The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House

by Joseph O'Neill

  Much to his horror, Mayhew discovered that there was a level below even that of his fifty-five respondents. Such places charged only a penny a night. Their customers were the sweepings of criminal society – the lowest prostitutes, the most miserable and inept thieves and beggars and pitiable vagabonds, thirty of whom would huddle together on the floor of a small room, ‘a mass of poverty, filth, vice and crime – an assemblage of all that is physically loathsome and morally odious – a chaos of want, intemperance, ignorance, disease, villainy and shamelessness, that can be paralleled in no other part of the globe’.

  Many of the keepers of such places were fences and all were indulgent towards the criminality of which their lodging houses were the focus. Yet, even these were not at the very base of the social hierarchy. There were some for whom even a penny was beyond their means. These were the people who would sleep under the railway arches. It is interesting that even they did not consider the workhouse as a possible alternative.

  Liverpool’s juvenile thieves had a reputation equally as bad as London’s, while the areas of the city they inhabited were as wretched as anything in the capital. The worst area was to the south of Scotland Road – Byrom Street, Lime Street, Renshaw Street, Berry Street and Great George Street. In 1858 the nearby criminal district between Duke Street and Whitechapel was demolished, with the result that most of its inhabitants debunked to the areas around Scotland Road and around Ben Johnson Street off Scotland Place. Other infamous areas were those that surrounded Ford and Maguire Streets and the Vauxhall district around Chisenhale Street. Liverpool had a larger population in transit than perhaps anywhere else in the country.

  Professional thieves from all parts of the country liked to keep on the move. For instance, Mancunians frequently operated in Liverpool and vice-versa. Thieves who specialised in stealing lead – a readily saleable commodity – from new buildings moved from one major building project to another. But it was not only criminals who kept moving. When the Tredegar local authority announced an extensive public works scheme men arrived from all over the country – so many in fact that the local authority made a contract with local lodging houses to take an average of 500 tramps every night.

  Many of these were ‘ticket of leave’ men, released early from penal servitude. According to Manchester’s Chief Constable, Palin, the city was a magnet for these criminals who were responsible for a great deal of local crime, drawn by the number of disreputable lodging houses. All the commentators agreed: ‘low lodging houses’, as the newspapers liked to call them, or ‘flash houses’ as the public called them, generated crime. This, as much as the unhealthy nature of the accommodation, was a major reason why they became the focus of official concern and regulation.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Whitewashed, Cleansed and Purifed’: Regulation and Decline

  Dishevelled men clustered on the pavement blinking and rubbing their eyes like subterranean creatures shocked by the light. Inside the house the commands of peelers echoed round the rooms, as windows were thrown open and the pleas of outrage escaped onto the streets. Two peelers drove the ragged men out the front door and the sound of heavy boots clattered on the bare boards above.

  ‘Out! All out!’ the peeler ordered. The clatter of metal bedsteads hitting the bare floorboards and shrieks of protest filled the house as the exodus continued. The pavement filled and overflowed into the road: women and ragged children, navvies and beggars, farm labourers and a joiner, his bow saw slung across his back and his tool bag at his feet.

  A hefty peeler then banged the door shut, unrolling a notice from under his cape and tacked it to the door with his broad thumb.

  ‘What does it say?’ someone called. ‘What’s happenin’?’

  An old man squinted from the pavement, his moist eyes flickering under gnarled eyebrows.

  ‘They’ve closed it down,’ said the old man. ‘It’s shut, by law.’

  The events that took place in Macclesfield in 1851 were replicated all over the country. It seemed that the lodging house had been done away with in an instant.

  In describing common lodging houses as ‘nests of disease and misery of every kind’ the Parliamentary Commissioners of 1845 were merely reiterating what had been the middle class view for half a century, when calls for regulation began. The London Constabulary Report a few years later confirmed the conventional wisdom that lodging houses were ‘low and vicious’ schools of crime. Regulation, therefore, was designed to control both the physical and the moral condition of the mobile poor particularly in the cities.

  It is wrong, however, to think that prior to the 1851 legislation lodging houses were subject to no statutory controls. Police already had the power to arrest lodgers who had committed crimes and often used this as a pretext for entering houses. In addition, in 1849 several boards of health compelled some of the worst lodging houses to whitewash the walls and ceilings and to use limewash in other parts. In some areas, such as Chester, in 1847, the city improvement committee required a number of lodging houses to dig drains for their premises. These houses were later inspected under the Nuisance Removal and Disease Prevention Act of 1848, which gave local authorities the power to demand that lodging houses be properly cleaned.

  Ashley Cooper – Lord Shaftesbury, philanthropist, politician and social reformer – was the moving force behind the Common Lodging Houses Acts of 1851 and 1853, which required the owners to notify the authorities of outbreaks of disease and put the onus for maintaining, repairing and keeping the house clean on its keeper and not the owner. These Acts also empowered local authorities to prescribe basic sanitary requirements, enforce the segregation of the sexes and prevent overcrowding. Officials now had a right of access and keepers were required to limewash all walls and ceilings twice a year. Residents were also obliged to leave the premises between 10am and late afternoon so that the rooms could be aired. This meant that the sick and poor had to walk the streets. Mixed accommodation – often brothels – was abolished.

  In the euphoria that followed the Act the police in many areas turned out the occupants of lodging houses, closing 150 in the Macclesfield area alone and dumping lodgers on the streets, overwhelming the poor law authorities and causing an enormous increase in the number of people sleeping rough. This draconian policy was immediately reversed.

  In other places the official response was more measured. In Chester, for instance, the city council set up a permanent committee to implement the provisions of the Acts, particularly in relation to adequate washing and sanitary provisions. Chester was in advance of national legislation as it took action against overcrowding long before it became a ‘nuisance’ under the 1866 Sanitary Act and pursued keepers whose houses were overfull.

  These Acts of the 1850s are generally dismissed as ineffective and there is no doubt that they had many limitations. Several of these limitations, however, were the result of factors beyond the scope of legislation. Foremost among these was police reluctance to visit the worst houses at night. Daytime inspections were a waste of time, as it was impossible to determine the extent of overcrowding when most of the lodgers were absent. Even if a room contained no more than the stipulated maximum number of beds, there was no way, other than by night-time inspections, of knowing how many slept in each bed. Once the keeper displayed the necessary signs stating the number of people allowed in any one room he generally had nothing to fear from inspectors.

  The requirement to air the lodging house during the day was extremely unpopular with both keepers and lodgers. Opening the windows made the place cold, especially in winter when the only form of heating was the kitchen fire, and drove the lodgers out to haul their belongings through the chill streets. Further, neither Act contained a workable definition of a lodging house. Consequently many keepers evaded regulation by claiming that all lodgers were family members. Both Acts unwisely provided for the registration of keepers, but not the premises or their owners; if the keeper was debarred from running a house, then the owner simply employe
d someone else.

  The onus for enforcement was in the hands of the local authority and depended entirely on its priorities and willingness to ensure that the measure did not remain a dead letter. In many instances inspection and enforcement were beyond the resources of the police and in the absence of a precise definition of the term ‘lodging house’, local watch committees were able to restrict their activities to what they considered a manageable number of establishments.

  The Acts, however, had a number of unintentional consequences, one of which was to put additional pressure on those houses which had not been forced to close. Some raised their prices in order to meet the new regulations and consequently forced many of the poorer lodgers to seek shelter elsewhere, often in workhouse casual wards and refuges operated by charities, where the atmosphere was harsh with discipline and cold, improving air.

  There is also some evidence that Macclesfield was not the only local authority to use its new powers to rid itself of undesirables. In Chesterfield, for instance, rigid enforcement of restrictions against overcrowding seems to have been used to force out known reprobates. As these examples demonstrate, the impact of the Acts largely depended on how the authorities chose to use them. Chester provides an interesting case.

  By 1854 there were 261 lodging houses in Chester, all of which the authority deemed to be ‘in a satisfactory state’. This happy situation, however, was achieved only after eighty-eight keepers had been summoned for infringements and half convicted. The council’s policy was to refuse licences without the required privies and supply of fresh water. This relentless enforcement reduced the number of houses to a mere forty by 1869, several of which were owned and run by widows taking in a small number of lodgers out of financial need.

  In London, however, the situation was more varied and complex. In 1853 there were 3,300 lodging houses under inspection with about 50,000 nightly lodgers. Yet, it is estimated that about two-thirds of London’s lodging houses were unaffected because they operated outside the law: unregistered, tucked away in the entrails of rookeries, they were largely untroubled by the efforts of the authorities. Similarly, it is doubtful if the 1851 Act did much to improve the common lodging house in other big cities such as Manchester, where lodgers continued to sleep as many as six to a bed while others slept on the floor. In Angel Meadow and Deansgate men, women and children still lodged in the same rooms and in the corridors. A survey of 1858 classified seventy per cent of lodging houses in the area as ‘filthy’ and half of them had neither toilets nor water.

  The 1857 report by the police commissioners on the working of these Acts confirmed that while regulation had not transformed lodging houses it had brought about some improvements. Many reformers believed that the most effective way to improve the quality of lodging houses was for local authorities to build and run them. The powers to do so were conferred by the Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act of 1851 which allowed local authorities to buy, lease or build their own lodging houses.

  The Act contained no element of compulsion: local authorities were free to open lodging houses if they chose but had to meet all costs themselves. Unsurprisingly, few councils were willing to commit to an ongoing drain on local resources beyond their statutory obligations. The experience of the few towns that did use their powers under the Act confirmed the reservations of the more cautious, demonstrating that, though it was possible to make a miniscule profit by providing decent accommodation at low prices, this was insufficient repay the considerable outlay of capital investment.

  Huddersfield chose to venture where most feared to tread and was the pioneer of the municipal lodging house. The Model Lodging House, in Chapel Hill, was constructed out of an old warehouse in 1854, when it was the only lodging house in England constructed and operated from local taxation. By November 1854 it housed 680 people. Its prices were above those of most common lodging houses, with single beds at 3d and 4½d and separate rooms for couples at 6d per night. All guests had access to a reading room, where they could read newspapers, hear temperance lectures and participate in religious services.

  It is clear, however, that Chapel Hill was open to the criticisms directed against the London models and those houses built by philanthropists: it failed to cater for the same people who used commercial lodging houses and was merely providing a subsidy not for those in most need but for those who were relatively comfortable. Most of the 4½d lodgers were mill workers, in steady employment who were housed in what was known as the ‘mechanics’ house’. They enjoyed the privilege of a separate reading room where the newspapers to which they subscribed were available and their beds were made up with white coverlets. Management reports show that single men were exceptionally sober and respectable, though the same could not be said of the unmarried women. Birmingham and Dundee followed suit in providing municipal accommodation. Neither was ever short of customers.

  Further legislation developed the regulation of lodging houses. The Public Health Act of 1866 gave the local authority power to prevent overcrowding and in Chester, for instance, it seems that this was rigidly enforced as many houses were inspected several times a week, with the result not only that the regulations were adhered to but also that many lodgers were deterred from using the houses. In other parts of the country, as John Hollingshead found in his research into the rookeries in the 1860s, these Acts ‘were enforced, or not enforced, according to the energy and conscientiousness of the local inspector of nuisances.’

  Despite this, the effect of regulation seems to have been to restrict the number of houses given over to criminality and to increase decent provision for the honest working man travelling in search of employment. In Chester in the 1870s inspection was often carried out by plain clothes police and seems to have kept the houses reasonably respectable.

  In 1870 Thomas Archer ventured into Spitalfields, that ‘great poverty-stricken district, bounded by Whitechapel and Mile End to Shoreditch and Bethnal Green’. He was encouraged by what he found and reported that the Acts had swept away the worst lodging houses which so recently ‘made half London terrible’. About ten years later James Greenwood visited the lodging houses of Golden Lane, in the City, reputedly ‘the very ugliest neighbourhood in all England’. Rich in scoundrels, the area annually yielded its crop of coiners and smashers and was the natural habitat of beggars and cadgers and ‘the slummiest of slums’. There were at that time seven lodging houses in the Lane which nightly accommodated all who could fit in their 500 beds. He found much improvement following the introduction of the Acts.

  The worst accommodation was still provided by many of the unlicensed premises, known as ‘hot water houses’, which were still much in demand and seemed to operate entirely without police interference. These were small houses found in such places as London’s Little Cheapside, Cow Heel Alley, Reform Place and Hot Water Place. They had no beds but for a penny allowed customers to lie on the floor with about twenty other beggars and cadgers. Just prior to Greenwood’s visit a child had died of scarlet fever in such a place.

  By 1870 the population of lodging houses had fallen slightly since the onset of regulation and the police were confident that they had eliminated them as a source of epidemic diseases. The Public Health Act of 1875 transferred responsibility for lodging houses to the local Public Health Committee. The standard of housing generally had risen by this time because of greater stability of the population and employment, improved sanitary conditions and the increased number of houses available on the rental market.

  Under the 1875 Act the local authority acquired the power to set and vary the number of lodgers accommodated in a lodging house and enforce the separation of the sexes. It was responsible for promoting cleanliness and proper ventilation, taking precautions to avoid lodgers contracting any infectious disease and acting to prevent the spread of any such disease should it appear. In addition it had an umbrella responsibility for ensuring lodging houses were well-ordered. In practice, this meant that keepers were compelled to display notices s
tating how many people were allowed to sleep in each room. Where two or more married couples occupied a single room, each bed had to be screened from the view of the other beds, usually by a timber partition.

  The Act required every public health authority to appoint a medical officer and a sanitary inspector, to implement the laws on housing, water and hygiene. The hygiene regulations in effect meant that there had to be a separate water closet or privy for every twenty lodgers, a good water supply and adequate washing facilities, and no paper on inside walls. Windows were to be open for at least an hour in the morning and afternoon and beds were not to be shared by males over the age of ten. The beds were to be stripped and aired for an hour a day and were not to be slept in for eight hours after being vacated.

  Both police reports and testimonies before the commission of 1884 on the Housing of the Working Classes suggest that the keepers of lodging houses were not only remarkably compliant to requests that they improve hygiene by cleaning, delousing, whitewashing and limiting numbers, but also did so without raising prices: they knew their clientele. Cynics explained this in terms of keepers’ self-interest, claiming that they wanted to deflect attention from the nefarious activities that went on within their walls. The right the police now enjoyed to enter lodging houses, theoretically for the purposes of inspection, undoubtedly drove the experienced criminal to areas where the police were not likely to go or to houses peopled by their own kind.

  Yet, there remained pockets within the cities that resisted improvement. As late as 1909 Mary Higgs maintained there were still plenty of unregistered houses where married couples slept in open rooms with a bucket in the middle of the floor the only sanitary arrangements.