From the dining-room we went to the basement, where I was shown a number of capital bath-rooms, fitted with a plentiful supply of hot and cold water; a laundry and drying-rooms; store-rooms filled with joints of meat, loaves of bread baked on the establishment, white as milk and of a flavour that made one think of farmhouses and Mrs. Poyser; sacks of flour, potatoes, and other things of that kind; and an immense kitchen, with a wonderful array of ovens and boilers for cooking by steam; everything as polished and bright as a new bell, and not the smallest feature anywhere discernible that did not exhibit the completest signs of anxious and attentive supervision. This Well Street building may be called a Home, and in a sense may answer to that character, but in reality it is nothing but a fine, admirably managed marine hotel or club, filled with bedrooms a good deal more comfortable than many a one in a hotel that a man has had to pay five or six shillings a night for; providing liberal meals in the shape of breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, and furnishing the seaman with all the comforts of a first-rate club for the extraordinary moderate charge of fifteen shillings a week. What does such an institution replace—or rather what is it designed to replace? I suppose there is no part of the sailor’s shore doings more talked about and less understood than the life he leads at the greasy little boarding-house kept by a crimp or a tailor, or, worse still, by old women and abandoned daughters. I stood gazing at one of these houses—a broken-down bit of a hole, with an evil, swaggering look in the posture of its door, and with dirty, stained white blinds in the windows—and thought what a wonderful, dreadful book might be made of the scenes that had taken place in it. A sailor-man was at my side, and I fell into a short talk with him.
“Do you regularly stop at the club?” I asked.
“Yes; it is my home whenever I am in London. I have used it for years, and so have scores of the men you see.”
“A pity all sailors are not equally alive to their own interests,” said I. “Here they are made really comfortable for a few shillings a week; money is advanced to them, clothes furnished to them at cost price, a hundred little comforts placed within their reach, and friends are at hand to help them to a berth if they find difficulty in getting a ship.”
“Perfectly true,” said my companion.
“What attraction beyond the privileges and happiness a residence in this club-house offers can they discover,” said I, pointing to the miserable little boarding-house we confronted, “in such a den as that?”
“Most of the men you find in such places are forced into them,” replied the man. “All about here is filled with touts and runners and their bullies. Sailors are watched coming ashore. They may want to put up at this Home; but the boarding-house runners are at hand to tumble ’em into cabs, drink is given them, the girls—and such girls!—are called in to help, and if the men are obstinate they are fallen upon and beaten; and, to such an extent is this kind of intimidation carried on, that, however anxious a man may be to rescue a shipmate from the hands of those rascals, he’ll think twice before he does it, for so sure as he attempts to interfere and bring a man to this Home, so sure is he of being fallen upon and half killed when he’s alone and the night’s come. There’s not a policeman hereabouts but is full of stories of such work.”
“And what, pray, is the sailor’s life in the low sort of lodging-house?”
“A vile debauch, as a rule, caused by the temptation thrust upon him. It would be difficult to make respectable people understand how he’s robbed. I knew a man who was brought to one of these dens and asked to ‘shout’—that is, to stand a drink all round. He did so, and was made drunk. Next day he was charged for eight ‘shouts,’ the people swearing he had ordered the liquor, and that it was not their fault if he was too intoxicated to remember. That’s only one sample. Abandoned women are kept in the pay of the slop tailors to bring seamen to their shops and press them to buy, and a single purchase at such places is enough to ruin a poor man. There are, no doubt, respectable boarding-houses, but they are few and far between; the most of them are kept by rascally men and women, who, taking the sailor as a simple-hearted fellow, fresh from a spell of salt water, and willing for a bit of a frisk, ply him until they have peeled him, and then kick him out. It was not long ago that a pencil-scrawl was brought to this Home. It had been chucked out of a lodging-house window by a man to a friend who was passing. It stated that the people of the house had stolen all the writer’s clothes, and it begged the manager to send up a suit that the man might get away.”
“Such things must be known to sailors?” said I.