Round about a Pound a Week

by Mrs. Pember Reeves

Bread, however, is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked; it is always at hand, and needs no plate and spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam, or margarine, according to the length of purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands, and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals in the day. Dinner may consist of anything, from the joint on Sunday to boiled rice on Friday. Potatoes will play a great part, as a rule, at dinner, but breakfast and tea will be bread.

Potatoes are not an expensive item in the 20s. budget. They may cost 1s. 3d. a week in a family of ten persons, and 4d. a week in a family of three. But they are an invariable item. Greens may go, butter may go, meat may diminish almost to the vanishing-point, before potatoes are affected. When potatoes do not appear for dinner, their place will be taken by suet pudding, which will mean that there is no gravy or dripping to eat with them. Treacle, or—as the shop round the corner calls it—“golden syrup,” will probably be eaten with the pudding, and the two together will form a midday meal for the mother and children in a working man’s family. All these are good—bread, potatoes, suet pudding; but children need other food as well.

First and foremost children need milk. All children need milk, not only infants in arms. When a mother weans her child, she ought to be able to give it plenty of milk or food made with milk. The writer well remembers a course of eloquent and striking lectures delivered by an able medical man to an audience of West-End charitable ladies. He ended his course by telling his audience that, if they wished to do good to the children of the poor, they would do more towards effecting their purpose if they were to walk through East End streets with placards bearing the legend “Milk is the proper food for infants,” than by taking any other action he could think of. His audience was deeply interested and utterly believing. The fact that the children of the poor never taste milk once they cease to be nursed by their mothers was well known to the lecturer through his hospital experience, and hence his earnest appeal to have the mothers of those children taught what was the proper food to give them. He was, however, wrong in his idea that poor women do not realize that milk is the proper food for infants. The reason why the infants do not get milk is the reason why they do not get good housing or comfortable clothing—it is too expensive. Milk costs the same, 4d. a quart, in Lambeth that it costs in Mayfair. A healthy child ought to be able to use a quart of milk a day, which means a weekly milk bill for that child of 2s. 4d.—quite an impossible amount when the food of the whole family may have to be supplied out of 8s. or 9s. a week. Even a pint a day means 1s. 2d. a week, so that is out of the question, though a pint a day would not suffice for a child of a year old, who would need his or her full share of potatoes and gravy and bread as well. As it is, the only milk the children of the labourer get is the separated tinned milk, sold in 1d., 2d., 3d., and 4d. tins, according to size. These tins bear upon them in large red letters the legend, “This milk is not recommended as food for infants.” The children do not get too much even of such milk. Families of ten persons would take two tins at 3½d. in the week. Families of five, six, or seven, would probably take one such tin. It is used to put in tea, which, as it is extremely sweet, it furnishes with sugar as well as with milk. Sometimes it is spread on the breakfast slice of bread instead of butter or jam. An inexperienced visitor probably suggests that it would make a good milk pudding, but is silenced by hearing that it would take half a tin to make one pudding, and then there is no richness in it. Some people have suggested skim milk as a way round this very terrible deprivation of the hard-working poor. But skim milk does not take the place of whole milk as a food for infants. Parents who are comfortably off would never dream of starving their infants upon it. Even supposing that the children of the poor could magically flourish upon skim milk alone, there is not enough of it on the market to allow its use to be regarded as a universal panacea for hungry babies. In fact, it is worth a moment’s speculation as to whether the whole milk-supply of England is sufficient to insure a quart a day to each English child under five years of age. It is more than likely that, unless the milk-supply were enormously increased, adults would have to go entirely without milk should the nation suddenly awake to its duty towards its children.

The purpose of this book is not to inquire as to whether this mother or that mother might not do a little better than she does if she bought some skim milk, or trained her children to enjoy burned porridge. It is to inquire whether, under the same conditions and with the same means at their command, any body of men or women could efficiently and sufficiently lodge and feed the same number of children.

A boys’ home which maintains some thirty children between the ages of six and fifteen feeds, clothes, and lodges, each boy on an average of 6s. a week. This does not sound an extravagant sum. It is the outcome of much study, great knowledge of the subject, and untiring zeal. The working man’s wife whose husband out of a 22s. or 23s. wage allows her 20s., and who has that convenient family of three children which is permitted by experts on the subject to be a becoming number in a working-class family, has only 4s. a head on which to feed, lodge, and clothe, the family.

Milk depots have been in existence in Lambeth for some years, and have undoubtedly done splendid service to babies under one year of age whose mothers cannot nurse them, but can afford to pay the growing amount of 9d. to 3s. a week for their children. The milk has to be called for, which limits the area in which it can be supplied; but it is sent out in sealed vessels, and is mixed in the exact proportions suitable to the age of the infant. So, when it can be afforded, its results are excellent. Unfortunately, the nursing mother is not helped by this, and it is she who requires milk for the needs of the baby she is nursing. Moreover, the price is, in the case of the 20s. budget, quite out of the question should the children number more than one, or at the most two.

As things are, once weaned, the child of a labouring man gets its share of the family diet. It gets its share of the 4d. tin of separated milk, its share of gravy and potatoes, a sip of the cocoa on which 3d. or 4d. a week may be spent for the use of everyone, and, if its father be particularly partial to it, a mouthful of fat bacon once or twice a week, spared from the not too generous “relish to his tea.” Besides these extras it gets bread.

Women in the poorer working-class districts nurse their babies, as a rule, far longer than they should. It is not unusual for a mother to say that she always nurses until they are a year old. In many cases where a better-off mother would recognize that she is unable to satisfy her child’s hunger, and would wean it at once, the poor mother goes hopelessly on because it is cheaper to nurse. It is less trouble to nurse, and it is held among them to be a safeguard against pregnancy. For those three reasons it is difficult to persuade a Lambeth woman to wean her child. In most of these cases milk or palatable food supplied to the mother would save the situation, and contrive a double debt to pay—the welfare of both mother and child. But the mother, who is by nature a poor nurse, usually finds, when she “gets about again,” that her milk deserts her, and the grave difficulty of rearing the baby is met by her with a weekly 5d. tin of milk of a brand which has not been separated, but which is a very inadequate quantity for an infant.

The articles of diet other than bread, meat, potatoes (with occasional suet puddings and tinned milk), are fish, of which a shilling’s worth may be bought a week, and of which quite half will go to provide the bread-winner with “relishes,” while the other half may be eaten by the mother and children; bacon, which will be entirely consumed by the man; and an occasional egg. The tiny amounts of tea, dripping, butter, jam, sugar, and greens, may be regarded rather in the light of condiments than of food.

The diet where there are several children is obviously chosen for its cheapness, and is of the filling, stodgy kind. There is not enough of anything but bread. There is no variety. Nothing is considered but money.