In what periods do you collect the rents?—Some monthly; about one-third monthly; the rest we collect quarterly.
What may be your losses on the collections?—They will average, perhaps, about one-fifth; we lose rather the most on the quarterly tenements.
What are the chief causes of your losses from this class of tenants?—Loss of work first; then sickness and death; then frauds.
Are the frauds considerable?—Not so much as the inabilities to pay. I find the working classes, if they have means, as willing to pay and as honourable as any other class. Within the last 18 months there have been a great many people out of work; at other times there is as much loss to the landlord from sickness as from any other cause. Three out of five of the losses of rent that I now have, are losses from the sickness of the tenants, who are working men.
When children are sick, there is of course no immediate interruption to the payment of rent?—Very seldom.
What sort of sicknesses are they from which the interruption to work and to the payment of rent occurs?—Fevers, nervous disorders, and sickness that debilitates them.
Then anything which promotes the health of the tenants will tend to prevent losses of rent to the owners of the lower class of houses?—Yes, I have decidedly found that rent is the best got from healthy houses.
In some of the cellar dwellings in Manchester the losses of rent, chiefly from sickness, amounted to 20 per cent.
§ 198. In all cases of deaths from epidemic diseases, one of the first duties of the officer of health would be to inquire whether there were any other persons in the house attacked with disease, and examine them. In all such cases as those cited, §§ 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, he should have adequate power, which, that it may be efficient must be summary, to take measures to protect the parties affected and others, by ordering their immediate removal to fever wards. It is only in a deplorable state of ignorance of the nature of the evils which depress such districts that there could be any hesitation in granting such powers from the fear of abuse; the most serious legislative difficulty would be to ensure their constant and efficient application. Mr. S. Holmes, the builder of the Stockport viaduct, and formerly an active member of the Liverpool town council, gives the following illustration of the extreme miseries witnessed in that town, and it is certainly not an exaggerated description of the scenes to which the officer of health must at the commencement of his duties be frequently carried on the occurrence of deaths.
The melancholy facts elicited by the corporation clearly show that Liverpool contains a multitude of inhabited cellars, close and damp, with no drain nor any convenience, and these pest-houses are constantly filled with fever. Some time ago I visited a poor woman in distress, the wife of a labouring man. She had been confined only a few days, and herself and infant were lying on straw in a vault through the outer cellar, with a clay floor, impervious to water. There was no light nor ventilation in it, and the air was dreadful. I had to walk on bricks across the floor to reach her bed-side, as the floor itself was flooded with stagnant water. This is by no means an extraordinary case, for I have witnessed scenes equally wretched; and it is only necessary to go into Crosby-street, Freemasons’-row, and many cross streets out of Vauxhall-road, to find hordes of poor creatures living in cellars, which are almost as bad and offensive as charnel-houses. In Freemasons’-row, about two years ago, a court of houses, the floors of which were below the public street, and the area of the whole court, was a floating mass of putrified animal and vegetable matter, so dreadfully offensive that I was obliged to make a precipitate retreat. Yet the whole of the houses were inhabited!