London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

In one parish, where the poor are regularly employed in street sweeping, and paid a regular wage in money, the whole scavaging work is done by the paupers, as they are usually termed, though they are not “on the rate.” By them the streets are swept and the houses dusted, the granite broken for macadamization, and the streets and roads repaved or repaired. This is done by about 50 men, the labour in the different departments I have specified being about equally apportioned as to the number employed in each. The work is executed without any direct intervention of the parish officers employed in administering relief to the poor, but through the agency of a board. All the men, however, are the poor of the parish, and but for this employment would or might claim relief, or demand admittance with their families into the workhouse. The system, therefore, is one of indirect pauper labour. Nearly all the men have been unskilled labourers, the exception being now and then a few operatives in such handicrafts as were suffering from the dearth of employment. Some of the artizans, I was informed, would be earning their 9s. in the stone-yard one week, and the next getting 30s. at their business. The men thus labouring for the parish are about three-fifths Irishmen, a fifth Welchmen, or rather more than a fifth, and the remainder Englishmen. There is not a single Scotchman among them.

There is no difference, in the parish I allude to, between the wages of married and single men, but men with families are usually preferred among the applicants for such work. They all reside in their own rooms, or sometimes in lodging-houses, but this rests with themselves.

I had the following account from a heavy and healthy-looking middle-aged man, dressed in a jacket and trousers of coarse corduroy. There is so little distinctive about it, however, that I will not consume space in presenting it in the narrative form in which I noted it down. It may suffice that the man seemed to have little recollection as to the past, and less care as to the future. His life, from all I could learn from him, had been spent in what may be called menial labour, as the servant, not of an individual, but of a parish; but there was nothing, he knew of, that he had to thank anybody for—parish or any one. They wanted him and he wanted them. On my asking him if he had never tried to “better himself,” he said that he had once as a navvy, but a blow on the head and eye, from a portion of rock shivered by his pick-axe, disabled him for awhile, and he left railway work. He went to church, as was expected of him, and he and his wife liked it. He had forgotten how to read, but never was “a dab at it,” and so “didn’t know nothing about the litany or the psalms.” He couldn’t say as he knew any difference between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic church-goers, “cause the one was a English and the t’ other a Irish religion,” and he “wasn’t to be expected to understand Irish religion.” He saw no necessity to put by money (this he said hesitatingly), supposing he could; what was his parish for? and he would take care he didn’t lose his settlement. If he’d ever had such a chance as some had he might have saved money, but he never had. He had no family, and his wife earned about 4s. a week, but not every week, in a wool warehouse, and they did middling.

The above, then, are the modes in which paupers, or imminent paupers, so to speak, are employed, and in one way or other are paid for their labour, or what is called paid, and who, although parish menials, still reside in their own abodes, with the opportunity, such as it is, of “looking out” for better employment.

As to the moral qualities of the street-sweeping paupers I do not know that they differ from those of paupers generally. All men who feel themselves sunk into compulsory labour and a degraded condition are dissatisfied, and eager to throw the blame of their degradation from their own shoulders. But it is evident that these men are unwilling workers, because their work is deprived of its just reward; and although I did not hear of any difficulty being experienced in getting them to work, I was assured by many who knew them well, that they do not go about it with any alertness. Did any one ever hear a pauper whistle or sing at his street-work? I believe that every experienced vestryman will agree to the truth of the statement that it is very rarely a confirmed pauper rises from his degradation. His thoughts and aspirations seem bounded by the workhouse and the parish. The reason appears to be because the workhouse authorities seek rather to degrade than to elevate the man, resorting to every means of shaming the pauper, until at last he becomes so utterly callous to the disgrace of pauperism that he does not care to alter his position. The system, too, adopted by the parish authorities of not paying for work, or paying less than the ordinary prices of the trade, causes the pauper labourers to be unwilling workers; and finding that industry brings no reward, or less than its fair reward, to them, they get to hate all work, and to grow up habitual burdens on the State. Crabbe, the poet, who in all questions of borough and parish life is an authority, makes his workhouse boy, Dick Monday, who when a boy got more kicks than halfpence, die Sir Richard Monday, of Monday-place; but this is a flight on the wings of poetical licence; certainly not impossible, and that is all which can be said for its likelihood.

The following remarks on the payment of the parish street-sweepers are from one of Mr. Cochrane’s publications:—

“The council considers it a duty to the poor to touch upon the niggardly manner in which parish scavengers are generally paid, and the deplorable and emaciated condition which they usually present, with regard to their clothing and personal appearance. One contractor pays 16s. 6d. per week; 2 pay 16s.; 12 (including a Highway Board) pay 15s. each; 1 pays 14s. 6d.; 2 pay 14s.; and 1 pays so low as 12s. On the other hand, five parish boards of ‘guardians of the poor,’ pay only 9s. each, to their miserable mud-larks; one pays 8s.; another 7s. 5d.; a third 7s.; a fourth compensates its labourers—in the British metropolis, where rent and living are necessarily higher than elsewhere—with 5s. 8d. per week! whilst a fifth pays 3 men 15s. each, 12 men 10s. each, and 6 men 7s. 6d. each, for exactly the same kind of work!!! But what renders this mean torture of men (because they happen to be poor) absurd as well as cruel, are the anomalous facts, that whilst the guardians of one parish pay 5 men 7s. each, the contractor for another part of the same parish, pays his 4 men 14s. each;—and whilst the guardians of a second parish pay only 5s. 8d., the Highway Board pays 15s. to each of its labourers, for performing exactly the same work in the same district!—Mr. Darke, scavenging contractor of Paddington, lately stated that he never had, and never would, employ any man at less than 16s. or 18s. per week;—and Mr. Sinnott, of Belvidere-road, Lambeth, about three months since, offered to certain West-End guardians, to take 40 paupers out of their own workhouse to cleanse their own parish, on the street-orderly system;—and to pay them 15s. per week each man[25]; but the economical guardians preferred filth and a full workhouse, to cleanliness, Christian charity, and common sense;—and so the proposal of this considerate contractor was rejected! It is certainly far from being creditable to boards of gentlemen and wealthy tradesmen who manage parish affairs, to pay little more than one-half the wages that an individual does, to poor labourers who cannot choose their employment or their masters....

“The broken-down tradesman, the journeyman deprived of his usual work by panic or by poverty of the times, the ingenious mechanic, or the unsuccessful artist, applies at the parish labour-market for leave to live by other labour than that which hitherto maintained him in comfort.... The usual language of such persons, even when applying for private alms or parochial relief, is, not that they want money, but ‘that they have long been out of work;’ ‘that their particular trade has been overstocked with apprentices, or superseded by machinery;’ or, ‘that their late employer has become bankrupt, or has discharged the majority of his hands from the badness of the times.’ To a man of this class, the guardian of the poor replies, ‘We will test your willingness to labour, by employing you in the stone-yard, or to sweep the streets; but the parish being heavily burthened with rates, we cannot afford more than 7s. or 8s. a week.’ The poor creature, conscious of his own helplessness, accepts the miserable pittance, in order to preserve himself and family from immediate starvation....

“The council has taken much pains to ascertain the wages, and mode of expenditure of them, by this uncared-for, and almost pariah, class of labourers throughout the metropolitan parishes; and it possesses undeniable proofs, that few possess any further garment than the rags upon their backs; some being even without a change of linen; that they never enter a place of worship, on account of their want of decent clothing; that their wives and children are starved and in rags, and the latter without the least education; that they never by any chance taste fresh animal food; that one-third of their hard earnings is paid for rent; and that their only sustenance (unless their wives happen to go out washing or charing), consists of bread, potatoes, coarse tea without milk or sugar, a salt herring two or three times a week, and a slice of rusty bacon on Sunday morning! The meal called dinner they never know; their only refection being breakfast and ‘tea:’ beer they do not taste from year’s end to year’s end; and any other luxury, or even necessary, is out of the question.

“Of the 21 scavengers employed by St. James’s parish in 1850, no less than 16,” says Mr. Cochrane’s report, “were married, with from one to four children each. How the poor creatures who receive but 7s. 6d. a week support their families, is best known to themselves.”