are in league with rascals of
the worst type, loafers and hooligans, who are not ashamed to beat and
maltreat women and force money from them.
This district is a district of despair to the philanthropist, the social
reformer, and the Christian worker. It has been called the Avenue of the
West. It is a cesspool to which all that is worst in the squalid vice of
the capital flows. And the pity of it is that the stream is constantly
fed by tributaries from the cleaner, greener land beyond. It is here
that hundreds of our rural immigrants drift in ignorance or in
despair of London's vastness and inhospitality, and here they rapidly
deteriorate, and become in time as evil as their environment.
There is no mystery about the character of the people in these streets
of shame. And yet the element of mystery greets you at every turn,
whether you wander these byways of wickedness by day or by night.
If you would explore the mysteries of the Avemus, it is not in the
houses or the streets that you will see the veil lifted.
But stand with me in this room in the school where the mentally and
physically feeble offspring of degenerate parents are cared for and
taught. Listen to the cry of a woman, who pours her heart out to the
sympathetic teacher who has sent for her to give her advice about her
little boy.
"It's the place, miss," wails the woman. "It's ruin to us all to be
in it. It's ruined his father--it's ruined me, and it's ruining the
children. If I could only get out of it! But I can't--I never shall
now."
Ten years ago this woman and her husband came from the country to try
their luck in London. The man failed to get work, fell in with evil
companions, and they drifted to the Avemus. The husband is a loafer--the
wife does a little work at a laundry when she can get it. They live in a
vile street, where oaths and foul language and brutal deeds are all they
hear and see. The house they live in is filled with bad characters. The
eldest boy--he came a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked child from the country
with his parents--is in prison; the girl, who was bom after they came to
the Avemus, is in an idiot asylum; the boy at the school is developing
criminal tendencies. The mother sees with despair the min of her family,
but she is helpless to avert it. Her husband is a drunkard. She herself
has fallen into the slough at last.
Her case is typical of hundreds in the neighbourhood. So terrible is
the effect of the environment on the children that day and night the
Industrial School officers are searching for girls and boys, whose only
hope of salvation is to be separated from their parents.
If you were to spend one night in the Avemus your face would be crimson
with righteous indignation that little children should live open-eared
and open-eyed in constant contact with such horrors.
Do you see a broad-shouldered, burly, kindly-looking man walking quietly
along the street? As he comes into sight a group of lads and lasses
disperse as if by magic. There is a sudden bolt up a narrow passage that
through a back street leads into the open thoroughfare.
The big man smiles good-humouredly. He has seen the group, and the girl
he wants was in it. He will find her before the night is over, because
he will enter every house she is likely to have taken refuge in. He is
the Industrial School's officer. Three years ago he rescued a girl from
evil surroundings and she was sent to Canada. She has managed in some
mysterious way to get back again across the sea, and has headed straight
for the Avemus, where she has a bad mother, and a father who is worse.
There is nothing brings the shame and degradation of one phase of London
life so acutely home to you as a day and a night with the officers whose
duty it is to remove the young from the homes and haunts of vice. In one
street in the Avemus there are two hundred children growing up. There is
not one house in the whole of that street that does not harbour women of
the most degraded type.
Many of these children are already busy as money-makers. Some of them
are sent out into the streets to beg; to play their carefully planned
tricks and dodges on the humanity of the passers-by. There are women who
wash their faces, smooth their hair, and dress in seedy black as widows,
and take little children out with them to beg. These "poor widows"
starve the children and spend the money in drink. Sometimes they don't
take their own children; they hire a deformed child or a cripple of
a mother who is willing to let it out. There are hundreds of little
children now in industrial homes who were forced into the streets to ply
the trade of mendicity and mendacity, and who were treated with the most
brutal violence by their parents if they came home empty-handed. Many a
child, failing to get money by begging, would steal rather than go home
to be received with foul words and brutal blows.
This Avernus of the West is an area of vice. The most typical area
of crime lies nearer to the City's heart. It has been said, "Wall off
Hoxton, and nine-tenths of the criminals of London would be walled off."
That is, perhaps, a too sweeping statement, but that there are whole
areas in Hoxton inhabited entirely by criminals is a fact beyond
dispute. Those criminals are principally thieves and burglars. The
majority are of the lowest order, but there are among them several
superior "artists"--men who plan and carry out big jobs. The "fences,"
or receivers of stolen goods, have made quite a little colony here, and
the modern trainer of thieves, the Fagin of the twentieth century, has
his daily and nightly classes in the neighbourhood.
Look at this row of neat-looking houses. There are blinds and
well-arranged curtains at the windows, the handle of the bell is
polished, the steps are clean. The signs without bespeak comfort within.
These houses are largely occupied by the superior craftsmen in crime.
One or two receivers also reside here, and the cleverest trainer of
young thieves in London occupies the upper portion of the house that has
the best show of flowers in the home-made window-boxes.
It has been my privilege to converse with some of these trainers and to
get an insight into their methods. I am not betraying any confidence in
publishing what I have learnt of their system, because it is perfectly
well known to the police and to the Christian workers who labour among
the pupils of the modern Fagin. The boy who is "trained" is, as a rule,
taught one branch of the art of robbery only. For instance, a thief who
wants to be an expert abstracter of ladies' watches never steals watches
from men. If he "mixes his pockets" he loses his delicacy of touch.
The fingers must be employed in one way in taking a watch from a man's
pocket, and in quite another way in taking a watch from a lady. To steal
from the person adroitly and with little fear of detection the fingers
must be in constant practice in one particular way. Many a thief who
has stolen from women for years with impunity has come to instant grief
when, tempted by the apparent carelessness of the owner in a crowd, he
has tried to take a watch from a man.
The most difficult branch of the "profession" for the young thief to
learn is "counter creeping." To enter a shop on your hands and knees,
crawl round behind the counter, and secure the till unnoticed by the
shopkeeper requires the most skilful use, not only of the hands, but
of the knees. The slightest sound as you crawl along the floor might
attract attention. Yet, in spite of its difficulties, this branch of
the business has many apprentices, who practise in a room in which an
imitation counter is fitted up.
The "till sneak" occasionally acts with an accomplice, sometimes with
two. When the favourable shop has been fixed upon, the habits of
its owners studied, and the propitious moment chosen, one of the
confederates enters as a pretended customer and engages the attention
of the shopkeeper--frequently a woman. Another confederate keeps
observation outside, and is ready to facilitate the exit of his "pals."
The trained till thief creeps in and secures the haul noiselessly.
It often happens that the shopkeeper does not discover the loss until
another customer has been served, and he or she goes to the till to put
money in it and finds it empty.
But with all their cleverness, with all the risks they run in following
their dishonest occupations, these professional thieves seem to make a
very poor living.
If you would see how they live, let us go boldly into one of the
criminal areas and enter the houses.
Here is the most notorious criminal street in London. The inhabitants
are frankly thieves and of a very rough class. In the centre of
the street is a lodging-house in which some two hundred thieves are
accommodated nightly, and there is hardly a house from end to end in
which the weekly rent is gained by honest industry.
Look at this "notice" chalked up in big letters on a wall: "Coppers
wanted. Three killed last night."
That is a playful exaggeration. A policeman killed in this street
a month or two ago, but only one. The whistle of a hooligan captain
sounded, and scores of young roughs poured out of the houses to obey
the summons. A "nark," or a lad who was suspected of "marking"--i.e.
betraying a comrade by giving information to the police--had ventured
into the neighbourhood, and the gang were called forth to administer
lynch law. There was a big fight, for the suspected "nark" had pals too.
In the course of the combat an unfortunate policeman so far forgot the
first law of nature as to enter the street with a view of restoring
order. He was so badly knocked about and injured that he died shortly
afterwards.
If you enter the houses, which are mostly let at 12s. 6d. a week and
taken by one person, who lets off the rooms and lives rent free in the
process, you will find the most terrible squalor and apparent misery.
Most of the families live in one room. Occasionally, when one of the
girls is old enough to do factory-work and bring home a regular wage,
the luxury of two rooms is indulged in.
Here is a criminal family living in one room. There is a broken-down
bedstead in the corner, and on it a dirty mattress and a patchwork
quilt, originally of many colours, but now of one prevailing hue, that
of greasy brown. There is not a chair or a table in the place. There are
only a few broken and battered pails and tubs, which serve the purpose
of chairs. In one of these tubs a baby is wedged in with rags, and in
this position carried out and placed on the pavement. That is because
the mother, who is alone, is going out, and there is a fire burning in
the battered grate. The baby might play with the fire and burn the bed,
and that would be a loss to the family. So the baby is deposited in the
tub outside the front door, and left there for the hours that its mother
has arranged to be absent.
If you were to enter this room in the small hours you would find it
occupied by the grandmother, the mother and her husband, two young
girls, and a lad of fifteen. There are two older lads in the family, but
they are more comfortably lodged in one of His Majesty's prisons.
Here is the home of a professional burglar. He has only one room at
present for himself, his wife, a lad of seventeen, two girls of fourteen
and eight, and a baby. Presumably the burglary trade has shared in the
general depression, for the family are at dinner when we enter, and it
consists of nothing more appetizing than bread and cheese.
In one day I visited the homes of over fifty professional thieves in
this district. This burglar was the only one who did not reciprocate
my friendly advances. He was surly, and, but for the fact that
circumstances compelled him to be civil to the friend who accompanied
me, he would, I am sure, have given me a very unpleasant interview. In
twenty of the houses I visited, a member was temporarily absent from the
family circle. Some were away for six months, some for five years. There
was no concealment as to their present address. "In prison," was the
frank reply, sometimes made with a smile.
In only one instance was there any trepidation shown at the entry of
unexpected visitors. That was when we went downstairs into a kitchen
occupied by a middle-aged lady. Hearing strange footsteps, she had
hastily attempted to conceal a bulky-looking sack under the bed. She
explained her "palpitations" by assuring us that she suffered from heart
disease.
As the lady was the wife of a gentleman who receives stolen goods, and
has another kitchen at the back in which gold and silver articles are
subjected to certain "transforming processes," we quite understood the
nervousness which the lady betrayed, and her relief when we bade her
good-bye and mounted the stairs again.
There are a dozen streets in this area, every one of them packed with
criminals. But everywhere is the sign of squalor and penury. Walk
through the streets, and you will see the children ragged, dirty, and
barefooted. Nowhere in London is the note of misery so emphasized.
Crime, so far as these areas are concerned, must be a far less
profitable occupation than the worst-paid class of honest labour.
And yet these people look solely to crime for their rent, their
clothing, and their food, and wouldn't do an honest day's work if it
were offered to them.