During the 1870s conditions began gradually to improve in most areas as Joseph Arch’s agricultural trade union became effective. But towards the end of that decade a general depression in agriculture affected the livelihoods of workers in most parts of the country. A generation or so before, a foreign observer had expressed the opinion that ‘English agriculture taken as a whole [was] at this day the first in the world’.16 But in 1877 its prosperity was beset by widespread outbreaks of rinderpest. An exceptionally wet summer in 1878 was followed in 1879 by the worst and wettest that most farmers could remember and this time it was accompanied by an outbreak of liver-rot in sheep. That year was ‘a disastrous one for agriculture’, one farmer recorded in his diary, having ‘had a very bad yield of corn & sheep rotten & doing very bad’.17 Four years later there was a violent epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease.
During these years the growth of railways in the United States, the rapid spread of farm machinery there and the increasing cheapness of ocean-going steamer transport combined to make it possible for American farmers to export great quantities of prairie-wheat. The price of English wheat consequently plummeted and soon almost half the country’s grain, nearly all of which had previously been supplied at home, was coming from abroad. In the wake of the wheat came imports of frozen meat, of live cattle, and of a cheap substitute for butter. Farm wages fell sharply once more; many farmers went bankrupt; whole tracts of land were abandoned to birds of prey; almost 100,000 labourers left the land to find work in the towns; and over a million people emigrated. Yet by the end of the century, after a series of more productive and healthier seasons, it was generally agreed that life for poor country people was less harsh than it had been. There was more variety in their diet; wages, so one of them said, seemed to ‘go a bit further’; women and children were far less often to be seen working singly or in gangs in the fields. Already by 1881 there were only 68,000 boys under fifteen working on the land as compared with 106,000 thirty years before and no more than 40,000 women as compared with 144,000 in 1851.18 In all there were still over a million people occupied in agriculture but this was by now only 12 per cent of the total population whereas the 1,388,000 so employed in 1851 had represented a proportion of over 20 per cent.19
While the lot of the agricultural labourer was less unenviable than it had been in the earlier years of the century, his way of life continued to be an impoverished one; and so it remained throughout the Edwardian era. In about 1906 the average weekly earnings of a farmworker had risen no higher than 17s 6d, well below the figure of 21s 8d which Seebohm Rowntree considered the minimum sum a man living in York would require to support a wife and three children with the basic necessities of life.20 Some farmworkers earned considerably less than this. One, a labourer with a wife and five children living in the Wiltshire village of Corsley in 1906, had no more than 15s a week. The rent of his cottage was is 6d a week, and other regular outgoings included 2s 5a a month to a Friendly Society and 5s a year for an allotment. One typical week in January he and his wife spent 13s 4¾d and with this sum were able to purchase three pounds of sugar (5½d), half a pound of tea (8d), one and a half pounds of butter, (is6d), two ounces of tobacco (6d), half a pound of lard (2½d), quarter of a pound of suet (2d), half a pound of currants (1½d), one pint of beer (2d), one pound of soap (3d) and a pair of stockings (6½d). Other purchases were small quantities of bacon (½ 4d), oranges (2d), Quaker oats (5½d), cheese (9d), baking powder (1d), papers (2d), coal (IS 2½d), milk (6½d), oil (2½d) and bread (3s). When clothes had to be bought or the parents were ill, the amount spent on food had to be severely reduced. It was estimated that a third of all the families living in the village were existing below what had come to be known as the poverty line.21
There were certain compensations. Various Allotment Acts, for instance, had enabled many labourers, like this man in Corsley, to provide their families with fresh vegetables, though farmers did not like their men having these plots of land which, so they felt, took up too much of their time and energy, and the men themselves often enough found them scarcely worth the trouble of maintaining, because of the depredations of the protected game of the landlord. Also, membership of a pig club gave labourers the opportunity of acquiring a little extra meat without undue expense, while membership of a union, such as the Eastern Counties Agricultural Labourers’ and Smallholders’ Union, formed in 1906, might bring occasional benefits through united action against avaricious employers.22 At the same time, the government endeavoured to help small farmers by a Smallholdings Act of 1907 which eventually led to the establishment of about 14,000 new holdings, extending over 200,000 acres, before the outbreak of the First World War. Yet, while the number of smallholdings was increasing and the dairy industry was growing – with a twofold increase in the area of permanent grassland between 1870 and 1914 – arable farming was sharply declining, the corn area of the country being diminished by 30 per cent in the fifty or so years before 1914. By 1909 the number of agricultural workers in the country had fallen to 750,000, and many villages, so C. F. G. Masterman wrote that year, were now becoming bereft of craftsmen practising such traditional skills as those of smiths and wheelwrights and were largely occupied by the old and by children. In the remoter villages changes were less pronounced; but in these places the inhabitants were inward-looking and inbred communities, some of which had no more than three or four surnames in the entire parish.23
Despite the decline in agriculture – which was by now contributing little more than 6 per cent to the national product – there were still many farmers who were evidently very comfortably off. They did not presume to interfere too much in the running of local affairs or to have political views at variance with their landlords’, generally preferring to grumble about the weather or low prices rather than the iniquities of Lord John Russell or Mr Gladstone. Gabriel Oak in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, which was first published in 1874, is typical of his kind. A deliberate, slow, steady man, large in frame and modest by nature, he had formerly been a shepherd. ‘By sustained efforts of industry and chronic good spirits’, he had been enabled to lease a farm. When he smiled
the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun … He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like Dr Johnson’s; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather leggings and large boots.
Mr Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention, and a small clock as to size. This instrument being several years older than Oak’s grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by constant comparison with and observations of the sun and stars, and by pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours’ windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced time-keepers within … On Sundays he was hampered by his best clothes and umbrella … He went to church but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon.24
Gabriel Oak had no social pretensions, but there were naturally some farmers who behaved in the way that Arthur Young had condemned a century earlier, who bought expensive furniture, put their servants into livery and sent their children to smart schools. But all these things, Young objected, ‘imply a departure from that line which separates these different orders of being [gentlemen and farmers]. Let these things, and all the folly, fopper
y, expense, and anxiety, that belong to them, remain among gentlemen; a wise farmer will not envy them.’25
Some farmers, nevertheless, did continue to envy them. Richard Jefferies, the naturalist, himself a Wiltshire farmer’s son, described in a book published in 1880 how a farmer’s daughter who had been to an expensive boarding-school reacted to the prospect of marriage on returning home to her country town after her last term.
A banker’s clerk at least – nothing could be thought of under a clerk in the local banks; of course, his salary was not high, but then his ‘position’. The retail grocers and bakers and such people were quite beneath one’s notice – low, common persons. The ‘professional’ tradesmen (whatever that may be) were decidedly better, and could be tolerated. The solicitors, bank managers, one or two brewers (wholesale – nothing retail), large corn factors or coal merchants, who kept a carriage of some kind – these formed the select society next under … the clergy and gentry.26
51 Towns, Factories and Public Health
Every year, even before the depression of British farming in the 1870s, tens of thousands of men, women and children left the country for the towns which by 1851, for the first time, contained more people than the country and, by 1881, over twice as many. Most found it difficult to settle in places the sheer size of which was intimidating. The population of Greater London, which had been scarcely more than a million in 1801, had risen to well over 2 million by 1841, was over 3 million in 1861, and increased to almost 4 million in 1871, 104, 713, 441 in 1881 and to 5,571,968 in 1891. It was still the largest city in the western world. Whereas no other in England had had more than 100,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the 1851 census was taken there were nine. The population of Leeds had risen to 172,000, that of Birmingham to 233,000, Manchester’s to 303,000. Four years later, when the population of Britain as a whole stood at just over 23 million (compared with 56 million in European Russia, 37.5 million in France, 34 million in Austria and 32 million in the United States) Manchester’s and Birmingham’s population, as well as Liverpool’s, had increased to nearly half a million, and there were over twenty other towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants each, most of them industrial towns, the growth of such places as Exeter and Norwich being far more modest.
The smoky, foreboding aspect of these industrial towns was made familiar to Dickens’s middle-class readers, many of whom had never seen them, by his description of Coketown in Hard Times which he wrote after going to Preston in Lancashire, where the workers had been on strike for almost six months. He had gone there to see for himself how the poor passed their lives in such a place – such a depressing, ‘nasty’ place, as he discovered it to be.
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.1
Towns like this, usually covered in soot and dust and overcast by smoke, could but add to the unhappiness of those newly arrived from the country. ‘I drew near the town and the tall chimneys of the factories became visible through the dense clouds of smoke,’ recalled a former factory worker of his first sight of Leeds, whose population had risen to 207,000 in 1861 when it was the sixth largest town in the country. It exhibited
the many marks by which a manufacturing town may always be known, viz. the wretched, stunted, decrepit and frequently mutilated appearance of the broken down labourers, who are generally to be seen in the dirty, disagreeable streets; the swarms of meanly-clad women and children, and the dingy, smoky, wretched looking dwellings of the poor.2
For the sake of cheapness, thousands of cottages were still built back-to-back, with privies in front and open ashpits in the streets, with a cellar for coal and food, and with one small room, as a Unitarian missionary wrote, ‘to do all the cooking, washing and the necessary work of a family in, and another of the same size for all to sleep in’. Even worse than these were those dwellings around dark, airless, noisome courts – whose occupants were obliged to share a privy and a tap – and those dark cellars in which, so one authority estimated, as many as 50,000 workers spent their nights in Manchester and almost as many in Leeds. Friedrich Engels, the German-born author of The Condition of the Working Class in England, who for twenty years from 1849 worked in a Manchester textile firm founded by his father, described the state of the poorer quarters of these northern towns. He wrote of the water from polluted rivers flooding into the cellars; of the vain attempts of their inhabitants to repair the rutted, broken streets outside with shovelfuls of ashes; the holes filled with refuse and excrement; the cottages ‘cramped almost to suffocation with human beings both day and night’; the slums of Huddersfield; the lodging houses of Manchester, ‘hot-beds of unnatural vice’; the engorgement of the sewers and the consequently high rate of mortality in Leeds; the death rate of the poor in Liverpool where, according to an official report, the average age at death of the ‘gentry and professional persons’ was thirty-five, of ‘tradesmen and their families’ twenty-two, and of ‘labourers, mechanics and servants’ fifteen; and the ‘little pitch-black stinking river’ that Sowed through Bradford.
The interior of Bradford is as dirty and uncomfortable as Leeds [Engels wrote]. Heaps of dirt and refuse disfigure the lanes, alleys and courts. The houses are dilapidated and dirty and are not fit for human habitation … The workers’ houses at the bottom of the valley are packed between high factory buildings and are among the worst-built and filthiest in the whole city. Such conditions are to be found in the other towns of the West Riding … such as Barnsley and Halifax.3
London was as bad as anywhere and in some districts worse. Hippolyte Taine, whose Notes sur Angleterre was published in 1871, described ‘one of the poor neighbourhoods’ down by the river where ‘low houses, poor streets of brick under red-tiled roofs cross each other in every direction’.
It is in these localities [he wrote], that families have been discovered with no other bed than a heap of soot; they had slept there during several months … One observes the narrow lodgings, sometimes the single room, wherein they are all huddled in the foul air. The houses are most frequently one storied – low, narrow – a den in which to sleep and lie. What a place of residence in winter, when, during the weeks of continuous rain and fog, the windows are shut!4
Soon after Taine wrote these words, Charles Booth, the rich co-founder of the Booth Steamship Company, came to London from Liverpool and for seventeen years immersed himself in the detailed study of poverty which was to result in the many-volumed Life and Labour of the People in London. Having closely examined the ways of life of some 90,000 people in various parishes in East London and Hackney, he divided them into eight classes. At the lowest level were some 11,000 ‘occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals’ whose food was of the ‘coarsest description’ and whose only luxury was drink; their life was the ‘life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional distress’. Slightly above them Booth placed 100,000 of those whom he described as ‘very poor’, living on the casual earnings of two or three days’ work a week. Then came 75,000 people with intermittent earnings, such as dockers, coal-heavers and waterside porters, who were
in and out of work according to the season or the amount of work available for them; these were also deemed ‘poor’. So were the next class of people, 129,000 of them, who were in receipt of ‘small regular earnings’. Then came the largest group of 377,000 people who had ‘regular standard earnings’ of from 22s to 30s a week; after them Booth listed 121,000 of the best paid of the artisans; and after them the smaller numbers of the lower middle class and the upper middle class. Almost half of all these people were ‘poor’ by the criteria Booth devised to define the term; and over 30 per cent of the population of London as a whole lived on the verges of his poverty line or below it.
Booth estimated that a man categorized as ‘very poor’ and with a wife and three children to look after would spend on average about 15s a week and this would absorb the whole of his income. About 9s would be spent on food, about 5s 9d on rent, heating and lighting, and the remaining few pence on clothes and whatever other necessaries it might prove essential to provide. Artisans with ‘regular standard earnings’ could afford to spend over twice as much. Booth provided the example of a casual dock labourer of thirty-eight, Michael H. who was ‘in poor health fresh from the infirmary’:
His wife of forty-three is consumptive. A son of eighteen who earns 8s regular wages as a car man’s boy, and two girls of eight and six, complete the family. Their house has four rooms but they let two. Father and son dine from home; the son takes 2d a day for this. The neighbouring clergy send soup two or three times a week, and practically no meat is bought. Beyond the dinners out, and the soup at home, the food consists principally of bread, margarine, tea, and sugar. No rice is used nor any oatmeal; there is no sign of any but the most primitive cookery, but there is every sign of unshrinking economy; there are no superfluities, and the prices are the lowest possible – 3½d per quarten for bread, 6d per lb for so-called butter, is 4d for tea, and id for sugar. The accommodation costs about 17s a month. On firing, etc., the H——s spent 10s 4d in the five weeks – as much as, and more than, many with double the means; but warmth may make up for lack of food, and invalids depend on it for their lives. Allowing as well as I can for the meals out, and the charitable soup, I make the meals provided by Mrs H——for her family to cost id per meal per person (counting the two little girls as one person). A penny a meal is very little, but expended chiefly in cheap bread, cheap butter, cheap tea, and cheap sugar.5
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