The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  At the beginning of the twentieth century enlightened local authorities, such as Newcastle upon Tyne, began to provide houses that were ‘judiciously planned … of four rooms each, well adapted for families of a certain rank whose convenience is seldom consulted by building speculators’, as described by Eneas Mackenzie in ‘The present state of Newcastle: Streets within the walls’, in his Historical Account of Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Including the Borough of Gateshead. But despite all these great improvements, it was not the philanthropist who shaped the housing of the majority of working people. The quality of their accommodation remained subject to the vagaries of the market and the conditions they endured were the result of a chronic shortage of affordable accommodation for those at the bottom of the economic pile. For many of these people the prospect of even a rented room was beyond their wildest expectations. The choice they faced was stark: ‘the spike’ (tramp ward of the poorhouse) or a bed shared with a stranger.

  Chapter Two

  ‘A Stain of Blood Bigger than a Man’s Hand’: Aversion to the Poorhouse and the Draw of the Fire

  When James Greenwood first stood in line outside the tramp ward of the poorhouse he discovered something he had never suspected. Those hunched in the savage cold queuing for one of the scarce beds were entertained by an orchestra like none he had ever heard.

  Every instrument was a human body and the sounds all coughs. ‘Every variety of cough that I ever heard was to be heard there,’ he said. It was a concerto of coughs with ‘the hollow cough; the short cough; the hysterical cough; the bark that comes at regular intervals, like the quarter chiming of a clock, as to mark off the progress of decay’. The instruments were both great and small, ‘with coughs from vast hollow chests and coughing from little narrow ones’, all perfectly timed, ‘now one, now another, now two or three together’, while suspense was maintained by the intermittent gaps as there was also ‘a minute’s interval of silence in which to think of it all, and wonder who would begin next’.

  The experience got no better when the doors opened and Greenwood and the other fortunate ones were counted by the beefy hand of the Tramp Major, who then turned away the rest into the snarl of the wind and the hailstones that began to ping off the sandstone walls of the poorhouse. Each man passing through the door raised his arms like a wounded crow attempting flight while the porter searched him. Once through the door Greenwood’s breath plumed in front of him: it was as if the great stones of the stark room, reeking of astringent antiseptic, exuded a chill.

  ‘Strip! Get them rags folded nice and neat in front of you!’ said the Major, pointing with a length of three by two timber to the ground in front of their feet. The men piled their clothes before them and shuffled, white and vulnerable as shell-less snails, into a line before three enormous lead hip baths.

  ‘Jump in!’ said the Major, waving the length of timber towards the three great lead baths. The men lowered themselves into the water, wincing as the cold gripped their limbs and knotted their wasted calves and thighs. The porter handed the men in the baths a lump of carbolic soap. Immediately they set to rubbing their heads feverishly with the soap as if by the vigour of their efforts they might coax some warmth into their quivering limbs. Instantly, the water turned the colour of a pigeon’s chest.

  Greenwood did a mental calculation: he would get to the bath after seven other men had used it.

  That night in his cell, clad in his institutional nightshirt, as he was about to lie down he saw ‘in the middle of his mattress, a stain of blood bigger than a man’s hand’. Once under his single blanket he couldn’t control his shivering. He felt that he might well vomit the bread, vegetable gruel and water he had eaten for his supper. The reek of the carbolic soap filled the room.

  The following morning he was woken by a silent porter and locked in a cell opposite the one he had slept in. The limewashed walls were blank, except for a metal grille at the base of the outside wall. A pile of rocks, a sledge hammer and a shovel rested against another wall. He knew that when he had broken the rocks into stones small enough to shovel through the grill he would get his breakfast of bread, gruel and water.

  After Greenwood had eaten the porter returned his clothes – crumpled and reeking of rotten egg after fumigation. He walked out into the bright morning and realised that no amount of washing or burning of clothes would rid him of the smell of that place. In fact, it took many years for the aura of the workhouse to dissipate. Decades after the last one closed, the fear and stigma associated with it still resonated. As late as the 1960s older people rhetorically referred to the workhouse as shorthand for humiliating penury and shameful destitution. To enter the workhouse was to abandon all pretence of respectability and to admit abject failure. For itinerants there was the casual ward, or the tramp ward, the occupants of which were looked down on even by other paupers living in the main body of the workhouse.

  This attitude was universal: tramps, beggars and petty thieves also looked down on those who went ‘on the parish’, one famously dismissing them as ‘too idle to beg’. With our overweening sense of entitlement, constantly nurtured by an ubiquitous welfare apparatus that intrudes into every facet of our economic and social life, we assume the state is obliged to cosset us through every stage of our lives and cushion every inconvenience that afflicts us. Our nineteenth-century ancestors, however, valued their independence and their ability to provide for themselves. Failure to do so was shameful, proof of personal inadequacy that involved a calamitous loss of self-respect and social status.

  James Greenwood’s experience confirms the opinion of every other commentator on the life of the underclass: it is difficult to exaggerate their aversion to the workhouse. Many preferred not only to sleep rough but even to contrive their own imprisonment. The Manchester poor of the nineteenth century were typical: though facilities in few lodging houses equalled those of the tramp wards there, many who could not afford a lodging house slept on the brick-fields that littered the outskirts of the city. Citing figures for 1909, Mary Higgs confirms this, maintaining that ‘only a small proportion of the homeless take refuge in the casual wards.’

  The casual ward regime was intended to discourage the feckless, the idle and all those happy to live at the expense of rate-payers. To the Victorians, who were extravagantly charitable by modern standards, it was axiomatic that not all the poor were deserving of charity. Some were impoverished by drink, idleness, improvidence or other character defects and the notion that such people should benefit from indiscriminate charity seemed perverse morally and reprehensible: to bestow charity on the undeserving simply encourages and rewards those defects responsible, for their poverty, while also imposing an unwarranted burden on the public purse. Besides, there were other reasons not to encourage such behaviour.

  The unattached, rootless and indigent wanderer has always aroused suspicion and fear. As Bob Dylan put it, ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose’: no one is more dangerous than he who is immune to sanction. Laws restricting itinerants first appeared in the seventh century and subsequently termed them ‘vagrants’, ‘tramps’, ‘rogues’, ‘vagabonds’ and ‘travellers’. Much of this legislation was designed to discourage their aimless way of life and to prevent them from becoming a burden on the community.

  Those who fell into extreme poverty had to resort to the Poor Law Union, the chief state agency for the relief of the destitute. In practice this meant the local Board of Guardians, an elected body which levied an annual rate to alleviate the poverty of those it deemed worthy of assistance. For the entire Victorian period the support available to settled and vagrant poor was governed by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, under which even the vagrant had settlement rights – the entitlement to support from the parish in which he was normally resident – provided he remained within the boundary of the Union to which his parish belonged. A regulation of 1837 further required Unions in England and Wales to provide food and shelter for the itinerant destitute – in addition to
the settled – in return for paupers performing work. Able-bodied Scots had no right to relief of any kind.

  Soon accommodation for vagrants became a standard part of every workhouse in England and Wales. Casuals, as the itinerant poor who presented themselves at the workhouse were known, first had to find one of the Union’s relieving officers and seek admission. In the early years casuals were usually housed in infectious wards, separate from the main body of the workhouse: not only were vagrants known for carrying contagious diseases – notably measles – but they generally undermined the good order of the workhouse and were best kept away from other paupers. Eventually most workhouses developed purpose-built facilities to house them. Brick floors, iron ‘guardroom’ beds and the absence of heating gave the tramp ward a harsh institutional oppressiveness. They were also known as ‘vagrant wards’, ‘casual wards’ and ‘the spike’.

  As there were limited beds available, it was common for vagrants to start queuing outside the workhouse from late afternoon. The wards opened at about 5 or 6pm and vagrants were searched for money, tobacco and alcohol. Anyone with money was forced to pay; consequently they invariably hid their valuables outside before being searched, and retrieved them on release. The vagrants then stripped and bathed and were given a nightshirt and a blanket, while their clothes were ‘stoved’ or fumigated. Their supper consisted of 8oz of bread and a pint of gruel, known as ‘skilly’. Sometimes it was a lump of cheese, a hunk of bread and gruel with only water to drink.

  It was common for the police to ferry vagrants to the workhouse – which often turned them away. One of the young vagrant criminals Mayhew interviewed in 1850 maintained that it was pointless for the likes of him to apply to the parish as it invariably rejected the young and fit. A report by the Colchester Union explained one reason for turning vagrants away: to admit them often meant that ‘every article in the room swarmed with vermin … The most horrible and loathsome diseases pervade most of them and it is by such persons that fevers and cutaneous [skin] disorders are communicated to the regular inmates.’

  However, from 1837 unions were legally obliged to take vagrants – though this did not always happen. In order to qualify for a breakfast an allocated quota of work had to be completed. Often this involved stone breaking but many workhouses enforced different tasks. Salford workhouses, for instance, had a corn-grinding mill, operated by handles in the cells. After breakfast their fumigated clothes were returned and they were turned out for work. The old and infirm were excused labour and the unwell saw the workhouse medical officer, who might admit them to the infirmary. The fit were retained to work for no longer than four hours after breakfast. Those who arrived on Saturday were detained until Monday. There was no work on Sundays but the inmates were locked in their sleeping quarters all day where they talked, brooded and picked vermin from their clothes and bodies.

  George Orwell recounted his experiences of a Sunday ‘lock-in’ during the 1930s. ‘We leaned against the wall and the tramps began to talk about the spikes they had been in recently. It appeared from what they said that all spikes are different, each with their own peculiar merits and demerits, and it is important to know those when you are on the road.’ There is no reason to believe that his experience was any different from that of tramps half a century earlier.

  Workhouses took other measures to discourage the moocher. From 1871 those who appeared regularly – twice within a month – were liable not only to be detained but also required to perform tasks similar to those imposed on a criminal serving a prison sentence. This certainly deterred the moocher, as the number of people presenting themselves at casual wards fell to half the pre-1870 figure.

  The Casual Poor Act of 1882 increased the workhouse powers of detention: first-time applicants could now be detained until the morning of the second day after arrival, while habituals might be held until the fourth day after arrival. For the purposes of the Act all London casual wards were deemed one unit: in other words, anyone presenting himself at two different workhouses in London within a single month could be detained at the second for three days and compelled to perform penal labour.

  As with most aspects of the workhouse, there are conflicting accounts of the nature of inmates. One tramp, reflecting at the end of the nineteenth century on his experience of casual wards over many years, concluded that, while many inmates were ‘moochers’ – ne’er-do-wells – there were also some genuinely seeking work. A few years later, Patrick Macgill and his fellow tramping navvies – Moleskin Joe, Carroty Dan, Clancy of the Cross and Dermod Flynn – avoided the spikes, and indeed all private lodging houses and instead stuck to the ‘models’, which seems to support the view of a Poor Law official in a northern union who claimed that only about three per cent of causal ward inmates were genuinely seeking work, while the rest were hardened and incorrigible vagrants.

  The standard of accommodation, spartan and functional as it was, was better than that offered by the average common lodging house. Tramp wards were certainly superior in cleanliness. Speaking of Flower and Dean Street, near where the Ripper murders occurred, J.E. Ritchie believed that ‘in prisons and workhouses the inmates are much better lodged’. Yet few of those with personal experience of both agreed with this verdict. It’s easy to see why the workhouse held no attractions for those able to afford the few coppers needed for a lodging house.

  The rigorous discipline and enforced working regime of the workhouse was anathema to the habitual moocher. The abstemious life of the tramp ward, with its absence of women, drink and tobacco, was to the liking of few inmates. Besides, those the tramp major believed to have ‘the Scratch’ – scabies – were subjected to a ‘brimstone bath’ which involved the entire body being enclosed in a box, with a hole for the head, in which a quantity of brimstone was then burnt.

  James Greenwood, having sampled the workhouse, later visited the lodging houses of Golden Lane, in the City, reputedly ‘the very ugliest neighbourhood in all England’ in 1874. He remarked that the people he encountered there were of the same class as those in the casual ward, though the atmosphere was totally different. He concluded that one of the greatest attractions of the lodging house was that there a man might go to bed as dirty as he likes – and there were few who did not take full advantage of this happy situation.

  The same year Greenwood visited the ‘hot water houses’ of Little Cheapside, Cowheel Alley, Reform Place and Hot Water Place, where there were no beds but for a penny customers could lie on the floor with about twenty other beggars and cadgers. The people there expressed contempt for those who availed themselves of parish charity, dismissing them as ‘idle loafers’. Even among the dregs of society there are gradations of ignominy as important to them as the distinctions between a baronet and a duke are to the aristocracy.

  Another explanation for this aversion is suggested by Mayhew. After speaking to hundreds of vagrants, he was convinced that above all else they valued warmth and were prepared to sacrifice everything else for it. ‘Otherwise,’ he says, ‘to sleep, or even sit in, some of the apartments of these establishments [common lodging houses] would be intolerable.’ Besides, the enforced work task deterred the vagrant. Andrew Doyle’s study of the casual wards in the West Midlands and Welsh Borders led him to conclude that three-quarters of the occupants were ‘thieves of every sort, deserters from the army, bad characters of every sort … runaway apprentices and idle vagabonds of every kind’, united only in their determination never to work. This fits in with a great deal of anecdotal evidence from those who spent time in lodging houses, where criminals and beggars were unanimous in their contempt for those foolish enough to work, dismissing them, regardless of age, as ‘young mugs’.

  Despite this strong aversion, there was no sharp division between many of those who used the lodging houses and the patrons of the tramp wards. Many itinerants used both. In London in the 1890s there was a shifting population of what Charles Booth called ‘poor derelicts of humanity’ who ebbed from common lodging houses to nig
ht shelters and flowed to tramp wards with the regularity of the turning tide. The numbers in lodging houses increased sharply during the winter of 1888 to 1889 as the number of organisations offering indiscriminate charity increased, thus attracting vagrants to the city, many of whom spent their days making the rounds of one charity after another, eating their fill and then returning to the lodging house where they sold their excess food and clothing or exchanged it for drink.

  This was not confined to London or the big cities and towns. In Chester for instance, and other places where outdoor relief was easily had, many vagrants used it to pay for their lodgings. In St Thomas’, Oxford, many of those who usually found shelter in the workhouse such as unmarried mothers, lone children, the disabled and those of advanced old age, were long-term residents of lodging houses and there is ample evidence that it was fairly common for such people and those supported by private charities to find a place in a lodging house.

  Yet working people were also sometimes forced to use the casual wards. Seasonal farm workers, including fruit pickers, used those on their route to where they worked and while there lived in sheds and other forms of improvised shelter. The Kent and Sussex wards catered for many Londoners who were down for the hop-picking at the end of the summer. The seasonal migration of harvesters, many of them Irish, was a well-established part of the ebb and flow of population long before Victoria came to the throne. The Irish crossed over in the late summer, travelled to their place of work and returned home before the winter.

  Of all those in search of temporary accommodation, none was the subject of more curiosity or attracted as much public discussion as the navvy. He attained mythical status during the nineteenth century as the vast engineering projects on which he worked eventually criss-crossed Britain with a network of roads, canals and railway lines and transformed the country. Many historians believe these structures are a greater achievement than the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China.