The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  Conspicuous as the Italians were, their numbers were insignificant in comparison with the Irish. While the Mediterranean immigrants brought a splash of exoticism to Britain’s drab industrial cities, those from across the Irish Sea were seen as enemies who made the hard life of the indigenous poor even harder. Many influential commentators blamed the Irish for urban squalor and found in them an outlet for the anti-Catholic bigotry endemic in nineteenth century Britain. The eminent historian James Froude described the Irish as more akin to apes than humans and Thomas Carlisle dismissed them as spreaders of squalor and chaos. The Manchester City News of 12 March 1864 found there were 472 lodging houses in the city; of these 147 were the resort of known thieves, 244 were occupied by vagrants and ‘poor travellers’ and 72 by hawkers, foreigners and the Irish.

  Those Irish who arrived as the Famine began to cut great swathes through the population were often destitute: between 1846 and 1848 almost 16,000 of those admitted to the Asylum for the Houseless Poor in Playhouse Yard, Cripplegate were newly arrived Irish. Even greater numbers arrived in Liverpool. Of those who arrived there in 1848, 161,000 were paupers, half-naked and starving, who threw themselves immediately on the mercy of the parish. Newport was also flooded by desperate arrivals. The Irish, both those who intended to stay and those hoping to go to America, also arrived in Bristol and Scotland in large numbers. The roads from Bristol to London thronged with immigrants.

  Irish lodging houses, in common with those urban slums where they lived in great numbers, had a vile reputation. Mayhew’s informants in the 1850s told him that ‘the Irish will sleep anywhere to save a halfpenny at night if they have ever so much money’. It was widely assumed that every Irish lodging house had its own poteen still and that inmates existed in a state of perpetual drunkenness. In 1836, for instance, the Manchester police found that ‘illicit spirits were often clandestinely sold in them and hawked about by Irish women’. Many of them were ‘crammed with Irish the whole of Saturday night and parties of men came mad-drunk out of these places.’

  A high proportion of foreigners also found their way to lodging houses in rural areas where there was a demand for seasonal labour. In mid-nineteenth century, for instance, eleven per cent of lodgers in the St Thomas’ area of Oxford were Irish and five per cent European. Far more than the indigenous population, the Irish had a penchant for lodgings: in 1851 about a third of Irishmen between 20 and 44 years of age lived in lodgings of some type. The Irish therefore comprised a substantial proportion of lodgers and also of owners and keepers. In St Thomas’, Oxford, certain lodging houses became a focal point for the Irish arriving in the city. There was also one that was favoured by German and Italian musicians who were as much a feature of town life as they were of the cities.

  As late as the 1860s the Manchester Guardian was still reminding its readers of the Irish peril after its reporter visited a lodging house on Charter Street, in Angel Meadow. As expected, he encountered all the shocking details he sought. Lodgers needed only 3d for a bed for the night, very often sleeping in buildings which had previously been pubs but had lost their licences. The pub landlord was now the landlord of the lodging house, often with the same clients. Some landlords displayed remarkable ingenuity in their efforts to maximise profits. One even removed the roof to cram in more lodgers.

  It is hardly surprising that the great influx of Jews escaping persecution in the final three decades of the nineteenth century should receive a lukewarm welcome. As well as renewed pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, a cholera epidemic in Poland and famine in Lithuania caused many to flee. In 1886 Jews were expelled from northern Germany and from Moscow in 1890. In 1900 3,000 redoubtable souls crossed Europe on foot in order to get to England.

  Many arrived on the south coast destitute. The 150,000 immigrants who settled in Britain between 1881 and 1914 soon overwhelmed the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor. The newcomers huddled together behind the docks in London, in the Leylands of Leeds and in Strangeways, Manchester. In 1889 the Jews of Kottingen in Lithuania decamped en masse to Sunderland.

  But nowhere was the Jewish presence more evident than in London’s East End. The earliest Jewish immigrants got a toehold in the secondhand clothes trade and soon dominated the markets at Houndsditch and Petticoat Lane. Those who came after them developed a network of tailoring shops which undercut the competition and produced clothes at prices lower than anyone thought possible.

  Jews also specialised in cabinet- and shoe-making and these trades formed the basis of the success of smaller communities in Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, Hull and Newcastle. As in London, most of the Manchester Jews found work in the cheap clothing and household furniture trades, centred on Red Bank, Strangeways and Lower Broughton, where there was plenty of inexpensive housing, many lodging houses and a long-standing reputation for crime and disorder. Like the Irish, the Jews attracted hostility from their hosts yet by 1914 there were 300,000 Jews in Britain.

  One of the many concerns raised by this influx was that it coincided with a significant increase in crime and many commentators linked this to urbanisation and mass immigration. John Wade spelled out this connection when he contrasted the small towns, from which so many immigrants originated, consisting of a settled population, on the one hand, and great cities, on the other, where many of the inhabitants were migratory. In the former, ‘the retreats and opportunities for delinquency are few and limited; the pursuits and even the character of each person are matters of notoriety and interest; not to be known is to be an object of inquiry and suspicion: in a word, everyone is the police of his neighbour, and unconsciously exercises over him its most essential duties.’ No one who has ever lived in a village or small town could doubt that Wade has put his finger on the social value of what many people resent as the intrusive nosiness of neighbours who seem obsessed with the minutiae of others’ lives.

  In the cities ‘there is no curiosity about neighbours – everyone is engrossed in his own pursuits and neither knows nor cares about any human being except the circle to which he has been introduced and to which he is connected by ties of business, pleasure or profit.’ This is the city so many experience today, where no one knows their neighbours and people lie dead in their homes undiscovered for months, because people ‘don’t like to interfere’. It is because of this, Wade adds that ‘cities afford so many facilities for the concealment of criminality … The metropolis is like an immense forest in the innumerable avenues of which offenders may always find retreat and shelter.’

  One result of this widespread fear of crime with which immigrants were linked was legislation which fundamentally altered the status of those wishing to settle in Britain. By the 1905 Aliens Act entry to Britain was no longer a right. Anyone who could not support himself could now be sent back to his country of origin. However, a number of recent immigrants had already found a very lucrative way of supporting themselves and were yet regarded as a far greater threat to society than anyone who had been prevented from entering the country.

  Chapter Nine

  Ferdinando Ferina and the Man Who Spits Fire and Glass: The Lodging House Owner and Keeper

  ‘God curse you bastards to hell,’ he wailed, his great sweating bulk filling the doorway. ‘Come one step nearer,’ he said, brandishing the metal leg of a bed above his greasy head, ‘and I’ll split ye.’ He steadied himself with his left hand against the flaking jamb of the door and moved his head from side to side like a tormented hound sniffing the air. His eyelids flickered like a wayward pulse over his blind eyes, one pointing east and the other west.

  ‘Now Con,’ said the emollient policeman, ‘that’s no way to greet this gentleman who’s come here special to see you.’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ said James Greenwood, taking half a pace forward yet remaining beyond the orbit of the bed leg. Even from that distance he could smell his host’s potent mixture of sweat and alcohol; it was as if alcohol were seeping from his clammy skin. ‘Delighted to make your acqu
aintance, sir,’ said Greenwood, extending his hand and then letting it fall to his side.

  In 1874 James Greenwood visited the lodging houses of Golden Lane, in the City, and on meeting the proprietor of one he was not disappointed. Every negative expectation he brought to the encounter was confirmed by Blind Con, famed for his antipathy to all officials. Con was the perfect caricature of the lodging house owner: a violent, villainous rogue who encouraged and gained from the criminality of his lodgers.

  But what do we know about other lodging house owners and how far does this confirm the negative stereotype?

  Owners were, of course, of various different types. Many were speculative builders but most began by purchasing an old building. A typically shrewd entrepreneur, who realised that the rising demand for cheap accommodation represented a major opportunity for those with a relatively small amount to invest, was John Miller. When the demolition that prepared the way for the Commercial Road development of 1845 reduced the number of beds in the area, Miller was a butcher with premises at 30 Dorset Street. He immediately bought 26 and 27 in the same street. The buildings were adjacent to each other and came with large gardens accessible from the street and in which he eventually built six cottages; this became Miller’s Court, where the horribly mutilated body of Mary Kelly, the Ripper’s final victim, was discovered.

  The houses at 26 and 27 Dorset Street were converted in the same manner in which countless similar old buildings were made ready for service as lodging houses. Each floor was gutted and made into a large dormitory, while the ground floor was converted into a communal kitchen to serve both houses. The other floors were packed with cheap beds, usually with straw-filled mattresses.

  Most of the lodging houses in the area made infamous by the Ripper murders were owned by Frederick Gehringer, Jimmy Smith and his sister Elizabeth and Daniel Lewis and his sons. Smith and Gehringer also owned several pubs in the area. The lodging houses in Dorset Street were the fiefdom of Jack McCarthy and his friend and business associate, William Crossingham. Smith and McCarthy took a keen interest in prize-fighting and organised a number of bouts, offering facilities for sporting gentlemen to wager a few pounds on their fancy. Despite their nefarious activities and reputation as men who could look after themselves, their lodging houses provided an invaluable service for those who would not countenance the workhouse.

  They also provided a range of additional services for their niche clientele. McCarhy and Smith owned ‘open all hours’ general stores near their houses which stocked everything a lodger might want. Among their pubs on Dorset Street alone they owned the gargantuan Britannia, the Blue Coat Bay and the Horn of Plenty, which, even by the standards of the area was no place for the drinker who had led a sheltered life. The building next to the Britannia was a brothel, where two spinsters made under-age girls available to their clients.

  Other owners in the Spitalfields area were of a similar background to Miller. John Smith started out as a greengrocer and gradually acquired properties around Brick Lane until, by the 1860s, lodging houses were his main concern. Three of his children followed in his footsteps and became well-known keepers in the area.

  The investments of Miller and Smith appeared prescient by the late 1840s, when an influx of Famine Irish created an insatiable demand for cheap accommodation. By 1849 there were 50,000 Famine Irish in London desperate for a place to lay their heads. The Irish soon became synonymous with the poorest peddlers, selling oranges, fish, cress, matches and vegetables – all areas in which, because of their ability to live on the meanest pittance, they were able to undercut their rivals. Others worked as unskilled labour in the building trade and when all else failed, begged.

  The value of houses in Dorset Street area decreased in relation to the number of lodging houses in the area. At the same time their owners were less inclined to waste money on a depreciating asset. The death of a child in 1857, when part of a dilapidated house in Dorset Street crushed him to death, indicated what was already well-known: most of the houses in the street and many in the wider area were unsound and therefore worth little on the open market, so consequently could be bought cheaply. Many of the new landlords in this area were men whose money had been acquired by dishonest means, often gamblers or thieves according to Mayhew. Others raised the money by selling shares. Adverts in local newspapers, assuring investors of an annual return of four per cent, were common throughout most of the nineteenth century.

  The link between alcohol and lodging houses was common in the cities and towns. Writing of Bethnal Green in 1848, Hector Gavin found that ‘nearly all the small public houses and beershops take in lodgers’. The Beer Act of 1830 in effect made it possible for virtually anyone to set up a ‘beerhouse’ which offered beers and ales at reasonable prices. Many having attracted a crowd by luring them with an evening’s entertainment, saw no reason to send them home: why not also provide them with accommodation? About one in every fifteen lodging houses in towns was also a beershop, while the fraction in the country was far greater.

  In many ways a lodging house was an ideal investment for the craftsman fortunate enough to have an industrious and forceful wife to run the business while he continued his trade. An analysis of the lodging houses in St Thomas’, Oxford, shows that of the heads of households which were lodging houses only fifteen per cent described themselves as ‘lodging house keepers’, while the remainder worked in commerce and industry. A third of all heads of households were in trades closely associated with lodging houses, such as licensed victuallers, innkeepers, publicans and beerhouse keepers. By far the most frequent occupation of owners was that of keeper of a beerhouse which accounted for about one in every fifteen in London and as many as one in four in other areas. The remainder worked in jobs that were common in the area where they lived and seven per cent were general labourers.

  A study of 330 common lodging houses based on the 1861 census suggests that, though eighty per cent were owned by men, many were managed by owners’ wives or other family members. In London, however, there were more women than men owners. Less than one in ten of male keepers were single, whereas nearly eighty per cent of the women were widowed or unmarried. Owning and running a lodging house was also seen as a good way for a single woman to make a living.

  It was also a means by which men of humble origins and modest means could rise in the world. Thomas Wright, discussing lodging houses around the port of London in 1892, confirms this: ‘Many of them are the property and most of them are under the management of one speculator in this line of business. This man may fairly claim to rank among “men who have risen” or be classed with the “self-made”.’ Many of these, he believed, arrived in the capital and were indistinguishable from the penniless throng of newcomers in search of work until they began assisting the manager of a lodging house, before developing the necessary skills and advancing to acquiring their own property.

  Both Mayhew and Charles Booth agreed with Wright that the owners of the most basic lodging houses were very much like their lodgers. Mayhew claimed that eighty per cent of them had once been travellers and analysis of census returns suggests that there was certainly a great deal of common experience between the two groups. A few examples will suffice to support this view.

  The keepers of houses in Hereford in 1861, for instance, included nine publicans, three general labourers, two hawkers, two farm labourers, a copper smith, a nailer, a tinplate worker, a shoe-maker, a tailor, a servant, a gloveress, a horse-keeper and a seedsman. Oxford’s keepers in the same year comprised a street sweeper, a boot-maker, a laundress, a journeyman bookbinder, a stonemason, a coachman, a baker, a plasterer and a bricklayer, while Leicester’s included a dealer in clothes, a firewood-seller, a hawker of small wares, a bricklayer’s labourer, a coal heaver, a maker of umbrellas, a night soil man, several agricultural labourers and a framework knitter. A house in Market Deeping was kept by a married couple who described themselves as ‘travellers’.

  The censuses abound with examples, such a
s that of 1851 for Stamford in Lincolnshire, a town with a population of just over 9,000. At that time there were twenty-nine lodging houses there, two of which belonged to John McCormick, a hawker and Thomas McSweeney, an agricultural labourer. Another owner, John Farnell was, like McCormick and McSweeney, Irish and those lodging in all three houses were predominantly Irishmen. This is yet another way in which keepers resembled their lodgers.

  In many Surrey lodging houses during the second half of the nineteenth century it was not uncommon to find two or more houses owned by the same family. Keeping a lodging house was often a family business. At the lowest level many people opened up their homes as lodging houses as a means of keeping a roof over their head.

  The average lodging house in a county town had room for between eight and ten lodgers and it is estimated that a house with six lodgers could generate an income of no more than 14s a week, sufficient to provide a pinched standard of living. Consequently, in most cases owners generally had another source of income and it was usual for a wife to manage the lodging house while her husband pursued his chief occupation.

  There is no doubt that women played a major role in the functioning of lodging houses, not just as managers but also as owners. Of the 1,401 lodging houses listed in the London post office directory in 1851 half were owned by women. Of those listed in a survey of lodging houses in market towns in central England in 1851, nearly nine out of every ten keepers were female. For many middle class women, especially those from the lower middle class, economic necessity compelled them to make a living and a lodging house provided one of a limited number of options. It was common for a spinster or a widow to team up with another woman in a joint venture.