The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  Many of those in irregular employment, together with those who had lost steady employment, joined the great mass of those competing for casual jobs. To gain such jobs you needed neither a reference nor a recommendation. The lodging houses around the London Docks in the 1860s were typical of all those by Britain’s quaysides, peopled by ‘everything from decayed and bankrupt master butchers, publicans and grocers to old soldiers, discharged lawyer’s clerks and thieves trying for work’. At that time there were about 20,000 people dependent on the docks for a livelihood. As reported by Mayhew, ‘The courts and alleys around the docks are packed with low lodging houses. Those who live in the area, in addition to dockers, are sack-makers, watermen and that peculiar class of London poor who pick up a precarious living by the water side.’ The latter were those who scoured the banks of the Thames for the detritus daily washed up on its banks, including timber and metal.

  At the centre of this area were the parishes of St George, Shadwell and Wapping, some of the most overcrowded in the country with an average of seven people per house – which made them fifty per cent more crowded than those in the poorest part of Bethnal Green. In one of the largest lodging houses in this area, an investigator found in a ‘small room on the ground floor between twenty and thirty of the most wretched objects I ever beheld. Some were shoeless, some coatless, others shirtless and from all these came so rank and foul a stench that I was sickened.’

  These spectral figures were among those who constantly replenished the nation’s enormous pool of casual labour. Whenever skilled men could find no employment in their own trade, whenever office workers were laid off in large numbers, whenever men lost their jobs on the land and flooded into the city, whenever immigrants landed on these shores, eager and hopeful, they invariably took their places among the dockers and market workers and increased the competition for casual work. For many of these people, the lodging house represented their first contact with a new, often alien environment and played a major part in inducting them into the mysteries of their new life.

  In an age when cities were sucking in people from abroad and the surrounding countryside, the lodging house played a key role in helping people make the transition from rural, agricultural life to the rigours of the industrial city. For much of the nineteenth century it seemed the whole world was in transit, particularly in times of industrial growth and agricultural depression when the surplus rural population sought work in the cities. The vast majority of these newcomers rented a room or lodged either with a family or in a lodging house. Single men generally opted for lodging.

  Evidence from the 1851 census for Leicester shows that one-fifth of all lodgers lived in groups of more than five; in other words, twenty per cent of all lodgers lived in what we would call a lodging house. In 1851 they made up twelve per cent of all households and five per cent of the population. In the poorest part of the city at least twenty per cent of households took in lodgers. This figure seems to be fairly typical of industrial towns in the second half of the nineteenth century: Preston’s figure for 1851 was twenty-three per cent.

  Figures from the 1881 census also show something else of interest: people wanted to lodge with their own countrymen. Thus, there was a significant tendency for the Irish to lodge in houses with a noticeable Irish element. In Liverpool, seventy-five per cent of Irish lodgers lived in households with Irish heads; in Huddersfield it was eighty per cent and eighty-seven per cent in Cardiff. The same trend applied to Germans, Italians and Jews. This strongly suggests that the lodging house was an important means by which newcomers adapted to the city. By lodging with their countrymen, they eased the transition and found familiarity and support when all around them was strange and challenging. In the days before the labour exchanges such contacts were an invaluable means of finding work, support and camaraderie.

  Those dependent on employment that was precarious were not, of course, confined to the great centres of population. Though it was often implied that the frequenters of lodging houses in the market towns were chiefly peripatetic thieves, beggars and tramps, the evidence suggests otherwise. In fact, there were many long-term or semi-permanent lodgers and about a third of these were locally born.

  Many were general labourers who sought work on a day-to-day basis, sometimes referred to as ‘catch work’ labourers. Not infrequently these people were middle-aged bachelors and many were farm labourers, walking to their work each day, often as far as four miles. Other common occupations among the frequent users of lodging houses were drovers and soldiers and about a third were women, the majority in the company of a male companion.

  To the middle class, however, lodging houses posed a danger. For them, the family provided the best possible context for adapting to economic fluctuations and those whose lifestyle not only excluded family life but also, as in the case of those living in a lodging house, actually precluded it, were likely to fall prey to all the ills of rootlessness – poverty, immorality and lawlessness. It was also widely accepted that the family nurtured the ethics of economic success – encouraging providence and industry – and in times of crisis provided support and self-help. Yet there is no doubt that lodging houses reduced homelessness in the expanding industrial towns and ensured that poverty, often the result of irregular, casual employment, did not always consign people to the workhouse. Lodging houses of the smaller type were particularly beneficial to the newcomers, as these were frequently homes in which the owners lived with their family and provided lodgers with a share in that life.

  There is no doubt that lodging houses helped craftsmen to adapt to the culture of their own trade. Many decent lodging houses catered for specific crafts. In 1851, for instance, the Boot public house in College Street, Northampton, housed coachbuilders from all over the British Isles, while the Lion & Lamb in Bridge Street housed many tailors. It was common for large-scale retailers employing many staff to accommodate them in dormitories, as was the experience of H.G. Wells, fictionalised in his novel Kipps.

  As the century wore on, the number of skilled workers found in such places continued to dwindle. In the early days of trade unions they supplied their members with accommodation at lodges and pubs. Later they provided travelling allowances and then unemployed benefits. In this respect the position of skilled men was incomparably better than that of the unskilled, who were pushed back on their own resources.

  For those unable to compete in this harsh world, there were limited alternatives. One was to join the army. For many, however, this proved no more than a deferment of the inevitable. Few soldiers leaving the army had acquired any new skills that might lift them above the mass of the unskilled. In fact, the minute pension with which most returned to civilian life was for many the seal that held them in the trap of casual labour for the rest of their days. The pension was always too little to live on and insufficient to make it possible to avoid work altogether. Chelsea pensioners, for instance, were commonly found in lodging houses. Serving soldiers – moving from one posting to another – were also a staple among the residents.

  The condition of the lodging houses around the London Docks and those in every other major port tells us a great deal about their occupants. Mayhew visited one large lodging house near the docks, which it appeared to be an outhouse of some sort, the size of a barn, its walls unplastered and the roof shot through with holes, so that whenever it rained water poured through. A grimy table ran around one wall and provided support for a score of ‘ragged, greasy wretches’, while others huddled around the fire, toasting herrings, drying out cigar ends and boiling potatoes in a coffee pot.

  Of the thirty men there, eight were occasional dockers, who managed at best to get three days’ work a week. When out of work they lacked the 2d necessary for a bed and had to walk the streets all night. These men told Mayhew that it was common for them to go several days without food or drink and in winter they often went a fortnight or three weeks without a day’s work.

  Some of these men set off for Billingsgate Market whe
re they hoped to earn a few pence as porters. Most were young, two-thirds under 21. As for the dormitory where they slept, it struck Mayhew as ‘exactly the same as a Dissenting chapel, the divisions between the beds standing up like partitions between the pews. Stretched there like corpses, in a bed as narrow as a coffin’ were many shirtless men with only a rug or a leather sheet as a cover.

  Later Mayhew ventured back to the same area on a Sunday to find all the shops open and the streets thronging with prostitutes and sailors. Standing about in languid circles were clusters of Irish labourers, smoking short pipes amid washing lines ‘dangling dirty white clothes to dry’ while ‘ragged, unwashed, shoeless children scampered past’. In doorways, huddled and shivering, slept a number of prostitutes. In the lodging houses he visited, which he believed were typical, he saw no one eating with cutlery, only their hands.

  One particular house was home to sixty people, of whom about half were pickpockets, ten street beggars, some old and infirm who lived on charity or relief, ten to fifteen dockers and the same number of labourers in ‘low and precarious callings’, but also a few ‘reduced from good circumstances’. At one stage there were nine people who made a living by collecting dog dung – used in the manufacture of leather and known in the trade as ‘the pure’ – for which they received 5s a basketful. Additionally, the house was usually home to several ‘bone-grubbers’ who made a living out of things they found discarded in the streets – everything from bones and rags to pieces of metal. By this means they managed to scratch an income of about a shilling a day. Similarly, a number of mud larks manage to subsist on what they found washed up on the banks of the Thames.

  Jack London, another student of the underclass, was struck most of all by the sense of deadening hopelessness which these lodging houses embodied. Watching men eating in silence, he sensed ‘a feeling of gloom pervading the ill-lighted place’ making him wonder ‘what evil they had done that they should be punished so’. He divided those he encountered into two categories, which he called the young and hilarious and the old and gloomy.

  Wandering, London soon came to realise, was no life for an old man. In the intense competition of the nomadic life, the old invariably went under. It became increasingly common for houses to compel lodgers to leave in the morning. Consequently old, unemployable men had to carry all their possessions with them while they trudged the streets. Many of these impoverished, elderly people became so dispirited that they drifted towards the workhouse and resigned themselves to the indignity of ‘going on the parish’ or sought accommodation offered by charitable institutions such as the Salvation Army.

  For most, however, this was unconscionable. Yet commentators were unanimous in their conviction that the lodging house was no place for those of ‘needy respectability’. The model lodging house, they were convinced, was the antidote to the evils of the common lodging house.

  The Panacea: The Model Lodging House

  The earliest products of philanthropy, such as those established by the Peabody Trust, provided accommodation for families and made no provision for single men. This came later with those models designed to provide clean and orderly surroundings in a wholesome atmosphere, which would allow the poor to escape the degradation of squalor while at the same time offering the institution’s shareholders a fair return on their investment. In addition it was anticipated that they would set standards which other strictly commercial lodging houses would be required to meet, if they were to compete, and also raise the expectations and aspirations of the poor.

  The prototype of the model lodging house, the Destitute Sailors’ Asylum, appeared in 1835 and was opened for the benefit of seamen. The project of naval officer Captain R.J. Elliott and funded though the financial support of the Queen Dowager, Adelaide, the wife of William IV, the house was designed by Henry Roberts. It stood on Well Street, by the London Docks, where it accommodated 300.

  Roberts was also responsible for other models in London as well as Tunbridge Wells and Windsor. Later mendacity houses sprang up in Banbury, Oxford, Cambridge and other places, offering a single night’s accommodation to those who agreed to leave the area the following day. The Albert Street, Mile End, lodging house, built by the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, accommodated 110 families and was full from the day it opened in 1848. The Association’s building in Albert Street, Spitalfields, accommodated 60 families and made provision for 234 single men. Surrounded by open spaces, it included baths and wash-houses and all ‘requisite appurtenances’ – a reading room, a coffee room, workshops, a kitchen and facilities for buying drinks. Each sleeping compartment had its own window for light and ventilation and each lodger had his own key. State of the art washrooms and lavatories were plentiful. When it opened in 1849 the cost was 3s a week for a single man.

  A Times editorial of the day described the Spitalfield’s House as ‘so clean, so airy, so wholesome and altogether so inviting that one almost longs to live in it one’s self and make use of its endless accommodations’. The benefits were, the author believed, not merely physical: ‘It is a good and improving thing to be quiet, domestic, methodical and clean; to live by rule; and above all to pay one’s rent punctually at the stipulated time.’ Its tenants were weekly tenants and therefore it was no place for the itinerant worker.

  The Association was convinced that it was not only its tenants who benefitted from its provision: they were forcing other landlords to improve their properties in order to compete. Landlords who failed to improve would be wiped out for ‘who but the most depraved would not prefer a light, dry, clean and wholesome abode to a dark, damp cellar, when he can have the one on the same terms as the other?’

  However, John Holllingshead was only one of many contemporaries who felt that such places were largely a waste of money, in that they helped only those who were,

  well able to help themselves. The main beneficiaries are people who have no genuine entitlement to the largesse of this sort of philanthropy. The costermongers, the street hawkers, the industrious poor are still rotting on their filthy, ill-drained, ill-ventilated courts, while well-paid mechanics, porters and clerks, willing to sacrifice a certain portion of their self-respect, are the constant tenants of these model dwellings.

  He goes on to analyse the occupants of model housing built in Bethnal Green by Angela Burdett Coutts. Rents there were beyond the means of the poorest at as much as 4s per week. Weavers at the time earned about 7s a week and to spend up to 60 per cent of that on accommodation was beyond their means.

  Only six of the fifty lodgers in the models Holllingshead studied were locals and all were ‘a little more advanced in cleanliness and civilization and quick to see where 10/- of comfort is selling for less than half price’. In 1860 there were over 6,000 tenants in model lodging houses. Hollingshead recounts a visit to one in Charles Street, Drury Lane, designed to hold eighty-two men each at 4d a night or 2s for the week. ‘In the kitchen about a dozen men were standing about … some cooking at the fire, others talking and idling. One old man was writing and another asleep with his head and arms lying among some broken potatoes on the table. They looked all greasy, faded men, men difficult to keep clean, who smelt of onions.’ Many were lawyers’ clerks, linen drapers’ assistants and mechanics. ‘Some stopped for years, some a month and some only a night.’

  Hollingshead remained convinced that these places did nothing for what he called ‘the lowest of the low’, partly because the third of the population who live in London squalor ‘have little demand for pure, wholesome, well-constructed dwellings’. They are inured to their conditions and ‘aspire to nothing more’. In effect, these places were of no benefit to those for whom they were designed and instead developed into a charity for skilled workers and the lower middle classes. An account of a model in Charles Street in 1861 seems to confirm this as one observer recounts ‘the land-lady, an old lady who regarded herself as the mother of them all, told me that many [of the lodgers] were law
yer’s clerks, linen drapers’ assistants and mechanics … she had never had but one costermonger – a most superior man of his kind, who lived there for two years until he got married when he left.’

  Rowton Houses, the work of the Tory peer Lord Rowton, were the largest and most innovative of London’s model lodging houses. The success of the Vauxhall house was such that this ‘hotel for the working man’ became the standard by which all other models were judged. A further five were built on the same lines at King’s Cross, Hammersmith, Whitechapel, Camden and Newington Butts. The press was fulsome in its praise of the facilities provided for single men, each with his own sleeping cubicle, ventilated with a window, and communal facilities including a day room and gardens. The entrance was deliberately imposing, causing one visitor to exclaim that the place was nothing less than ‘a palace for working men’.

  Rowton paid great attention to the layout of the accommodation and there is no doubt that it far exceeded anything previously available to working men. Critics likened the houses to the West End clubs frequented by the upper class and lauded his attempts to introduce lodgers to a ‘shared domesticity’ of the sort regarded as central to stable family life. The first thing the visitor saw – enormous doors of polished teak – could not fail to impress. The entrance hall was well lit, glazed and decorated with plants to create the feeling of a substantial hotel.