The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  They cost £16,000 each and his sister Emily launched the first, the SS Augustine, with a bottle of champagne in Liverpool. At the age of 25, Booth co-owned his own shipping line. When he set sail for the first time, he left behind the rest of their entire staff in Liverpool – his brother Alfred Booth and the office boy – and set to with a will. Just seven years later, he was in such a state of mental and physical collapse, that he abandoned the business for Switzerland, unsure whether he would ever recover.

  Of course he pushed himself hard, ruining the health of his business partners, and that must have taken its toll on himself. But the mystery of his breakdown probably has more to do with his complex personality and the contradictory feelings he had about religion and politics. He was deeply religious, but found it increasingly difficult to believe – Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published when he was nineteen. And he had been influenced by the ‘positivism’ of his cousins – the idea that only the things you can count can exist: ‘Science must lay down afresh the laws of life,’ he said: like the Utilitarians, the positivists believed in starting with a blank sheet of paper. ‘I feel assured that the principles of Positivism will lead us on until we find the true solution to the problem of government.’

  He was also increasingly critical of the kind of smug middle-class philanthropy carried out by his neighbours in affluent Liverpool. Here he was influenced by his wife. Charles Booth was not born into the tradition of Utilitarian number-crunchers – he was married into it. Mary’s father, Charles Zachary Macaulay, was secretary to the Board of Health – after Chadwick’s departure – and Commissioner of Audit.

  Booth was one who, as he put it, ‘reaches the point of marriage slowly, with many misgivings’. And it took him three years to marry Mary, discovering in her an intellectual equal with decided and conflicting views of her own. Under her influence, he firmly rejected the prevailing view of poverty – caused by ‘idleness, gluttony, drink, waste, profligacy, betting and corruption’, according to the chairman of the Congregational Union. He couldn’t help noticing that many of the despised poor led considerably more God-fearing lives than he did. He believed that wealth and success gave him obligations – his idea of business was to pay as much as he could and sell as cheap as he could, not the other way round. But what was he to do personally? He earned more money than he needed. Should he give it away, or would that make things worse? Should he pay more for his everyday food? Should he pay his workforce more? He and Mary steadfastly refused to put on the lavish dinner parties of their neighbours, limiting them to three courses only, but should they do more?

  By 1873, the moral crisis was preventing him from sleeping. He didn’t seem able to digest food. He dragged himself back from his breakdown in Switzerland and for the rest of the decade hovered between saving the business and complete collapse. He worked 12-hour days, living off vegetables and cider, staving off seasickness at sea by drinking champagne and reading Trollope. By the age of 40, the business was so successful that Booth was able to buy a luxurious country house – Gracedieu Manor in Leicestershire. Mary’s cousin Beatrice Potter, who was to be so important in his life and – as Beatrice Webb – in all our lives in the next century, describes meeting him then for the first time.

  Nearing forty years of age, tall, abnormally thin, garments hanging as if on pegs, the complexion of a consumptive girl, and the slight stoop of the sedentary worker, a prominent aquiline nose, with moustache and pointed beard barely hiding a noticeable Adam’s apple, the whole countenance dominated by a finely-moulded brow and large, observant grey eyes, sitting through meals occasionally picking at a potato or nibbling a dry biscuit.

  Beatrice was in the throes of a long and miserable affair with the radical Liberal politician, and mayor of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. She was also suffering from what was clearly a family problem: nagging worries about the ‘uselessness of life’. With the depression in the 1870s and the influx of refugees from the famine in Ireland and the pogroms of eastern Europe, poverty was to become the key issue of the next decade.

  Booth was always horrified by socialism, but he was fascinated by the debate. Then in 1885, the situation exploded. The Social Democratic Federation – led by the radical Old Etonian journalist H. M. Hyndman – published a survey which showed that 25 per cent of Londoners were living in extreme poverty. It was inflammatory. Riots followed. Nobody had ever come up with that kind of statistic before, and the campaigning editor W. T. Stead threw the weight of the Pall Mall Gazette behind the story. Stead was one of the original investigative journalists, ending his life on the Titanic. At that moment, he was facing arrest for buying a 13-year-old girl for £5 in the back streets of Marylebone, to prove that white slavery was alive and well. There was little he wasn’t prepared to do to shock conventional opinion.

  Booth was absolutely outraged. Although he had never met him before (he never met his namesake William Booth either) he went straight round to Hyndman’s house to tell him personally just what he thought of that kind of cheap incendiary sensationalism. What’s more, he would prove that the 25 per cent figure was wrong. He would pay out of his own pocket to establish the truth. And in this way, just as those Conservative MPs in the 1980s took bets about whether they could live on unemployment benefit for a week, Booth was drawn into his life’s work by a wager with a socialist.

  The bet changed his life. Within a couple of decades, he was the most famous sociologist in the country, and his inquiry was so famous that all you had to do was put the words ‘Mr Booth’s Inquiry’ at the top of a questionnaire, and people would fill it in. It was one of those moments when people stumble over their true purpose of existence.

  III

  Even at the beginning of his survey, Booth was getting suspicious of his old positivist friends. Unlike his predecessors, he could already sense that it wasn’t enough just to count. He decided to approach the truth by mixing statistics with personal observation, to find the mid-point between quantity and quality. Figures ‘mislead from want of due proportion or from lack of colour,’ he told his even more sceptical friend Canon Barnett. Yet he was also determined that this should be a completely objective survey, measuring poverty without emotion, ideology or solutions. Only when the facts were absolutely clear might he come round to setting out any suggestions about what might be done about it. Booth’s tragedy was that this mythical moment never quite arrived. He could never quite make up his mind.

  Nobody turned up to the meetings of his Board of Statistical Research, which he had set up to oversee the project. So, with his assistant Beatrice (she was desperate for some kind of distraction from looking after her invalid father) they set up in his office off Gracechurch Street, struggling towards what would be a new foolproof method.

  The breakthrough came in a letter to Beatrice from Chamberlain. Why not start by interviewing the school board visitors, he suggested – then check what they say about each family with door-to-door interviews, discussions with the police and with anyone else who could help. Booth embraced the idea immediately. The trouble was the size of the task. The population of London was then around four million and it looked as though he might be the only interviewer. ‘The task was tremendous; the prospects of its completion so remote; and every detail cost time,’ he complained, as he began to juggle the burgeoning project with his shipping line.

  The pattern of his next 17 years was being set. He devoted the daytimes to business, eating fruit at his desk to avoid the effort of lunch and devoting the hour after dinner to his family – when he usually fell asleep. By 10pm, he was free to return to his hobby, sometimes walking the streets, sometimes writing up the statistics gathered by his assistants, constantly urged by his wife to limit this work to just three hours a day. Then at the end of the week, it was the long cross-country train journey back to Gracedieu, with so many candles perched along the carriage window sill to light his work that – more than once – he was mistaken for a travelling grocer. Then in the early hours of Monday,
back to London. ‘In the early chills of the morning, greetingless, fireless and breakfastless – I woke to find you gone,’ wrote Mary to him as she settled back to her own role in the project: secretly vetting and re-writing every finished page of his reports. The most quoted paragraphs are nearly all hers.

  The first interviews took place at 7.30 pm on 1 and 2 September 1886, as Booth sat with his pencil ready to put the first piece of order on the chaos that was London – speeded in his work by growing concerns about socialist agitation and the urgency of an answer. ‘Against this method of agitators who class all the working classes together as starving millions I strongly protest,’ he said. ‘And I do so all the more that I am deeply in earnest in my desire that the conditions under which the mass of people live should be improved, as well as those who now suffer actual distress.’

  It was an important distinction, between those who are really poor and those who have poverty thrust upon them by their hopeless husbands. He was especially ambitious to find out the part really played by drink in poverty as popular mythology claimed. But how do you define the poor people you need to count? To do so, Booth invented the idea of the ‘poverty line’. He set this at 10 to 20 shillings a week for an average family of four or five people. This was ‘primary poverty’, poverty because you didn’t have enough money. It was arbitrary, of course. A poverty line which really meant anything – as Booth realized – would have to be drawn individually for each family. And his definition has caused controversy ever since: these days we tend to measure ‘standards of deprivation’ set in the 1960s – a kind of relative poverty – which include people who can’t afford a holiday, birthday party or the occasional meal out.

  After eight months, he was able to do a paper for the Royal Statistical Society about Tower Hamlets. But to his astonishment, he discovered that Hyndman had been wrong. In fact, Hyndman had under-estimated the extent of poverty in London. Moving on to Hackney, he went back to the parish of St George’s-in-the-East only to find it was even worse than he had previously thought. Even with Booth’s narrow defination, 30.7 per cent of Londoners were living in poverty.

  Drink was clearly a factor, but it wasn’t the cause. It might even be the result of poverty: Booth was falling foul of the perennial problem for number-crunchers – an inability to work out what causes what. But in the whole of the East End, he reckoned that only about 14 per cent of poverty seemed to have anything to do with addiction to alcohol – and this had more to do with women than men. ‘This latter phase seems to be one of the expected results of the emancipation of women,’ wrote Booth.

  Even more shockingly, he publicly praised those supposed dens of iniquity, the East End pubs – and did so from personal experience: ‘Behind the bar will be a decent middle-aged woman, something above her customers in class, very neatly dressed, respecting herself and respected by them,’ he wrote. ‘The whole scene is comfortable, quiet and orderly.’

  The first volume of Life and Labour of the People of London was published in April 1889, to a city building up to the Great Dock Strike. The first edition sold out quickly, and Beatrice was praised by the reviewers for her work describing life in the Docks and the Jewish community. ‘The book is entirely without literary merit but contains information useful for philanthropists,’ wrote The Athenaeum. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette described Booth as a ‘Social Copernicus’.

  His detailed house-by-house descriptions of streets had an enormous impact. There was Shelton Street, in Covent Garden, now the venue for boutiques and expensive bars, and then as now filled with young men drinking beer in doorways. But then it was the home to 200 families in forty houses, most living in rooms about eight foot square, and making a living selling flowers, fruit, chickens or vegetables at the nearby market by day, sleeping in beds curtained off at the side of the room by night. Though on hot nights, most would just sit fully-clothed in the least vermin-infested corner of the room. These are people like Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. This is in his description of nearby Parker Street:

  At No 19 on the ground floor there was a woman with two grown-up daughters, all looking hardened in sin. They would beg for a bread ticket as though they had not broken fast for days, but if refused would alter to a fiendish grin and the most fearful language would follow, the strength of voice and expression leaving no doubt as to the absence of food or ill-health. In the first floor lived the Neals. The man had been a soldier and now earns his living as a market porter; his wife was fast breaking up and his son, a tall fellow of twenty-two, appeared to be in rapid consumption; the daughter also grown-up, sold flowers in the street. All four lived and slept in this room. In the back room lived a family consisting of mother, a son of twenty, a daughter of twelve, and an old grandmother who looked eighty – who gets her living as a crossing-sweeper and gets a lot of food and coal tickets given. The mother sells in the streets but suffers from asthma, and the son a few months ago was at the point of death from the same complaint. The girl also looked in a wretched condition – patches of plaster protruding where the walls had been roughly mended, windows stuffed with rags or mended with paper – vermin everywhere.

  Parker Street looks different now. No 19 is between the office for the Elite Model Agency and the theatre showing Cats, but has been replaced by a hideous late Victorian block of flats. History doesn’t relate what the families felt – if indeed they ever discovered that their lives had been laid bare on the printed page.

  IV

  ‘We are very fond of each other,’ Beatrice confided in her diary in 1887, well into the first year of working side by side with Booth. ‘A close intimate relationship between a man and a woman without sentiment (perhaps not without sentiment, but without passion or the dawning of passion). We are fellow workers both inspired by the same intellectual desire.’ But it was all about to change. If he had still not reached any conclusion about his figures, Beatrice had. She now believed in municipal workshops as a solution to low and intermittent wages. And, worse, she had met and secretly become engaged to a socialist: the frighteningly intelligent socialist Sidney Webb. ‘A huge head and a tiny body’, she confided in her diary.

  The Booths couldn’t stand him. Trying to avoid the awkwardness, Beatrice suggested to Mary that they ignore the engagement. Mary breathed a sigh of relief: ‘You see Charlie and I have nothing in common with Mr Webb,’ she wrote back. ‘Charlie would never go to him for help, and he would never go to Charlie, so that it would not be natural for them to see each other. When you are married it will be different.’

  But it wasn’t. The rift grew and as Sidney and Beatrice embraced the new Fabian Society and set about making the next century in the image of dull, authoritarian socialism, and as Charles continued to agonize about coming to any sure conclusion, they and the Booths drifted further and further apart. It was the end of a fifteen-year relationship. ‘When I strained it, I should have thought slightly, it broke – or rather I found that it was already broken,’ wrote Beatrice later. ‘Even today I have not yet fully recovered from my amazement and wonder at this fact.’

  Booth didn’t seem to notice. He was off on the second phase of his gigantic project, looking at the work and living conditions of Londoners. And although Beatrice wasn’t there this time, Booth took her great lesson to heart. She had learned ‘how to sweat’ as a tailor’s assistant in order to write about the rag trade. So when he divided the classes from A (underclass) to H (upper middle class), he set about sharing lives. He took lodgings in houses typical of classes C, D and E, to find out about life around the poverty line.

  ‘CB went to live in the East End,’ said Mary’s diary baldly, hiding what an extraordinary thing this was to do in late Victorian England. He refused to disguise himself, but seemed accepted by his fellow lodgers as he caught fleas and filled his notebooks with details like the frozen garbage in the gutters. A man of his time, he seemed to feel no shame at all – no sense of apology for landing on them from his different station, as moder
n Booths would probably consider natural. One working class family he stayed with in Liverpool only discovered who he was when he suddenly invited them to work as caretakers at Gracedieu.

  To match and check the poverty line, Booth introduced the idea of ‘crowding’, of not having enough space to live in, like the Neals in Parker Street. Striving for an objective system of measurement that he could apply to any city from New York to Calcutta, he applied it rigorously to London – 31.5 per cent of the city was crowded. Again, it was not an objective test. Just because people were richer, they might not choose to spend their money on more space. But he set about classifying streets in eight colours from black to yellow – with black lines to indicate ‘vice’ – and put them up on an enormous map of London 16ft by 13ft, still on display at the London School of Economics, and now available on the Internet.

  Worst of all again was St George’s-in-the-East with 48.9 per cent poverty and 57 per cent crowding, where ‘the temptation to drink to excess … comes with especial strength’. Best on all measures was what Booth called ‘happy, happy Hampstead’.

  It was still a gigantic undertaking, as Booth and his assistants wandered back across every street, counting, classifying and bringing the information back. His work was now world-famous. He was in a unique position as a wealthy industrialist and leading expert on poverty and social conditions, but (to the exasperation of the Webbs) there was still no solution. Why did he not do a little less counting and a little more campaigning work for change? Yet at the end of volume 9, the message was the same: ‘I shall still attempt no answer … in spite of the length to which it has attained, I have to ask once more the patience of my readers.’