VI

I have seen a good deal of the working of the English Poor-law, and have

learned to have some decisive opinions about it It has always seemed to

me, since I had any acquaintance with it at all, that it might have been

constructed on purpose to restrict the free action of honest labour and

to set a premium on idle vagabondage. I determined, fourteen or fifteen

years ago, to put the system to a test in my own person, and for my own

sake to start with the odds in favour of the institution. My belief was,

and is, that no law-abiding man could travel in search of work through

England under the provisions of the Poor-law without danger to health

and even life, whilst any worthless and shiftless idler can by its

provisions eke out a tolerably comfortable subsistence.

I got me a shabby suit of clothes, sent a portmanteau to the place where

I intended to end my journey, and, posting a ten-pound note in advance,

carried a money order for that sum in the lining of my hat. Thus

provisioned, and with a shilling in my pocket, I started to walk towards

the money. I was David Vane, compositor, and it was my object to see

if David, with the best will in the world, could live under Poor-law

provisions without bringing himself into the mesh of the policeman's net

I gave him seven weeks of it, and walked over half the south, midland,

and western counties; giving him an occasional rest in a cheap

lodging-house when workhouse fare had come to be too much for him.

When; I came to a town where my money lay at a post-office, I drew a

shilling or two and sent the bulk on further; but during the whole seven

weeks I only trespassed on my hoard to the extent of fifty shillings.

Without that hoard, or without a breach of the law, my imaginary

compositor would surely have died. I see now and again in the newspapers

a sporadic correspondence about the treatment of men on tramp, about the

food supplied them, the hours of their imprisonment, and the amount of

labour they are compelled to perform. I notice that chairmen of boards

of guardians are quite satisfied with the existing condition of things.

I encounter, in the newspapers, gentlemen who have tasted workhouse

skilly and soup, and who like it, and consider it well made and

nourishing. I meet others who account the sleeping accommodation good,

the bread excellent, and the labour demanded no more than reasonably

adequate. I should ask nothing better than to see these easily contented

gentlemen each enjoying a seventh part of my personal experience.

I may say at once that my notes of this journey were destroyed years

ago, and that I cannot tell with absolute certainty in what places

certain things happened. My experiences were challenged at the time, and

the challengers got little good by their denial of my statements. I had

hoped that my Quixotic enterprise might have some good result, but the

absurd old system has undergone no alteration.

It was in a green lane in Oxfordshire that I came across my first

travelling companion. He was a man of about sixty, a decent-looking old

fellow, and, as I found out when I got into talk with him, by trade a

tailor. He had stopped to bathe his feet in a little brook spanned by

a single arch of mossy brickwork, and whilst he cooled his feet in the

stream he rubbed his cotton socks with a bit of yellow soap the size

of half a crown. He was civil and ready to talk; but he was very

downhearted, He showed me his fingers, the tips of which were raw and

smeared with tar.

'That's this mornings work,' he said. He named the workhouse he had

stayed in. 'That's put me off earning a living for a good week to come.

A man can't sew whilst his fingers is in this state. Stone breaking's

bad enough; but when it comes to oakum-picking it's all up with work for

one while. There was another chap there last night,' he went on, as I

should take to be worse off than me. He's a watchmaker. Dressed very

nice and tidy he was, and got a job to go to in the town this morning.

He begged hard to be let off, and offered to pay for his night's

lodgings if they'd let him. They kep' him to it, hows'ever, and he did

his work, 'wouldn't ha' done it,' he concluded. 'I'd ha' gone afore the

Bench first; though that ain't mostly any good in these 'ere country

places.'

This disclosure interested me, for I myself belonged provisionally to

one of the light-fingered professions. It would be about as easy for a

compositor to earn a living fresh from oakum-picking as for a tailor

or a watchmaker; and I determined, if that task were set before me, to

plead my trade and see what came of it I had no longer to wait than next

morning; but when the work was given out it looked to my ignorant eye so

inconsiderable that I forbore to make any complaint about it. A piece

of old tarred rope, six or seven inches long and an inch and a half in

diameter, had to be picked into fine oakum between seven o'clock in the

morning and eleven. The business looked anything but formidable, and I

began upon it with a light heart.

The accustomed men began by hammering the ends of their strands upon the

stone floor, and I followed their example, and, having secured a hold

for the finger-tips, went ahead with the work. I may say that until a

man of delicate fingers has tried this occupation he can have no idea

of the long-drawn and exasperating misery of it. It is no use to be

impatient, for in attempting to go too fast you succeed only in skinning

your thumb and fingers. The only chance is patience, and that is not an

easy thing. The old stagers, who had had years of it, got along quite

comfortably, and were thankful that they were not stone-breaking. The

new men swore and grumbled and flayed their fingers. The result of

my own experience was that David Vane, compositor, was put beyond the

chance of earning a living at his legitimate trade for a good fortnight

The accommodation paid for by the labour consisted, all told, in one

hunk of dry bread--weight, I should say, about four ounces; one pint

of stirabout made of Indian meal and flavoured with soot; and

a particularly dirty and uninviting bed. Having bestowed these

benefactions on the harmless workman, the British Poor-law in return

insists that he shall become a hopeless pauper by stealing from him his

handicraft.

I tried stone-breaking pretty often later in the course of my tramp, and

found it a much less painful occupation. The handling of cricket-bat

and sculls hardens the palm of the hand whilst it leaves the tips of the

fingers unprotected. But though at the time of my excursion I was fresh

from life on the river, it took me some time to get inured to this new

occupation, and stone-breaking alone would, of course, unfit for his

work any man who needed lightness and steadiness of hand. Work and

accommodation varied very widely. In one or two places we got good bread

at night, good broth in the morning, and a bed to sleep in which, as I

suppose, the average tramp would find almost luxurious. The bedclothes

were coarse, as they had a perfect right to be, but they were clean;

and the food, though scanty and of the plainest, was wholesome and

nourishing. In one place, I remember, the bread actually stank, and the

hungriest of the hungry crowd left it uneaten. The broth served out next

morning was nothing more or less than the water in which bacon had been

boiled. The beds were kennels. A long wooden bench was divided into

compartments by upright boards; a quantity of dirty straw which might,

by the look of it, have served already in a stable was spread in each

recess, and was covered with foul sacks which bore the name of a local

miller. Several of these sacks, cut open and stitched together, served

for a counterpane.

'I'd 'eard about this place,' said my neighbour when the able-bodied

pauper who superintended us had trooped us into this abominable chamber,

'and I'd a dam good mind to smash a lamp or summat and get run in

instead o' comin' here. If I'd ha' knowed the truth about it, I'd ha'

done it.'

This was the worst, and by far the worst, of the places I encountered.

Indeed, I met nothing else comparable to it. I made a trifling error in

my description of it at the time. By a slip of the pen I represented the

shed in which the casual paupers were accommodated as being a lean-to

against the body of the workhouse, whereas it was in fact a lean-to

against the outer wall of the workhouse grounds. This was enough in the

minds of the guardians to justify them in denouncing me, through their

chairman, as a liar, and was held to be triumphant proof that I had

never been there, though I proved 'David Vane, compositor,' upon their

books and upon those of the two neighbouring workhouses.

In some country places we went straight to the relieving officer, who

gave us our tickets for the night. In other places of more considerable

population we were allowed to lounge about the outside of the police

station until the hour appointed for distribution. Once inside the

workhouse, we were prisoners until at least eleven o'clock next morning

whether the tale of stones were broken or no, or the strands of rope

were or were not reduced to oakum. In default, men were occasionally

detained to be taken before the Bench; but what became of them I

never had an opportunity of learning apart from the experiences of my

travelling companions, who estimated the punishment at seven or fourteen

days. A good many of these had gaol experiences, and I am forced

to admit that the decent folk on tramp were few in number. But the

occasional honest mechanic or skilled workman in search of employment

was hard bestead.

I met two journeymen printers, one of whom, having threepence for a

bed outside the workhouse, was able to find employment in the town of

Gloucester; whilst the other, being unable to get away from durance

before eleven, was left out in the cold. I met other men who, in order

to escape this absurd imprisonment, slept in the fields, and so risked

liberty on the other side rather than miss the early labour market; for

to sleep in the fields is a misdemeanour punishable at law: though why

it should be so, if nothing else be provable against a man, Heaven only

knows. In the language of the road, to sleep in the open is to 'skipper'

and to sleep in the workhouse is to go 'on the spike.' It was a common

question in fine weather, 'Skipper or spike to-night?' The habitual

loafer invariably chose the spike. The man who had business and wanted

to get along elected to skipper, though he lost two meals thereby.

The law, which ruins the hands of the skilled workman, and detains

skilled and unskilled alike until the labour market is closed to

them, supplies a dietary which would kill anybody but a professional

fasting-man in a month, and keeps a keen eye on mendicancy. It is like

the sun, with a difference: it looks alike on the just and the unjust

The mischief is, it is made for the comfort of the worthless and is

the plague of the deserving. There are easy-going boards of guardians,

easy-going workhouse masters and labour masters, who do not insist upon

the tale of work which is demanded by others. The old stagers know the

easy places and give them a natural preference.

The one place of terror on the line I took was Gloucester. The guardians

of the Gloucester Union had made up their minds to put down the casual

pauper, and, as the means readiest to hand, they determined to make the

work too hard for him. I was so persistently warned against Gloucester

that I went there to see for myself what it was like. The house itself

was orderly and clean, and the discipline as complete as in a gaol. The

only thing which distinguished it from other places of its kind was the

severity of the labour imposed.

The limits of labour are fixed by law. There is such and such a weight

of oakum to be picked, or such a weight of stone to be broken; but

the good guardians of Gloucester, without in the least infringing the

provisions of the Poor Law Board, made the work twice as severe as

it was in other houses than their own. Before every casual pauper was

placed the regulation quantity of stone--it was the hardest I tackled on

my pilgrimage--and beyond the morning's stint was set a screen through

which every atom of the stone had to be passed before the job was

finished and the wanderer was allowed out upon his way again. It was no

business of mine to be refractory, and I hammered away with such zeal

as I could command; but it took me six hours to get through the tale

of work. When I had earned my own discharge I left a handful of

unfortunates behind me who had theirs yet to finish. They were

all unaccustomed and inexperienced, or they would not have been at

Gloucester. Whether that charming western city keeps up its reputation

until now I do not know; but the guardians found their system succeed

so well that they have probably adhered to it I had forgotten to mention

one fact which is common to all workhouses. The casual tramp breakfasts

when he has done his work, but not before.

Discerning private critics of my novels have noticed how much capital I

have made of this odd adventure. In 'A Life's Atonement' Frank Fairholt

goes on tramp, seeking to efface himself amidst the offscourings of

the poor after an accidental deed of homicide, In 'Joseph's Coat' Young

George goes on tramp, slinking from casual ward to casual ward until he

meets Ethel Donne at Wreath-dale. In 'Val Strange' Hiram Search on tramp

opens the story; and it was by way of spike and skipper that John Jones,

of Seven Dials, brought fortune to his sweetheart in 'Skeleton Keys,'

I fully admit the impeachment, and, indeed, I am not indisposed to brag

about it. Perhaps few writers of fiction have gone as close to nature

for their facts.

I met more queer people and found more queer adventures on that tramp

than I have ever been able to find a literary use for. One amazing

vagabond with a moustache announced himself to me, when I had found a

way into his confidence, as a professional deserter. He had enlisted in

every militia regiment in the country and in half the regiments of the

line. When he had secured the first instalment of his bounty he made a

bolt of it, and, by way of securing safety, took immediate refuge in the

next military depot. I understood that he had pledged himself to serve

her Majesty for a period of something like a thousand years. Wherever I

had the chance to test him I found him a most enterprising liar, and

I dare say he exaggerated a little here. I asked him what trade

he followed or professed between whiles. The rascal grinned with a

delightful cunning and said he was a hand comb-maker.

'The trade's dead,' he told me; 'machinery's knocked the bottom out

of it. There's only one shop in England where they makes combs by 'and

nowadays, and you can bet as _I_ steers clear o' _that_. It's a lovely

lay to go on, matey. “The trade's ruined,” you says, “by machinery,”

you says. “I was brought up to it for a livin',” says you, “an' it's

the only thing,” you says, “as I've got to yearn my daily bread by the

sweat of my brow by,” you says. Lord! I've had as much as ninepence in a

day out o' that yarn on the very road as we're a travellin' now.'

I had a qualm of conscience; but his artless tale was told, as it were,

under the seal of confession, and I never betrayed him.