Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

Another case of extreme poverty was less tragic. There was a woman with three children whose husband was a soldier in India, to whom she longingly hoped to be eventually sent out by the military authorities. Meanwhile she was in extreme poverty in Bristol, and so was her friend, a fine young Irish woman. Their sole resource was a neighbour who possessed a pair of good sheets, and was willing to lend them to them by day, provided they were restored for her own use every night! This did not appear a very promising source of income, but the two friends contrived to make it one. They took the sheets of a morning to a pawnbroker who allowed them,—I think it was two shillings, upon them. With this they stocked a basket with oranges, apples, gooseberries, pins and needles, match boxes, lace,—anything which could be had for such a price, according to the season. Then one or other of the friends arrayed herself in the solitary bonnet and shawl which they possessed between them, and sallied out for the day to dispose of her wares, while the other remained in their single room to take care of the children. The evening meal was bought and brought home by the outgoing friend with the proceeds of her day’s sales, and then the sheets were redeemed from pawn at the price of a half-penny each day and gratefully restored to the proprietor. This ingenious mode of filling five mouths went on, with a little help, when I came to know of it, in the way of a fresh-filled basket—for a whole winter. I thought it so curious that I described it to dear Harriet St. Leger one day when she was passing through Bristol and spent some hours with me. She was affected almost to tears and pushed into my hand, at the last moment at the Station, all the silver in her purse, to give to the friends. The money amounted to 7s. 6d., and when Harriet was gone I hastened to give it to the poor souls. It proved to be one of the numerous occasions in life in which I have experienced a sort of fatality, as if the chance of doing a bit of good to somebody were offered to us by Providence to take or leave and, if we postpone taking it, the chance is lost. I was tired, and the room inhabited by the poor women was, as it happened, at the other end of Bristol, and I could not indulge myself with a fly, but I reflected that the money now really belonged to them, and I was bound to take it to them without delay. When I reached their room I found I was in the very nick of time. An order had come for the soldier’s wife to present herself at some military office next day with her children, and with a certain “kit” of clothes and utensils for the voyage, and if all were right she would be sent to join her husband’s regiment in India by a vessel to sail immediately. Without the proper outfit she would not have been taken; and of course the poor soul had no kit and was in an agony of anxiety. Harriet’s gift, with some trifling addition, happily supplied all that was wanted.

I did not see so much of drunkenness in Bristol as the prominence given to the subject by many philanthropists led me to expect. Of course I came across terrible cases of it now and then, as for example a little boy of ten at our Ragged School who begged Miss Carpenter to let him go home at mid-day, and on enquiry, it proved that he wanted to release his mother, whom he had locked in, dead-drunk, at nine in the morning. I also had a frightful experience of the case of the drunken wife of a poor man dying of agonizing cancer. The doctor who attended him told me that a little brandy was the only thing to help him, and I brought small quantities to him frequently, till, when I was leaving home for three weeks, I thought it best to give a whole bottle to his wife under injunctions to administer it by proper degrees. Happening to pass by the door of the wretched couple a day later, before I started, I saw a small crowd, and asked what had happened? “Mrs. Whale had been drinking and had fallen down stairs and broken her neck and was dead.” Horror-struck I mounted the almost perpendicular stair and found it was so; the poor hapless husband was still alive, and my empty brandy bottle was on the table.

The other great form of vice however was thrust much more often on my notice—the ghastly ruin of the wretched girls who fell into it and the nameless damnation of the hags and Jews who traded on their souls and bodies. The cruelty of the fate of some of the young women was often piteous. Thankful I am that the law for assaults has been made since those days far more stringent and is oftener put in force. There were stories which came to my personal knowledge which would draw tears from many eyes were I to tell them, but the more cruel the wrong done, the more difficult it generally proved to induce anybody to undertake to receive the victims into their houses on any terms.

A gentleman whom I met in Italy, who knew Bristol well, told me he had watched a poor young sailor’s destruction under the influence of some of the eighteen hundred miserable women then infesting the city. He had just been paid off and had received £73 for a long service at sea. Mr. Empson first saw him in the fangs of two of the wretched creatures, and next, six weeks later, he found him dying in the Infirmary, having spent every shilling of his money in drink and debauchery. He told Mr. Empson that, after the first week, he had never taken any food at all, but lived only on stimulants.

CHAPTER
XI.
BRISTOL.
THE SICK IN WORKHOUSES.

My new life on Durdham Down, though solitary, was a very happy one. I had two nice rooms in Belgrave House (then the last house on the road opening on the beautiful Downs from the Redland side), wherein a bright, excellent, pretty widow, Mrs. Stone, kept several suites of lodgings. It is not often, alas! that the relations of lodger and landlady are altogether pleasant, but in my case they were eminently so, and resulted in cordial and permanent mutual regard. My little bedroom opened by a French window on a balcony leading to a small garden, and beyond it I had an immense view of Bristol and the surrounding country, over the smoke of which the rising sun often made Turneresque pictures. My sitting room had a front and a corner view of the delightful Downs as far as “Cook’s Folly” and the Nightingale Valley; and often, over the “Sea Wall,” the setting sun went down in great glory. I walked down every week-day into Bristol (of course I needed more than ever to economise, and even the omnibus fare had to be considered), and went about my various avocations in the schools and workhouse till I could do no more, when I made my way home as cheaply as I could contrive, to dinner. I had my dear dog Hajjin, a lovely mouse-coloured Pomeranian, for companion at all times, and on Sundays we generally treated ourselves to a good ramble over the Downs and beyond them, perhaps as far as Kings’-Weston. The whole district is dear to me still.

The return to fresh air and to something like country life was delightful. It had been, I must avow, an immense strain on my resolution to live in Bristol among all the sordid surroundings of Miss Carpenter’s house; and when once in a way in those days I left them and caught a glimpse of the country, the effort to force myself back was a hard one. One soft spring day, I remember, I had gone across the Downs and sat for half an hour under a certain horse-chestnut tree, which was that day in all the exquisite beauty of its young green leaves. I felt this was all I wanted to be happy—merely to live in the beauty and peace of Nature, as of old at Newbridge; and I reflected that, of course, I could do it, at once, by breaking off with Miss Carpenter and giving up my work in hideous Bristol. But, per contra, I had concluded that this work was wanted to be done and that I could do it; and had seriously given myself to it, believing that so I could best do God’s will. Thus there went on in my mind for a little while a very stiff fight, one of those which leave us either stronger or weaker ever after. Now at last, without any effort on my part, the bond which held me to live in Red Lodge House, was loosened, and I was able both to go on with my work in Bristol and also to breathe the fresh air in the morning and to see the sun rise and set, and often to enjoy a healthful run over those beautiful Downs. By degrees, also, I made several friendships in the neighbourhood, some most dear and faithful ones which have lasted ever since; and many people were very kind to me and helped me in various ways in my work. I shall speak of these friends in another chapter.

One of my superstitions has long been that if any particular task seems to us at the first outlook specially against the grain, it will continually happen that in the order of things it comes knocking at our door and practically saying to our consciences: “Are you going to get up and do what is wanted, or sit still and please yourself with something else?” In this guise of disagreeability, workhouse visiting first presented itself to me. Miss Carpenter frequently mentioned the workhouse as a place which ought to be looked after; and which she believed sadly wanted voluntary inspection; but the very name conveyed to me such an impression of dreary hopelessness that I shrank from the thought. When St. Paul coupled Hope with Faith and Charity he might have said “these three are one,” for without the Hope of achieving some good (or at least of stopping some evil) it is hard to gird ourselves to any practical exertion for our fellow-creatures. To lift up the criminal and perishing classes of the community and cut off the root of crime and vice by training children in morality and religion, this was a soul-inspiring idea. But to bring a small modicum of cheer to the aged and miserable paupers, who may be supposed generally to be undergoing the inevitable penalties of idle or drunken lives, was far from equally uplifting! However, my first chance-visit to St. Peter’s in Bristol with Miss Elliot, showed me so much to be done, so many claims to sympathy and pity, and the sore lack of somebody, unconnected officially with the place, to meet them, that I at once felt that here I must put in my oar.

The condition of the English workhouses generally at that period (1859) was very different from what it is now. I visited many of them in the following year or two in London and the provincial towns, and this is what I saw. The sick lay on wretched beds, fit only for able-bodied tramps, and were nursed mostly by old pauper women of the very lowest class. The infirm wards were very frequently placed in the worst possible positions. I remember one (in London) which resounded all day long with din from an iron-foundry just beneath, so that one could not hear oneself speak; and another, of which the windows could not be opened in the hottest weather, because carpets were taken to be beaten in the court below. The treatment of the pauper children was no less deplorable. They were joyless, spiritless little creatures, without “mothering” (as blessed Mrs. Senior said a few years later), without toys, without the chance of learning anything practical for use in after life, even to the lighting of a fire or cooking a potato. Their poor faces were often scarred by disease and half blinded by ophthalmia. The girls wore the hideous workhouse cotton frocks, not half warm enough to keep them healthy in those bare, draughty wards, and heavy hob-nailed shoes which acted like galley-slaves’ bullets on their feet when they were turned to “play” in a high-walled, sunless yard, which was sometimes, as I have seen, six inches deep in coarse gravel. As to the infants, if they happened to have a good motherly matron it was so far well, though even she (mostly busy elsewhere) could do but little to make the crabbed old pauper nurses kind and patient. But how often, we might ask, were the workhouse matrons of those days really kind-hearted and motherly? Of course they were selected by the gentlemen guardians (there were no ladies then on the Boards) for quite other merits; and as Miss Carpenter once remarked to me from the depth of her experience:—

“There never yet was man so clever but the Matron of an Institution could bamboozle him about every department of her business!”