In Darkest England, and the Way Out

by William Booth

Crippled musical instruments, for instance, old toys, broken-down perambulators, old clothes, all the things, in short, for which we have no more need, and for which there is no market within our reach, but which we feel it would be a sin and a shame to destroy.

When I get my Household Salvage Brigade properly organised, beginning, as I said, in some district where we should be likely to meet with most material, our uniformed collectors would call every other day or twice a week with their hand barrow or pony cart. As these men would be under strict discipline, and numbered, the householder would have a security against any abuse of which such regular callers might otherwise be the occasion.

At present the rag and bone man who drives a more or less precarious livelihood by intermittent visits, is looked upon askance by prudent housewives. They fear in many cases he takes the refuse in order to have the opportunity of finding something which may be worth while "picking up," and should he be impudent or negligent there is no authority to whom they can appeal. Under our Brigade, each district would have its numbered officer, who would himself be subordinate to a superior officer, to whom any complaints could be made, and whose duty it would be to see that the officers under his command punctually performed their rounds and discharged their duties without offence.

Here let me disclaim any intention of interfering with the Little Sisters of the Poor, or any other persons, who collect the broken victuals of hotels and other establishments for charitable purposes. My object is not to poach on my neighbour's domains, nor shall I ever be a party to any contentious quarrels for the control of this or that source of supply. All that is already utilised I regard as outside my sphere. The unoccupied wilderness of waste is a wide enough area for the operations of our Brigade. But it will be found in practice that there are no competing agencies. While the broken victuals of certain large hotels are regularly collected, the things before enumerated, and a number of others, are untouched because not sought after.

Of the immense extent to which Food is wasted few people have any notion except those who have made actual experiments. Some years ago, Lady Wolseley established a system of collection from house to house in Mayfair, in order to secure materials for a charitable kitchen which, in concert with Baroness Burdett-Coutts, she had started at Westminster. The amount of the food which she gathered was enormous. Sometimes legs of mutton from which only one or two slices had been cut were thrown into the tub, where they waited for the arrival of the cart on its rounds. It is by no means an excessive estimate to assume that the waste of the kitchens of the West End would provide a sufficient sustenance for all the Out-of-Works who will be employed in our labour sheds at the industrial centres. All that it needs is collection, prompt, systematic, by disciplined men who can be relied upon to discharge their task with punctuality and civility, and whose failure in this duty can be directly brought to the attention of the controlling authority.

Of the utilisation of much of the food which is to be so collected I shall speak hereafter, when I come to describe the second great division of my scheme, namely the Farm Colony. Much of the food collected by the Household Salvage Brigade would not be available for human consumption. In this the greatest care would be exercised, and the remainder would be dispatched, if possible, by barges down the river to the Farm Colony, where we shall meet it hereafter.

But food is only one of the materials which we should handle. At our Whitechapel Factory there is one shoemaker whom we picked off the streets destitute and miserable. He is now saved, and happy, and cobbles away at the shoe leather of his mates. That shoemaker, I foresee, is but the pioneer of a whole army of shoemakers constantly at work in repairing the cast-off boots and shoes of London. Already in some provincial towns a great business is done by the conversion of old shoes into new. They call the men so employed translators. Boots and shoes, as every wearer of them knows, do not go to pieces all at once or in all parts at once. The sole often wears out utterly, while the upper leather is quite good, or the upper leather bursts while the sole remains practically in a salvable condition; but your individual pair of shoes and boots are no good to you when any section of them is hopelessly gone to the bad. But give our trained artist in leather and his army of assistants a couple of thousand pairs of boots and shoes, and it will go ill with him if out of the couple of thousand pairs of wrecks he cannot construct five hundred pairs, which, if not quite good, will be immeasurably better than the apologies for boots which cover the feet of many a poor tramp, to say nothing of the thousands of poor children who are at the present moment attending our public schools. In some towns they have already established a Boot and Shoe Fund in order to provide the little ones who come to school with shoes warranted not to let in water between the school house and home. When you remember the 43,000 children who are reported by the School Board to attend the schools of London alone unfed and starving, do you not think there are many thousands to whom we could easily dispose, with advantage, the resurrected shoes of our Boot Factory?

This, however, is only one branch of industry. Take old umbrellas. We all know the itinerant umbrella mender, whose appearance in the neighbourhood of the farmhouse leads the good wife to look after her poultry and to see well to it that the watchdog is on the premises. But that gentleman is almost the only agency by which old umbrellas can be rescued from the dust heap. Side by side with our Boot Factory we shall have a great umbrella works. The ironwork of one umbrella will be fitted to the stick of another, and even from those that are too hopelessly gone for any further use as umbrellas we shall find plenty of use for their steels and whalebone.

So I might go on. Bottles are a fertile source of minor domestic worry. When you buy a bottle you have to pay a penny for it; but when you have emptied it you cannot get a penny back; no, nor even a farthing. You throw your empty bottle either into the dust heap, or let it lie about. But if we could collect all the waste bottles of London every day, it would go hardly with us if we could not turn a very pretty penny by washing them, sorting them, and sending them out on a new lease of life. The washing of old bottles alone will keep a considerable number of people going.

I can imagine the objection which will be raised by some shortsighted people, that by giving the old, second-hand material a new lease of life it will be said that we shall diminish the demand for new material, and so curtail work and wages at one end while we are endeavouring to piece on something at the other. This objection reminds me of a remark of a North Country pilot who, when speaking of the dulness in the shipbuilding industry, said that nothing would do any good but a series of heavy storms, which would send a goodly number of ocean-going steamers to the bottom, to replace which, this political economist thought, the yards would once more be filled with orders. This, however, is not the way in which work is supplied. Economy is a great auxiliary to trade, inasmuch as the money saved is expended on other products of industry.