My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  The Act introduced licensing by local authorities, dependent on inspections, to ensure the existence of at least basic sanitary facilities, segregation by gender and the ‘respectability’ of the person in charge. In practice, however, the licences were easily secured, needing just three signatures from local residents, and as, at that time, the authority which controlled the process was the police – who were more concerned with crime than sanitation – most of the lodgings continued to be run in a way that would maximize profits for their owners. These were individuals who, on the whole, were as unconcerned by notions of charity as the police were with the sleeping arrangements of London’s poor.

  With the arrival in the mid-1860s of what would be the final major epidemic of cholera, parliamentary action was taken on sanitation and housing, but this was done alongside an effort to abolish all outdoor relief, the intention being to teach the poor independence, and to separate the deserving from the indolent. In effect this resulted in little more than punishment of the already desperate.

  More positively, attempts were being made by those who genuinely wanted to provide decent housing for those flocking to the East End. Model dwellings were erected by trusts, but, no matter that they were charitable, they still offered profits for investors and, when land prices rose, rents were raised to ensure those profits were healthy. Unfortunately, this made the new housing unaffordable for many of the target tenants.

  Things other than rent rises proved a barrier. Trusts such as the Peabody, for example, while originally barring tenants who earned over thirty shillings, also excluded anyone earning less than twelve shillings, and those who did qualify were required to pay their rent in advance and to provide an employer’s reference, both of which were, by definition, impossible for casual workers. They were also not allowed to do homework in case it should be in one of the offensive trades. As most casual work, from fur-pulling to glueing matchboxes, was offensive in one way or another, they were, if they wanted to continue working, ineligible for a tenancy and so were condemned to the foul conditions of the unregulated tenements and hovels run by private landlords and to the common lodging houses.

  Other regulations required that tenants be vaccinated; that they would not keep dogs; that they would not decorate their rooms with paint, paper or pictures; that washing would not be hung outside to dry; and that they would prevent their children playing in the corridors or stairwells. The rules even extended to a curfew, with the main door being locked and the gas supply turned off at eleven p.m.

  Being unable to hang out washing was bad enough – many made a living by taking in laundry – but probably the most restrictive of the regulations was the Peabody Trust’s refusal to allow the sharing and subletting of rooms, practices which would have made the rents manageable.

  So, although the model dwellings were an undoubted improvement, their success was limited to the better-off section of the labouring classes who had regular, comparatively well-paid employment. The rest were effectively excluded, and ironically, by clearing the slums, the developers were displacing more people than they were housing.

  Lord Iveagh, a member of the Guinness family, decided to conduct his own investigation into housing conditions to see what was needed and what realistic rents would be, and set up the Guinness Trust with Lord Rowton. Rowton was shocked into action and Rowton Houses, the ‘poor men’s hotels’, came into being. These were open to any man too poor to have a home of his own but who still wanted ‘comfort and decency’.

  When the fifth of these was opened on Fieldgate Street in August 1902, the Municipal Journal described it as

  … a handsome structure… situated in a very typical area of Whitechapel, and the lines of its elevation stand out conspicuously from the dirty and squalid rows of surrounding houses.

  The low cost and freedom from petty, restrictive rules made the houses popular with both the very poorest and those in work who preferred the facilities offered by Rowton to the often much worse alternatives.

  The social reformer and founder of the National Trust, Octavia Hill, thought the question of housing the working classes required a more educational approach. Financed by John Ruskin, Hill bought up slum housing and employed female rent collectors, including Beatrice Webb, who were to help the poor learn better ways, and to manage their households and budget their income. Once ‘improved’, she believed they would aspire to larger, cleaner homes and would become increasingly self-sufficient, although she was concerned that certain low types should not be housed together in tenements because they were not fitted to living in such a manner and would cause all sorts of trouble.

  To ensure profits and money for repairs, rent had to be paid regularly. The consequence of failing to do so was eviction, a lesson for the ne’er-do-wells and an example to others. Hill also insisted, when addressing a parliamentary committee on housing, that it was ‘quite sufficient’ for working people to have one shared water pipe on each floor rather than one in each individual dwelling.

  Beatrice Webb was not made of such stern stuff and was appalled by the conditions she found when out collecting rents close to the Tower of London:

  [along] the blank wall ran four open galleries, out of which led narrow passages, each passage to five rooms… Within these uniform, cell-like apartments there [were] not even a sink and water tap… on the landings between the galleries and the stairs were sinks and taps – three sinks and six taps to about sixty rooms – behind a wooden screen were placed sets of six closets on the trough system, sluiced every three hours [which was] used in common by [the] 600 or more inhabitants of the buildings.

  Still demand for cheap accommodation continued to grow and poorly constructed, two-storey terraces were built throughout the East End, but never enough to relieve the pressure; the shortage meant that rents rose, and the common lodging houses continued to thrive.

  Yet more charities and philanthropic societies were set up, legislation introduced and tenement blocks constructed, although many were only partly occupied. Even with supposedly reasonable rents, decent, if gloomy, facilities and their superiority over what was offered in most of the private sector, they were still out of the reach of all too many, and there was also a resistance to living in these early high-rise flats which still exists today. Those who were trying to help misunderstood the nature of what was required.

  One scheme which flopped, because the character of the locals was not taken into account, was the market in the Columbia Square housing development. Built in Bethnal Green in the 1850s, it was one of the many generous projects undertaken by the philanthropist Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Unusually, the housing blocks were filled straight away, and even had a waiting list, but the adjacent, elaborately designed Columbia Market, opened in 1869 with the aim of providing healthy food at good prices for the local residents, was a total failure.

  There was the usual need for homes in the area and there were enough people who could afford to become tenants, but a highly ornate indoor market found no place in local people’s lives. One major hindrance to its success was the stipulation that it would not open on Sundays, an important shopping day for working people, particularly for the large Jewish population in the area; but also open-air street markets played an important role – and still do – in the traditional lives of East Londoners, as a place to buy inexpensive goods, as a place of employment for casual labourers and, probably most importantly, as a free, noisy, lively meeting place. It is little wonder that Columbia Market, with its impersonal formality and its solemn instructions for ‘Soberness’ and ‘Vigilance’ etched around its walls, failed.

  There was a more worrying failure in the attempt to clear the slums. Often, when old housing stock was demolished, it was not the original tenants who moved into the new, replacement homes. With higher rents and strictly administered tenancies unsuited to their traditional way of living, they moved on, occupying a diminishing number of multiple-tenancy houses, not only with individual rooms now being let out and shared, bu
t with beds and floor space rented on a rotation system that operated throughout the day and night on a ‘hot bed’ system.

  And so the problems continued, made worse, if only temporarily, for those forced to leave their community by the clearances. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the scandal of the slums was periodically brought to the public’s attention, sometimes by the well-intentioned in their attempts to raise funds for their humanitarian work, and sometimes, such as during the autumn and winter of 1888, when Jack the Ripper was terrorizing Whitechapel, by sensationalist publicity surrounding crime and depravity.

  A vision of this appalling world was brought into public awareness by Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor. This began as a series of reports in the Morning Chronicle, in which the author disclosed the lives of those caught up in poverty, crime and deprivation, reproducing their stories in their own words.

  As they read Mayhew’s articles, the affluent in Victorian society became uneasy, but, as ever, hypocritical consumers of social investigation could disapprove in the comfort of their drawing rooms as they read of young girls working as prostitutes and of young boys committing desperate acts of violence, while being titillated by the gory details – all without the bother of having to consider that it is far easier to be ‘moral’ with a full belly.

  Others refused to believe that the subjects of the pieces really had no choice. Charles Booth, who would become a champion of the impoverished, was originally as dubious as other cynics regarding how these people supposedly lived.

  A prosperous ship-owner, Booth believed that the extent of poverty in the East End, as documented in 1885 in the studies of the Social Democratic Federation, was little more than wildly exaggerated Marxist propaganda, and he determined to prove the truth of the situation by conducting a survey of his own. The results were surprising: they showed that the Federation’s conclusions were a complete underestimate of the problem, and that 35 per cent of East Enders were actually living below the poverty line. Unsurprisingly, the poorest workers of all were employed in the sweated trades, but at least they had work, however inadequate and badly paid, and that usually meant they could afford some sort of shelter, the all-important step up the ladder that saved you from the workhouse – the hated ‘bastille’.

  The new Poor Law of 1834 that had introduced this tough regime, as a replacement for outdoor relief for the able-bodied pauper, was as much about deterrence as relief of the needy. But the intention that the workhouses would be self-sufficient did not succeed and the burden on the ratepayers increased alarmingly, with the poorest districts, having the fewest ratepayers and the largest numbers to support, suffering excessively.

  Much the same worries as are expressed in the tabloid newspapers of the late twentieth century were being voiced then: assistance without sacrifice would encourage the poor to become idle scavengers and kindness would be abused, so life should be made hard for the recipients of benefit or they would prefer it to finding honest work. The memories of people of my father’s generation – born early this century and remembering an older family member being in the workhouse – make it quite clear that the system was never seen as an easy option. Being made to dress in harsh, heavy uniforms and do back-breaking, pointless tasks for the barest minimum of food, warmth and shelter, while separated by gender from your family, was hardly an attractive prospect.

  Everything possible was done to reduce costs and workhouse hospitals would simply turn away sick people if they ‘belonged’ to a Poor Law Union in a different parish. Accusations of brutality were frequent and the more notorious incidents, such as the so-called Andover scandal of the 1840s, when the inmates were actually starved, resulted in small flurries of concern, but it is obvious from contemporary sources that little was done to improve conditions.

  One advertisement, of 22 April 1864, for the position of assistant matron in Mile End Old Town Workhouse, Bancroft Road – a building which now forms part of the Royal London Hospital – stipulated a single woman or widow without a family, Protestant, with experience of cutting-out clothes, who, for just twenty-five pounds a year, also had to be

  … a strict Disciplinarian… willing to devote her whole time to the performance of such duties as may devolve upon her.

  Discipline was certainly strict. Misdemeanours resulted in punishments which seem totally out of proportion in their severity, but the Guardians were more concerned with protecting the pockets of the ratepayers than with the lot of the paupers in their care. Punishments were made public as a warning to others. On 17 November 1858, a poster was distributed proclaiming that Louisa Crankshaw and Mary Clarke, both aged eighteen, and Mary Brown, aged nineteen, had been sentenced to

  … one month’s imprisonment with hard labour for tearing their clothes in the Casual Ward of Mile End Workhouse.

  Many posters broadcast stories of deserted families being left to the mercies of the workhouse. Such abandonment was illegal under the Vagrancy Act, which covered the ‘Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, Rogues and Vagabonds’, and stipulated:

  every person running away and leaving his wife, or his or her child or children… or whereby she or they, or any of them, shall become chargeable to any parish, township or place, shall be deemed a rogue and a vagabond [and] that it shall be lawful for any person whomsoever to apprehend any person who shall be found offending against this Act, and to deliver him or her to any Constable or other Peace Officer.

  One found guilty of such behaviour was Henry Eason, who received three months’ hard labour for leaving his family, a sentence which served as both a caution to others and a punishment for his ‘crime’.

  Considering the description of the dock labourer Charles Beaumont, alias Smith, of Commercial Road, issued by the Guardians after he deserted his wife, Mary, and their four lawful’ children, he would probably also have been caught and punished before very long:

  The said CHARLES BEAUMONT, when last seen, was dressed in a low crowned hat, dark jacket, brown waistcoat, corduroy trowsers [sic], and Blucher boots. He is about 4ft. 3m. high, dark hair, and full whiskers, pitted with small pox, and has a cast in the right eye; supposed to be working in the name of CHARLES SMITH at the St Katharine’s or London Docks.

  It was not only men who were charged with such behaviour; in the days before reliable, manageable contraception, women regularly left infants to be maintained by the Union, adding, according to the Guardians, a further ‘heavy burden upon the rate-payers’.

  The workhouse was not exclusively the last resort of the poor. An advertisement was posted in 1863 for a male attendant ‘to take charge of the HARMLESS LUNATICS in the Male Imbecile Ward’. If the ‘imbeciles’ were physically fit, they might well have been set the exhausting task of breaking some of the ‘200 Tons of the best Guernsey Granite’ for which tenders were requested by the same institution.

  Paupers found at fault in their commitment to carrying out such tasks were swiftly repaid with a term of imprisonment. Even so, there were still those keen enough to enter the workhouse that they were prepared to risk the punishment. According to a report of 1853 in the Evening News:

  A man who applied for admission to the St George’s East casual ward was found to be wearing two pairs of trousers while a package containing 1s 5d was discovered tied round his leg. He has been sent to prison for a month for falsely declaring himself to be destitute.

  Presumably the magistrate who sentenced him would have been a ratepayer and therefore not very sympathetic towards anyone falsely attempting to increase the ‘heavy burden’. Considering the conditions within the workhouse, the man with the abundance of trousers must have been either desperate or more suited to the ‘male imbecile ward’.

  Regulations did, however, vary in their strictness: the ‘pauper inmates’ were usually allowed out once a month, sometimes even less, and then only if they were over sixty years of age – the older inmates not being of much use for the physical work they were obliged to underta
ke. Some Boards of Guardians allowed ‘dissenters’ and Roman Catholics to attend outside services on Sundays – which might explain why my grandparents could take my six-year-old father to visit his elderly, Catholic, great-aunt, Mog, on Sundays, and why she was allowed to stay at his childhood home on occasional weekends. Where they put her, however, is more of a mystery, with the nuclear family of five children and two parents living in just a front room, a kitchen and scullery, and with two upstairs bedrooms being let out to lodgers – the eight-strong Howard clan, with whom my father’s family shared the one outside lavatory.

  According to the memories of some of the more elderly contributors to the oral history, it is an ingrained dread of the workhouse and of relying ‘on the parish’ which accounts for their fear of accepting Social Security and help from Social Services, and of going into hospital; for them, accepting assistance is still associated with the last resort of the absolutely desperate and the dying.

  And no wonder. In December 1913, well within popular memory, the Bethnal Green News carried the story of an inmate of the Bethnal Green Casual Ward, ‘suffering somewhat from malnutrition’, who was imprisoned for seven days after a doctor testified that he should have been able to have finished grinding the whole nine pecks of corn he had been set to crush on the workhouse mill in the allotted seven and a half hours, refuting the sick pauper’s claim that he had been able to grind only one peck in five and a half hours, the work being too hard for him in his malnourished state.