The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  One of the things that made the nineteenth century navvy so conspicuous was his clothes, which were as distinctive as a judge’s wig or a policeman’s helmet. He wore a big donkey jacket, with two wide outside pockets and inside a large poacher’s pocket. Moleskin or heavy corduroy trousers, a double-canvas shirt, a velvet or corduroy waistcoat, a billycock hat, a wide, big-buckled belt, to support his back when lifting, and a large scarf of coloured cotton, tied with a special ‘pincher’s knot’, made up the rest of his attire. Just as the student of the 1960s hoping for a summer job on a building site betrayed his inexperience by wearing trainers, so the nineteenth-century navvy signalled his experience by wearing the correct uniform.

  The first navvies were the men who built the ‘inland navigation system’, the canal system, between 1745 and 1830. People called them ‘navigators’ – later shortened to ‘navvies’ – a term that remained in popular and official use for two centuries. Later it came to describe any labourer who worked on large-scale civil engineering projects.

  Initially, a significant number of these men were migrant agricultural labourers from the poorer parts of Ireland, often subsistence farmers from the north-west, west and south-west of Ireland. It was customary for people from these areas to travel to England to work on the harvest. Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, many Irishmen fled their famine-stricken land and came to England in search of work. When George Stephenson, John Rennie, James Brindley and other pioneering engineers recruited labour for their roads and canals, Irishmen signed up.

  But the majority of navvies were not Irish. Many came from Britain’s dispossessed rural population, driven out by enclosure and advances in agricultural practices which left no role for marginal farmers dependent on common land to eke out an existence. Others were labourers living in the areas adjacent to each civil engineering project. Some were the ancestors of the 15,000 travellers who live in Britain today. Nor were they all mobile: the majority of those who worked on the major engineering projects remained in the area when the project was completed.

  But others – many of them young and unattached – moved on to the next job. They mastered the ‘graft’, a drain-digging spade which became the symbol of their trade, and formed part of an itinerant workforce to be found wherever major construction was going on.

  As the century progressed navvies became a recognised and distinct section of the working population, set apart by the special nature of their work. They were rightly proud of their expertise. A good navvy could shift twenty tonnes of earth a day. Navvies new to the job could not keep up with the experienced workers and they frequently managed only a half-day’s work. It took a year to gain the strength, stamina and experience required to perform feats of endurance which struck many contemporaries as super-human. Nor was the British navvy’s reputation for prodigious labour confined to these shores. Many went on to work in Europe, where they frequently earned twice the pay of others because they were deemed twice as productive. Many travelled to America where they worked on canals and most famously the railways.

  But their reputation had a less positive aspect. They were renowned for fighting, hard living and hard drinking. ‘Respectable’ Victorians viewed them as outside civilised society and feared for both their moral welfare and the bad example they set. Their fears were fuelled by incidents such as that in 1846, when the huts of Irish workers near Penrith were attacked and troops had to be called out after a riot ensued. The Navvy Mission Society was perhaps the greatest of the organisations tasked with their spiritual welfare.

  Yet the navvies’ were transforming the country. The 3,400 miles of canal built in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are a phenomenal achievement. Building a canal is more than just digging a big ditch. It involves quarrying, brick-making, joinery and iron working; laying rails and pipes; and building locks, bridges, gates, arches and tunnels. Navvies not only excavated the channel, moving millions of tons of soil with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. They also lined the bottom and sides with impermeable clay, working it into position with the soles of their boots. This ‘heeling-in’ or ‘puddling’ process was used for 200 years. As recently as 1964 the Chew Valley Reservoir in the south-west of England was lined by the same method used on the Newry Canal in 1742.

  In return for this the navvy commanded high wages. In 1845 he earned 3s 9d (19p) a day – twice the wage of a farm labourer. To maintain this income he had to be mobile and follow the work. During the years of the great railway boom of the mid-nineteenth century, professional navvies were the norm. In some areas local labourers supplemented their numbers, but on the major developments in urban areas or in remote, thinly populated regions, the seasoned navvy was the bedrock on which the railways were built. At one stage during the nineteenth century, one in every hundred workers was a navvy. During the height of railway construction in the mid-nineteenth century, more than 250,000 navvies were employed throughout Britain.

  Moving from place to place to work on the large number of public works undertaken in Victorian Britain, many navvies found accommodation in lodging houses in nearby towns and villages. But they were often unwelcome guests as their reputation for dishonesty, drinking, womanising and riotous behaviour usually preceded them. Besides, there was never sufficient accommodation for the great armies of navvies on major schemes, and the result was that many slept in the open or in squalid shanties. Employers refused to incur the cost of decent accommodation and consequently many of these navvy settlements were struck by cholera, dysentery or typhus. The inevitable public outcry resulted in a gradual improvement and by the end of the nineteenth century contractors were obliged to provide their workers with adequate accommodation.

  This, however, did nothing to reduce the dangers inherent in their work. Though deaths and serious injuries were commonplace, as late as the 1840s there was no compensation scheme and railway engineers like Brunel resisted all efforts to improve the safety of working conditions. It was only with the Woodhead Tunnel scandal that changes were made. The death rate among the navvies who built the tunnel, between 1839 and 1852, was higher than that of the soldiers who fought at the Battle of Waterloo. A parliamentary inquiry ensued and after many years its recommendations for improved safety procedures began to filter through to working practices.

  The constant danger under which the navvy worked added to his aura and spread with the roads, canals and railways. They were the elite of the labouring class, the renowned ‘long-distance men’, who lived for the moment, taking risks and spending their wages riotously. Free of domestic ties, they lived rough and didn’t care what people thought of them. Yet they were good-hearted, generous and loyal to their own and despite middle class fears, local newspaper in areas that had experience of them were often complimentary. Journalists had nothing but praise for the men building the Manchester Ship Canal between 1887 and 1894, commending them for their generosity and gentlemanly demeanour.

  Building the famous canal was so dangerous and the company surgeon, Robert Jones, became so adept at making artificial limbs for disabled navvies that he is acknowledged as the father of orthopaedic surgery. In total, 2,000 men were disabled and 1,100 lost their lives constructing the waterway that made Manchester a great inland port.

  The Ship Canal is only the most famous of the great public utilities which the navvies made their speciality. Between 1845 and 1853 alone they built seven major reservoirs in the Edinburgh area. The navvies working on the Manchester to Liverpool Railway received no pay when sick or injured. Instead their employer issued them with meal tokens, which they could exchange for bread and soup.

  Travelling the length and breadth of the country in search of work, they built up a support network, usually based on public houses. Many of these hostelries, like the Mason’s Arms and the Bricklayer’s Arms, still bear the mark of their origins and are one of the reasons why navvies became associated with pubs and drink. This is not to say that this reputation was entirely undeserved, as the evidence of new
spaper reports and anecdotal reportage is overwhelming. Navvies often received their wages in public houses, where their desire to celebrate met a convenient and immediate outlet. Men who were well-paid after a week of hard physical labour often found in the public house the conviviality and leisure they craved. Far from home and family, opportunities for recreation and relaxation were limited and the pub was one of the few places where they were sure of a warm welcome.

  Warmth of another kind was what drew many to the lodging house.

  Dot Dancing: The Kitchen Fire

  Navvy or beggar, it made no difference: everyone who crossed the threshold of a lodging house expected a blazing fire to greet them. What happened when lodgers gathered around it was often not to the liking of commentators. Mary Higgs, for instance, describes with barely suppressed revulsion, what she witnessed when she entered a women’s lodging house in the early years of the twentieth century. Clustered round the fire were ‘a group of girls far gone in dissipation … shamelessly smoking cigarettes, boasting of drink and drinkers, using foul language, singing music hall songs and talking vileness. A girl called Dot danced the “cake-walk” in the middle of the kitchen.’

  Despite the reservations of Mary Higgs, there were few who could resist Dot’s dancing or the other pleasures that unfolded in front of the fire. No matter how squalid, impoverished and unwelcoming a lodging house, every keeper, even of those patronised exclusively by beggars, knew that a welcoming fire was an absolute necessity if he hoped to stay in business. Visiting a lodging house situated ‘in a court within a court’ near Drury Lane in 1844, John Fisher Murray wrote that despite all its deficiencies the house had ‘a capital fire’ and that ‘the fire in these hotels is three parts of the accommodation’. When, as in this case, the house also provided a common saucepan, a gridiron and a frying pan, its clients were prepared to overlook virtually all other shortcomings. There, as in most such places, they were happy to sup their tea from a jam jar.

  The fire was in every sense the centre of the lodging house. It was where the lodgers cooked, ate and congregated to gossip or exchange information. It was the centre of communal life, the place where people gathered to escape the cold and rain, to smoke and while away the hours, to wash, dry and mend their clothes. It was also an independent source of income for the keeper as those who were not lodgers were able, for a small fee, to utilise the kitchen all day, cook and make use of the boiling water always available for making tea and coffee. They stayed there out of the rain and cold. For a penny they also had use of the frying pan.

  As late as the 1880s, writing of a lodging house in the Covent Garden area, James Greenwood, like many commentators before and after him, remarked that ‘the most conspicuous feature of the house was the fire that blazed in a grate capacious enough to roast a whole sheep. It is easy to understand that it is regarded as no inconsiderable part of their money’s worth by the poor, shivering wretches who of nights pay the fourpenny entrance fee.’

  Describing the kitchens of the lodging houses in Saffron Hill in the mid-nineteenth century, Beams likens them to the tap room of a low public house, where the most disgusting conversation took place. Not all, however, took part in these discussions. Many were busy cooking, others were reading and drowsing, while more sat around smoking. In such places people smoked even in the sleeping areas, despite which there were surprisingly few fires, probably because there were so many lodgers awake and moving about at all times of the day and night. Though Victorian men did not smoke in the presence of respectable women – let alone curse – the air in the lodging house was thick with both obscenities and tobacco smoke for, whatever their station in life or their expectations, lodgers were united in their love of tobacco. Smoking was for many itinerants their greatest luxury and the height of self-indulgence. As Mayhew put it, in such places ‘anyone who was not hardened to tobacco smoke was half-killed with coughing.’

  Conversation was liveliest in houses frequented by thieves and prostitutes. These are the places Mayhew refers to when he speaks of ‘the habitual violation of all injunctions of law, of all obligations of morality and of all restraints of decency’. Surprisingly, he was convinced that such places were more often run by women than men.

  However, the hearth also had a severely practical function. As Mayhew put it, ‘In lodging houses every sojourner is his own cook’, and the commonest meal was tea with a piece of bacon or the ubiquitous herring, a staple of the urban poor, or haddock, bloaters and sausage. The better kitchens provided most things required to cook and eat a meal with the exception of cutlery, which was easily stolen and too dangerous to make available to lodgers. Each lodger had to have his own crockery or utensils or else hire them and those who could not afford such luxuries ate with their hands from newspaper. The kitchen also served as a laundry and drying room, a workshop where clothes and boots were repaired and a barber’s.

  Though to the casual observer lodgers were indistinguishable, closer scrutiny and first-hand experience revealed that this was far from the case. Though the occupants of lodging houses could not avoid close physical proximity with fellow lodgers, they usually socialised with their own type. Beggars seldom mixed with burglars: a social divide as wide as that between a duchess and a dustman separated them in the hierarchy of the lodging house. Yet both looked down on those who worked for a living.

  There was also a tacit understanding that lodgers valued their anonymity. They were not required to provide a name and even long-term residents often preferred it that way. Many used pseudonyms. Among the West Midlands patrons of lodging houses in 1866 nicknames included: Saucy Harry and his moll, Bristol Jack and Burslem, Harry the Mark from Carmarthen, Spanish Jim, Hungerford Tom and Stockport Ginger, the Governor of Chester Castle, Belfast Jack, Wakefield Charley and Lancashire Crab. Other lodgers of the same period travelled under the names of William Outlaw, Huzza King, William Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Patrick Skibbereen and William Gladstone. A bricklayer and a carpet weaver, who were travelling companions, gave their names at their Hereford lodging house in 1861 as Necodemous Salt and Michael Pepper.

  In the lowest lodging houses around London docks which Mayhew visited in 1849 the kitchens generally opened at 5am and closed at 11pm, at which time a fresh batch of lodgers was taken in and those who had slept there the previous night turned out. This was often a cause of trouble and frequently violence. Attempts by those without the means to stay to gatecrash or ‘bilk’ a spot near the fire were a recurring problem. To prevent this from happening many keepers locked the doors to the sleeping area and the outside doors of the house, despite the dangers of fire. Dealing with objectionable lodgers could involve the use of force and, as no lodging house welcomed the involvement of the police, owners often employed ex-boxers to deal with disagreeable customers.

  Though keepers and lodgers did not always agree, the latter were occasionally capable of collective acts of generosity which encapsulate all that was best and most attractive about the lodging house. James Greenwood witnessed what was known among those who lived in lodging houses in the 1880s as ‘a bunker’. It was really a banquet benefit, a meal organised by the lodgers for the purpose of raising money for one of their number who was in urgent need of cash.

  The food was provided by beggars, who went from house to house asking for something to eat. Even the most hard-hearted householders – or more often their servants – who refused to give beggars money could often be wheedled into giving them food. The beggars then collected what they had begged and divided it up into parcels which they sold, usually to other lodgers. The rest was made up into a hotchpotch stew. The lodgers then bought – for 6d – the right to eat as much as they could consume and the proceeds went to the person in need.

  When the feast Greenwood describes was about to commence it became clear that some lodgers, lacking the necessary 6d, were to be excluded. One of these, whose eyes looked ravenously on the food, was a street musician whose entire wardrobe consisted of a tattered coat too small
for him, fastened at the throat with a piece of twine, a pair of trousers and broken down mismatched shoes, through the front of one of which his naked toes were visible. This man had to make do with the penny parcel of begged food, which he ate out of his cap. ‘His cheeks were sunk so close together it seemed a marvel how he could shut his mouth without biting them.’ The beneficiary received 15s and 6d.

  As the lodging house was capable of fostering such camaraderie and producing a mutual support system which encouraged ingenuity and self-help, why was it so universally feared and denounced by commentators? Why was it talked of in the same breath as psychotic depravity and brutal murder?

  Chapter Three

  ‘Stains on the Walls and Floorboards’: The Location of Lodging Houses

  Some crimes are so vile that time fails to diminish their capacity to appal. Others retain a grim fascination because they encapsulate a particular place at a specific time and are redolent of a world that has passed away. A few continue to enthral because they provide a tantalising glimpse into the disordered mind of the homicidal psychopath, yet remain an insoluble puzzle. A small number combine all these elements; these become the focus of intense and enduring fascination: details are sifted and dissected, held up to the light and examined from every possible angle. Such are the Ripper murders which took place in Whitechapel in 1888, the year in which snow fell on London in July.

  Of all the countless details of the Ripper murders brought to light by those who have examined the case, one in particular provides an insight into the world of the East End where the crimes were committed. In fact, this detail does not relate to the actual murders but to the situation years after the Ripper had disembowelled Mary Kelly, his final victim.