CHAPTER III.
A public meeting was held at 'the Farm House,' Harrow Street, in the Mint, some time since, to take into consideration the grievances of the poor people whose homes were about to be demolished to make way for a new street, a railway, and some dwellings for the accommodation of a superior class of tenants.
It is necessary for a thorough understanding of the question which is agitating the entire community that every phase of it should be studied.
In and about the Mint, which is a notorious 'slum,' in addition to a very large contingent of the criminal classes, there resides a colony of industrious folks, whose livelihood must be earned in the great thoroughfares. Hawkers of fish and fruit and vegetables, penny-toy vendors, watercress and flower girls, cheapjacks, street stall-keepers of all sorts and conditions, and men and women and children who work at certain industries carried on in the neighbourhood—these are among the deserving class of the poor, earning precarious incomes, who are about to be driven out by a Metropolitan improvement and forced to seek shelter in one or other of the already densely-packed districts.
The first effect on the dishoused people themselves will be disastrous. They will not only be compelled to give up their work and their clientèle in the neighbourhood, but they will lose a privilege which is absolute salvation to many of them. The injury is greatest to the most industrious, because they have 'established a character' among the little tradespeople of the district, and in the winter they obtain the necessaries of life on credit. In the winter, times are bad for many of the ordinary industries of the poor, and, but for the fact that local shopkeepers will trust established tenants of decent character, hundreds of them would be brought face to face with absolute starvation.
The 'characters' worked up in one district are useless in another, and thus it will be seen how severe a blow to the poor dwellers in a neighbourhood its destruction must be.
Moreover, in addition to being injured themselves, the displaced inhabitants will injure the neighbourhoods to which they migrate. A sudden rush will be made, say, on the rookeries of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel—places already overcrowded. What will be the result? Where we have one family living in a single room now, we shall presently find two families packed, and the rush for accommodation will send the rents of these places up another ten or fifteen per cent.
Some of the dislodged people, men and women who are never half-a-crown ahead of the world, must, as they get no compensation for the loss they will be put to by eviction, drift into the workhouse.
Now, the workhouse is utter ruin to the class who look for their work daily. A man goes into the casual ward; before he leaves it in the morning, he must do a certain amount of work. It is quite right that he should, but what is the result? When he gets out it is too late to look for work that day; the chance is gone. So he must come in again the next night, and the process is repeated. This is the way habitual loafers are too often manufactured, and one fruitful source of vagabondage is the constant disturbance of the poor from the places where they had settled down and started in business.
Another evil which must inevitably come of the poorest and the most helpless being driven farther and farther back before the march of improvement is this: They must come into closer and closer contact with the criminal and the vicious classes. Men come into a low district because they are poor and other neighbourhoods are beyond their means. Many of them come honest and remain honest, but the children degenerate rapidly under the evil influences of the place.
Take the history of the Black Gang of the Mint as an example. It is composed of the worst desperadoes, young and old, of the metropolis. Its ranks are thinned over and over again by the arrest and conviction of the members, but their places are filled almost directly by the sons of the labourers and hard-working folks of the district. This is a painful fact which is perpetually being forced on the attention of those who do philanthropic work in the slums. The criminal classes are daily recruited from the children of the labouring classes, and this is mainly due to their enforced herding together in the rookeries. But where else are the dislodged poor with large families to go?
Those who have passed their lives among these people, and have watched area after area of labourers' dwellings disappear, know that each fresh clearance has a deteriorating effect on the character of the remaining districts. Unless some scheme be devised which will check the wholesale destruction of slum neighbourhoods and the hasty displacement of those who cannot be accommodated elsewhere, the ultimate result must be pestilence or revolution. We may frankly recognise the necessity of condemning buildings unfit for habitation without denying the hardships of the evicted tenants. All reforms injure one class at first in order to benefit another. But while public attention is so fully aroused to the question of 'Housing the Poor,' we may as well learn the lesson of the past in order to avoid a recurrence of the evil. How is it a puzzled public is asking every day that, with medical officers of health, sanitary inspectors, inspectors of nuisances, and what not, all armed with full powers, so many districts of labouring-class accommodation have been allowed to drift into a state of dilapidation and filth which renders it imperatively necessary to raze them to the ground? The machinery to prevent such a state of things was ample. We have a right to know why it has broken down.
I will endeavour to explain as far as I can why we have at present a 'Horrible London,' and also to suggest in what way it may be possible to avoid having another. The clearance of vast spaces has sent accommodation in tenement houses up to a premium, and landlords have been able to let their rooms regardless of their condition.
The officers whose duty it is to report on sanitary neglect are appointed by the vestry, and hold their appointments at the goodwill and pleasure of the vestryman.
Much of the worst property in London is held either by vestrymen or by persons who have friends in the vestry. The first thing, as a rule, which a man does who acquires low-class and doubtful property is to try and be elected a vestryman. What chance under such circumstances has a vestry-appointed officer of doing his duty in a thorough and efficient manner? His reports, if he make them, are too often burked. Messrs. Jones and Smith and Brown are the gentlemen upon whose votes will depend that increase of salary he is going to ask for next Christmas. And Messrs. Jones and Smith and Brown are the gentlemen who will be put to considerable pecuniary loss if he insists upon the unsanitary condition of certain large blocks of property in the district.
I do not for one moment pretend that this is the case in the Mint—there some of the vestrymen are among the most earnest agitators for a new order of things.
But the evil exists in some of the worst districts, and to an extent of which the public little dreams. If some of the flagrant pieces of jobbery in this class of property, which have been the result of vestry government, could be brought to light, the public would cease to wonder how such a condition of things could have come to pass.
Let anyone who wishes to inform himself thoroughly on the subject walk through any of the slums, and contrast the condition of the registered lodging-houses with the condition of the surrounding dwellings. The lodging-houses are almost everywhere in better repair. The floors are scrubbed continually, the walls are fairly clean, and there is proper sanitary accommodation. But these lodging-houses are under the control of the police—an officer appointed by Scotland Yard inspects them, and sees that every regulation is complied with. If the proprietor fails in his duty he loses his license.
A portion of this very Farm House in the Mint is a common lodging-house, and it is a place the most refined lady might enter and inspect without the slightest repugnance.
Within a stone's-throw of it are whole streets of houses which are sinks of all that is abominable.
If a periodical inspection of certain lodging-houses can produce such an excellent result, it must strike an observer at the first blush that a periodical inspection of houses let out to families would have a similarly beneficial effect.
I may say that the idea of licensing houses let out in rooms to the class of people whose condition we have been discussing, and placing them under the control of a police-appointed official, is a favourite one with many of the local agitators for reform.
For the accommodation of the doubtful class, buildings might be erected constructed almost entirely of brick and stone and iron; wood should be avoided wherever possible, as it harbours filth, and is easily damaged or removed to light the fire with. The rooms should be square, and without corner or crevice, and should have floors made of material which could be cleansed thoroughly with a mop and a bucket of water. No human power could ever cleanse the wooden floors of the present dens. The water-supply in such houses would of course be an efficient one. At present the bad water-supply is a source of the greatest evils. One butt in a backyard frequently has to supply the inmates of half a dozen houses, and this butt is, in nine cases out of ten, open at the top, so that it easily becomes impregnated with objectionable matter. In one instance a butt, when cleared out, was found to contain the dead body of a cat, and a playful youth of the neighbourhood confessed to having tossed it in six weeks previously. This is the water the inhabitants not only do such washing with as they occasionally indulge in, but it is also the liquid with which they make their tea. In its simple condition, water, I may state, is not largely consumed by the adult population, but the children frequently quench their thirst with it. Here at least is one evil which may be dealt with to the advantage of the very poorest denizen of the slums.
Another glaring iniquity in the present system is the insufficient accommodation of a most necessary kind, and this is an evil to which the most horrible phase of the 'domestic interior' of the slums is largely due. The only retiring-room in one place available for the 150 people who inhabit ten small houses is situated right away down another court, and in some instances the only accommodation of this kind is in the cellar of the building, and this cellar is inhabited by a family.
Such a monstrous state of things as this will, of course, never be permitted in any new property, however low class it may be; and any improvement in such matters as this—the water supply, and the adaptability of the rooms to the cleaning process—will tell advantageously on the health and cleanliness and decency of the inhabitants.
But while these improvements are being made, the old houses which are past repair must go, and many more are to be sacrificed to railway schemes and to new streets.
Such, is the condition of affairs in the Mint, a district which teems with the poor earning precarious livelihoods, and we may look forward with interest to the views of the tenants themselves, who will be invited to speak at a proposed meeting. It is, I believe, to be the first of a series about to be held, at which the whole question will be discussed. The names of Mr. Berry, a gentleman who was born in the Mint, and carries on business there still; Mr. Hawkins, a member of the School Board, who knows all the circumstances of the inhabitants; Mr. Hunter, a local temperance worker; Mr. Andrew Dunn, and Mr. Arthur Cohen, M.P., are guarantees that the discussion will be guided into practical channels, and those who have said so much about the poor will be able to hear what the poor have to say about themselves.
If anyone interested in the question should make his way to these meetings and wish to see some of the property that is coming down, let him take Gunn Street and Martin Street en route. Through the open doors he will catch a glimpse of some curious interiors. He will see, if he goes at the right time, unsold fish, grapes, vegetables, and what not, being carried into strange backyards and queer corners, and he will be struck with the extraordinary number of fowls, geese, and ducks which are roaming about in the slush and the garbage, fattening themselves for the Christmas market of the big thoroughfares, where they will doubtless be offered by their gentle-voiced proprietors as 'prime country fed.'
As, however, the accommodation is exceedingly limited, and the 'natives' are likely to attend in large numbers, the curious outsider had better, for many reasons, wait until the committee carry out their announced intention of calling a public meeting in a larger hall.
We have passed through the period in which it was necessary to arouse general attention, and no one who reads the public journals can be ignorant of the main facts of the case. The two great questions to which reformers have now to find a practical answer are these: What scheme will release this class of property from vestry control and compel a more efficient carrying out of the ample powers the authorities now possess? and in what way can we save the inhabitants of the scheduled areas from the loss, the misery, and the further degradation which have been the result of wholesale evictions hitherto?