"About My Father's Business": Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the Sorrowing

by Thomas Archer

Yes; listen to that startling clangour of military music coming from an upper room. We are standing, you know, in the cheerful kitchen of that Refuge for the Homeless in the renovated old slaughter-house in Newport Market, and I want you to come with me to see the boys' school, which occupies a very considerable portion of that weatherproof but ramshackle building.

Only those who are acquainted with the poverty and the crime of this great metropolis can estimate the deep and urgent need that still exists for refuges in which homeless, destitute, and neglected children can be received for shelter, food, and clothing. Only the practical student of the effect of our present administration of the Education Act can calculate how vast a necessity is likely to exist for the reception and instruction of the children of the poorest, even when all the machinery of the present School Board is put in motion for vindicating the compulsory clause.

Let that clause be interpreted in the most liberal manner—which would be in effect to provide State education without cost to the parents—and the Act will still leave untouched a vast number of children for whom nothing can be done until their physical necessities are provided for—children who are perishing with cold, starving for want of food. A visit to some of the big buildings recently erected by the London School Board will reveal the fact that there are many such children now in attendance; neglected, barefoot, half-clothed, hungry, and with that wistful eager look, sometimes followed by a kind of stupefaction, which may be observed in the poor little outcasts of the streets. There is no reasonable hope of doing much with these little creatures till the "soup-kitchen" and the "free breakfast" are among the appliances of education, where the necessity is most pressing, and the children perish for lack of bread as well as for lack of knowledge.

As it is—I need not refer again to the escape which is always open from the streets to the prison. The few Government industrial-schools to which magistrates occasionally consign young culprits brought before them are intended only for those who come within the cognisance of the law.

The operations of these reformatory-schools are successful so far as they go. They represent seventy-five per cent. of successful reformatory training as applied to juvenile transgressors committed by magistrates to their supervision.

Perhaps, when we are fully impressed with the meaning of the statistics which are published each year in the Report of the Inspectors of Certified Schools in Great Britain, we shall begin to consider how it will be possible to regard destitute children in relation to the guardianship of the state before they qualify themselves for Government interposition by the expedient of committing what the law calls a crime.

The last Report states distinctly that the sooner criminal children are taken in hand, the more complete is their reformation. There are fewer "criminals" of less than ten years of age than there are hardened offenders of from twelve to sixteen. This is, so far, satisfactory; but when we consider that (including Roman Catholic establishments) there are but fifty-three reformatories in England, and twelve in Scotland (thirty-seven of those in England and eight in Scotland being for boys, and sixteen in England and four in Scotland for girls), and that in 1873, when the Report was issued, the sum-total of children in all these institutions was but 5,622, of whom one-fourth were in the Roman Catholic schools—we cease to wonder at the vast number of homeless, neglected, and destitute children in London alone—a number which, notwithstanding the efforts of philanthropy and the activity of School Board beadles, exceeds the total of all the inmates of the State reformatories throughout the kingdom.

This refuge at Newport Market had included destitute and starving boys among those who were brought to its shelter from the cruel streets, the dark arches of railways and of bridges, and the miserable corners where the houseless huddle together at night, long before its supporters could make provision for maintaining any of the poor little fellows in an industrial-school. But the work grew, and the means were found, first for retaining some of the juvenile lodgers who came only for a night's food, and warmth, and shelter, and afterwards for receiving them as inmates.

Some of these are sent to the Refuge by persons who are furnished with printed forms of application, or by mothers who can afford evident testimony that they can scarcely live on the few shillings they are able to earn by casual work as charwomen, or by the no less casual employments where the wages are totally inadequate to support a family; while a few lads have themselves applied for admission because they were orphans, or utterly destitute and abandoned by those on whom they might be supposed to have a claim.