The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  When Polly went to collect her maintenance, Mr. Taverner would have informed her that William was delinquent in paying it. Eventually, at the behest of the Lambeth Poor Law Union, Nichols was summoned to the magistrate’s court to explain himself. He had prepared his answer well in advance. He produced the skillfully gathered evidence of his wife’s “adultery without consent.” According to Edward Walker, his daughter denied that she was living with another man, but the judge seemed convinced by the material.12 He ruled that William was now absolved of his financial responsibilities to Polly, and on July 28, 1882, William and his paramour packed their belongings, took his children by the hand, and bid goodbye to the Peabody Buildings on Stamford Street. The superintendent duly noted in the ledger, at the time of his departure, that William Nichols had been a “good tenant” but “left in debt.” The words “good tenant” were later struck through.*

  It is likely that Polly’s defense—that she was not “living in adultery” at the time the case came before the magistrate—was in fact true. Had she still been living with George Crawshaw, or under the protection of another partner, she would not have found herself completely destitute, as in fact she did, upon the withdrawal of her allowance. On April 24, 1882, Polly had no choice but to enter Lambeth Union Workhouse, this time for an indefinite stay. With the exception of a short period spent in the infirmary in January, she remained there for exactly eleven months, and discharged herself on March 24, 1883. It appears she attempted to find her feet, only to return for another stay, from May 21 until June 2.

  Inmates in a workhouse, unlike those in a prison, were free to remove themselves from the care of the Poor Law Union whenever they chose. However, without an offer of employment or any money at their disposal, it could prove impossible to extract oneself from the cycle of poverty. Those who were discharged left with a final meal in their stomach and some bread. In theory, this meager provision was to tide them over until they were able to find work and earn enough to pay for shelter and sustenance. In reality, inmates frequently stepped from life in the workhouse directly into life on the streets—begging, prostituting themselves, or stealing in order to earn enough to pay for food and a night’s lodgings. Many others ended up sleeping rough.

  On this occasion, it was fortunate that when Polly left the workhouse her father and brother had a home for her. The house at 122 Guildford Street, not far from the Peabody Buildings, was already a tight squeeze for Edward, his wife, his five young children, and his father. Whatever obstacles had prevented Polly from living with her family in the past had now been surmounted. Edward Walker later claimed with great emotion that he would have never turned his daughter out so long as he had a roof over his head. Nonetheless, life with his grown child did not always prove easy.

  If Polly, in the final throes of her marriage, had acquired a taste for drink to dull her pain, her thirst for this medicine had grown only more acute since her separation. Since alcohol was largely prohibited in the workhouse, her stay there likely staved off dependency, at least for a time. After her discharge Polly was free to resume whatever habits she may have acquired earlier. Although Edward Walker never revealed what sort of work his daughter assumed while she lived with him, he did suggest that she spent a good amount of time in the local public houses. As her brother’s family continued to grow, Polly may have wished to escape when she could from her increasingly awkward position at home. Her sense of shame too cannot be overestimated; she had lost her home, her husband, and her dignity. More excruciating still, she had lost her children, and the sight of her nieces and nephews could not fail to serve as a constant reminder of her worthlessness as a mother. Drink offered a way out.

  The arguments began. Polly’s drunkenness, even if not habitual, could not have contributed to a pleasant domestic environment in a small house. Although Walker insisted that his daughter “did not stay out particularly late” and “was not fast,” nor had he “heard of anything improper” happening among the group of “young women and men” that “she used to go with,” Polly’s behavior at home eventually rendered life impossible.13 It was said that after one disagreement in 1884, Polly simply decided to leave. “She thought she could better herself,” said her father, “so I let her go.”14

  When Polly left the protection of this family home, she likely did so to take up with a man she had met. In March 1884, Thomas Stuart Drew, a blacksmith who lived on neighboring York Street, had been widowed. Now alone, in his late thirties, with three daughters to care for, Thomas found himself in a position identical to that of Edward Walker when he lost his wife. Thomas’s girls needed a mother, and perhaps their situation, so similar to Polly’s childhood experience, attracted her to the widower and his family. Thomas apparently offered Walker’s daughter a settled home and an opportunity to feel, once more, a sense of usefulness in the roles of wife (though without benefit of marriage) and mother. Although Polly and her father were not on speaking terms, Edward Walker noted that when he saw Polly in June 1886, she appeared respectable in both dress and demeanor.

  The solemn occasion on which they met called for such propriety. Earlier that month, at around midnight, Polly’s brother and his wife had been sitting in the kitchen, chatting. Just as Mrs. Walker left the room to go to bed, she heard a sudden explosion behind her. When she raced back to the kitchen, she found her husband’s hair ablaze; the kerosene lamp he had gone to extinguish had burst into a fiery ball. The couple’s screams alerted their lodger, who attempted to put out the flames, but by the time he did so, Edward had suffered third-degree burns to the right side of his face and chest. They rushed him in a cab to Guy’s Hospital nearby, at which point he slipped into a coma. By early the following evening, he had died.

  For Polly, the shock of her only surviving sibling’s death was the first in a series of misfortunes to befall her that year. It is likely no coincidence that her stable relationship with Thomas Drew soon began to falter. If Polly had been able to manage her drinking in her new domestic arrangement, Edward’s unexpected demise may have driven her once more to the bottle. Come November, she and Thomas were no more, and by the following month, he had taken another bride; a woman whom he could legitimately marry, and with whom he did not have to live in sin.

  The consequences of separation in the nineteenth century were judged by many to be “a living death,” for while the law sanctioned a split between a married couple, it never permitted them to move their lives beyond that. Any future relationships would always be considered adulterous, while any children of those unions would always be regarded as illegitimate. With divorce and remarriage an impossibility among the working classes, communities and families were often inclined to turn a blind eye to middle-aged couples who wished to cohabit, but as the social reformer Charles Booth remarked, even this level of toleration had limits. “I do not know exactly how far upwards in the social scale this view of sexual morality extends,” he wrote, “but I believe it to constitute one of the clearest lines of demarcation between upper and lower in the working class.”15 For men like Thomas Drew and Edward Walker, proud skilled laborers who earned a respectable wage, this mode of living was ultimately beneath them.

  Unfortunately, neither living with a husband nor a common-law spouse was an option for Polly in the autumn of 1886. Without the maintenance William had once paid her, without a home, and without the means of sufficiently supporting herself, she had nowhere left to retreat to but the stony embrace of Lambeth Union Workhouse once more.

  “Houseless Creature”

  By October 1887, autumn had begun to spread its chill over those who passed the night in Trafalgar Square. Some curled up on the benches, while others slumbered on the flagstones, partially covered with yesterday’s newspapers in a vain attempt to keep warm. Weary old men and women in ragged, battered bonnets propped themselves against the wall below the National Gallery. Shoeless children rolled themselves into balls in the corners and slept like small dogs. W. T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette,
walked through the scene in the square one night, shaking his head and scribbling onto his pad. “Four hundred sleepers, men and women, promiscuously side by side, I count in the shadows of the finest hotels in the world.”1 Slumped at the base of a bronze lion or lying with her head against a bench was Polly Nichols, cold and anonymous.

  When morning came, the rough sleepers were joined by a steady trickle of the unemployed and the “friends of Socialism.” Daily that autumn they gathered in their thousands at the base of Nelson’s column. They came with their red flags and banners, singing songs and shouting slogans about workingmen’s rights. Speakers mounted a makeshift dais and addressed the assembled to rousing cheers, jeers, or hissing. The poor weather, even the blinding sulfurous fogs that fell like a curtain over the spectacle, failed to discourage the audiences. They came, men and women, the threadbare and the “respectably dressed,” in billycock hats and low-slung flat caps, and stood attentively with hunched shoulders and hands in their pockets, or balancing a child on a hip. Among those who gathered in the square with Polly in the last weeks of October was the writer, textile designer, and socialist William Morris, along with several of his associates from the Socialist League, including John Hunter Watts and Thomas Wardle. They came to observe and debate and, in the case of Watts, to take his place at the base of the column in order to pontificate.

  The speeches and demonstrations drew curious spectators along with the do-gooders. Some helped with the distribution of bread and coffee to “the homeless creatures” who had made Trafalgar Square their parlor. Others handed out Bibles or tickets to lodging houses, which were already filled to bursting. This congregation of the sympathetic, sensitive to the plight of the poor and downtrodden, provided beggars with a rich harvest. The ranks of police, significantly outnumbered by the crowd, kept an anxious distance—patrolling, listening, watching, and waiting, expecting the scene to explode into violence. This it did, with some regularity. Toward the end of October, the daily marches and processions grew more aggressive. The police were put on notice as speakers in Trafalgar Square hollered threats of violence. Some promised to set the city alight, to smash the windows of fashionable Regent Street, and to storm the Mansion House, the residence of London’s Lord Mayor. On their marches, the protesters tried to outfox the police escort that followed them. On October 19, a crowd burst onto the Strand, a major thoroughfare, in an attempt to march toward the City of London, the central financial district. The police pushed them back into the yards around the train station at Charing Cross. Railings collapsed; demonstrators were injured and trampled. The crowd hurled rocks at the officers; some were kicked and beaten. The following day marches set off toward the shops of Bond Street. Terrified shopkeepers rushed to shutter their windows at the approach of “King Mob.” On October 25, the procession made it as far as Belgravia, bellowing revolutionary songs at the windows of high society.

  Numerous attempts were made to clear the square of its “trouble-makers,” especially in the wake of these violent events. The commissioner of police used the Vagrancy Act as he took “steps to arrest . . . all rogues and vagabonds throughout the Metropolis who are found wandering or sleeping in the open air at night during the cold weather.” Inspector Bullock was on duty during the night of the twenty-fourth when the clearance began. Trafalgar Square had been his beat, and he had come to recognize many of those who bedded down there. At around ten o’clock, a charity worker had turned up, offering bread, coffee, and lodging-house tickets to “170 outcasts” in the square. As the night was looking to be particularly cold, most of those gathered went to the lodging houses listed on the tickets, “but several returned saying they were full.”2 Bullock offered to escort them to the casual ward of the workhouse at St. Giles, where a short stay was allowed in exchange for work, “but many of them said they could not think of going there.” The officer then made it clear that he would arrest them if they remained, and sent thirty of them, with two constables, to the workhouse on Macklin Street. En route, eleven of them slipped away down the side streets of Covent Garden. Bullock was not at all surprised when the missing turned up again, “sitting and smoking in the Square, lounging about, and taking part in the scrambles for money thrown down by people passing on the terrace.”3 It was then that he took ten of them—“six women, two girls and two youths”—into custody. Polly Nichols was one of them.

  Polly, who had probably taken a few glasses that evening, did not go willingly into the cells. She swore, put up a fight, and “was very disorderly” at the police station. The following morning she was made to account for herself before Mr. Bridges, the magistrate. As the prisoners were marched into the courtroom, a journalist from the Evening Standard remarked that they “presented a woeful aspect, being dirty and very ragged.” The police judged “Nichols” to be “the worst woman in the square.”4 It was described how she and a group of other women had made a business of begging beneath the terrace that separated the National Gallery from Trafalgar Square. These women waited for “respectable people” to appear, at which point they would “take off their shawls and shake themselves as if they were cold, in order to invite sympathy.”5 As a ruse, this appears to have been successful, or at least profitable enough to buy Polly a drink and a bed at a lodging house, should she wish it. Begging had kept her safely out of the workhouse, though, as she explained it to the judge, she had been reluctant to go to the casual ward “because they were kept there in the morning, and so lost any work they had to go to.”6 This was a doubtful excuse, and the magistrate would have known it. As Polly Nichols had been tramping since May of that year, it’s unlikely she had any regular work at all.

  It would have been with a heavy and dejected heart that Polly, on November 15, 1886, returned to Lambeth Workhouse. The security she had enjoyed with Thomas Drew had been pulled from under her feet, and she found herself once more in a position similar to what she had known after she parted with William Nichols. However, in this case her future was even less certain as she had lost the entitlement to receive a maintenance from her estranged husband. Into the admissions ledger beside her name was written “no home, calling: nil.” Following her brother’s death and her rift with her father, she must have felt an acute sense of isolation.

  Fortunately for Polly, on this occasion her sojourn at the workhouse was not lengthy. Most workhouses operated schemes designed to prepare girls and young women for jobs in domestic service. Not only did this provide an opportunity for girls who might otherwise have ended up in a life of vice to acquire skills and a source of income, but it also helped to mitigate workhouse expenses; the fewer the inmates, the lower the cost to the local ratepayer. Lambeth Workhouse appears to have extended this practice to include the placement of older women into service. The rationale would have been a similar one, in that it offered women who would otherwise be stuck in a workhouse cycle of poverty, the opportunity to begin their lives anew. As most middle-aged women would have several decades of experience in cooking, cleaning, mending, and looking after children, their skills were easily transferable. They knew how to clean a grate, scrub a floor, nurse a sick infant, and prepare meals. There were plenty of employers willing to overlook the blemished background of a workhouse inmate in order to make use of the free or low-cost labor. To have been selected for such a scheme, Polly would have had to have demonstrated good character from the outset, proving herself worthy for this opportunity through her diligence, compliance, and docility. As there was no alcohol to be had in the workhouse, this was unlikely to have proven too difficult. On December 16, Polly was duly “discharged to service,” as the register reads, though where she was employed is unknown.7

  Regrettably, this placement was not to become a permanent one. Servants and masters were not always compatible and the unspecified circumstance that cost her the position by the following spring may not have been down to a failing on her part. Whatever the situation, it appears that in May 1887, Polly could not bear the prospect of yet another sojourn in the wo
rkhouse and instead decided to take her chances tramping.

  A tramp, or vagrant, had a life that combined different roles: part iterant worker, part beggar, and sometimes, depending upon circumstances, part criminal or prostitute. Unfortunately, the Vagrancy Laws did not attempt to distinguish between these “professional” identities; a beggar or a criminal or a prostitute—anyone who lived on the street—was viewed similarly and simply categorized as a nuisance. However, a tramp’s life and means of self-support varied markedly from person to person and was often determined by age, gender, the presence of an infirmity, or any number of circumstances. A tramp took work where he or she could get it: selling various items on the street, taking laboring jobs such as loading and unloading goods at markets and at the docks, or doing odd bits of childcare or cleaning for working-class households. Life was lived hand-to-mouth, and the quest for work, food, and shelter was constant, sending men and women “tramping” from one end of town to the other, from lodging house to workhouse to public house and back again. While some tramps argued that this lifestyle provided them with freedom and that they enjoyed sleeping wherever they chose, the majority were pushed into this existence through want and a desire to avoid a lengthy and oppressive stay inside a workhouse. However, most were not averse to making use of the workhouse casual ward when it suited them.

  The concept of the casual ward, or “the spike,” as it was frequently called, was devised in 1837 when the government required that Poor Law authorities provide temporary overnight shelter for anyone destitute and in urgent need of accommodation.* Like the workhouse itself, the casual ward, often located in a wing of the workhouse, was not designed for comfort. The objective was always to discourage vagrancy, while offering the most basic assistance. Vagrants would be given a nauseating meal of skilly and bread and could spend the night in one of the single-sex dormitories, in exchange for several hours of work the following day. By the end of the century, anyone who entered a casual ward was made to spend two nights on the grubby beds in exchange for a full day’s labor in between, picking oakum, undertaking cleaning jobs, or breaking stones. If the superintendent believed an inmate wasn’t working hard enough for his or her keep, the inmate could be detained. Both the casual ward and the workhouse were havens for bullies.