The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  Lodgers had to present themselves before 7pm and were allocated a cubicle. Additionally, they had use of day rooms, the kitchen, libraries, the smoke room and repair rooms where they could tend to worn clothes and distressed boots. Glazed brick and tiled interiors made it easy to keep clean. Decorations consisted largely of etchings and paintings, many based on those displayed in the Houses of Parliament, and stags’ heads of the type found in the homes of the aristocracy. Together with the range of amenities available, these features contributed to an aura of domesticity far removed from the sterile institutional atmosphere of the workhouse or the harsh functionality of the common lodging house.

  However, at 6d a night they were beyond the means of the poorest. In fact the 1901 census reveals that lodgers were of a surprisingly diverse nature and were virtually all gainfully employed. Many were working men but there were a surprising number of clerks, shop assistants, accountants and lowly estate agents. The premises had to be vacated during the day but this was no hardship for those in work, and though payment was by the day it was possible to become a semi-permanent resident by renewing day after day and week after week. Lodgers shared not only the facilities but frequently chores such as washing and cooking.

  Nevertheless, it is wrong to assume that the atmosphere was that of an enclosed religious order – there were plenty of drunken and noisy men at weekends and there is evidence of illicit sexual activity. Nor were lodgers invariably honest: complaints of petty theft were common. The privacy provided by the cubicles was only partial, in that there was a large gap between the top of the partition and the ceiling which failed to keep out noise. Yet, there were a number of courtyards, some on the rooftop, with benches available for recreation and leisure. All in all they were places of comfortable order.

  A similar institution, Victoria House, once stood at the junction of Commercial Road and Wentworth Street and dominated the area off Whitechapel Road. A converted warehouse, it had a distinctive character different from Rowton House: it was patently religious and consciously spartan. Inmates had to embrace temperance – or at least tolerate it while staying there. Its most striking feature was the enormous lecture halls where preachers sought to transform the outlook of lodgers.

  St Giles was once one of the most feared rookeries in London. In an attempt to tackle the lack of decent accommodation there, the Society for the Improvement of the Working Classes built what is now Parnell House in 1849. The Society built another house in the Seven Dials, towards Covent Garden, where the vegetable market and the theatre districts ran up against each other. This area was for much of the nineteenth century notorious for prostitution and the squalor of its lodging houses. In the mid-century the Famine Irish flooded into the area. Charles Street Model Lodging House stood in Mecklin Street (formerly Charles Street) and held about eighty. The original building, erected in 1847, was refurbished and renamed Shaftsbury Chambers in 1892.

  It was in the same area that London County Council (LCC) made its first contribution to housing the poor. Parker House, on Parker Street, opened in 1896 with provision for hundreds of men, while a few streets away the enormous Bruce House, on Kemble Street, built in 1895, in addition to beds for over 1,000 single men, offered dayrooms, a shop, a barber, a tailor and a boot mender – in fact everything the itinerant worker could want. Ashley Chambers, at nearby Wild Court, was another LCC house. The accommodation in all these houses far exceeded what was available elsewhere at 6d a night. Once more the newspapers likened their facilities to a gentleman’s club.

  As for the nature of the lodgers, we have a detailed picture of what the 220 lodgers in Bruce House, on Kemble Street, Drury Lane did for a living around the beginning of the twentieth century. There were thirty-five who addressed circulars, a common form of domestic labour by which people eked out a bare subsistence. A further thirty-three were labourers and street or market hawkers. Some, with disarming candour, described themselves as beggars. This is much as one might expect. However, surprisingly there were also two school teachers, two insurance agents, three engineers, nine clerks and five described poetically as ‘broken down gentlemen’; then, as now, the social ladder did not convey people only in one direction. To leaven the mix there was also a doctor, an actor, a solicitor and a framer. Several of these regarded the house as their home and occupied the same cubicle for years.

  A hostel erected by the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes stood in George Street, Bloomsbury, and provided accommodation for 104 single men. It comprised a kitchen, a wash-house, baths with hot and cold water, a pantry and ‘a secure and separate well-ventilated safe for the food of each inmate’, a library, a common room – decorated with white tiles on brick arches – with two rows of elm tables and seats, a fireplace and a constant supply of hot water. There were eight dormitories, ‘subdivided with moveable wooden partitions 6’ 9” high, each with its own door within which is a well ventilated area with a bed, chair, clothes box, gaslight and heating as required. There are washing closets on each floor.’ Unsurprisingly, people flocked there in far greater numbers than could be accommodated. Their charges were similar to those of landlords offering infinitely inferior provision.

  The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes went on to build an entire street of workers’ houses on Streatham Street, Bloomsbury, designed to ‘combine every point essential to the health, comfort and moral habits of inmates; particularly with respect to ventilation, drainage and an ample supply of water’. When they opened in 1846 the rent for the most basic family accommodation was from 3s to 6s a week. The Society’s President, Prince Albert, also erected a block of model houses at Cavalry Barracks in Hyde Park entirely at his own expense. These were designed by the Prince and exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The initial hope and expectation was that these efforts would show that it was possible to make a fair return on investment in cheap accommodation and therefore capitalists, whose philanthropic instincts were tempered by hard-headed business calculation, would fill the breach left by philanthropy. But rising land prices in the 1850s meant that the return on such an investment was insufficient to tempt the shrewd entrepreneur.

  To be viable, models required a large population of tenants to ensure they operated at full capacity. Consequently the bulk of them were in London, though there were some in other centres of population. The Bradford Model Lodging House Company Limited opened a house in the city in 1866. This philanthropic enterprise was designed to provide investors with an annual return of 5 per cent. It accommodated almost 60,000 people over a 12 month period, during which time more than 5,000 were turned away for lack of room.

  Despite their many qualities, there remained many who agreed with Hollingshead in questioning the benefits of such enterprises. Thomas Archer bemoaned the fact that ‘half a million of money … for providing improved dwellings for the poor should be used for the purpose of adding to the convenience of the comparatively well-to-do’. He too stressed that model lodging houses did nothing to help those at the bottom of the economic pile.

  Additionally, the rules in the models were not to the liking of certain elements of the working class. This was most evident in the Peabody buildings, where rents had to be paid in advance, arrears were not allowed, and all applications required an employer’s reference. This meant that casual workers were effectively barred, as were most types of home workers who were not allowed to carry on their trade on Peabody premises. Peabody buildings also provided very few units for single people and these were often reserved for the aged, widows and widowers.

  It is important to put the models in context. They had a minor impact on the lodging population as there was so little of this type of accommodation; the number of Londoners occupying them in the nineteenth century was equivalent to half the capital’s annual population growth. Archer also claims that ‘these places have something of the institutional censure of the workhouse about them that deters many for the poorer classes prefer a place
where they can go in and out without it being anybody’s business’.

  Archer suggested that life in such places drained the spirit of a man and led to depression:

  Despite all its acknowledged advantages, men are driven from the place after a few weeks by sheer ennui, almost by a kind of reasonless aversion to its regularity and completeness and above all by want of personality about the building and its arrangements. They drift into some place in the neighbourhood – many degrees dirtier, less comfortable and less reputable than the place from which they have pined to be free. These places destroy all individuality and self-respect as they exude an institutional reek.

  Confirmation of this comes from experience of one Rowton House which serves its original function to the present day: Arlington House in Camden Town. In the early 1930s Orwell wrote of it in Down and Out in Paris and London, where he praised it as superb value for money, at a time when 1s bought a cubicle and for 2s 6d a ‘special’ was to be had, ‘which is practically hotel accommodation’. Orwell, however, found the strict discipline irksome. It seems that the rules posted on the walls prohibited most things, including card playing and cooking.

  Other benefactors for whom housing became the focus of their philanthropic efforts varied greatly in their resources. The East End vicar, the Reverend Barnett, founded the East London Dwelling Company to buy and refurbish properties to provide decent housing for the poor. By 1886 he had established Brunswick Buildings and Wentworth Buildings right in the heart of the Spitalfields rookery. Their success attracted, among other philanthropists, the Rothschilds, whose Four Per Cent Dwellings Company erected Rothschild House, home to 200 Jewish families. Accommodation was basic and the building was like a military barracks. In common with most other philanthropic housing projects, it attracted criticism for not helping those at the bottom of the social hierarchy – particularly the geriatric destitute and the chronically sick. Only the industrious and provident poor could afford the rent and the 1885 Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes found that most of the families occupying this sort of accommodation were those of respectable artisans or those with more than a single income.

  Father Arthur Osborne Jay opened the Trinity Chambers Lodging House in the Nichol at the end of the nineteenth century. He offered beds at 2s a week – below the market rate – and refused to take tramps. His ninety-two lodgers enjoyed hot baths, the use of a kitchen and a common room. He had no illusions about the prospects of his clients if they remained in Britain and encouraged them to emigrate to Canada and Australia.

  With the 1851 Labouring Classes Lodging House Act the government first became involved in the provision of accommodation and sought to make up for the deficiencies of philanthropic efforts. The Act allowed local authorities to buy, lease or build lodging houses. It laid down detailed instructions on how they should set their charges: not so high as to exclude the working man in search of employment but not so low as to be an indirect form of poor relief.

  Most local authorities, however, were reluctant to undertake the burden of Westminster’s munificence, towards which Parliament intended to make no practical contribution. They were under no compulsion to do so as the powers conferred by the Act were optional. Local councils realised from the outset that municipal accommodation would never – because of the nature of its clientele – be self-financing. Significantly, they also realised that if municipal lodging houses were to become indiscriminate charities they would attract professional scroungers and ne’er-do-wells in great numbers.

  By the time beds in models became available in large numbers they cost between 2s and 3s a week, that is almost twice the price of the average common lodging house. One effect of this was that few of them were ever full. Most councils took the view that rather than building lodging houses they would do better to improve existing ones. Consequently models remained very much the domain of philanthropy, with a few exceptions.

  Besides, models were not viable outside the centres of population and had little impact elsewhere. Outside the great cities, in the countless villages and market towns across Britain, there was also an enormous population constantly in motion in addition to large numbers for whom the lodging house was a settled home.

  Chapter Five

  Harvesters, Hucksters and Harpists: The Common Lodging House in the County Towns

  According to Philip Larkin, the substance of a man’s life consists of a succession of small indignities, things known only to himself. Most of us become inured to minor humiliations and do not despise ourselves when we laugh fulsomely at the boss’s jokes. Others feel the sting of every insult. One such individual was a street clown, interviewed by a social commentator in the 1850s.

  ‘You can’t imagine what a curse the street business often becomes,’ he said, ‘with its insults and starvations. I dare say that no persons think more of their dignity than persons in my way of life.’ Expressing a sentiment common among the people of the street, he said he would ‘rather starve than ask for relief from the parish. Many times I’ve gone to work without a breakfast and played the clown until I could raise a dinner. Most of the street clowns,’ he added ‘die in the workhouse. In their old age they are generally very wretched and poverty-stricken.’ His garish attire of red and white stripes, spattered with red and black spots, belied his despair.

  The clown’s life, grim as it was, would have been even worse had it not been for the network of lodging houses which by the mid-nineteenth century criss-crossed Britain. Without them neither he nor any of the itinerant army of entertainers and hawkers would have been able to ply their trade. These were the people who gave the streets their distinctive character. Fiddles and trombones, organs and drums, voices baritone and bass filled the air. It was impossible for the Victorian to venture into the street without encountering some delight which attracted an audience of children and street Arabs eager for distraction.

  Most of these performers were itinerants, smitten by wanderlust, forever searching for audiences more appreciative and more generous. In large cities the range of distractions seen over the course of a year included every form of musicianship, every conceivable act of agility and every imaginable entertainment. This great entertainment fraternity, in common with itinerant peddlers, wintered in the big cities and began to circulate around the country in April, moving from one lodging house to another, brightening the lives of all they encountered.

  There were an enormous number of these people in the 1800s and their numbers increased in the second half of the century. In 1891 there were over 7,000 actors, 39,000 musicians and 9,000 ‘performers and showmen’. There were numerous touring theatrical companies and few county towns in which German bands did not perform at least once during the summer months. In 1891 there were over 1,200 German musicians, most of whom were constantly on the move. Such bands visited Banbury every spring for over forty years.

  There were even more Italian musicians, many of whom travelled alone or in pairs and reached most villages and towns in even the remotest parts of the country. There were also Irish musicians – fiddlers and pipers, accordion and bodhrán players. These however, were a mere fraction of the number of native musicians – everything from ‘professors of music’ to clog dancers and the blind or disabled fiddlers. All used the lodging houses.

  The street singer was generally known as a ‘griddler’. ‘Chanters’ were those who sang the broadsheet songs they peddled. One of the commonest street entertainers was the ballad-singer. His ingenuity lay in telling of dramatic news items – gruesome murders, executions and bloody wars made excellent subject matter – in the form of a ballad which he would sing in order to promote the sale of their ballad sheets, printed on long sheets of paper and often displayed on a clotheshorse. The sheets sold for a penny or a halfpenny. ‘Praters’, who sang hymns and religious songs, were to be seen and heard in virtually every city and town in the country.

  In addition there were Christy Minstrels, animal trainers – though the beast they had ta
med might be nothing more ferocious than a poodle coached to stand on its hind legs – and jugglers. It is a measure of how many street entertainers there were that in the 1860s Michael Bass MP led a campaign to suppress them. The chief effect of this, despite the Act he piloted through Parliament in 1864, was to make Mr Bass and those who supported him immensely unpopular with the poor who denounced them as curmudgeonly killjoys.

  Some of the most interesting entertainers were those seen only at specific times of the year. Jack in the Green, a character whose origins go back to pagan antiquity, appeared on May Day, also known as Chimney Sweep’s Day. The sweep, his wife and family took to the streets. Encased from head to foot in a wicker frame not unlike a beehive, with boughs and flowers woven into it and only a small window to see through, the sweep was entirely concealed. His family, their faces blackened with soot and the women in short white dresses and gaudy shoes, played mouth organs around the dancing sweep and collected coppers from the crowd.

  Puppet shows, then as now, exercised an unrivalled fascination for children. The puppeteer was generally accompanied by a helper in a white top hat, playing a mouth organ and often a drum. It was his role to collect the donations at the end of the show.

  In November Guy Fawkes appeared in an array of elaborately demonic forms, sometimes drawn on a cart and often accompanied by exotically dressed figures who played instruments and worked the crowd.

  Similar to the street clowns were the street dancers, from old soldiers, who bemoaned the fact that they might ‘dance half an hour for a ha’penny’, to faux ballerinas. One unfortunate soldier wore an artillery man’s blue jacket, grey trousers and a dark blue army cap. Yet he confided in Mayhew that he lived in a lodging house of the better kind, which admitted only adults. Cryptically, he added: ‘I couldn’t bear to live in a house where there were boys and girls, and all sorts – there’s such carryings on.’