by Rule, Fiona
Most of the new landlords did not go into the business of running a registered common lodging house immediately. A preferred route to this goal was to initially secure the lease on a property and let it out on a weekly basis as furnished rooms. Rooms let in this manner had not been included in the regulations set out in the Common Lodging Houses Acts (only those let on a nightly basis had to be registered with the Police). This loophole allowed aspiring landlords to rent rooms with little interference from the authorities, just as long as they were prepared to trust their tenants for a whole week before they paid their dues.
Investing this amount of trust in tenants who were desperately poor was a risky business and nearly every slum landlord in London had experienced ‘bunters’: men and women who made a profession out of taking lodgings in which they stayed for some time before absconding without paying the rent. Henry Mayhew met with a ‘bunter’ named ‘Swindling Sal’ from New Cut in Lambeth who told him about ‘Chousing Bett’, a particularly notorious bunter: ‘Lord bless me, she was up to as many dodges as there was men in the moon. She changed places, she never stuck to one long; she never had no things to be sold up, and, as she was handy with her mauleys (fists), she got on pretty well. It took a considerable big man, she could tell me, to kick her out of a house, and then when he done it she always give him something for himself, by way of remembering her. Oh, they had a sweet recollection of her, some on’ them.’ Swindling Sal and her kind justified their actions through prejudice; making the sweeping generalisation that most lodging-house keepers subscribed to the Jewish faith (which was actually untrue), they reasoned that their victims ‘was mostly Christ-killers, and chousing (defrauding) a Jew was no sin’.
In order to protect themselves against losses incurred through bunters, landlords charged highly inflated rents so that the money paid by their honest tenants more than covered losses due to fraudulence. This practise earned them little respect from the more educated classes. Henry Mayhew himself described keepers of low lodging houses as ‘rapacious, mean, and often dishonest.’ This opinion was shared by many other social commentators of the era, and their criticism was not unjust. However, it should be borne in mind that had it not been for the existence of low lodging houses, the very poor (of which there were many) would have had nowhere else to go. Making money from the starving was certainly not a career to be proud of, but the virtual absence of any form of welfare for the very poor inevitably resulted in housing being created for profit. It could reasonably be suggested that the Government was the real villain of the piece.
Once they had gained control over their properties, the new Spitalfields landlords quickly became aware of the type of clientele from whom they could make the most money as a seemingly endless stream of prostitutes enquired after rooms to let. This state of affairs was by no means unusual. Indeed, Henry Mayhew suggested that ‘those who gain their living by keeping accommodation houses... are of course to be placed in the category of the people who are dependent on prostitutes, without whose patronage they would lose their only means of support.’
Chapter 14
Prostitution and Press Scrutiny
Despite its less than salubrious atmosphere, Dorset Street and the surrounding area was a good hunting ground for prostitutes as there was a large and mixed supply of punters. Spitalfields Market offered a regular supply of market workers and out-of-town traders. The Docks, with their never-ending supply of sex-starved sailors were well within walking distance and it even became fashionable for West End gentlemen to visit the area for an excursion known as ‘slumming’. Consequently, any woman finding it hard to make ends meet and able to disregard her self-respect, could earn money by plying her trade on the streets.
The landlords of lodging houses (particularly those not subjected to Police scrutiny) used prostitution to feather their own nests. Many acted as quasi-pimps; although they would not find punters for the girls, they would provide them with protection from the numerous gangs that prowled the streets extorting money from the street-walkers. These gangs usually comprised between three and ten youths. Most lived just outside the area they stalked. The Old Nichol estate, which lay just north of Spitalfields, spawned many of these gangs. The youths would walk down to Spitalfields in the evenings and generally make a nuisance of themselves, pestering elderly street-vendors and intimidating the local prostitutes from whom they would often extort money. However despite their frightening appearance, these gangs were comprised of cowards who only singled out those weaker than themselves for rough treatment. The appearance of one of the lodging-house doormen would usually send them packing. Consequently, the doormen became indispensable to the working girls.
Many of the local prostitutes were rather pathetic, gin-soaked women whose alcoholism had caused their families to abandon them many years earlier. Most were in their forties and possessed rapidly fading looks. They plied their trade on the streets, taking punters down the nearest alleyway for a quick knee-trembler. The lucky few managed to make enough money to hire their own room in one of the numerous courts. Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street was a perfect location for prostitutes. The fact that the court only had one exit meant that punters going in and out could be observed and the girls’ nightly intake could be easily assessed. Additionally, the proximity of the neighbouring rooms meant that the girls were afforded a much larger degree of mutual protection than they would have enjoyed had they resorted to doing their business out in the street.
The new landlords’ acquisition of property in the Dorset Street area really paid off in 1883 when the now rather aged Spitalfields Market began a phase of massive redevelopment. Over the next 15 years, the main market area acquired a new iron and glass roof and the old 17th-century buildings surrounding it were demolished. In their place, new buildings were built around the market area, including four blocks containing shops at street level, basements below and three-storey residential accommodation above. These new buildings still survive today at the eastern side of the market. The huge amount of building work at the market meant that, in addition to the traders and porters, masses of men involved in the building trade arrived in the area seeking somewhere cheap to sleep. Obviously, the streets closest to the market benefited the most from this sudden influx of workers and landlords of property in Dorset Street, Whites Row and Brushfield Street really reaped the benefits.
However, while the lodging-house keepers were busy cashing in on the development of Spitalfields Market, their properties and their dubious business activities were about to come under the spotlight of public scrutiny. Journalists decided it was time that the more educated classes got to know how the poor really lived. Soon a flurry of articles and pamphlets appeared, most of which dealt with the deplorable housing conditions suffered by the poor.
One of the first journalists to write about the issue was George Sims, who composed a series of articles for Pictorial World entitled ‘How The Poor Live’ early in 1883. Later the same year, he followed with a series called ‘Horrible London’ in the Daily News. In October 1883, William C. Preston, using the pseudonym Reverend Andrew Mearns, wrote ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, a 20-page penny pamphlet that highlighted the plight of the poor. The Pall Mall Gazette published a selection of passages from the pamphlet, including the following, rather prosaic tract that deals with conditions in lodging houses:
‘One of the saddest results of (this) overcrowding is the inevitable association of honest people with criminals. Often is the family of an honest working man compelled to take refuge in a thieves’ kitchen (referring to the shared facilities in the common lodging houses)... who can wonder that every evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease?... Ask if the men and women living together in these rookeries are married and your simplicity will cause a smile. Nobody knows. Nobody cares... Incest is common; and no form of vice or sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention... The low parts of London are the sink into which the filth and abominable from all parts of the country seem t
o flow.’
Preston’s pamphlet started an avalanche of public comment but few of its readers actually took practical steps to improve matters. One man that did his utmost to make a difference was an East London vicar called the Reverend Barnett.
In the same year as Preston’s pamphlet was published, Barnett and a group of public-spirited investors formed the East London Dwellings Company with a view to buy, rehabilitate or rebuild on slum properties. Unlike the Metropolitan Board of Works, Barnett and his colleagues wanted to bring relief to the very poorest inhabitants of London. In return, investors would be able to sleep the sleep of the just, and receive 4% in dividend. Barnett’s idea proved to be more than just hot air and by 1886, the East London Dwellings Company had completed Brunswick Buildings in Goulston Street and Wentworth Buildings in Wentworth Street (previously one of the most run-down streets in Spitalfields). The success of these two schemes attracted other developers to the area including the banking family, Rothschild.
The Rothschilds had settled in the East End when they first arrived in Britain and had evidently not forgotten their roots. They purchased the land in Flower and Dean Street that had been demolished by the Metropolitan Board of Works and under the name of the ‘Four Per Cent Dwellings Company’ they built Rothschild Buildings. These developments housed over 200 Jewish families and although residents complained of bed bugs and overcrowding, the conditions were comparatively sanitary. The design of Rothschild Buildings was not unlike that of an army barracks and critics believed that these surroundings would make it impossible for a community to flourish.
However, research shows that this was far from the truth. Against the odds, a strong sense of community and mutual support developed in the blocks and the tenement rules (which looked very forbidding on paper,) were generally enforced by the tenants themselves in the interests of safe and orderly communal living. In his book Rothschild Buildings, Jerry White notes that ‘after that first and crucial decision about who could have a flat and who could not, the people of Rothschild Buildings were largely on their own. The myth of an all-powerful rooting system of “rebuke and repression” which kept the people orderly owed more to bourgeois prejudice than reality... the community life which centred on the landings of Rothschild Buildings was friendly and vibrant. “At Rothschild, we were like one family” is a frequently heard description of the relationship between neighbours’.
However, life was not this rosy at all tenement blocks. However good their intentions, most philanthropic housing developers sought tenants that were poor but hard working and honest. They were not in the business of providing housing for the indolent, criminal or chronically sick. Consequently, most people that frequented the common lodging houses in Spitalfields were ineligible as tenants and Spitalfields became unattractive to developers. The sites the housing companies wanted were in Finsbury and Westminster, where there were plenty of people willing and able to pay 6/- or 7/- a week, not in the East End, where flats remained empty and rents were often unpaid. Only 2% of the population of Tower Hamlets and 2.8% in Southwark, lived in charity tenements in 1891, compared to 8% in Westminster. Several slum clearance sites in Wapping, Shadwell, Limehouse and Deptford were rejected by housing charities in the 1870s and 1880s, and remained undeveloped until the LCC took them on.
Over 4% of London’s population lived in philanthropic housing blocks in 1891, but as we have seen, the charities did not provide shelter for the very poor and the demolitions which they encouraged and depended upon intensified the plight of the destitute. For example, the 1884-5 Royal Commission was convinced that the really poor, including those evicted in the demolition schemes undertaken to satisfy philanthropic developer the Peabody Trust’s need for land, did not find places in the Peabody Buildings, and that preference was given to respectable artisans and families with more than one income.
Poor families with nowhere to go moved into Spitalfields with alarming regularity and despite the efforts of men such as the Reverend Barnett and the Rothschilds, the area continued to be overrun with honest poor rubbing shoulders with criminals. In 1885, an old woman spoke to the Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes: ‘I came to London 25 years ago and I’ve never lived in any room for more than two years yet: they always say they want to pull down the house to build dwellings for poor people, but I’ve never got into one yet.’ The Government could not fail to ignore the deplorable situation regarding the housing of the very poor in many areas in London. In a bid to improve the situation, the Housing of the Working Classes Act was passed in 1885. However, housing of the poor was not tackled with any real success until four years later, when the Metropolitan Board of Works was replaced with the London County Council. By then, the already sizeable problem with overcrowding in Dorset Street and its surrounds had worsened.
Chapter 15
The Fourth Wave of Immigrants
On 1 March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by a gang of revolutionaries. This act, although seemingly unconnected to religion, proved to be a catalyst for an outbreak of extreme violence and animosity towards Jewish communities in Russia, Poland, Austro-Hungary and Romania and provoked an exodus on an unprecedented scale.
Following the assassination, rumours abounded throughout Russia that the Jews were responsible (in actual fact, only one of the gang was Jewish). Word spread that the new Tsar had issued a decree instructing all Russians to avenge the death of his father by attacking any Jew they might happen to come across. Although this decree never existed, it gave many Russians the opportunity to vent their frustrations at the sorry economic state their country was in by providing a scapegoat. In April 1881, an anti-Jewish riot (known as a pogrom) broke out in Elisavetgrad. In scenes that were to be repeated in Nazi Germany, Jewish businesses were attacked, shops ransacked and homes burned. Jews were beaten, insulted and spat on. Word spread fast about the attack and soon pogroms were breaking out all over Eastern Europe.
The Russian Government pandered to the anti-Jewish feeling and passed a hastily-written act that was designed to remove any of the power and status held by Jews that so upset the rest of the population. This act, known as the ‘May Laws’ required all Jews to live only in urban areas. Even the ownership or purchase of countryside land was forbidden. In addition, restrictions were applied to Jewish businesses, university quotas for Jews were halved and Jews were no longer allowed to practice professions such as medicine or law.
The May Laws, coupled with the constant fear of violence resulted in a mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1914, nearly three million Jews emigrated from Russia and her neighbouring countries. Most went to America but 150,000 came to Britain.
Once admitted to Britain, many of the Eastern European immigrants headed for the East End, mainly because there were established Jewish communities there where they could buy kosher food, speak languages they understood and perhaps even meet up with old friends. Spitalfields had a well-established Jewish community by the 1880s and so seemed to be a perfect destination for the newly arrived immigrants. However, not all Spitalfields Jews welcomed the new arrivals.
By the late-19th century, London’s Jewish community had created a comfortable niche for itself. Wealthier Jews held office in parliament and were even part of the Royal family’s inner circle. Working-class Jews had to work no harder than their non-Jewish counterparts in order to make a living. Most importantly, Jews could live in London without fear of anti-Semitism ruining their lives. The arrival of the Eastern European Jews, many of whom were peasant country folk, worried the British Jewry. Many felt their position in society was jeopardised. Others were simply embarrassed by their country cousins. Even the Chief Rabbi urged his counterparts in Eastern Europe to dissuade the population from travelling to Britain. However, their attempts at restricting the amount of Jews arriving at the ports failed miserably.
Although the British Jews were understandably wary of the sudden rush of Jewish immigrants, once the immigrants arrived, t
hey did their very best to help them. In much the same way as the Huguenots had operated 200 years previously, the Jews set up schools, adult education centres and employment agencies to help the new arrivals integrate into English society as easily as possible. Much of this work was funded by established families such as the Rothschilds. However, the sheer numbers of Jewish immigrants flooding into areas such as Spitalfields caused problems with the existing population, mainly because there was already very little room to spare. The Jewish immigrants did their best to cram as many people as they could into the space available, causing one wit to note, ‘give a Jew an inch and he’ll put a bed in it; give him two and he’ll take in a lodger.’
Chapter 16
The Controllers of Spitalfields
By the 1880s, living conditions in Dorset Street and many other roads in Spitalfields had reached an all-time low. The area was vastly overcrowded, extremely poor and largely ignored by the authorities. Unable to take on the labouring jobs available to men, poor, single women fared the worst and as we have seen, many resorted to selling themselves on the street in order to put food in their stomachs and a roof over their head.
The women roamed the badly-lit streets and alleyways of Spitalfields for hours on their nightly quest for bed money. They couldn’t afford to be choosy when it came to punters and copious amounts of alcohol helped to dull their judgement. These sad, desperate women were sitting ducks for any man with a sadistic streak and assaults were common. However, the autumn of 1888 brought with it the spectre of something much more sinister, that would leave an indelible mark on Dorset Street, Spitalfields and its people for well over a century.