High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  VII

  For all the generosity of rich philanthropists, and the devotion of the lives of others to the service of the poor, resources were scarce. Indiscriminate charity offended on two counts: it squandered some resources and provided help to the undeserving, demoralising those who fended for themselves and further preventing the undeserving from mending their ways. The challenge for those who would do good was not just to tackle a problem that, paradoxically, had grown with prosperity, but to tackle it in the most morally productive way. Even such bleeding hearts as Dickens saw that to give help to those who could help themselves, but who refused to do so, was to undermine the foundations of society. This was the beginning of a twentieth-century impulse that believed charity – or welfare, as it became – could only be effective if overseen by a central bureaucracy, which eventually meant the State.

  In 1869 a body was formed to bring together, and to an extent to regulate, the charities that sought to do good works: the Charity Organisation Society, an upright and perhaps uptight operation that, as we have seen, crossed swords with such great philanthropists as Barnardo and Booth. Dickens, who had managed to do charity work successfully for the best part of thirty years by the time the COS came along, lampooned it as the ‘Haven of Philanthropy’ in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.59 To some of its detractors, because of the strictly moralising attitude it was perceived to have towards the indigent classes it purported to serve, its acronym stood for ‘cringe or starve’. Its own historian – the grandson of one of its founders – takes a more constructive view, arguing that the COS ‘embodied an idea of charity which claimed to reconcile the divisions in society, to remove poverty and to produce a happy, self-reliant community.’60

  The COS’s ideology irritated freelance philanthropists such as Dickens. It was that ‘indiscriminate charity only made things worse; it demoralised.’61 The COS effectively sought to establish a programme of social work by the ‘more fortunate classes’, a form of friendship that would ‘restore a man’s self-respect and his ability to support himself and his family.’ Motivated by this ideology, a group established to coordinate the work of charities ended up as ‘a movement to reform the spirit not only of charities but of society.’ It equated indiscriminate charity with socialism. The COS did, however, originate the idea of casework and, with it, founded the idea of the social worker. The social worker was the friend the poor needed to remoralise themselves.

  The COS was founded when numerous charities were coming into existence, when the rich were becoming very rich because of the growth of their markets, of the middle class and of consumerism, while the poor, unaided by the State, were being cast ever further adrift from the rising standards of living enjoyed by most workers. The population was growing rapidly, but the infrastructure to support such people barely existed, especially sanitary housing, schools (before 1870), hospitals and remunerative work. For those who lapsed into criminality judicial punishments were severe – even after the abolition of transportation by the 1857 Penal Servitude Act, and the restriction of the death penalty to murder, treason, piracy and arson in Her Majesty’s dockyards, sentences of flogging for youths and men and long periods of hard labour for men and women were routinely handed down.

  Pauperism decreased in London in the 1860s as a proportion of the population, but rose in absolute terms because of the rapid growth in numbers in the city. One deficiency had been care of the sick, highlighted in the 1867 cholera epidemic in London. The Tory government passed the Metropolitan Poor Act that year, which established a common fund for the whole of the Metropolis for the provision of hospital care and asylums. Each individual parish union contributed to the funds, but they were administered centrally. Care of the mentally handicapped and mentally ill was, by any civilised standards, a disgrace before this Act: but it at least established three asylums for ‘idiots, imbeciles and harmless idiots’ – the terminology would soon be changed to the ‘feeble minded’, though those who were a danger to society were designated ‘lunatics’ – in the London area, a precedent soon followed by the counties.62 However, the law did not finally draw a distinction between harmless lunatics and dangerous ones until 1889. A committee in 1875 chaired by Sir Charles Trevelyan also argued that the State should support those from the lower-middle and respectable working classes who needed institutional care but could not afford it, to ensure they were not lumped in with the lunatics of the lowest class. Class distinctions were important, even in insanity.

  Another widespread problem by the late 1860s was street begging, some by the genuinely destitute, but some just cynical exploitation – such as parents dressing their filthy children in rags and sending them barefoot into the streets to solicit money. Some begging was aggressive, aimed at women and designed to intimidate them into opening their purses. As the middle and upper classes sought to have the laws against vagrancy and begging enforced, so too they began to feel that a more organised form of charitable provision would eliminate the need for such behaviour. It was quite clear that much fraud was taking place, and that money was being diverted from the deserving to the undeserving as a consequence.

  In rural areas the gentry would visit their local poor and see that their needs were catered for; and would seek to set an example, and make exhortations of thrift so that occasional hard times could be managed out of savings. But, as Edward Denison, a young MP and son of a bishop had lamented, there was no such moneyed class in the East End of London, merely a sea of destitution, crime and vice. It was Denison’s writings on the need to stop indiscriminate charity that brought about the COS in 1869. It would become one of the main roles of the Society to recruit ‘friendly visitors’ to go among the poor, not perhaps like Lady Bountiful, but to give practical help, advice and support to those who could stand on their own two feet. It would become a principle of the COS that charity was given not out of religious obligation, but out of friendship, and friendship with the best interests of the recipient always at heart.

  One of the roots of the COS was in the Society for the Relief of Distress, founded in 1860. It advocated a series of district officers in the poorest areas who would coordinate the charitable work for the locality, and would work closely with the Poor Law guardians. As the number of charities grew, so too did calls for there to be a body that audited their accounts. In the aftermath of the 1867 cholera outbreak so many new charities moved into the East End that some felt the increased relief was encouraging some of the poor to make claims they would never otherwise have attempted.

  It was at around this time that the colourful figure of Henry Solly came into the story. Solly was son of a London timber merchant whose financial ruin in 1837 meant his son had to work for a living. Solly disliked commerce, but at the dawn of Victoria’s reign had undergone a religious and political radicalisation. He was fortunate to marry into money – his cousin, the daughter of an Essex landowner – and this enabled him to become a Unitarian minister in Somerset. His family had long been dissenters, though Solly soon found he did not much like being a Unitarian. Yeovil, where he was based, had glove factories, and his contact with workers there caused him to engage with Chartism. The Yeovil Unitarians regarded this as rabble-rousing, and he was dismissed from his ministry. For the next decade he operated from various pulpits in Devon, Somerset and Gloucestershire, while his commitment to radical causes expanded beyond the six points of Chartism and into anti-slavery, anti-Corn Law agitation, education reform and the cooperative movement. He found a pulpit at Carter Lane in the City of London in 1852, but considered his work there a failure. He went to Lancaster in 1858 but, after 1862, gave up the ministry.

  This decision was, however, the making of Solly as a social reformer. For all his political radicalism he believed in the established order, but was committed to the idea of improvements within it, notably for the lower classes, whose path to respectability he wished to smooth. His big idea to achieve this was the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union, of which he was one of the founders in Ju
ne 1862. The Union also came to Solly’s aid: he was without a pulpit and an income, and became the first professional secretary of the Union the following year. His instinct about the clubs was that they should be places of fellowship and recreation but with an alternative focus from the other magnet for the working man, the pub. Solly was a lifelong teetotaller. He worked hard to build the movement, and travelled thousands of miles. A network of clubs was soon all over England: the only difficulty was that the high-minded ideals Solly had for them were at odds with the desires of their members. He left the movement in 1867 after an argument but returned shortly afterwards, only to leave for good in 1873, when the members’ desire to buy and drink alcohol in their clubs proved too much for him.

  Solly had not done with social reform, however. Determined to help the poor by encouraging hard work and thrift, he was instrumental in founding the London Association for the Prevention of Pauperism and Crime in 1868. He had read a paper that year at a meeting of the Society of Arts that had been entitled How to deal with the Unemployed Poor of London and with its Roughs and Criminal Classes. Directors of charities discussed the paradox of pauperism increasing the greater the efforts to alleviate it. The conclusion was that the Poor Law guardians were incapable of assessing the needs of their parishes, and a more formal system of dispensing relief was needed. It was suggested that a body be established, funded by a 1 per cent tax on all the charities, to provide the auditing and regulatory services, inquiring into all applications by the poor for help, that now seemed so badly needed.

  The following year the broad group that Solly (another of whose ideas was for industrial villages which, although they did not get off the ground, gave the germ of the idea for the garden city movement) had formed evolved into the Charity Organisation Society, whose aims were to ensure the more responsible and targeted spending of charitable funds. Lord Lichfield found the new society offices in the Adelphi, where it set up home in March 1869. The full title of the body was the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity, which describes the importance to its founders of the aim of driving beggars off the streets either by satisfying their needs through benevolence or, if found to be bogus, driving them into the arms of the police.

  From the outset the COS employed an element of social work, giving counselling and advice to the cases it helped, encouraging them to be self-reliant. It formalised the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor: the former being those prepared, if given support, to help themselves. So it was that charity was diverted to act as a springboard to personal responsibility, rather than supplanting it or rendering it, in some cases, unnecessary. It also took on the important role of coordinating philanthropy, and ensuring those who established charities were genuinely helping the poor. To ensure its own bona fides was rock solid it recruited vice-presidents and a council of the highest in the land, including dukes, marquesses, archbishops and bishops, MPs, distinguished public servants such as Trevelyan, and Ruskin and Octavia Hill, the last two of whom had their own project to house the poor. The only name missing to begin with was the high priest of Victorian philanthropy, Shaftesbury, but within a couple of years he was added to the list.

  The COS’s first annual report announced its intention to set up an office in each Poor Law division, managed by a local committee and under the leadership of a professional agent. The effectiveness varied from area to area. The first parts of London to set up such committees were where areas of extreme wealth lay alongside areas of poverty – Kensington, Marylebone, Paddington and St George’s, Hanover Square. In areas such as the East End where there were no upper or upper-middle classes – or even middle classes – finding volunteers, and money, was much harder: this was missionary work rather than neighbourliness. The COS, whose purpose was, after all, coordination of philanthropic efforts, sought (with limited success) to have the richer committees help the poorer ones.

  The agent’s job was to liaise with the local charities, Poor Law officials and others such as clergy who might help look after the needy. It was also his job to examine cases of serious hardship not being dealt with adequately by the existing structure of charity and parish relief; and, where he was satisfied the need was genuine, to help. The poor were given tickets to exchange for food, rather than money that could be spent on drink or tobacco. In its second report, it stated that ‘to give material relief, food or money, to everyone who asked for it on the sole conditions of their being what is commonly called deserving and in want, even after the most careful verification of those conditions, would inevitably do more harm than good, though this might not be seen during the first year or two.’63

  The COS disliked soup kitchens, some of which gave soup and other basic food out free of charge, while others sold it at a subsidised rate. They constituted the ‘indiscriminate’ charity the COS believed wasted money, encouraged begging and deterred self-sufficiency. Poor people who did not have to buy food had money for other purposes, notably drink. As the COS’s history points out, in the early 1870s there were 165 pubs in a square mile of the East End, with a turnover of £450,000 a year. A 2d school fee in the area, which many parents said they could not afford, would raise just £10,053.64 Many requests for help with the school fee were refused: in its seventh annual report in 1875 the COS recorded that ‘but for the thorough system of investigation adopted by the society, relief might often have been given to undeserving and worthless persons whose earnings, if they had not been wasted through intemperate habits, would have enabled them to provide for the wants of their families.’65

  The government approved the COS’s mission: George Goschen, who ran the Poor Law Board in Gladstone’s first ministry, published a minute in November 1869 entitled Relief of the Poor in the Metropolis. It sought to distinguish between the Poor Law Board, which would help the destitute, and private charity, which could help those who were just very poor – by, for example, supplementing the low earnings of a widow, or helping a man seeking work to buy tools or to have his travelling paid for. The Poor Law could not pay for such things. Goschen also suggested charities should not help those being assisted by the Poor Law Board. Thus there would be cooperation regularly between both sides so each would know what the other was doing. With this encouragement from the government, the COS set about opening divisional offices, and had covered most of the Metropolis by 1871.

  However, the COS relied not only on cooperation from the government: it also required cooperation from charities and clergy, and this it did not inevitably receive. In some parts of London the main charities supported the COS and cooperated fully: Octavia Hill’s, in Marylebone, was one such, and in the hard winter of 1872–3 the local Poor Law Guardians supplied her with a daily list of applicants for relief from her district. In others, however, there was no such interaction. Yet the Society persisted: and although it never achieved complete coordination of charitable activities in London, it was in all Poor Law Divisions able to establish a committee to adjudicate on who was deserving, and who undeserving; and to further ‘the promotion of habits of providence and self-reliance, and of those social and sanitary principles, the observance of which is essential to the well-being of the poor and of the community at large.’66

  The district offices were staffed by volunteers – usually women – for several hours daily to supplement paid staff: but the volunteers were often at the sharp end, meeting the poor, and drawing up their cases. When a case was taken on, volunteers would visit the family regularly until it was either back on its feet, or so beyond help that the workhouse or some other intervention from the Poor Law Board was the only option. However, the aim of enabling those being helped to help themselves was never abandoned unless absolutely inevitable. The COS would arrange loans, grants for emigration, apprenticeships, places in convalescent homes; and give practical help such as enabling those seeking work to buy clothes, or giving widows a mangle so they could take in washing, or a sewing machine to enable them to make and mend clothes. In e
xtreme cases the COS would arrange small pensions for those respectable elderly who could no longer work: the State would not do this until 1908.

  Many applied for medical help, which caused the COS to examine the organisation of provident funds. None suitable for the lower classes existed: but the COS found that, if one did, around half who applied for help – of those giving correct addresses – could have afforded to pay in to one. It established a sub-committee to look into the prospect of establishing one, and did so in 1879 with the launch of the Metropolitan Dispensaries Association: Sir Charles Trevelyan undertook much of the work required for its foundation.

  For all the initial difficulties, the COS made a valuable contribution to the relief of poverty in London. It handled 12,506 cases in 1871, its third year of operation. It referred 3,909 of these on to other agencies, including 1,482 to the Poor Law guardians. It directly helped 4,360, including 2,446 by making direct grants, 828 by making loans, and 295 by finding work. It turned down the other 4,237: of those 286 had given false addresses, but the other refusals came into three categories. It decided 818 were ‘not requiring relief’, in that their income was sufficient for them to survive, provided they showed self-discipline and thrift. Another 1,983 were ‘ineligible’; but the last 1,150 were ‘undeserving’, showing the moral dimension the Society attached to charity.