CHAPTER VI
BUDGETS

Perhaps it will be as well here to reiterate the statement that these chapters are descriptive of the lives and conditions of families where the wage of the father is continuous, where he is a sober, steady man in full work, earning from 18s. to 30s. a week, and allowing a regular definite sum to his wife for all expenses other than his own clothes, fares, and pocket-money. Experience shows how fatally easy it is for people to label all poverty as the result of drink, extravagance, or laziness. It is done every day in the year by writers and speakers and preachers, as well as by hundreds of well-meaning folk with uneasy consciences. They see, or more often hear of, people whose economy is different from their own. Without trying to find out whether their own ideas of economy are practicable for the people in question, they dismiss their poverty as “the result of extravagance” or drink. Then they turn away with relief at the easy explanation. Or they see or hear of something which seems to them bad management. It may be, not good management, but the only management under the circumstances. But, as the circumstances are unknown, the description serves, and middle-class minds, only too anxious to be set at rest, are set at rest. Drink is an accusation fatally easy to throw about. By suggesting it you account for every difficulty, every sorrow. A man who suffers from poverty is supposed to drink. That he has 18s. or 20s. a week, and a family to bring up upon that income, is not considered evidence of want. People who have never spent less than £4 a week on themselves alone will declare that a clever managing woman can make 18s. or 20s. a week go as far as an ordinary woman, not a good manager, will make 30s. They argue as though the patent fact that 30s. misspent may reduce its value to 18s. could make 18s. a week enough to rear a family upon. It is not necessary to invoke the agency of drink to make 20s. a week too small a sum for the maintenance of four, five, six, or more, persons. That some men in possession of this wage may drink does not make it a sufficient wage for the families of men who do not drink.

It is now possible to begin calculations as to the expenditure of families of various sizes on a given wage or household allowance. For a family with six children the rent is likely to be 8s., 8s. 6d., or even 9s., for three or four rooms. A woman with one or two children sometimes manages, by becoming landlady, to make advantageous arrangements with lodgers, and so reduce her payments, though not her risk, to considerably less than the usual market price of one or two fairly good rooms. But women with large families are not able to do this. A family with four or five children may manage in two rooms at a rental of 6s. to 7s., while a family with one, two, three or even occasionally four, children will take one room, paying from 3s. 6d. up to 5s., according to size. It is safe to assume that a man with a wife and six children and a wage of 24s. a week will allow 22s. for all outgoings other than his own clothes and pocket-money, and that his wife will pay for three, or perhaps four, rooms the sum of 8s. a week.

The budget may begin thus:

s.d.
Rent (four rooms: two upstairs, two down)80
Clothing club06
Boot club10
Soap, soda, etc.05
Burial insurance011

The other regular items in such a woman’s budget, apart from food, would be heating and lighting, comprising coal, wood, matches, gas or oil, and candles. The irregular items include doctor’s visits to a sick child, which may cost 6d. a visit, or 1s. a visit, including medicine, and renewals which may be provided for by “crockery club, 4d.,” or may appear as “teapot, 6d.,” or “jug, 3¾d.,” at rare intervals.

Coal is another necessary for which the poor pay a larger price than the well-to-do. The Lambeth woman is compelled to buy her coal by the hundredweight for two reasons, the chief of which is that she is never in possession of a sum of ready money sufficient to buy it by the ton or by the half-ton. A few women, in their passion for regular weekly payments, make an arrangement with the coalman to leave 1 cwt. of coal every week throughout the year, for which they pay a settled price. In the summer the coal, if they are lucky enough to have room to keep it, accumulates. One such woman came through the coal strike without paying anything extra. She used only ½ cwt. a week from the coalman, and depended for the rest upon her store. But not all have the power to do this, because they have nowhere to keep their coal but a box on the landing or a cupboard beside the fireplace. They therefore pay in an ordinary winter 1s. 6d. a cwt., except for any specially cold spell, when they may pay 1s. 7d. or 1s. 8d. for a short time; and in the summer they probably pay 8d. or 8½d. for ½ cwt. a week. In districts of London where the inhabitants are rich enough to buy coal by the ton, the same quality as is used in Lambeth can be bought in an ordinary winter—even now, when the price is higher than it used to be—for 22s. 6d. a ton, with occasional short rises to 23s. 6d. in very cold weather. Householders who have a large cellar space have been able to buy the same quality of coal which the Lambeth people burn, in truck loads, at the cheap time of year, at a price of about 20s. a ton. The Lambeth woman who buys by the hundredweight deems herself lucky. Only those in regular work can always do that. Some people, poorer still, are driven to buy it by the 14 lbs. in bags which they fetch home themselves. For this they pay a higher proportionate price still. While, therefore, it has been in the power of the rich man to buy cheap coal at £1 a ton, the poor man has paid 30s. a ton in winter, and almost 27s. in summer—a price for which the rich man could and did get his best quality silkstone.

Wood may cost 2d. a week, or in very parsimonious hands 1d. is made to do. Gas, by the penny-in-the-slot system, is used rather more for cooking than lighting. The expense in such a family as that under consideration would be about 1s.

The budget now may run:

s.d.
Rent80
Clothing club06
Boot club10
Burial insurance011
Coal16
Gas10
Wood01
Cleaning materials05
135