London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  However, something got lost in translation and the police reserves were directed to the Mall, rather than Pall Mall. Just who was to blame for this error concerned the committee who questioned everyone from the commissioner down to the unfortunate constable, William Hulls. PC Hulls told the committee that Dunlap told him to take a message to Hume from Sir Edmund Henderson to `throw the men along the Mall'. He went as fast as he could, fighting his way through the throng from the foot of Nelson's Column, reaching the barracks in five minutes. Hume received his message and added `I suppose they are going to make for Buckingham Palace, and then lined up his men and moved them off. Hulls returned to duty and neglected to report the successful completion of his mission to his superiors because he `saw them all busy on that occasion and did not like to interfere"' Thus, in a faint echo of Balaclava, the men at St George's barracks charged off in the wrong direction leaving Pall Mall and its windows to the mercy of the London mob. The first window was broken at 3.40 p.m. at Messrs Christopher's in Pall Mall East; at the Junior Carlton Club a crowd member mounted the balustrade and addressed his colleagues. A shower of small stones hit the club, breaking more windows. It has been suggested that members of the club had been taunting the protestors from the comfort of their offices but this is not confirmed in the committee report and is hard to clarify for certain.

  The press went to town on the riots, condemning the protesters and blaming the SDF for the trouble. The Times wanted to know `whether there is no law that can touch Messrs. Hyndman, Burns and Champion' (the principal SDF leaders), while the Morning Advertiser declared that in `no other capital in the world could fellows like Burns and Hyndman have been permitted to preach the detestable doctrines they did' Indeed when working-class Parisians had objected to the seizure of the Montmartre arsenal and had declared the Paris Commune in March 1871 the retaliation of the French authorities was absolute, with some 25,000 communards being killed in fighting and a further 10,000 executed or exiled. By contrast the response of the London authorities was therefore more than moderate.

  The Morning Post dismissed the protesters as being composed of `a few fanatics, a great amount of loafers and idlers, and a huge contingent of professional thieves' and the Daily Telegraph accused the police of being unprepared: `Practically, London was yesterday afternoon in the hands of the mob, who could have done anything they chose. For the credit of the nation such a miserable scandal must not be allowed to occur again'79 Such sentiments were repeated in the pages of the Birmingham Gazette, Birmingham Post, Leeds Mercury and Liverpool Post.80 Other papers were careful to point to the very real hardships that some people were experiencing in the capital and the danger of neglecting the poverty and misery of some Londoners. The Daily News warned that `a disposition now exists to turn empty stomachs and idle hands into materials for social and political agitation' and advised that the authorities act to prevent this happening.R" The Pall Mall Gazette published an interview with the leadership of the SDF who denied any responsibility for the rioting in the capital: `That was entirely contrary to our wishes' claimed Hyndman, `We simply [...] set before the people what we conceived to be the only truth that could bring them permanent and substantial relief; but we had no idea that they would at once proceed to break windows, or indulge in any violence whatsoever, before adding the `time for that is not yet come, in our opinion. It may come, but this was premature - decidedly premature'." There is a sense in Hyndman's comments, and in the reportage of the Pall Mall Gazette, that this had very little to do with fermenting revolution. As the paper noted, the socialist speakers `accompanied [the rioters] rather than led them' and the leaders of the SDF were clearly unhappy that political protest had descended into riot and the looting of shops. As groups of rioters made their way to Hyde Park they could been seen carrying armfuls of clothing, bottles of alcohol and other goods, all pillaged from the shops on Piccadilly and its adjacent streets.

  This `final curtain call for the London crowd' recalled the events of June 1780 rather than those of Paris in 1789 or 1870.83 Historians have mixed views on the social background of the `West End' rioters. Gareth Stedman Jones has argued that they were predominantly drawn from among the East End's casual poor and he and Eric Hobsbawm have described this group as `apolitical' in their actions: these were men that could gather `to hear Conservative-inspired demands for protection as a solution to unemployment' and then `riot the very same afternoon under the banner of socialist revolution"' The underlying apathy of the unskilled working class is contrasted with the aspirational politicking of London's artisans - the traditional radicals in the capital's political history. However, Marc Brodie warns us against too easily accepting such a simple dichotomy: London's working class had a number of local and personal influences that affected their political consciousness.85 Stedman Jones recognizes this, accepting that many were `motivated by sectional rather than class interests' in their attendance at rallies and later union actions.R6 East London's politics was a volatile mix of ideologies and pragmatic demands for change; its poorest classes could be exploited to swell the ranks of demonstrations for any number of causes.

  The verdict of the parliamentary committee was that the police were at fault for the disturbances. There had been, they concluded, a lack of numbers, a breakdown of communication, and a failure to co-ordinate resources. The committee was clearly puzzled that the police did not deploy mounted police to marshal such demonstrations. Sir Edmund Henderson was contrite and admitted that in future the Met would review its preparations. The committee finished with these words: `we conclude our report by a strong expression of opinion that the administration and organization of the Metropolitan Police Force require to be thoroughly investigated; and we hope that this investigation will take place without delay.R7 Before the end of the following year the police were to be found wanting again, this time because their attempts to police the demonstrations of the unemployed ended in much more than a little `horseplay'

  Beyond the concerns with the ability of the policing authorities to quell any attempts at socialist revolution and unruly demonstrations was a more deepseated fear of social unrest caused by the deprivation experienced by thousands of Victoria's subjects. The occupation of Trafalgar Square and St James' Park was an ugly reminder of the plight of London's poorest. The solution was far from clear. That a significant section of British society lived in, or close to, poverty and pauperism was in many ways an indictment of the very system that had made the Empire as successful and powerful as it was at the end of the century. Industrial growth and military might (at least at sea) had made some people very rich; others had grown very comfortable as wages rose and consumption increased. The splendour of the Victorian age is still visible in Britain's modern urban centres. But the very motor of capitalism means that for some to prosper many others have to settle for less. The challenge for the late Victorians and Edwardians was to steer the nation through turbulent waters without suffering a cataclysmic mutiny below decks. The poor had to be helped to become part of the system and to be able to support themselves within it. The alternative was to share the wealth of the Empire more evenly among its vast population; or at least to mitigate some of the worst effects of a market economy on its poorest subjects by using public funds, raised by taxation.

  Figure 5 `The unemployed and the police', Moonshine, October 1887. In this cartoon the suggestion is that the real troublemakers are the political speakers who were using the plight of the urban working classes to call for radical reform.88

  This is where we need to return to the work and ideas of Beatrice Webb and Helen Bosanquet and the ideological battle between collectivism and individualism.

  THE BOSANQUETS AND WEBBS: COMPETING IDEOLOGIES OF REFORM

  Helen Dendy was born in Manchester in 1860, the youngest daughter of businessman and former nonconformist minister, John Dendy. After achieving a first at Cambridge, Helen moved to London and joined the COS. She met and married the philosopher Bernard Bosanquet in 1895 and they collabo
rated on several publications that outlined their vision of `individualism'.89 While historians have perhaps neglected Helen Bosanquet her more illustrious counterpart occupies a much larger place in history. Beatrice Potter was born in Gloucestershire in 1858, one of ten children. Her father, Richard, was a businessman and railway director and Beatrice grew up in some comfort and as, her biographer notes, sought `from an early age, to question her circumstances'.90 In 1883 she also joined the COS to work with the London poor. The COS was `professionally pioneering but ideologically reactionary' in that while it adopted the very modern practice of personal visits to those in need, this was accompanied by a very Victorian emphasis on self-reliance." Along with other reforming bodies in the capital (such as the `observation post' at Toynbee Hall, where young men from good families were urged to settle after completing their degrees at Oxbridge to help instill the benefits of education and self-improvement among the local working poor92)the COS stressed the importance of personal contact with the poor and working classes.

  However, Beatrice clearly wanted to do more than the `ladies work' undertaken by Octavia Hill and her COS visitors and she ventured to Manchester to look at social conditions there and to broaden her political outlook. In 1886, after working as a rent collector at Katherine Buildings, Whitechapel (one of the capital's new model dwellings), she published her first article in the Pall Mall Gazette on the subject of unemployment in the East End.93 In this Beatrice firmly rejected attempts to create work for the unemployed by means of artificial schemes of public works and demonstrated a philosophy that was very close (in its attitude towards pauperism at least) to that of Helen Bosanquet. The two women had, therefore, similar beginnings and shared experiences in social investigation. By 1890, however, Beatrice had rejected individualism and had declared herself a socialist, if not a revolutionary one.94 After a chastening experience with Joseph ('Radical Joe') Chamberlain, Beatrice met, and then married, Sidney Webb whose cockney charm and avowed intellect must have helped overcome his unprepossessing looks. They forged a strong intellectual partnership and, as Fabian socialists, made a major contribution to the history of Labour politics in Britain.

  The story of the intellectual `war' between the Bosanquets and the Webbs has been told elsewhere in more detail and with much greater depth than this volume has space to allow and so what follows is a relatively brief summary of their different positions with regard to poverty and the role of the state.95 Although they adopted different approaches to the problems of society, and, in particular, poverty, the Bosanquets and Webbs, according to A. M. McBriar, `certainly shared a feeling characteristic of many intellectuals in the later Victorian age: a sense that the traditional values of earlier Victorianism no longer provided a satisfactory way of reconciling man to society and the universe' McBriar goes on to add: `Not being either revolutionaries or deniers, they were in search of a new creed to live by, a new "collectivism" that would restore a sense of true community to a society become divided and disharmonious."' Helen Bosanquet had refined the rhetoric of `deserving' and `undeserving' recipients of charity and poor relief. Instead she recognized that some people could be helped while others were beyond redemption. In a collection of essays published in 1895 Helen failed to see any real future for the `residuum; who did no useful work as far as she could see:

  they pick up `bits and pieces' of work and are paid so little that they have to rely on supplements and charity. [The residuum] is economically dead. It maybe possible to galvanize it into a temporary appearance of life, to raise up a social monster that will be the terror of the community; but the best that can be really hoped for is that it should gradually wear itself away, or in the coming generations be reabsorbed into the industrial life on which it is at present a mere parasite.97

  C. S. Loch shared Helen's opinion that the `residuum' was beyond redemption while believing that the rest of the working class could be improved by raising individual standards.9R

  Beatrice Webb believed that co-operation, trade unionism and state supplements might be used to help workers lift themselves out of poverty, while accepting that there were distinctions to be drawn between those who were out of work as a result of economic circumstances and those who were deemed idle and shiftless. Beatrice was aware that `the industrial organization, which had yielded rent, interest, and profits on a stupendous scale, had failed to provide decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for the majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain"' Fabians argued that it was society, through the infrastructure of the State, which had the power to redress the problems caused by market economics. Ultimately socialists had little time for philanthropy, seeing it as `an aspect of wealth and privilege that should abolished'*' loo Home visits could be seen as intrusive and as a continuation of middle-class attempts to control the behaviour of the working classes for their own ends rather than simply an act of selfless giving.

  As a result, Helen Bosanquet has suffered from being characterized as representing old-Victorian values of self-help but it is more appropriate to see her as someone struggling with the huge social problems she saw everyday in her COS work. Reconciling the need to support those in need without reducing them to a life of dependency was uppermost in her mind. She was a realist and her views bear closer inspection because she asks difficult questions that resonate today. In writing that `many of our attempts to "elevate the masses" are only attempts to train them to our own standard, not because it is intrinsically better, but because it is what we are used to and can understand' she challenged the prevailing wisdom that the middle classes necessarily knew best.'°' She went on to warn her readers that: `We need to be quite sure that we really want to cure poverty, to do away with it root and branch. Unless we are working with a whole-hearted and genuine desire towards this end we shall get little satisfaction from our efforts'. In what might be regarded as a critique of middle-class philanthropy she added that `in the absence of poverty the rich would have no one upon whom to exercise their faculty of

  For all this Bosanquet was optimistic that the solutions for society's social problems lay in the institution of the family; at a time when some socialists were convinced that the family could not possibly survive the ravages of capitalism. Bosanquet had faith in the East End matriarch, even if she had little in their menfolk. `Among a certain low type of men the prevailing expression is one of vacuity, of absence of purpose or character; among the women corresponding to them the prevailing expression is that of patient endurance, she opined.113 She rejected Fabian socialism and opposed the provision of school meals as undermining the family and as a 'subsidy to lazy parents; not as a benefit to poor incomes.'04

  In 1909 the two camps came crashing together in the Poor Law Commission Report where they differed in their findings. Bosanquet, who authored the major report, defended the role of private charities while in the minor report Webb championed the cause of bureaucratic socialism as the way forward for welfare policy."' McBriar sets out the distinction neatly: `The COS believed that economic independence for all was desirable, and that this could achieved by a "wise administration" of charity and the Poor Law; Socialists, on the contrary, aimed at an economic dependence on the State which would [in the view of the Bosanquets] be degrading to the working class and to the whole community.1107 In a recent volume Kathleen Martin has warned against seeing such a clear distinction between the two camps, suggesting that the Webbs had strong reservations about the value of social Writing in 1896, C. S. Loch, secretary of the COS, set out the default position of the organization: `To shift the responsibility of maintenance from the individual to the State is to sterilize the productive power of the community as a whole and also to impose on the State ... so heavy a liability ... as may greatly hamper, if not also ruin it. It is also to demoralize the individual""

  Figure 6 `The real starver of the poor. - John Bull vainly endeavors to relieve the distress', Fun, November, 1887. In this cartoon Fun illustrates the problems of providing benefits to poorer families, suggesting
that the criminal `residuum' as well as those deserving of help would exploit this.105

  Clearly we are still struggling to address this conundrum in our modern society. The provision of state benefits is sometimes accused of creating a'dependency culture' and tabloid newspapers delight in printing occasional stories of `greedy benefit scroungers' who abuse the welfare system at the expense of the `honest' majority. Neither of these women were revolutionaries although both would have described themselves as feminists; both believed that women had a more important role to play in society than Victorian society was prepared to allow them. Neither of them saw the birth of the welfare state in 1945 although both lived long enough to see the creation of old age pensions in 1908: this must have been viewed with satisfaction in both camps. Indeed the move towards state interference or intervention, whichever way it is characterized politically, was well underway as the new century dawned. In 1900 Britain spent approximately £8.4 million on poor relief, the only form of `social security' funded from taxation. On the eve of the First World War this had leapt to £43.3 million and now included unemployment and health insurance, pensions and social housing schemes."'

  `BLOODY SUNDAY' AND THE EVENTS OF NOVEMBER 1887

  Having considered the contrasting attitudes towards solving the social problems of the day, as expressed by two leading female philanthropists, we can now return to the more serious expressions of discontent that so unnerved contemporaries. The spring of 1886 had brought protestors to the centre of London, with riotous consequences as we have seen: the following hot summer had led to scenes of hardly less horror from a middle-class perspective as large numbers of unkempt Londoners lounged about and undertook their ablutions in the fountains of Trafalgar Square. Later in 1887 the situation became markedly worse and the venue was, once again, Trafalgar Square.