The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  A study of lodging house owners and keepers in Hastings during the period 1839 to 1851 shows that many were women. Those of the better houses often described themselves as ‘blooming widows’. But ownership also afforded opportunities for the enterprising slum dweller. One such was Susan Morgan, a second-hand clothes dealer in the Nichol, an infamous rookery in the East End, who ran a lodging house next to a pub in Turk Street.

  In Chester many of the owners and keepers were widows or women abandoned by husbands and left with children to support. A study of owners and keepers in Leicester found that many were elderly widows, often suffering from downward social mobility, which forced them to use their homes as a source of income.

  Mayhew’s claim that about half of London’s mid-nineteenth century owners had once been travellers may be suggestive of the situation in the capital but is not supported by evidence from other parts of the country. Analysis of the data from St Thomas’, Oxford, suggests that seventy per cent of owners were born in the area, though a significant number were foreigners, including some colourful characters who had lived exciting lives.

  One of these, the wonderfully named Ferdinando Ferina, was said to have walked to England from southern Italy before establishing a lodging house dynasty in the city. Not content with housing a large portion of the local drifters, he also wanted to fill the city’s streets with the sound of music: he rented out barrel-organs. His wife was renowned as a good woman: she tended the ailments of her most unfortunate lodgers. Other unusual characters associated with the city’s lodging houses included a Negro bouncer who, having tired of chewing glass and eating fire for a living, ran away from the circus and supported himself by maintaining order in one of the city’s lodging houses and another Italian family, whose accommodation was markedly inferior to that of the compassionate Mrs Ferina and was well-known for being ‘dirty, damp and dilapidated’.

  One of the great attractions of a lodging house was that start-up costs were low. All that was needed was the capital to acquire a lease on a suitable property, which Mayhew believed could be had for as little as 8s a week and certainly no more than 20s. It was easy to furnish it with items that were virtually unsaleable: one keeper Mayhew cites, less pernickety than his competitors, bought his furniture from a smallpox hospital and others from cholera hospitals. Thereafter the chief running costs were gas and coal.

  Charging no more than a few pence per night, was it possible for the owner to make a profit? The unanimous answer of all those with personal experience of such places and all the commentators is a resounding affirmative.

  Mayhew estimated that, on average, large London lodging houses took about 17s 6d a night. Others, usually of the most disreputable sort, made a great deal more. A Mrs Cummins of St Giles is said to have charged her clients between 1s 6d and 2s per hour. The owner of six houses in and around Thrawl Street in Whitechapel never went near the East End but luxuriated in the splendour of his palatial home in Hampstead.

  One of Mayhew’s 1850 informants told him that quite apart from it being common for one person to own as many as ten lodging houses, a single house accommodating eighty men produced a profit of £500 a year. Given that anyone earning £150, such as a senior clerk, was regarded as middle class, this is equivalent to a professional’s salary. This remained the situation throughout the nineteenth century. Talking in 1853 of what he regarded as one of the worst rookeries in London, St James’s, peopled by thieves and beggars, the City Missionary, Mr Walker, was convinced that the owners of lodging houses in such areas made a great deal of money.

  Referring specifically to Flower and Dean Street in the 1880s, J.E. Ritchie believed that, despite all the regulation, it was still possible for commercial speculators to make money out of lodging houses. It remained the case that little outlay was expended on furniture – other than beds – and keepers made significant sums by selling food to lodgers and charging them for minding their valuables.

  Many owners and keepers were also adept at manipulating the poor law system to their advantage. They stood for election to the parish board of governors and even district boards and used their position to ensure that their customers received outdoor relief – which paid for their accommodation.

  Approximately three-quarters of London’s low lodging houses were managed by someone other than the owner and it seems that the rougher the establishment the more owners were anxious to distance themselves from the day-to-day running of the place. There were as many women as men keepers, but as to the character of such people, this varied with the nature of the establishment, from ‘civil and decent’ to ‘roguish and insolent’.

  Keepers were more notorious than owners. A successful keeper had to be a man of many parts. He certainly needed something of the entrepreneur, but his authority was often tested and could only be maintained if he was physically capable of ejecting the troublesome and keeping them out. He therefore needed a certain physical authority or, as one observer put it, ‘had to have something of the bully about him’. He needed to balance the requirements of his clients, who often straddled the world of crime and that of honest labour, on the one hand, and, on the other, those of the police who expected a degree of co-operation. It was generally acknowledged that many nineteenth century keepers were ambivalent in their attitude to the law.

  Most of the houses in the notorious Dorset Street district were owned by middle class entrepreneurs and investors, who did not live in the area but entrusted their running to wardens or keepers. Many of these people were ‘known to the police’ and had more than a fleeting familiarity with the criminal world. Because of the nature of the clients lodging houses attracted in poor areas, the wise owner generally employed both a keeper and what was usually known as a ‘night-watchman’ who doubled as a bouncer. The latter’s role was to eject those who could not pay, which he did regardless of their condition. Hence the hopelessly drunk, the penniless and the sick, male and female, were likely to find themselves on the streets, regardless of the weather.

  Detective Sergeant Leeson, who had an intimate knowledge of the streets around Commercial Road at the end of the nineteenth century, had a low opinion of managers, claiming that they were ‘greater criminals than the unfortunate wretches who have to live under their roofs’.

  Despite the many talents required to manage a house the wage was generally very low. In 1851 Mayhew estimated it at between 7s and 12s a week, which was roughly the wage of a farm labourer and significantly less than a London labourer earned. Keepers invariably got free family accommodation but still found it necessary to supplement their income. Many insisted that lodgers tip them on arrival.

  Keepers frequently employed staff, usually to work in the kitchen and to clean. Invariably these people were recruited from the lodgers. They too supplemented their income by running errands for other lodgers. These were often people who fitted in nowhere else but found a niche serving those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. W.H. Davies had little regard for them, damning most of them as ‘narks’. They often cut hair, patched clothes and mended boots. They sometimes washed the shirts of lodgers and there are several accounts of clothes being so verminous that it was necessary to first lay them out on the stone floor and assault them with a broom.

  One of the most intriguing accounts of a manager is provided by James Greenwood in 1874 in his description of Pugmaster’s Lodging House, Pugmaster Lane, between Bishopsgate and Whitechapel. The manager was a slim young man, his shirt dirty and his greasy trousers held in place by a leather belt. His face was as grimy as his hands and his long hair, lank and beautifully oiled.

  His domain, long ago a splendid mansion, is a registered lodging house and he insists that the regulations requiring separation of the sexes are rigidly enforced and that anyone seeking to violate them is thrown out.

  However, the requirement that each married couple should have a room to themselves was not adhered to nor were the ventilation requirements. Married couples were instead allocated a section of a
room partitioned off by flimsy strips of half inch deal, for which they were charged 6d a night and more for children. In the men’s room the air was redolent of rum and there was a man lying in bed during the day. The deputy referred to him as the ‘bedridden’. An arm, a hand holding a bottle, a green nightcap and a pair of bloodshot eyes were all that was visible over the coverlet. It transpired that he was the establishment’s best customer, having stayed in his bed for three months continuously, without once removing his trousers, sustaining himself solely on the drink the deputy fetched for him. In another room were a number of girls who made a living selling flowers.

  Visiting another such house between Field Lane and the West End in 1865, Thomas Archer encountered a ‘manager’ or ‘foreman’ responsible for two lodging houses. He was a young man, wearing a white apron and ‘giving the appearance of a barman at a respectable tavern’. The more interesting character, however, was the proprietor of the house that held between 80 and 100 people. This man’s general appearance was that of a ‘highly respectable vestryman in his year-before-last’s suit of clothes, and with the confirmed habit of going to bed without taking them off ’. Despite the apparent respectability of both men, police reports described both houses as ‘thieves’ kitchen’.

  Writing of lodging houses in the Borough in the 1880s, Greenwood tells of the manner in which most keepers passed the night. The front doors of these houses were seldom closed and never locked and the traveller looking for a bed at dead of night had merely to push the door open, where he would generally find the deputy dozing beside his glowing brazier. He takes the money and issues the patron with a tin ticket. The lodger bundles up his clothes and puts them under the bolster for safe keeping, as it is taken for granted that anything left ‘lying about’ will be stolen.

  Indeed, keepers were widely believed to be dishonest and were deemed no better than their worst customer, which is hardly surprising if, as Mayhew suggests, many had once been travellers themselves. Analysis of national data suggests that keepers knew their clients and had a great deal in common with them. Many had similar jobs and bought for recycling the materials which their lodgers gathered. Many were notorious fences, who dealt especially in stolen food which they often bought from their lodgers before selling it to others. Some kept children specifically for the purpose of stealing or begging, the proceeds of which they appropriated. When their lodgers could not pay for a bed, the keeper, it was said, sent them out to steal what they owed.

  ‘Rapacious, mean and often dishonest,’ as described by Mayhew, was by no means the worst that was said of them. The consensus was that they were ‘men and women of the lowest grade whose ideas of morality are exceedingly plastic’. Like many others, Manchester’s Head Constable held them entirely responsible for the conditions in which their lodgers lived and denounced them when he discovered ‘in one room, totally destitute of furniture, three men and two women lying on the bare floor, without straw and with bricks only for their pillows’.

  Keepers often claimed that they were the victims of their lodgers and it is certainly true that they had to take precautions against the compulsion of many of their guests to steal anything that was not immovable. The rugs used as bed covers were commonly stamped with STOP THIEF and utensils, pokers and furniture were chained up or fixed to the floor. Two Birmingham keepers who came to Chadwick’s attention in 1842 went further still: they locked all their guests in the sleeping area, ‘otherwise they would steal anything that was moveable’.

  Many keepers were pro-active in filling their lodging houses. Those who owned drinking establishments, rather than directing their sodden patrons homeward with a cheery word of encouragement, steered them into one of their own beds. Others employed people to stand outside nearby pubs and round up likely clients, often enticing them with the promise of illicit drink.

  One of Mayhew’s informants, a veteran of lodging houses throughout Britain, told him that the most lawless and disorderly houses were those in London, though the most villainous keepers were to be found in rural areas. Other informants corroborated this view, asserting that even in low houses in the capital the master or keeper was generally not involved with stolen goods, whereas this was common in the country.

  Lodging houses and crime were inextricably linked in the popular imagination. As early as 1839 a young criminal told a Parliamentary Commission that he was the helpless victim of the pernicious influence of the lodging house, for it was there that he was ‘enticed into crime’ and, he assured his audience, ‘if a lad ever gets into a lodging house, it’s all up with him’. No less an authority than Lord Shaftesbury fully agreed: ‘it is there that nine-tenths of the great crimes, the burglaries, and murders, and violence that desolates society are conceived and hatched’. In ‘kid kens’ gangs of children were housed and fed in return for the proceeds of their crimes. The most infamous of these was run by Ikey Solomon, on whom Dickens based Fagin in Oliver Twist.

  Mayhew concluded after interviewing 150 of the lowest class of male juvenile criminals that fences who ran or operated from lodging houses did in fact often use children, whom they fed and sent out to steal on their behalf. They often rewarded them with beer and tobacco. These fences came in all shapes and sizes. In particular they varied greatly in their commitment to criminal activity. At one extreme, the fence was the leader of a criminal gang, the ‘putter-up’, who planned and financed crimes while keeping a safe distance from the actual crime. A lodging house provided a means of maintaining criminal contacts without immediately attracting the attention of the police.

  There were always petty criminals in the lodging houses who were prepared to act as intermediaries or fences on a small scale. They bought items of little value, often from children, and sold them to an established fence or disposed of them personally at a small profit.

  The best fences, of course, were those who never came to the attention of the police and therefore left no record of their activities. These tended to be the ones who flourished and eventually operated on a large scale. They worked exclusively through dependable contacts, acting on behalf of novice crooks and all those outside the closed circle of trusted associates. This was, from the police’s point of view, the worst of all possible worlds as it meant that stolen goods disappeared without trace. Far better that they pass through the hands of pawnbrokers who, though not scrupulously honest, might on occasion help the police.

  There is no doubt that criminals were a constant presence in most lodging houses, and the repeated stories of unwary lodgers having their valuables and even their clothes and boots stolen suggest there was little honour among thieves and not much fellow feeling. Theft was a recurring cause of fights among lodgers and there is ample evidence to suggest that keepers were not always blameless. The landlord took no responsibility for inmates’ belongings and the naive and trusting were likely to learn very quickly that ‘a man must be very sharp to stay long without becoming the victim of petty theft’. This explains why many a wily lodger slept in his entire wardrobe, knowing that this made it less likely that he would wake in the morning to find he did not have a shirt for his back.

  The problem of crime was larger in London than elsewhere and the Cockney wrong ’un was generally regarded as being of a different calibre from his provincial confrère. In terms of expertise in the black arts of skulduggery, he deferred to none: he was the master of his trade. With this came an intractable recalcitrance, which made him irredeemable, a recidivist of the most obdurate type.

  In his letters to the Chronicle in 1848–9, Mayhew spoke of the criminals he found in a lodging house near London Docks. The pickpockets there were generally from the bottom end of their profession, specialising in handkerchiefs and whatever they could lift from stalls and shops, anything easily disposed of. In particular, there was always a ready market for food in the lodging house.

  Housebreakers – near the top of the criminal hierarchy – were believed generally to live with prostitutes. Like many others, Mayhew found a
number of small-scale fences of the sort that few lodging houses lacked. The culture of the lodging houses accepted stealing as the norm. Most of the thieves were young boys under the age of 21. Many occasionally resorted to work, but only for as long as necessary to meet their immediate needs and to enable them to indulge their liking for ‘low prostitutes’. Burglars regarded themselves as superior to pickpockets and eschewed their company.

  At the bottom of the hierarchy of theft were the beggars, many of whom specialised in cadging food from servants in respectable houses, which they then sold in the lodging house. Unsurprisingly, conversation in such houses tended to centre on the best ways to steal and the most propitious places for exercising the nefarious arts. The age structure of the occupants in the thieves’ houses Mayhew visited fitted that found by other researchers: only 6 were over 40-years-old; 15 between 30 and 40-years-old; 16 between 20 and 30-years-old; and 18 between 10 and 20-years-old. Of these, 16 were born in London, 9 were Irish and, apart from 2 Germans and 2 Americans, the rest were from all over the country.

  Most interesting perhaps was the information these lodgers gave about how long they had been out of regular employment and ‘knocking about’. All but eight answered between two and ten years. Their earnings in the previous week averaged less than 5s. Of the fifty-five men present, thirty-four had been in prison at least once and one of them twenty times, with an average of four imprisonments each. Of the total number of 140 imprisonments, 63 were for vagrancy and 77 for theft, always for small sums. Drink did not seem to be a major problem for them, no doubt to some extent because they did not have the means. Of these men, thirty-four admitted to being thieves.

  Mayhew explained their way of life as the result of their being ‘naturally of an erratic and self-willed temperament, objecting to the restraints of home and incapable of the continuous application to any one occupation whatsoever. They are essentially the idle and the vagrant; and they generally attribute the commencement of their career to harsh government at home.’ Police reports at the time suggested that there were over 200 such lodging houses in London, each housing thieves and pickpockets.