freshness, alacrity, and even the engaging impetuosity and loving
confidence which characterise these little ones, is not far to seek. As
you came up you noticed row after row of blue check bags, hanging in a
current of fresh air on the wall of the staircase.
Those bags contain the clothes in which these children are brought to
the Home in the morning. They are changed with the morning's ablutions,
and clean garments substituted for them until the mothers come in the
evening to fetch away their bairnies, and by that time they have been
aired and sweetened. It is noticeable that this has the effect in many
instances of inducing the women to make praiseworthy efforts to improve
the appearance of the children, and, indeed, the whole tendency of the
treatment of the little ones is to develop the tenderness and love which
lie deep down in the hearts of the mothers. Even the endearing nicknames
almost instinctively bestowed upon the tiny darlings have a share in
promoting this feeling, and the pretty rosy plump little creatures, or
the quaint expressive bright-eyed babies, who are called "Rosie,"
"Katie," "Pet," "Little Old Lady," and so on, all have a kind of happy
individuality of their own in the regards of the dear lady who founded
and still directs the institution, and in those of the nurses who tend
them. Sometimes the names arise from some little incident occurring when
the children are first brought there, as well as from the engaging looks
and manners of the little ones themselves. "The King," is a really fine
baby-boy, the recognised monarch of the upper nursery, but his sway is
strictly constitutional; while a pretty little wistful, plump lassie, is
good-humouredly known as "Water Cresses," and has no reason to be
ashamed of the name, for it designates the business by which a
hard-working mother and elder sister earn the daily bread for the
family.
Did I say that the charge for each child is twopence daily? Nominally it
is so; and let those who desire to know something of the real annals of
the poor remember that even this small sum--which of course cannot
adequately represent anything like the cost--is not easily subtracted
from the scanty earnings of poor women engaged in slopwork, or selling
dried fish, plants, crockery, and small wares in the streets, or going
out to work in warehouses, rope-walks, match-making, box-making, and
other poor employments, where the daily wages will not reach to
shillings, and sometimes are represented only in the pence column. Let
it be remembered, too, that the husbands of these women (those who are
not prematurely widows, or whose husbands have not deserted them) are
employed as dock labourers, and are often under the terrible curse of
drink, or are in prison, while the women struggle on to support the
little ones, who but for this institution, would perhaps be
left--hungry, naked, and sickly--to the care of children only two or
three years older than themselves; or would be locked in wretched rooms
without food or fire till the mother could toil homeward, with the
temptation of a score of gin-shops in the way.
Each of the bright intelligent little faces now before us has its
history, and a very suggestive and pathetic history too.
Look at this little creature, whose pet name of Fairy bespeaks the
loving care which her destitute babyhood calls forth; she is only ten
months old, and her mother is but nineteen, the widow of a sailor lost
at sea two months before the baby was born.
Katie, of the adult age of five years, is the child of a man who works
on barges. Rosie, one of the first inmates, has a drunken dock-labourer
for a father, and her mother is dead. Dicky represents the children
whose father, going out to sea in search of better fortune for wife and
children, is no more heard of, and is supposed to be dead. "The King" is
fatherless, and his mother works in a bottle-warehouse. The pathetic
stories of these children is told by Mrs. Hilton herself, in the little
simple reports of this most admirable charity. They are so touching,
that I cannot hope to reproduce them in any language so likely to go
straight to the heart as that in which you may read them for yourself if
you will either visit the Crèche, or send ever so small a donation, and
ask for a copy of the modest brown-covered little chronicle of these
baby-lives. Standing here in the two nurseries, where the dolls and
Noah's arks, the pictures and the doves, nay, even the baby-jumpers
suspended from the ceilings, are but accessories to the clasp of loving
arms and the softly-spoken words of tender womanly kindness, I wonder
why all one side of Stepney Causeway has not been demanded by a
discriminating public for the extension of such an institution.
Loitering in the lower room, where one little bright face is lifted up
to mine, as the tiny hands pluck at my coat-skirt, and another chubby
fist is busy with my walking-stick, I begin to think of the workhouse
ward, where mothers are separated from their children night and day; of
a prison, where I have seen a troop of little boys, and a flogging-room
provided by a beneficent Government for the recognition by the State of
children who had qualified themselves for notice by the commission of
what the law called crime.
A pleasant odour of minced beef, gravy, and vegetables, known as "Irish
stew," begins to steal upon the air. The wooden benches in one of the
rooms are suddenly turned back, and like a conjuring trick, convert
themselves into tiny arm-chairs, with convenient trays in front for
plates and spoons. The little voices--forty like one--strike up a fresh
chant, and a whisper of rice-pudding is heard. So we go out, wondering
still, and with a wish that from every nursery where children lisp
"grace before meat," some gracious message could be brought to aid and
strengthen those who believe with me that the most profitable investment
of political economy, the most certain effort of philanthropy, is to
begin with the men and women of the future, and so abate the fearful
threatenings of coming pauperism, and the still more terrible menace of
a permanent "criminal class."
The policy of the authorities, says Mrs. Hilton, in her interesting
narrative of the Crèche, in stopping outdoor relief to poor widows with
children is causing much sorrow. The 2_s._ 6_d._ or 3_s._ received from
the parish secured their rent, and they managed, with shirt-making or
trouser-finishing, to earn a bare subsistence; but now the battle for a
mere existence is terrible. Doubtless, the children would be better
cared for in the House, but mothers cannot be persuaded to give them up.
One such case has just passed under my notice; but the woman shall speak
for herself. "'Oh, Mrs. Hilton, they have taken off my relief!--I, with
four little ones who cannot even put on their shoes and stockings. They
offer me the House; but I never can give up my children. Look at baby;
he is ten months old; his father died of small-pox six months before he
was born; he was only ill five days.' I told her I was afraid she would
not be able to earn enough to keep them all. 'Well,' she said, 'I must
try--I will never go into the House.'"
"But these women have very little feeling for their children, they are
so low and brutalised." Are they? Let those who think so visit this
Cradle Home, and witness the bearing of the mothers who come to take
their little ones home, or to nurse the sucklings at intervals snatched
from work. Let them hear what such poor women will do for children _not_
their own, even to the extent (as recently took place, in one instance,
at least) of sharing with their less necessitous babes the natural
sustenance that the mother cannot always give.
Sixty-five children received daily and a hundred or more on the books,
with space needed for many more than can be admitted; children who, some
of them infants as they are, have learned to lisp profane oaths and
babble in foul language, and to give way to furious outbursts of
passion, the result of neglect and evil example, and the life of the
street and the gutter. It is but a short time, however, before this
strange dreadful phase of the distorted child mind disappears, and the
pet name is bestowed along with the gentle kindness that obliterates the
evil mimicry of sin. The baby taken home from this purer atmosphere of
love becomes a messenger of grace to many a poor household, as the short
annals of the Crèche will tell; and even the pet names themselves are
adopted by the mothers in speaking of and to their own children. One
short story from the first report sent out by Mrs. Hilton, and we will
go our way with a hope that some words of ours may win a fresh interest
for these little ones.
"A precious babe died, and the mother, too poor to bury it, sent for a
parish coffin. The child was very dear to us, and we had named her our
nursery Queen which had degenerated into 'Queenie.' It was a sore trial
to us to see the golden curls mingled with sawdust, which is all that
was placed in the coffin; and yet we could not spend public funds on the
funeral, and feared to do it privately. In a few hours a mother came and
said, 'Come and look at your Queenie now.' We went and saw that loving
hands had softened all the harsh outlines. A little bed and pillow had
been provided, a frill placed round the edge, and some children had lain
fresh-gathered flowers on the darling's breast. The cost had been
9½_d._, paid for by those mothers, and although so freely and lovingly
given, it was the price of more than a meal each."
If every mother in London with a well-stocked larder would give the
price of a meal for the sake of a living child--but, there! my duty is
not to beg, but to describe.
_WITH LOST LAMBS._
Only quite lately I had to write about the old French colony in
Spitalfields, and of the changes that have come over entire
neighbourhoods which were once associated with what is now a failing
industry, or rather with one which, so far as London is concerned, has
nearly died out altogether.
Not that the public has ceased to hear sundry reports of those quarters
of the metropolis of which the name of Bethnal Green is an indication as
suggesting dire poverty, neglected dwellings, poorly-paid callings, and
constant distress. Some few years ago it became quite a fashion for
newspaper special reporters (following in the wake of one or two writers
who had begun to tell the world something of the truth of what they knew
of these sad regions) to make sudden amateur excursions beyond
Shoreditch, for the purpose of picking up material for "lurid" articles
about foul tenements, fever, hunger, want, and crime. Bethnal Green
became quite a by-word, even at the West End, and certain spasmodic
efforts in the direction of charitable relief were made by well-meaning
people, so that for a time there was danger of a new kind of
demoralisation of the "low neighbourhood," and the price of lodgings,
even in the wretched tenements of its notorious streets, were expected
to rise in proportion to the demand made by emigrants from other less
favoured localities, to which the special correspondent had not at that
time penetrated. One good work was effected by the attention of sanitary
authorities being called to the fever dens during a time of terrible
epidemic, and a certain provision of medical aid, together with
purification of drains, whitewashing of rooms, and clearing of sties and
dustheaps, was the result. This was but temporary, however; and those
who best know the neighbourhood lying between Shoreditch and Bethnal
Green, and disclaimed by the local authorities of both because of its
misery and dilapidation, are also aware that in various parts of the
whole great district from the Hackney Road to Bishopsgate, and so
embracing Spitalfields and part of Whitechapel, far away to Mile End and
"Twig Folly," there can be discovered more of want, hunger, and disease
than could exist in any free city under heaven, if men were not such
hypocrites as to defy and disregard the laws which yet they claim to
have a hand in framing, and a power to enforce.
Only those who are personally acquainted with such a district can
conceive what is the condition of the children of its streets, and yet
every ordinary wayfarer of the London thoroughfares may note to what a
life some of them are committed. About the outskirts of the markets,
round the entrances to railway stations, cowering in the shadows of dark
arches, or scrambling and begging by the doors of gin-shops and taverns,
the boys--and what is even worse, the girls--are to be seen daily and
nightly, uncared for, till they have learnt how to claim the attention
of a paternal government by an offence against the law. When once the
child, who is a mere unnoted fraction of the population, has so far
matriculated in crime as to warrant the interposition of the police, he
or she becomes an integer of sufficient importance to be dealt with by a
magistrate. Let an infancy of neglect and starvation lead to the
reckless pilfering of a scrap of food from a counter, or the abstraction
of something eatable or saleable from a market-cart or a porter's sack,
and the little unclassified wretch is added as another unit to a body
recognised, and in some sense cared for, by the State. As a member of
the great "criminal class," the juvenile thief becomes of immediate
importance. Even though the few juvenile criminal reformatories be full,
the gaol doors are open, and the teachings of evil companionship are
consummated by the prison brand. The individual war against society
gains strength and purpose, for society itself has acknowledged and
resented it. The child has entered on a career, and unless some extra
legal interposition shall succeed in changing the course of the juvenile
offender by assuming a better guardianship, the boy may become an
habitual thief, a full-fledged London ruffian; the girl----?
It was with a deep sense of the terrible significance of this question,
that a small party of earnest gentlemen met, twenty-seven years ago, in
that foul neighbourhood to which I have referred, to consider what
should be done to rescue the deserted and destitute girls, some of whom
had already been induced to attend a ragged school, which was held in a
dilapidated building that had once been a stable.
These thoughtful workers included among them two men of practical
experience; one of them, Mr. H. R. Williams, the treasurer of the
present institution, the other the Rev. William Tyler, whose bright
genial presence has long been a power among the poor of that district,
where even the little ragged children of the streets follow him, and
lisp out his name as the faithful shepherd, who both gives and labours
in one of the truest "cures of souls" to be found in all great London.
To them soon came the present honorary secretary, Mr. J. H. Lloyd, a
gentleman already familiar with teaching the poor in a neighbouring
district no less wretched and neglected. They were the right men for the
business in hand, and therefore they began by moving sluggish boards and
commissions to put in force the sanitary laws--and, in spite of the
opposition of landlords with vested interests in vile tenements let out
to whole families of lodgers from garret to basement, and of the
malignant opposition of owners of hovels where every abomination was
rife, and pigs littered in the yards, while costermongers shared the
cellars with their donkeys--insisted on the surrounding streets being
paved and drained, and some of the houses being whitewashed and made
weatherproof.
Nothing less could have been done, for the terrible cholera epidemic was
already raging in that tangle of courts and alleys. Application was at
once made for a share from the Mansion House Relief Fund, and the
committee had to use every available shilling in order to supply food
and medicine, blankets and clothing, to the wretched families; to visit
whom, a regular relief corps was organised, carrying on its beneficent
and self-denying work, until the plague began to be stayed. Then with
scarcely any money, but with unabated hope and fervid faith, this little
company of men and women began to consider what they should do to found
a Refuge for the children (many of them orphans, and quite friendless)
who were everywhere to be seen wandering about, or alone and utterly
destitute in the bare rooms that had been their homes. There were
already certain institutions to which boys could be sent, for then, as
now, the provision for boys was far greater than for girls. This is one
of the strange, almost inexplicable conditions of charitable effort, and
at that time it was so obvious which was the greater need, that the
committee at once determined to commence a building on a waste piece of
land which had been purchased close by, and to devote it to the
reception of thirty destitute girls, who should be snatched from deadly
contamination, and from the association of thieves and depraved
companions.
Surely, if slowly, the work went on, the plan of the building being so
prepared that it could be extended as the means of meeting the growing
need increased. Almost every brick was laid with thoughtful care, and
when subscriptions came slowly in, the funds were furnished among the
committee themselves rather than the sound of plane and hammer should
cease; till at last, when the King Edward Ragged School and Girl's
Refuge was completed, a large edifice of three spacious storeys had
superseded the old ruinous stable amidst its fœtid yards and sheds,
and, what was more, the building was paid for, and a family of children
had been gathered within its sheltering walls. At the time of my first
visit to the institution no more than twenty had been taken into this
Refuge; but every foot of the building was utilised until the money
should be forthcoming to add to the dormitories, and enable the
committee to fulfil the purpose that it had in view.
In the large square-paved playground forty happy little members of the
infant-school were marching to the slow music of a nursery song; and the
numbers on the books were 196, in addition to 304 girls who came daily
to be instructed in the great school-room, where they were taught to
read, and write, and sew. A hundred and twenty boys were also being
taught in the Ragged Church opposite, while seventy children over
fifteen years of age attended evening classes, forty-two young men and
women were in the Bible class, and a penny bank, a library of books, and
a benevolent fund for the relief of poor children in the neighbourhood,
were branches of the parent institution.
This, however, was seven years ago, and since that time so greatly has
the work flourished, that the Ragged and Infant Schools have premises of
their own on the other side of the way; and the great building having
been completed by the addition of an entire wing, its original purpose
is accomplished, and it is "The Girl's Refuge," of the King Edward
Certified Industrial and Ragged Schools, Albert Street, Spitalfields.
It is to the receipt of munificent anonymous donations that the
committee owe the completion of the building, and in order to extend the
usefulness of their Refuge they have certified it under the provisions
of the Industrial Schools Act of 1866. That this was in accordance with
their ruling principle of making the most of every advantage at their
command may be shown by the fact that when the School Board, almost
appalled at the need for making immediate use of any existing
organization, began to send cases to existing "Homes," only eight of
these institutions could receive the children, and in these eight no
more than forty-four vacancies existed for Protestant girls. The
consequence of opening the King Edward Refuge under the Act was that it
received nearly all the cases of the year, and that in the twelve months
it was certified ninety new inmates after found an asylum within its
walls.
If you were to go there with me to-day, you would not wonder that the
supporters of this institution were anxious to erect another building in
some part of London, where another hundred lambs straying in this great
wilderness could be taken to the fold. Passing through the neat
dormitories, with their rows of clean white beds; peeping into the big
toy cupboard, where the kindly treasurer has recently placed a whole
family of eighty dolls, and other attractive inventions to induce
children to play, some of whom have never known before what play really
meant; looking at the lavatory with its long rows of basins let into
slate slabs, and each with its towel and clean bag for brush and comb;
noting the quiet "Infirmary," with its two or three beds so seldom
needed, and remarking that from topmost floor to the great laundry with
its troughs and tubs, a constant supply of hot water provides alike for
warmth and cleanliness, I begin to wonder what must be the first
sensations of a poor little dazed homeless wanderer on being admitted,
washed, fed, and neatly clothed. Why, the two kitchens--that one with
the big range, where most of the cooking is done, and the other cosy
farmhouse-looking nook, with its air of comfort--must be a revelation to
all the senses at once. Then there are the highly-coloured prints on the
walls, the singing of the grace before meat; the regular and wholesome
food; the discipline (one little rebel is already in bed, whither she
has been sent for misconduct, and an elder girl demurely brings up her
slice of bread and mug of milk and water on a plate); the provision for
recreation; the occasional visits of parents (many of them unworthy of
the name) at stated seasons; the outings to the park, the Bethnal Green
Museum, and other places; the Christmas treat; the summer presents of
great baskets of fruit; the rewards and prizes; the daily instruction in
such domestic work as fits them for becoming useful household servants.
What a wonderful change must all these things present to the children of
the streets, whose short lives have often been less cared for than those
of the beasts that perish! Everywhere there are marks of order, from the
neat wire baskets at the foot of each bed in which the girls place their
folded clothes before retiring to rest, to the wardrobe closets and the
great trays of stale bread and butter just ready for tea. Everywhere
there are evidences of care and loving kindness, from the invalid
wheel-chair--the gift of the treasurer to the infirmary--to the splendid
quality of the "long kidney" potatoes in the bucket, where they are
awaiting the arrival of to-morrow's roast mutton, three days being meat
dinner days, while one is a bread and cheese, and two are farinaceous
pudding days.
As we sit here and sip our tea--for I am invited to tea with the
committee--and are waited on by three neat and pretty modest little
women--one of them, a girl of eight, so full of child-like grace and
simplicity, that there would be some danger of her being spoiled if she
were not quite used to a little petting--who can help looking at the
inmates now assembling quite quietly at the other end of the room, and
thinking that in some of those faces "their angels," long invisible
because of neglect and wrong, are once more looking through, calm,
happy, and with a hope that maketh not ashamed. Do you see that still
rather sullen-looking girl of thirteen. She came here an incorrigible
young thief--her father, a tanner's labourer, and out at work from five
in the morning--her mother bedridden--her home was the streets--her
companions a gang of juvenile thieves such as haunt Bermondsey, and make
an offshoot of the population of a place till recently called "Little
Hell."