He then went to the worst part of town, where ‘house after house vied with each other as to which could best attract the lowest class of vagrant by dirt and dilapidated grimness.’ Only in one house did he find separate rooms for those willing to pay for privacy. Otherwise there was ‘the dreadful comingling of the sexes’. Most of the buildings he visited were no more than converted cottages.
As one seasoned traveller told Mayhew, sometimes these lodgings were so bad that ‘you must get half-drunk or your money for your bed is wasted. There is so much rest owing to you after a hard day; and bugs and bad air’ll prevent its being paid, if you don’t lay in some stock or beer or liquor to sleep on. It’s a duty you owes yourself.’
The Reverend George Edwards carried out a survey of cheap lodging accommodation in Preston in 1902. He found thirty-four houses, twenty-three of which took in women. They ranged from those with only a few beds to those that held over seventy people. They varied in quality but were generally better than in Wakefield forty years earlier. Other sources make it clear that there was a steady improvement throughout the second half of the century. One of the more unusual accounts was provided by George Davis of Hounslow.
Davis was clearly a man who would have felt at home in our litigious age. In 1880 he wrote to Scotland Yard complaining of the standard of accommodation available at the King’s Head, a large beer house and lodging house in Staines. As a result an Inspector of Nuisances visited Davis, whose chief complaint was that he was cold at night. The inspector, however, found ‘beds of oat chaff, a bolster, pillow, two sheets, a covering consisting of patchwork quilting and wadding, four or five times thick and a counterpane’, all of which were in ‘a fair condition’.
A popular route for itinerants of every sort was that from London to Birmingham. It is worth retracing the route that so many trod in the mid-nineteenth century, as it gives a feel for the range of accommodation available and the variety of people likely to be encountered along the way. Going from one lodging house to the next involved walking between ten and twenty miles a day, something that to many of us today appears a great feat of athleticism. Our Victorian ancestors, however, were prodigious walkers: Dickens routinely walked twenty miles for leisure and was by no means an exception.
The average charge for a reasonable house on that route was 4d and less for the more basic provision. When custom was poor, the traveller enjoyed the luxury of an entire bed to himself, whereas at busy times, when there were fairs or race meetings in the area, he might count himself lucky to get any share of a bed.
The most popular lodging house in Romford, as was common in many towns, doubled as a public house. The King’s Arms, like most lodging houses, provided a kitchen for cooking and a proper division of the married and single. With forty beds, some of which were surrounded by curtains, it was deemed respectable. Similarly, the main lodging house in Chelmsford was also a beershop. There, however, the resemblance ends for the Three Queens was not only ‘a rickety place’ but also a place where ‘you could get a pint of beer and a punch of the head, all for 2d’, as recorded by Mayhew. With only fourteen beds it was frequently overcrowded and made no pretence of respectability.
The Castle at Braintree was also a beershop, but one with a cosmopolitan flavour. One of its patrons described it as a place that ‘takes all sorts and sizes; all colours and all nations’. With only twenty-two beds it separated men and women but was nevertheless not in the same class as the Rose and Crown at Thaxton, which was distinctly up-market. At 6d a night it was one of the more expensive houses and offered singing and patter in the taproom. It had only ten beds and was decent and comfortable.
Saffron Walden may be one of the most affluent places in Britain today but in the mid-nineteenth century its lodging house, The Castle was ‘as slovenly as could be’. Its clientele was mixed, consisting of both tradesmen and ‘moochers’, though the two avoided interaction, as was common in most lodging houses where ‘each stuck to his own’. Less reputable still was Yorkshire Betty’s in Barnwell, Cambridge, where men and women were mixed in its thirty beds. Much smaller was the Woolpack at Newmarket, which had only six beds, but was described as ‘a lively place’.
At Bury St Edmunds the intriguingly named Old Jack Something’s was not to the liking of the disreputable. With only twelve beds, its proprietor ensured that it was always clean, comfortable and honest. The traveller passing through Mildenhall, however, might well find it hard to get shelter, as the only house was a private home with a mere seven beds.
A totally different establishment was the Tom and Jerry at Ely. A spartan place, unique in having no kitchen, the landlord was ‘easily frightened’ with the result that ‘it was a regular rough place where there was often quarrelling all night long and any caper was allowed between men and women.’ This points up the importance of firm management in a lodging house, as otherwise the inmates tended towards disruptive behaviour. The Plume of Feathers at St Ives, though bigger, was no better than ‘passable’. Like many of these market town houses it was small, with only eleven beds.
Perhaps one of the most disreputable and dangerous houses was the Bell and Dickey at St Neots, noted, in the words of one patron, for its ‘queer doings’. Being out of the way, much of what went on there was unnoticed and it attracted ‘a body of men that don’t like to run gaping to the beak’. Often there were three to a bed, men, women and children all intermingled. Its infamy, however, was exceeded by that of the Cock in Bedford, which was likened to the most squalid lodging houses in Whitechapel.
At the other extreme of respectability was a small house in Irchester, where bed before 9pm was the rule, described as ‘hard and honest, clean and rough’. Accommodation in Wellington was also in a private house but it was far from orderly and became the venue of rogues and villains when the fair was on. One of the best on the route was Mrs Bull’s, a private house which was not only comfortable and decent but a ‘nice, quiet Sunday house’ with twelve beds. The beds were good too at the private house offering accommodation in Market Harborough but otherwise the place was only ‘middling’.
The private house where travellers stayed at Lutterworth, located above a shop, was nothing less than ‘very queer’, as lacking in comfort as in decency, and consisting of only ten beds. The proprietor of the Rookery in Leicester had a distinctly rustic approach to tackling the problem of a bed shortage, as described by Mayhew: he ‘shakes up the beds with a pitchfork and brings in straw if there’s more than can possibly be crammed into beds.’ The Teaboard at Hinckley was much better, though smaller with only eight beds, and very comfortable. Similarly, the private house that offered beds at Nuneaton was small but snug.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Bill Cooper’s in Coventry, which one visitor described as ‘a dilapidated place and there’s no sleep [in its twenty beds] for there’s an army of bugs – great black fellows’. In nearby Birmingham things were a great deal better at Mrs Leach’s ‘comfortable and decent’ house with thirty beds, but, like most big cities, Birmingham had its share of bad places.
In the smaller towns, however, there was often no choice as many had only a single lodging house. Consequently these places attracted the entire gamut of travellers, as Mayhew revealed, ‘the beggar, the robber and the pick-pocket; the street patterer and the street trader; the musician, the ballad singer and the street performer; the diseased, the blind, the lame and the half-idiot; the outcast girl and the hardened prostitute; young and old and all complexions and all countries’. Cast together with them is the ‘wearied mechanic, travelling in search of employment, and even the broken-down gentleman or scholar, whose means do not exceed 4d’.
Even this comprehensive list does not mention all those groups for whom lodging houses were important. Many single parents found accommodation there, as did blind people. The 1851 census records eighteen blind keepers, while some lodgers were mentally ill and elderly, many of whom were in receipt of outdoor relief. There is evidence that some lodging house
s catered specifically for the elderly, such as that of Jonathan South, in Berrington Street, Hereford which in 1861 accommodated five people in their eighties and a man of ninety-nine. Few, however, were able to compete with John Pratt, who lived in a lodging house in Oxford in 1861, while in his hundred-and-sixth year.
These old people were often broken by a lifetime of relentless toil and too infirm to maintain themselves by their own labour. On the other hand, there was a significant element of the lodging house population who made it their life’s work to avoid work. How did they survive?
Chapter Six
‘Aint Eaten for Five Days’: Beggars and Tramps
His head was pressed against the wet pavement and his back arched up, his arms and legs splayed and his eyes turned up in his head, with only the whites visible. A crowd formed a circle about him, transfixed by the blood oozing from his nose and the froth flecking his mouth and chin. But it was the choking noise, the gurgling in his throat as his tongue lolled on his chin that held the crowd silent. Then his body fell limp. But the gurgling sound continued and the blood glistened on his face.
Two women stepped into the circle and lifted him to his feet. They parked him on a low wall and bent to his ear, whispering reassurance.
‘No wonder he’s collapsed,’ said one of the women. ‘Poor dear aint eaten for five days.’ The second woman took a sixpence from her purse and pressed it into the man’s palm. She turned to the crowd.
‘Will you see him starve?’ she reproached. ‘Will no one show a scrap of Christian charity to this poor creature?’ They wilted under her unblinking gaze and fumbled in their pockets.
That evening, back in their Drury Lane lodging house, in a court within a court, the epileptic and his female companions counted their money. It had been a profitable day.
Throwing a fit was just one of the myriad ruses used by professional beggars. It was always important to choose a time and location carefully. Outside a church, just as the congregation was leaving, was ideal. By the time he told his sad story – often supported by a written testimonial from a minister of religion – his concerned helpers were pressing on him the proceeds of an impromptu collection.
John Fisher Murray visited a lodging house in 1844 where he found the ersatz epileptic and many other professional beggars – or ‘gegors’ as they called themselves. Fisher had to concede that the fraudster’s use of soap, to produce the frothing at the mouth, and food dye pushed up his nostrils to produce the haemorrhaging, certainly added to the authenticity of his act. The ersatz epileptic was one of the numerous professional moochers whose aversion to work was such that they would expend any amount of ingenuity and effort to avoid it.
No one condemned these scroungers more vehemently than Henry Mayhew, as described in his seminal work on the underclass, London Labour and the London Poor:
We are surrounded by wandering hordes, distinguished from the civilized man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour and by want of providence in laying up a store for the future, by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehension, by his passion for intoxicating liquors, by his extraordinary powers of enduring privations, by his comparative insensibility to pain, by an immoderate love of gambling, by his love of libidinous dances, by the absence of chastity among his women and his disregard of female honour, by his vague sense of religion.
Every commentator agreed that drunkenness ‘appears to have been first and foremost a cause and a condition of the tramp’s existence’. There is no doubt that a a sober tramp was as rare as a warm and welcoming casual ward. In the 1890s five times as many people died of alcohol-related illnesses than did sixty years later. Those with experience of the tramp life at the end of the nineteenth century estimate that between ninety and ninety-five per cent of tramps were alcoholics. This is supported by the fact that habitués of the casual wards were at this time almost twice as likely as the general population to die of alcohol abuse.
Nor it is possible to claim that tramps were poor unfortunates cursed with low intelligence or mental illness. A Manchester study concluded that dossers were no less intelligent than the average working man, but that in ninety per cent of cases ‘yielding to drink has been the start of their degradation’. The Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded at the beginning of the twentieth century found that only five per cent of the inmates of the casual wards fell into this category.
Even the most compassionate philanthropists stressed the viciousness and dishonesty of beggars and asserted that the deserving poor never resorted to begging, which was the exclusive vocation of idle rogues and vagabonds who abused Christian charity. If professional beggars were permitted to benefit from charity, they argued, the moral order was turned on its head. Only those who are poor through no fault of their own deserve charity and even that must not be unconditional. It must be paid for with labour. If not, what incentive is there for the poor to work? If not, idleness and deceit are rewarded and ultimately the whole moral order collapses.
One reason for this unsentimental attitude was the ubiquity of beggars. The professional beggar was as common in Victorian cities and towns as the horse. He formed a distinct sub-class of the great nomadic tribe constantly on the move. He was at the bottom of the criminal hierarchy and regarded begging as a craft, a trade at which he worked in order to improve his income.
Despite appearances to the contrary, beggars were far from the pathetic, isolated individuals they presented to the public; in fact they were part of a fellowship which shared best practice. It is no coincidence that accounts of beggars’ strategies in different parts of the country are remarkably similar; the same ploys appeared in Manchester and Newcastle as in London and Bristol.
Though commentators were unanimous in condemning these charlatans, the public attitude was far more ambivalent. Britain’s long Christian tradition meant people esteemed charity and the charitable. Many were sympathetic to their plight and the poor were particularly generous to them – especially when under the influence of alcohol. Yet there was also a widespread fear of tramps as carriers of disease and many felt intimidated into giving them something, if only to get rid of them. Besides, tramps were widely believed to wreak vengeance on those who turned them away empty-handed, especially in rural areas where they reputedly burnt outhouses and crops in revenge against those who refused them charity.
Many sexual assaults were laid at their door too and they were widely regarded as incorrigible thieves who would steal anything that came to hand. Nonetheless, they were also the beneficiaries of a certain amount of maudlin sentimentality, expressed in poems and songs that suggested that the tramp’s life was without cares or mundane concerns.
The problem of a wandering population of homeless people was exacerbated by the introduction of the new Poor Law system in Ireland in 1838, at a time when it was estimated that between two and three million people there were dependent on begging or were destitute for part of the year. As thousands of Irish seasonal workers arrived in Britain – most travelling as ballast in the holds of returning coal vessels – they brought with them droves of beggars; many of the workers begged while travelling to somewhere they hoped to get work. It was usual for the men to travel first, followed by their wives and children, who also begged their way to where their husbands were working.
The Vagrancy Act of 1824 made begging illegal and gave the authorities the power to prosecute under one of three categories – idle and disorderly, rogues and vagabonds or incorrigible rogues – with each liable to a sentence of up to a year’s imprisonment. Each of these terms had a legal definition. The ‘idle and disorderly’ were those who failed to provide for their family, refused to work or begged in their parish of settlement. ‘Rogues and vagabonds’ were professional beggars who operated outside their parish of settlement, men who had abandoned their families and forced them to rely on poor relief, some travelling entertainers and fortune tellers, ‘reputed’ thieves’ and �
��suspect persons’, that is, those who loitered around the streets and were apparently up to no good. The ‘incorrigible rogue’ was the recidivist, the person who had previously been convicted as a rogue or vagabond and shown no inclination to mend his ways.
The Act also gave the authorities the power to search lodging houses and immediately there was a jump in the number of vagrants jailed. But prosecutions could do nothing in the face of the human catastrophe unfolding in the wake of the Irish Famine. In 1847 alone 250,000 Irish paupers arrived in Liverpool. Even after the Famine influx ended, seasonal begging and vagrant immigrants remained a fixture during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Vagrants are not to be confused with casual labourers, with whom they often shared beds in lodging houses. Many vagrants did occasionally resort to honest labour when there was no alternative, yet the perambulations of the vagrant were entirely different from those of the genuine job seeker. Tramps did not wander aimlessly but often followed well-worn routes. They left the cities in April, as the weather improved, and launched out into the countryside. As soon as the days began to shorten, they wended their way to the big cities where indiscriminate charity and firee accommodation were most readily had. Once there, many wintered in common lodging houses or shelters for the homeless and passed the day begging, holding horses or carrying parcels from piers and railway stations. Some got the occasional day’s work on a market or made a few shilling by scavenging for goods they could sell to marine stores.
The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House Page 11