A number of children also survived by scavenging. ‘Waste not, want not’ was the motto of those who were most in want. These children trawled the river banks in search of coal, metal, rope and bones which could be turned into a few coppers at a marine store.
Mayhew claimed that most children who were street hawkers were also thieves or beggars. Many did not have the wit to survive on the proceeds of theft. Invariably, these ‘soft’ creatures, often ‘half fools’, fell into begging, whereas their more astute fellows simply used begging as a pretext for stealing. Many of these children and young men had stolen first from their employers and then found that without a ‘character’ no one would employ them or worse still, their parents had driven them from home. It was at this stage that they came upon the lodging house and were inducted into a life of crime, which suggests that they were usually thieves before they had any experience of the lodging house.
One such urchin recounted how, in the 1850s, he met up with a group of men who passed themselves off as wounded soldiers, veterans of the Spanish Legion – the equivalent of the French Foreign Legion – and travelled the country begging and living in lodging houses. After a brief spell of imprisonment he tried to employ the techniques he had learnt from his mentors and posed as a ‘turnpike sailor’ and other victims of misfortune, making a good living and seldom having to work. He was adamant that there was once a time when an accomplished beggar could make as much as three guineas a week, but that time had passed and it was all even an old hand could do to feed himself.
Yet he also maintained that many lodging houses were totally dependent on the patronage of beggars. In such places beggars shared the mysteries of their trade, including information about villages and individual houses which had proved profitable. The ‘cadgers’ then had their own secret language or cant, which was entirely different from that of thieves and operated on the rhyming principle – examples of which are ‘Jack surpass’ for glass, ‘finger and thumb’ for rum and ‘heaps of coke’ for smoke.
During the 1890s the national press was full of accounts of the activities of ‘street Arabs’ or hooligans marauding round Manchester and terrorising the population. Local newspapers spoke of the Scuttlers – youth gangs based on loyalty to a specific area of the city – reducing the streets of the slums to a state of anarchy, where law-abiding citizens went in fear of their lives. There is no doubt the Scuttlers got a great thrill from the fear they induced in others. They thrived on the buzz of the chase and the high of an adrenaline rush. They regarded sweethearts as their property and used them as a means to demonstrate their hardness, usually when avenging slights, often entirely imaginary.
It was not only boys who followed this path. Mayhew encountered a prostitute of twelve and spoke at some length with one of sixteen. The latter was orphaned at an early age, and was sent into service at ten. Her life was so intolerable that she ran off after six months and found shelter in a lodging house. There she witnessed children of her own age sleeping with each other and before she was twelve she had taken up with a boy of fifteen.
For three years she plied her trade as a street walker, lodging in abject squalor in a house used by other prostitutes. She moved then to another house in which all the women were prostitutes, most controlled by pimps who beat them if they failed to bring home money and spent their days stealing, selling the proceeds in pubs or to the keeper of the house. The police, she contended, never called at such houses, though there was a constant stream of visitors, all thieves and prostitutes, many of whom bought a halfpenny worth of coffee, which entitled them to sit at the fire for as long as they chose.
Many of the waifs and strays who moved Dr Barnardo to set up his first children’s home in 1870 lived in common lodging houses. One such was Mary B., a ten-year-old living a vagrant life with her father, who was described as ‘a worthless fellow’ and who, while living in a Surrey lodging house, was twice prosecuted for causing the girl to beg. Later he moved to another town where he was arrested and whereupon the magistrates decided to take the child from his care. She was subsequently accepted into one of Barnardo’s homes.
Evangelical Christians also focused their attention on the lodging houses. These ‘slum saviours’ seldom met with a receptive audience and were likely to be dismissed as ‘slummers’. Dr Barnardo, like many a slummer, was himself the object of prostitutes’ ire when they accused him of luring away their men by encouraging them to lead useful lives.
Others sought to exploit the naivety of those seeking to reform them. The humiliation that befell a preacher from the Zion Chapel when he ventured into a notorious lodging house, the Phoenix, on the Ratcliffe Highway, was by no means unusual. He met there a cohabiting couple and encouraged them to sanctify their union in matrimony. In order to help them along, he provided the prospective bride with a separate room, a wedding dress and some furniture for the marital home. Immediately the groom pawned the dress and furniture and called off the wedding on the grounds that his proposed was already married to a sailor.
Despite the ire of many he hoped to reform and those who exploited them, Dr Barnardo persisted and opened his first home in 1866. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children also helped to reduce the number of children who wandered about the country as aids to begging parents and unscrupulous adults. Other philanthropists who operated on a smaller scale, nevertheless provided practical help for children.
One such was John MacGregor, a barrister and ragged school teacher, who saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851 a wonderful opportunity to help the children of the streets: he employed 120 boys as shoe-blacks. The enterprise was so successful that the scheme provided the children with accommodation which thereby kept them away from the baleful influence of the lodging house and by 1877 provided honest employment for 385 boys.
It was from about this time that the number of children in lodging houses began to fall and by the early twentieth century the houses contained very few. Significantly, this also coincided with a fall in juvenile crime. There are many reasons for this shift, including the falling birth rate, the expansion of the Industrial School system, the growth of philanthropic societies catering specifically for children and the decline in seasonal jobs in agriculture because of increased mechanisation. The slowing rate at which towns grew in the second half of the nineteenth century also contributed to this downward trend.
Perhaps the most significant cause, however, was the development of compulsory education. At the beginning of the nineteenth century few poor children received regular weekday education, whereas from the 1870s most received some form of elementary education. The Education Act of 1870 was vital to this development, while the subsequent 1876 Act made attendance obligatory for those under ten.
What’s more, from 1857 the courts had the power to deposit in industrial schools children aged between 7 and 14, who were deemed to be in danger of falling into a life of crime. In effect any child found begging or clearly lacking parental care was likely to end up in one of the schools, where he might be detained until he was 16. By 1898 there were over 22,000 children in these schools, most of whom would previously have crowded into low lodging houses and casual wards.
There was a difference between reformatories – where those convicted of serious offences were consigned – and industrial schools, where not all children were criminals; many in fact were the victims of neglect, as a result of which they were in danger of falling into crime. T.B.L. Baker, a Gloucester magistrate and an authority on juvenile crime, declared in the 1860s that the habitual, skilled boy-thief had ceased to exist outside London. He also discerned a reduction in crime in many large cities, such as Bristol, Birmingham and London. This he attributed to the practice of magistrates, from 1856, to routinely send second-time offenders to a reformatory. The effect of this in Gloucestershire was to reduce by half the number of juveniles appearing before the courts.
Similarly, the number of adults before the courts was also declining. The 1870s marked the b
eginning of a period of falling crime throughout the country which lasted until the end of the century. By the 1880s hundreds of juvenile criminals had already disappeared from the streets of major towns.
Yet as late as 1900 it was estimated that one in ten children were still working when they should have been in school. Ideally, Victorian children should have enjoyed the protection and nurture of a family, in the same way that the rightful place of a woman was thought to be at the centre of a home, supported by a husband. But just as many children were, in reality, forced to provide for themselves, there were many women who relied entirely on their own resources. When these proved inadequate many resorted to desperate measures.
Chapter Eight
Blowers and Blow-ins: Fallen Women and Foreigners
Her screams, the long howls of a wounded beast demented with pain and rage, wakened the house. Doors opened and boots clattered on the stairs. When they saw her they shied in revulsion, covering their mouths in wide-eyed horror. She stood in a circle of blood, her face smeared and hair matted, her eyes wild with terror, her shift scarlet with only little cuffs of white unbloodied. The bed was sodden and drops of blood pulsed from the mattress and pooled on the floor.
We will never know exactly what occurred in cubicle 44 of William Crossingham’s lodging house at 35 Dorset Street that night in May 1901. What is certain is that Mary Ann Austin, a 28-year-old prostitute, was subjected to a savage assault by a sadistic pervert, from which she died the following day.
Every evening the area to the east of Commercial Street, around Dorset Street, Whites Row and north of Pearl and Dean Street was awash with prostitutes. It was made infamous by the Jack the Ripper murders and most of his victims were women like Mary Ann who used the lodging houses around Flower and Dean Street as their base. Thirteen years before Mary Anne was murdered, Annie Chapman had left the same lodging house on the night she became a victim of the Ripper. It seemed that in the interim, despite the public outrage that followed the Ripper murders, little in the area had changed.
But brutal attacks on women were not confined to high-profile murders: they were part of the warp and weft of life in such areas. Shortly before the first Ripper murder hit the papers, a prostitute operating in the area had died as a result of a sadistic battering. Street gangs regarded prostitutes as fair game and seldom robbed them without also assaulting them, sometimes in the most obscene manner. In the slums a crude form of social Darwinism operated with tooth and claw savagery; old and broken prostitutes were at the bottom of the food chain.
The subsequent coroner’s inquest and murder trial left the exact circumstances of Mary Anne’s death a mystery. What they demonstrated clearly, however, was that the people of the slums lived in a hermetically sealed world in which the standards of the wider society were largely absent. The details of the case reveal that at the end of Victoria’s reign the worst lodging houses remained as bad as they had ever been.
Purportedly a women’s lodging house, William Crossingham’s of 35 Dorset Street was known as a prostitutes’ base. Mary Ann brought one of her clients there late on Saturday 25 May and paid the large sum of 1s 6d for a bed. The next morning, when her screams woke the house, there was no sign of the man. The keeper’s wife, Maria Moore, sent for a doctor and summoned Daniel Sullivan – William Crossingham’s brother-in-law and the keeper of another of his lodging houses. Sullivan immediately set about destroying all evidence of what had happened: he had Mary Ann’s clothes burnt, washed and cleaned her and moved her to another bed.
Meanwhile the doctor arrived and recognising that her condition was perilous, sent Mary-Ann to hospital, where she died the next day. It was only then that the police became aware of what had happened. Their attempts to discover the circumstances surrounding Mary Ann’s death proved futile: all the witnesses lied and when their lies were exposed they merely told a fresh set of lies. Their accounts were riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.
The man who had gone to bed with Mary Ann claimed to be her husband and swore that when he left her she was perfectly well; there was nothing in the testimony of the witnesses to suggest otherwise. The judge had insufficient evidence to convict anyone. The Daily Mail fulminated against all the usual suspects, blaming the keepers and describing the Dorset Street lodging houses as ‘the head centre of the shifting criminal population of London … the common thief, the area sneak, the man who robs with violence and the unconvicted murderer’. Nor were the police blameless: they ‘have a theory that it is better to let these people congregate together in one mass where they can be easily found than to scatter them abroad.’
The Victorians believed that the lodging house was inextricably linked with prostitution. Few writers on one failed to mention the other. It was widely believed that they were the means by which many innocent country girls, newly arrived in the city, were induced into a life of vice. Contemporary observers invariably concluded that there was a close link between living conditions and sexual licence generally. This was a leitmotif running through every discussion on housing and social conditions. As one commentator put it, ‘The greatest immorality is the necessary result of their promiscuously crowded habitations.’ Nowhere was overcrowding more evident than in the lodging house.
Public concern with prostitution suggests that it was a widespread problem and that it was the major route by which women passed beyond the realms of respectability. In fact, there were significant numbers of women, apart from prostitutes, who existed beyond the social pale. Women made up one in four of the vagrants arrested by the Metropolitan Police in the decade up to 1843 and in the 1860s they constituted between one-third and a quarter of known tramps. Throughout the period their numbers declined relative to those of men and by the end of the nineteenth century there were nine male tramps for every female.
Nevertheless in the 1870s and 1880s women made up between a fifth and a third of the occupants of lodging houses. Women’s beds in lodging houses were generally more expensive than men’s. Mary Higgs’ experience of such places at the end of the nineteenth century led her to believe that many of the women who used them were prostitutes who spent most of the evening dressing, went out at 10pm and generally returned drunk. She also maintained that the shortage of single beds for women forced them to take a man into the double bed with them in order to cover the cost. Many of the girls who worked in the lodging houses were, Higgs believed, coerced into prostitution by the keepers, who in effect became their pimps.
In 1901 over four million women, almost a third of the entire female population, were engaged in industrial or domestic employment. Like her male equivalent, the unemployed woman often had to travel in search of work. In practice few respectable women travelled alone, as it was generally assumed that a woman living on her own in particular lodging houses was a prostitute.
Then, as now, it was extremely difficult to determine the number of prostitutes operating at any one time. Estimates vary wildly. In 1851 William Acton calculated that there were 210,000 prostitutes in London alone – a figure equal to half the number of unmarried women in the city. A decade earlier the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police put the number of street walkers at 7,000, excluding the City of London area. Writing in 1857, Dr Michael Ryan, an authority on such matters, claimed that there were 80,000 professional whores in the capital and that they made something in the order of £8 million a year.
Though Acton’s figure is undoubtedly an overestimate, most commentators agree that police estimates are on the low side and put the figure at about 55,000 in mid-nineteenth century London. Data from provincial cities and towns suggest similarly high numbers. In 1843 the Manchester police calculated that there were 330 brothels and 701 ‘common prostitutes’ in the city. This figure, however, like all police estimates, is certainly on the low side, as it includes only prostitutes known to them. The Chief Constable, Captain Palin, stated in his report for 1868 that there were 981 convictions of prostitutes for being drunk and disorderly and only 92 for
accosting wayfarers. There were at that time ‘over 800 prostitutes in the city and 325 houses of ill-fame’, which almost certainly refers to houses, often lodging houses, used by prostitutes, as well as brothels. Nearly all of these women, in common with all the prostitutes who came to the attention of the police, combined theft with selling their bodies.
One reason why estimates are problematic is because of changes in the way prostitutes operated. From the 1830s to the 1850s the number of brothels declined, while the number of prostitutes operating on their own account remained constant. Police identified almost 2,000 London houses where prostitutes lodged in 1857 and the same number a decade later. However, these figures do not include occasional prostitutes.
Prostitutes – also known as ‘gay’, ‘mott’ and ‘blowers’ – were found in certain districts of most cities and towns, often the same areas in which lodging houses were concentrated. Figures produced by the Metropolitan Police District for 1857 list these areas as: Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Ratcliff, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Lambeth, Southwark, Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, Westminster and Marylebone.
Regardless of where they operated, prostitutes used a range of similar strategies to alert potential customers to their availability. The most blatant signal was to walk the street without a hat or a shawl – thus violating taboos against a woman displaying her hair or figure in public. To make it even more obvious she would parade up and down the same stretch of pavement in a languorous manner, while looking about her, as no respectable woman dawdled in the street. By turning around to make eye contact with a man and then pursing her lips to make a suggestive sound a woman announced her trade.
The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House Page 14