High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  The court condemned Barnardo, however, for the forged pictures, calling the practice ‘morally wrong’ and capable of growing ‘into a system of deception dangerous to the cause on behalf of which it is practised.’ He accepted the impropriety of the pictures, and stopped making and selling them. The arbitrators described his boys’ home in Stepney and girls’ village at Barkingside as ‘real and valuable charities, and worthy of public confidence and support.’ That was the finding that mattered.

  The COS, however, continued to attempt to discredit him, Loch regarding Barnardo as a charlatan who had had a lucky escape. This was despite the arbitrators having urged both sides to stop their ‘defamatory charges’ and to adhere to ‘the standards of conduct recognised among gentlemen and to the dictates of Christian charity whose obligations are pre-eminently binding upon men professing to take a lead in religious and philanthropic work.’ The COS started to attract hostile comment for its vendetta against Barnardo. Questions were asked about its use of scarce resources to this end. However, the publicity it generated made Barnardo’s name widely known, yet at a price. He ended the arbitration in serious debt, no longer master in his own house, and the charity poorer than might otherwise have been the case.

  The rebuilding of Barnardo’s reputation took years. The charity was often in debt because of its all-embracing policy, and Barnardo does seem to have confused his own private means with those of the charity, though not with intent to defraud. He was well served by an intemperate performance by Reynolds in the witness box. The scandal led to Barnardo’s leaving the Plymouth Brethren, which caused him grave distress. As well as being dogged by an element of public suspicion he was also, from his early thirties onwards, plagued by ill health, and a sufferer from both mental and physical exhaustion. To cap it all his private investments were disastrous, and he was forced to ask the trustees to pay him a salary in 1883, which they unhesitatingly agreed to do.

  Cairns took over the running of the board of trustees. This was a recommendation of the arbitrators, as was ending the practice of solitary confinement as a punishment, and having the homes inspected by government inspectors. Cairns, who was still Lord Chancellor, was a man of the highest probity, and his own reputation lent lustre and credibility to the charity. Without his name it might have collapsed by the late 1870s. As it was, by the late 1880s it had awesome debts of £200,000, thanks to a national expansion, and it was well into the twentieth century before the finances were regularised: by which time the homes were under royal patronage. Fortunately, the banks did not call in their mortgages.

  By his death in 1905 Barnardo had established ninety-six homes all over the country. He had also established boys’ and girls’ clubs in industrial areas that young people working in factories could attend for wholesome activities, and to receive a moral education of varying degrees of subtlety. It took a memorial fund and several more years after Barnardo’s death before the charity was thriving; by which stage the children he had helped could be counted in the tens of thousands, many of whom were established in respectable and self-sufficient lives in Britain and the colonies.

  William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, worked in a similar milieu to Barnardo. Booth, born in 1829, had started out as a pawnbroker, but had hated his work, for it showed him the extreme poverty in which so many existed and the misery this caused. ‘When but a mere child,’ he later wrote, ‘the degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets, droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence, kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life.’50 Two years into his apprenticeship he converted to Methodism, prompted by confessing his sins of sharp practice in the pawnbroking business, and began to proselytise for the faith.51 He also developed Chartist sympathies.

  He moved to London and became a lay preacher, but could find few opportunities to preach. So he started to do it outdoors, on Kennington Common, and in the streets. In 1851 he joined the Methodist Reform Church: and on his twenty-third birthday, in April the following year, became a full-time itinerant preacher, based in the church’s headquarters in Clapham. Booth had a revolutionary, dramatic style, in which he had been inspired by watching a visiting American revivalist. His message was that eternal punishment awaited those who did not believe in the Gospel and who failed to see the need of repentance from sin. He was preaching in 1865 outside the Blind Beggar pub in the Mile End Road when he was heard by a group of missionaries, who were greatly impressed. They invited him to preach to a series of meetings in Whitechapel, and he held the crowd at one, on 2 July 1865, completely rapt. He realised he had found his true vocation. He formed his own movement, which he called ‘The Christian Revival Society’, later renamed ‘The Christian Mission’. It met in the East End every evening – in a warehouse through whose windows street urchins threw stones and firecrackers – and on Sundays. From his platform Booth urged the derelicts of this community – the thieves, prostitutes and drunks – to repent and find salvation. He also opened soup kitchens, much to the despair of the Charity Organisation Society, which felt they encouraged the poor not to work.

  His work was physically hard, and sometimes dangerous. He preached in the poorer parts of London and would return home exhausted and often bloodied, having been pelted. His was one of 500 charitable and religious groups in the East End at the time. He pressed on throughout the 1870s: but it was not until 1878, when he changed the name of his mission to the Salvation Army, that it really took off. Booth was dictating a letter and used the phrase ‘we are a volunteer army’. His son Bramwell, deeply involved in the mission, protested he was not a volunteer, but a regular. Booth’s secretary was instructed to cross out the word and wrote instead ‘we are a salvation army’. The name change was inspired, and the notion of an army fighting against sin to save the poor sinners caught the public imagination, not only in Britain.

  Like an army, they marched, had ranks, bands, uniforms and flags. The Salvation Army had a sworn enemy in the drinks industry, which feared it existed largely to stop the lower classes drinking. In the 1880s there were 190,000 public houses in Britain, and 200,000 arrests a year for drunkenness. A group of Booth’s opponents, the Skeleton Army, set out to disrupt his meetings, not least by assaulting him and his soldiers. In 1882 a total of 662 soldiers were assaulted, 251 of them women. Thanks to the influence of Booth’s wife Catherine, the rescue of prostitutes was undertaken exclusively by women soldiers, which made the Salvation Army an engine of female equality.

  Booth had been heavily influenced by Carlyle’s strictures against the British for their treatment of the poor, and especially his notion that they were more likely to offer decent treatment to their animals. He compared the poorest people with a cab-horse: if they were underfed, or possibly even overworked as well, they would break down. He also made Carlyle’s point that Britain had ended slavery, but had done nothing to liberate its poor. ‘This Submerged Tenth – is it, then, beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they rot and die?’52

  Like Barnardo, Booth endured accusations of self-interest, peculation and corruption. The Anglican Church was hostile, with Shaftesbury moved to describe Booth as the Antichrist. The General was notoriously unbending, and ruled as an absolute monarch in his domain. However, the idea caught on and spread, not just in Britain but also abroad. When Booth wrote his testament and mission statement, In Darkest England and the Way Out, in 1890 the Army had assets in Britain of £377,000, and a worldwide total of £641,000. It had diversified from slum missions to homes for fallen women, brigades to meet released prisoners as they left jail to help place them on the right course, labour exchanges, a shelter for the destitute, a home for drunks, food depots and a factory for the unemployed. It also assisted with and gave advice on emigratio
n, using its network in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and America. Booth became so celebrated that in 1902 he was invited to the Coronation. By the time of his death in 1912 his movement had spread to fifty-eight countries.

  VI

  Some idealists wished to create communities for the lower classes in which the types of problems Burdett-Coutts, Dickens, Barnardo and Booth tried to deal with would simply not exist in the first place. One such was Titus Salt, a woollen manufacturer who built the model town named after him, Saltaire, to the west of Bradford to house his workers and their families. Salt’s father was a wool stapler in Bradford, the worsted centre of the world. Titus, born in 1803, had early ambitions to be a doctor. However, he fainted at the sight of blood, and so followed his father into the business. After working for him for ten years he set up his own firm, and cornered the market in fabrics that were a mix of mohair and alpaca wool. This made him astonishingly rich by the 1840s: and he decided to move his operations not merely to build a better factory in which to manufacture his goods, but also to get away from the squalor of Bradford. The population of the town had grown from 13,000 in 1801 to 104,000 in 1851, and it was regarded as the most polluted town in England. By 1851 it had 200 factories pouring out smoke, and its sewage was emptied directly into the River Beck, from which the town obtained its drinking water.

  Salt started to build Saltaire in 1851. He wanted to consolidate on one site the work done in five mills he had in Bradford, doing the rounds of which was exhausting him. Salt had, however, already given extensively to charities, and he also seems sincerely to have hoped that by taking his workers out of the miasmatic and debauched lives that so many in the industrial classes had, and giving them what would come to be termed ‘sweetness and light’, he would be improving his little part of the world. He saw that high productivity and a competitive advantage could be better obtained if the workers were happy, healthy and well educated. He seems to have been influenced by Robert Owen, half a century earlier at New Lanark in Scotland, in associating a high performance by workers with wholesome living and working conditions.

  The great mill at Saltaire – at 545 feet long on its south front it was the same length as St Paul’s Cathedral, and it was also six storeys high – was opened on Salt’s fiftieth birthday, on 20 September 1853: around 3,500 guests, including 2,400 of his workers brought by train from Bradford, sat down at a banquet in the combing-shed to celebrate the opening. They ate ‘four hind-quarters of beef, 40 chines of beef, 120 legs of mutton, 100 dishes of lamb, 40 hams, 40 tongues, 50 pigeon pies, 50 dishes of roast chickens, 20 dishes of roast ducks, 30 brace of grouse, 30 brace of partridges, 50 dishes of potted meat of various kinds, 320 plum puddings, 100 dishes of tartlets, 100 dishes of jellies, etc.’53 This was complemented by half a ton of potatoes, various desserts, and champagne and other wines.

  While the government still struggled to legislate in the matter, Salt instituted the maximum ten-hour day for his male operatives. The output was in any case massive: fourteen steam-driven boilers consumed 50 tons of coal a day. The weaving-shed had 1,200 looms producing 30,000 yards, or nearly 18 miles of fabric (mainly alpaca) a day, or enough in a year to stretch from Bradford to Peru, the home of the alpaca. By 1871 his workers and their families gave Saltaire, with its giant and majestic mill on the River Aire, a population of nearly 4,400. The mill, like other buildings in Saltaire, was built in the Italianate style so disliked by Ruskin, of whose writings Salt was an admirer.

  The condition of employment and residence was clean living. Drinking was frowned upon – there was no drink in the town, except on special occasions when Salt provided it. Salt was not opposed to alcohol as such, but to pubs as places where men could congregate and talk politics. There were no unions in Saltaire – but also no police. Salt’s factory overseers kept an eye on everyone. His other objection to public houses was that, when Bradford had endured a cholera epidemic during his mayoralty in 1848, he had noticed that many of the victims had also been heavy drinkers, which he believed had weakened their constitutions. He also saw a strong connection between drink and crime, and banned pubs out of ‘paternal solicitude for the moral and physical health of his people’.54 His people were, it seemed, grateful: the Saltaire Monthly Magazine in March 1871 thanked him ‘for his stern exercise of his proprietorial rights, through which he preserved the residents . . . from the annoyance and temptation of public houses and beer shops.’55

  Salt led by example. As his friend and biographer, the Reverend Robert Balgarnie, wrote, he rose early, worked hard, and was punctual. He was also a man for ‘methodical exactness’. Balgarnie continued: ‘He was scrupulously exact in the arrangement of his papers, and knew where to lay his hand on any document when required. His letters were always promptly answered. He was exact in his accounts, exact in the words he spoke – which never had the colour of exaggeration about them – exact in his purchases and sales.’56 In what Balgarnie calls his ‘wholeheartedness’ he was the very model of a Victorian self-made man.

  Salt’s spacious, well-lit and well-ventilated mill – the largest of its kind in the world, where all the processes needed to turn alpaca into cloth were under one roof – provided a pleasant workplace, light years ahead of the conditions elsewhere. He installed lavatories, which was unusual, though the urine was carried away especially for use in the dyeing process. Outside the mill, the means of the pursuit of perfection were all around. He built nearly 850 houses, conspicuously not on the unsanitary back-to-back model. As well as a back garden, the average dwelling had three bedrooms, a parlour, kitchen and pantry: there were some boarding houses and some houses for larger families. Salt may have been radical in his approach to industrial conditions, but he had a strict understanding of hierarchy. Houses in Saltaire fell into four categories – large villas for executives, well-appointed terraces for overlookers, the basic workman’s cottage described above, and the boarding-houses.57 The entire cost of the town’s construction was £106,562. Salt’s philanthropy did not end at Saltaire: he gave money to churches and chapels all over Yorkshire, including York Minister, and in Scarborough, his favourite watering-hole: he gave money to hospitals and asylums in Bradford and also in Lancaster, and to Bradford Grammar School.

  The town had shops, a Congregational church (the denomination of which he was a devout member), a Wesleyan chapel, a school for 750 children (which Salt, despite his Nonconformity, decreed should be subject to the State’s inspectorate), a club, a working men’s institute with reading rooms, baths and a wash house (he had been offended by the sight of washing hanging out to dry, spoiling the beauty of his urban estate), a library, a laboratory, an art school and a gymnasium, almshouses and a huge park in which to play cricket and croquet. Concerts and lectures were a regular feature of the Institute. He also built an infirmary, not least to give rapid treatment to any of his people who suffered an industrial injury. Anyone so badly injured that he or she could do no work would receive a pension for life; the elderly and infirm were accommodated in the almshouses, free of charge. There was a 500,000-gallon reservoir, which collected rainwater off the massive roofs of his buildings, obviating the need to drink polluted water. Gas provided heat and light, and every house had an outside lavatory. The main roads in Saltaire were named after the Queen and her Consort, lesser ones after Salt’s family and even after his architects, Lockwood and Mawson.

  Salt had a deeply moral attitude, and he hoped – and expected – to encourage a strong morality among his workforce. To codify what Salt expected of them, he drew up a dozen rules. Rule one was ‘Throughout the village, cleanliness, cheerfulness and order must reign supreme’. Rule two was ‘Only persons who are good, obedient, honest and hardworking will be allocated a house in the village’, and rule three ‘anyone caught in a state of inebriation will immediately be evicted’. Rules four to seven deal with the importance of maintaining the property, repairing damage, and forbidding the keeping of animals – with the Founder making a periodical inspec
tion to ensure all was in order. Rule eight was an aesthetic consideration, maintaining the founder’s sense of equilibrium by forbidding the hanging-out of washing. Other rules prescribe attendance at school up to the age of twelve, forbid subletting, and ban gatherings of more than eight persons in the street. Rule nine is perhaps the most indicative of Salt’s rigid paternalism: ‘The founder would recommend that all inmates wash themselves every morning, but they shall wash themselves at least twice a week, Monday morning and Thursday morning; any found not washed will be fined 3d for each offence.’58 The method of inspection is not described.

  Salt sat in Parliament as a Liberal for two years from 1859 (though he never spoke, reticence being one of his trademarks, and as such he became the incarnation of a Carlylean hero) and was created a baronet. By his beneficence, he appeared to have eased the clash between labour and capital: if only all employers were like him, the threat of revolution would disappear, many believed. Others found his paternalism oppressive and controlling. Some, notably Ruskin, felt he exerted too much power over his workforce. Ruskin felt Salt had only done what a decent employer should: he would not concede that Salt’s benevolence was far in excess of what most employers could afford, or most employees would ever expect. This was typically capricious of Ruskin: Salt was only following Ruskin’s prescriptions for enlightened capitalism, after all. He was keen to show his works off as an example to the wider capitalist class. For the first few years visitors came through Saltaire, for whom every facility was provided. Soon, though, Salt found it in his best interests to restrict the procession. It was not simply that they were distracting the operatives: they were also engaging in industrial espionage, taking careful note of Salt’s state-of-the-art machinery.