The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  Long before Caminada was set to rid Manchester’s streets of beggars, the activities of professional scroungers caused such widespread disquiet that in 1818 concerned citizens founded the Society for the Suppression of Mendacity, to ensure that charity reached the deserving poor. Though later characterised as hard-hearted and callous, many of its members were active in charitable works and the Society itself provided much help for the needy. Its view was that those who gave to beggars had no way of distinguishing the genuine from the bogus poor and, as most beggars were professional scroungers, money given did nothing to help the deserving but instead encouraged idleness and dishonesty.

  The idea caught on and eventually similar societies emerged all over the country. Each member was equipped with a book of relief tickets which he distributed in place of alms. The recipients presented these at one of the societies’ many offices, where they were interviewed. If deemed deserving they received food, overnight accommodation and perhaps money. Additionally, many of these societies employed officers to patrol the streets, distributing tickets to the genuine and handing over frauds to the police. In 1869 the Mendicity Society introduced a Bread Tickets Scheme to discourage alms-giving, whereby subscribers gave the tickets to beggars who then redeemed them against food at one of its many centres throughout the country.

  The first such society claimed that by 1834 it had reduced the number of beggars in Bath by ninety per cent. The London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity had an annual income of £4,000 by 1860 and employed eight patrol officers. In the course of its work it built up a register of beggars, accumulating details of 72,000 by 1900, which it used to prosecute frauds. On the other hand it also distributed free meals, as many as 239,000 in some years during the ‘hungry forties’.

  But even the distribution of free food was problematic. In 1871 the Charity Organisation Society condemned soup kitchens, asserting that they encouraged beggars and bemoaned the growth in night shelters which served only to confirm the addiction of the idle and feckless to a life on charity. ‘If you wish to relieve genuine poverty,’ it told the public, ‘you will find the means through the clergyman, the Little Sisters of the Poor or the relieving officer. In the streets you will find nothing but the professional toll takers, levying dues on personal weakness.’ The Society encouraged the public to issue street beggars with tickets which they were to present at its offices, where the deserving would get aid in the form of money, blankets and clothing. They also claimed to offer suitable employment to every able-bodied beggar.

  The London Mendicity Society also undertook to follow up begging letters, which were a major source of income for the literate beggar. By 1900 it had a collection of 229,000 such missives. The competent ‘screever’ was reputed to earn £5 a week in the 1870s, the equivalent of a professional salary. As late as 1905 George Sims reported that some lodging houses were home to syndicates of screevers, who operated on a cooperative basis and Rowton Houses in particular were much favoured by such groups as management would not allow the police access.

  As for beggars who worked the streets, there was considerable debate about how much they made. Mayhew estimated that a mid-nineteenth-century beggar earned about 8s a week, roughly equal to the wage of a farm labourer. In 1869 the Secretary of the Howard Association, the predecessor of the Howard League for Penal Reform, estimated that the figure was at least one pound and that many begging families earned more than curates, clerks or schoolteachers.

  Visiting a lodging house situated ‘in a court within a court’ near Drury Lane in 1844, John Fisher Murray was mesmerised by the ingenuity of the tricksters he encountered. The house, which had originally consisted of five small houses, kept its best beds for superior visitors, namely ‘begging letter writers, the lower class of imposters and swindlers, sneaks and pickpockets’.

  Some screevers did not send their pleas through the post but accosted passers-by with letters of recommendation, usually from a notable public figure or clergyman. These testified to the bearer’s good character and commended him to the public as a deserving recipient of charity. Such testimonials were much in demand and their production provided discredited lawyers and alcoholic clerks with a meagre income.

  In addition to throwing light on the activity of screevers, the Mendicity Society’s records also make clear the large number of children involved in begging. Child beggars outnumbered adults, though police and other official records underestimate the extent of their involvement because they enjoyed a degree of impunity not shared by adults. The police were loath to arrest them as magistrates were often at a loss how to treat them and usually sent them away with a warning, knowing full well that they would immediately resume begging. If a child’s parents were imprisoned for sending them begging, then they were sent to the workhouse. But masters were reluctant to take young children and if the magistrates sent every beggar there they would have swamped the whole Poor Law system.

  What then happened to these children, rejected by even the workhouse?

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Put a Man’s Eye Out with a Poker’: Children

  If a man who died in the mid-nineteenth century were restored to life and dropped down in the middle of any of our thronging cities, he would be instantly overwhelmed by the differences between his day and ours. If we asked him to focus solely on people he would be amazed by their height – on average 5in taller than in his day – and their monstrous girths: people in the nineteenth century were far more likely to be under weight than obese. But what would strike him most forcefully is the absence of children. Where are all the children? In 1841 they made up forty per cent of the population; today they are a mere twenty per cent.

  Children thronged the streets of every nineteenth century city and town. They ran along the pavements, whooping and jumping, flaying spinning tops and rolling hoops. The very idea of working class children sitting at home was anathema to parents. Their place was on the streets. But many were not playing: they were engaged in business. Their shrill voices screeched the latest headlines, telling of wars and disasters, salacious court cases and brutal slayings. They sold peas, ham sandwiches, soup, oysters and all the other myriad convenience foods of the day. They peddled matches and needles, herbs and flowers, swept crossings, ran errands and held horses. They delivered groceries and carried bags, cleaned chimneys and polished shoes.

  What is less well known, however, is that many lived independently in lodging houses, without any parental supervision. They formed a significant element of those who would otherwise have been consigned to the workhouse. In many cases they remained in the area where they were born. In Oxford’s St Thomas’ lodging houses forty per cent of lodgers were born in the city or the surrounding countryside, and this seems to have been fairly typical of houses serving rural areas.

  The bequest of the Industrial Revolution was a great deal more than factories and transport. It dealt a blow to traditional social structures, not least the family. One of the consequences of a burgeoning population during the agricultural revolution, which reduced the amount of labour needed on the land, was the advent of juvenile crime and begging on a level that aroused great concern among the political and social elite. Orphaned and abandoned children took to the streets where they wheedled a living, their only resource their wits. Estimates put the number at 16,000 immediately after the Napoleonic Wars and by 1848 there were believed to be no less than 30,000 in London alone, while all cities and towns had their share of street children.

  Younger children were much sought after by professional beggars as there were few so hard-hearted that they could resist the wide-eyed gaze of a famished child, especially if blind or crippled. Some of these unfortunates were foreign children, the victims of their unscrupulous countrymen who were traffickers. The Italian scoundrels who specialised in this exploitation were known as padroni and their modus operandi was always the same: they approached parents, most often in the impoverished south of Italy, promising, for a fee, to take their child t
o England and train him to earn a living. Once in England the children were reduced to a state of slavery, forced to beg or work as organ grinders or street entertainers.

  One notorious rascal, Giuseppe Delicato, filled lodging houses in Birmingham, Plymouth and Hanley with children he acquired by this means and who were reputedly able to earn as much as 10s a day by the 1890s. When some of his charges ran away, Delicato, with breath-taking audacity, advertised, offering a reward for their return. The problem was so serious that the Italian government legislated against the trade and the Italian Benevolent Society worked in Britain to find and return its victims. It was assumed that the problem of child exploitation would diminish with the 1876 Education Act, which compelled parents to send their children to school until they were ten, but many observers felt that the only change was that fewer children were exploited by padronis and more by their parents. A small number of German criminals also operated the same scam in their country, consigning their victims to lodging houses in the small German colony in Whitechapel.

  Nevertheless, most of what James Greenwood described as an ‘immense army of juvenile vagrants’ were indigenous and he and Howard Goldsmid were appalled by the conditions many of them endured in lodging houses. Hundreds roamed the streets of Manchester and the authorities were seriously concerned by the scale of the problem. As late as 1889 a Manchester survey found 700 street children in the city, while in 1871 children under the age of 15 made up more than a quarter of the inmates of lodging houses in St Thomas’ parish, Oxford. Barnardo’s estimate confirms this: he believed that almost one in four dossers in registered lodging houses was under 16.

  Writing of Leicester, Joseph Dare found that one of the problems of the city’s lodging houses was that many of the lodgers were children who had been forced out of their homes because of overcrowding. Generally these were the unfortunates pushed away from the fireside and forced to resort to the warmth of the public house. Even among the best of working men it was quite common for their children to sleep at a neighbour’s house if they had no room in their own.

  Though young, these children of the lodging houses did not defer to their elders in infamy. W.H. Davies, the renowned ‘super-tramp’, was convinced that the most dangerous occupants of lodging houses were these ‘half-boys, half-men’. Any house that harboured them was a hazardous place to live as it was these youths who, more than any group, made ‘the slums of London and other large cities so dangerous’. They were ‘distinguished from full-grown men by their total recklessness. They will lift a poker at the slightest provocation and are as quick to use a lethal weapon as to use their fists.’ He recounts an incident when such a youth put out the eye of an old man on the flimsiest of pretexts.

  Nineteenth century research into the background of these children reveals unsurprising results. Many were the children of criminals and had been abandoned by both parents. A combination of the deserted, the orphaned and the runaway, the vast majority were illegitimate offspring driven out to beg and steal. Some had absconded from refuges for homeless children, such as Barnes’ House in Salford. Once on the streets they relied on the common lodging house, whose keeper was often a receiver of the goods they stole.

  They were forced onto the streets or into lodging houses because, as the chaplain of Manchester Gaol testified in 1853, it was extremely difficult for lone children to get poor relief. When the Marquis of Granby lodging house, attached to the public house of the same name in Warwick town, was inspected in 1869, it had seventeen lodgers, including five children in bed or on the floor in each of its three rooms and ‘all appeared to be tramps’. John Martin, a mid-nineteenth century criminal put his dishonest life down to the company he met in such a house in one of Manchester’s most notorious areas, Blakely Street. These boys induced him to run away from his mother and become a professional thief. Another habitual criminal similarly blamed his demise on those he met in a lodging house in Banister Street, Birkenhead.

  In using both in-depth and group interviews to discover the backgrounds of these lodging house children, Henry Mayhew was far in advance of his time. In January 1850 he brought together 150 of the ‘lowest class of male juvenile thieves and vagabonds who infest the metropolis and the country at large’. All were under the age of 20 – one was just 6 and and many displayed the shaven head of the recently released convict. Of the total, eighty were orphans and only nineteen had both parents living. There were fifty beggars and sixty-six thieves. Only twenty-two were runaways and more than half of them wandered around the country every year, yet only a third slept regularly in casual wards and slightly fewer used tramps’ lodging houses.

  Of those who could read – sixty-three – nearly all had read tales of celebrated criminals and the illiterate had had the stories read to them, usually around the lodging house fire; all expressed delight in such exploits. This fascination with Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard and other legendary desperados who were young criminals’ heroes was widespread and found in lodging houses all over the country. The young swapped tales of the characters’ audacity in kitchens and prison cells and sang about them in the pubs, beerhouses and the penny gaffs frequented by criminals. From the mid-century hawkers sold cheap written accounts of their exploits.

  Mayhew found that many of the group he interviewed had their own adventures and tragedies to recount, like the Birmingham child who fled to London after enduring years of beatings. He fed himself by hawking trifles around the streets. ‘This attraction of a street career is very strong,’ Mayhew said, ‘among the neglected children of the poor.’ For these children the lodging house was an extension of the streets, a place where they were subject to no adult control and could do as they like provided they could afford to pay. After a short time living in this environment they often became proficient thieves and were irredeemably corrupted.

  Many of Mayhew’s respondents confirmed the importance of the lodging house as a breeding ground for young thieves. ‘Without such places,’ one told him, ‘my trade could not be carried on’, and that ‘if any innocent boy gets into a lodging house he’ll not be innocent long.’

  Like most criminals, they were constantly on the move and they loved the anonymity of the big cities. Some were the children of lodgers while resident beggars and thief masters kept others they were training up for criminal gain. But many were alone. Their attitude to making a living was just what we would expect of a child. They were concerned with making enough for today, for their immediate needs, with little thought for tomorrow.

  There were plenty of older criminals who regarded themselves as craftsmen, passing on their lore to the next generation, enabling them to make a living. Often, however, this was more self-interest than philanthropy. In many cases the mentor ran a lodging house and provided his charges with pencils, oranges, notebooks or other items they might peddle as a front for stealing.

  It was often easier for such children to make a living than their adult counterparts. There was an insatiable demand for boy labour throughout the entire Victorian era. Youths cost less than adults, were more amenable and could simply be discarded when they reached maturity. They worked as errand boys, shops boys, van boys, delivery boys and performed countless mechanical tasks that made up the manufacture of most commodities.

  Information presented to the House of Commons in 1899 detailed the employment of boys leaving London schools that year and found that forty per cent of them became errand boys, eight per cent office boys and junior clerks and eighteen per cent went into the building, metal, clothing and woodworking trades. Most of these jobs were of the classic dead-end type, offering no development and no improvement in wages. The future was inevitable: at some stage they would be turned out to join the great pool of causal labour and a lifetime of underemployment.

  It was accepted by everyone familiar with this issue that virtually all the youths living in these places were not in regular employment but made their living on the streets, generally peddling one commodity or another. It’s difficu
lt for us today to visualise the clamour and noise of the streets, the great seething mass of incessantly moving humanity, ebbing and flowing along pavements and roads. There were few things you could not buy on the streets. Hawkers offered nuts, oranges, fresh flowers, dried flowers, herbs and lavender. For as little as a 1s it was possible for a hawker to buy a day’s stock.

  When the summer ended and there was no demand for certain seasonal goods, the hawker turned to other items: combs, stay laces, cedar pencils and watercress. Some were sold from arm baskets or a ‘shallow’ hanging from string around the neck or a small tin tray.

  Much food was sold on the streets. Among the camestibles sold were fish – both wet and fresh, dry, smoked, cured, and shellfish – fruit and vegetables and ‘green stuff ’ – watercress, chickweed and groundsel. There was always a demand for food that could be eaten on the run: ham sandwich-sellers worked the streets around theatres and music halls, while muffin-sellers covered their wares with a flannel cloth as punters preferred them warm. Crumpets were popular from September to spring. Fried fish, hot eels, pickled whelks, sheep’s trotters, pea soup, hot green peas, penny pies, plum duff, meat puddings, baked potatoes, spice cakes, Chelsea buns, sweetmeats, brandy balls, cough drops and even meat for cats and dogs were all available from street vendors.

  Oysters were among the most popular and cheapest fast foods of the day. The enterprising street seller set up his improvised stall, which might be no more than an upturned box, wherever he liked and sold them four for a penny, already opened and garnished with vinegar and pepper. On average, these people made between 4s and 10s a week, barely enough to ward off starvation and maintain a tenuous hold on existence.

  For those in need of a drink to wash down their food, there was tea and coffee, ginger beer, lemonade, hot wine, new milk and curds and whey for sale on the street. Pastries provided a whole sub-class of street food: there were fruit pies, boiled meat and kidney puddings, plum puddings and a vast variety of tarts, cakes, buns and biscuits. From the 1870s there were also numerous sellers of that exotic continental delicacy, ice cream, usually Italian. At the bottom of the thoroughfare traders were the match-sellers.