“To say that scores of thousands of them are facing the coming
winter with fear and dread is but mildly to imply their
situation. They are the derelicts of London, whom the changes
in modern conditions have left hopelessly behind. Without
crafts, without knowledge, many of them with hope dead, they
face a future that good trade can do little to relieve, and bad
trade must greatly darken.”
“The prodigal son” of to-day plays out the last act of his tragedy, not
before a fatted calf, but in a Poplar back room. The shiftless and
incapables, attracted by low rent, by the chance of casual work, and
by the abundance of relief, drift here. To them are added the scores
of thousands of locally born people who are trained in such a way that
they cannot be anything else than casuals.
The very streets proclaim the lives of these people. Apart from the
main thoroughfares and from certain more prosperous avenues, you are
swallowed up in an endless succession of long roads of cheaply built
houses. The walls are crumbling, and the bricks seem as though they
would fall at a blow; many houses have broken, paper-stuffed windows;
there are whole streets where the doors and windows have not seen
paint for a generation. The children, babies with ophthalmic eyes,
girls dirty beyond belief play in the gutters. The women gossip at the
doors. The men, strong, yet none wanting their strength, lounge at
street corners.
In home after home you will find that the sole regular wage earned is
by a young son, who obtains ten shillings a week as errand boy in the
City. On this, with occasional additions from the others, the whole
family exists. The mother may obtain a few shillings a week at
‘charing,’ although such work is scarce in Poplar.
Twenty years ago the poverty of the East End was lessened by the home
work which the women could obtain. It is one of the most serious,
although often overlooked, factors of to-day that such home work
cannot be had save by a few. The aliens in Whitechapel and in Stepney
absorb almost all of it. The foreigners are more capable, more
thrifty, and more sober, and, save where brute strength is required,
our own derelicts stand no chance before them. The homes inside are
often enough indescribable. Here and there you find the one room kept
clean, but generally dirt is the outstanding feature. The beds are
black masses of filth. The walls of the rooms prevent real
cleanliness. I went into one two-roomed tenement inhabited by a man,
wife and three children. The kitchen was overrun with rats, which had
free entrance and exit through numerous holes in the wall. In the
bedroom a large part of the lath and plaster wall underneath the
window was torn away, leaving great gaps open to the yard. ‘Why
doesn’t your landlord do some repairs here?’ my companion asked. ‘He
won’t, sir; he says it is healthy for us to have holes in the walls,’
the woman replied. Many of these Poplar rooms urgently require the
active intervention of the local sanitary officers.
In such fetid dens, badly built, ill kept, and furnished with the
strangest of oddments, most of the Poplar poor live.
If it were necessary and part of my scheme this evening, I could take
up the whole of our time in telling the truth about the existing
horrors. But I do not think that any one will deny them. They exist,
and no one can disprove the fact. Let us rather consider _why_ they
exist, and what their existence means to the working man.
Stated in a few brief words, this is my theory and my unalterable
belief.