The three-year-old daughter of a carter out of work died of tuberculosis. The father, whose policies had lapsed, borrowed the sum of £2 5s. necessary to bury the child. The mother was four months paying the debt off by reducing the food of herself and of the five other children. The funeral cortège consisted of one vehicle, in which the little coffin went under the driver’s seat. The parents and a neighbour sat in the back part of the vehicle. They saw the child buried in a common grave with twelve other coffins of all sizes. “We ’ad to keep a sharp eye out for Edie,” they said; “she were so little she were almost ’id.”
The following is an account kept of the funeral of a child of six months who died of infantile cholera in the deadly month of August, 1911. The parents had insured her for 2d. a week, being unusually careful people. The sum received was £2.
| £ | s. | d. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funeral | 1 | 12 | 0 |
| Death certificate | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Gravediggers | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Hearse attendants | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Woman to lay her out | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Insurance agent | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Flowers | 0 | 0 | 6 |
| Black tie for father | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2 | 1 | 9 |
The child was buried in a common grave with three others. There is no display and no extravagance in this list. The tips to the gravediggers, hearse attendants, and insurance agent, were all urgently applied for, though not in every case by the person who received the money. The cost of the child’s illness had amounted to 10s., chiefly spent on special food. The survivors lived on reduced rations for two weeks in order to get square again. The father’s wage was 24s., every penny of which he always handed over to his wife.
The usual amount paid for burial insurance is 1d. a week for each child, 2d. for the mother, and 3d. for the father, making 11d. a week for a family with six children, though some over-cautious women make the sum more.
Another form of thrift is some sort of paying-out club. Usually payments of this kind come out of the father’s pocket-money, but a few instances where the women made them came within the experience of the investigators. One club was named a “didly club.” Its method seemed to consist in each member paying a certain woman ¼d. the first week, ½d. the next week, ¾d. the next week, and so on, always adding ¼d. to the previous payment. The money was to be divided at Christmas. It was a mere way of saving, as no interest of any kind was to be paid. Needless to relate, about October the woman to whom the money had been paid disappeared. Stocking clubs, crockery clubs, and Christmas dinner clubs, make short appearances in the budgets. They usually entail a weekly payment of 3d. or 4d., and when the object—the children’s winter stockings, the new plates, or the Christmas dinner—has been attained, the payments cease.
One form of money transaction which is hardly regarded as justifiable when poor people resort to it, but which at the same time is the ordinary, laudable, business custom of rich men—namely, borrowing—is carried on by the poor under very distressing conditions. When no friend or friends can be found to help at a crisis, many a woman has been driven—perhaps to pay the rent—to go to what she calls a lender. A few shillings are borrowed—perhaps five or six. The terms are a penny a week on every shilling borrowed, with, it may be, a kind of tip of half a crown at the end when all the principle and interest has been paid off. A woman borrowing 6s. pays 6d. a week in sheer interest—that is, £1 6s. a year—without reducing her debt a penny. She is paying 433 per cent. on her loan. She does not know the law, and she could not afford to invoke its aid if she did know it. She goes on being bled because it is the local accepted rate of a “lender.” Only one of the women whose budgets appear in these pages has had recourse to this kind of borrowing, but the custom is well known by them all.
Such is the passion for weekly regular payments among these women that, had the Post Office initiated regular collection of pennies instead of the industrial insurance companies doing so, either the Post Office would now be in possession of the enormous accumulated capital of these companies, or the people on 20s. a week would have been much better off. The great bulk of the pennies so urgently needed for other purposes, and paid for burial insurance, is never returned in any form whatsoever to the people who pay them. The small proportion which does come to them is swallowed up in a burial, and no one but the undertaker is the better for it. As a form of thrift which shall help the future, or be a standby if misfortune should befall, burial insurance is a calamitous blunder. Yet the respectable poor man is forced to resort to it unless he is to run the risk of being made a pauper by any bereavement which may happen to him. It is a terrible object lesson in how not to manage. If the sum of £11,000,000 a year stated to be paid in weekly pennies by the poor to the industrial burial insurance companies were to be spent on better house room and better food—if, in fact, the one great universal thrift of the poor were not for death, but were for life—we should have a stronger nation. The only real solution of this horrible problem would seem to be the making of decent burial a free and honourable public service.