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.