London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (24 page)

From the middle of the nineteenth century some of those influenced by the concerns of proto-social workers, public health reformers and moral crusaders regarding the state of the poor, attempted to improve the conditions in the crowded cities of Britain via building design. Two worthy organizations, the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes and the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, had been created between 1841 to 1844 and had made some small inroads in re-housing working families before 1875. The former had been founded, as the Rev Henry Taylor, Rector of Spitalfields, declared at its inaugural public meeting in September 1841, `for the purpose of providing the labouring man with an increase of the comforts and conveniences of life, with full compensation to the capitalist's' Their efforts were well meaning but inadequate; in total fewer than 2,000 families profited from their building programmes.52 Part of the problem for these early pioneers of social housing was that the rents they needed to charge, even to make the limited profit they desired, were still relatively high in comparison with the costs of living in slum housing. This had the effect of attracting only the better-off, skilled working classes to these new dwellings.53

In 1863 the architect Henry Darbishire published a paper on the housing of the poor in which he set out his principles for a new set of buildings initiated by the philanthropy of George Peabody, a wealthy American merchant banker, who had made England his home. Darbishire's approach, which reflected in part the relative failure of previous schemes (by effectively excluding the poor by being too costly to build and maintain), was to build cheaply and with working-class lifestyles in In what appears to be a misunderstanding of working-class culture he declared that: `if there is anything in the world that a poor man hates or a poor man's children are educated to hate with cordial, sincere, and unquenchable hatred, it is fresh air'" Evidently frustrated that each and every attempt to provide ventilation was covered over or blocked up by tenants, Darbishire presumably did not consider that heating costs represented a large proportion of working families budgets and that drafts - however well intentioned - were not welcome. Darbishire was equally concerned to make his homes easy to clean and keep tidy, thereby helping to instill the moral message of `improvement' in those that occupied them. Thus, Peabody homes were built of painted brick rather than paper and plaster (which cracked and attracted vermin) and had laundry facilities on site: there could be no excuses for not clean living in a Peabody home. As Martin Gaskell noted, `this was a severely practical model, and one which involved a very low opinion of working-class interests and expectations'. 56

The Peabody Trust built a series of large estates across the capital, starting in Spitalfields, all being different but built on the same principles as Darbishire had outlined. The blueprint involved a rectangular block built around a central open space that provided a playground for children and effectively isolated the dwellings from the surrounding area. As John Tarn puts it, the Peabody community `was in every sense separate, socially as well as physically', so that it could perform its dual role of housing and `improving' the working classes.'' The rules that governed tenancy were strict and contrasted starkly with the relative freedom offered by slum landlords: rent was paid in advance; there was to be no toleration of arrears and `disorderly and intemperate tenants' were to be shown the door immediately.58 Darbishire's vision, and Peabody's money, reinvigorated the model dwelling movement in the 1860s and the Trust (founded in 1862) was followed by the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company a year later, and the Artizans, Labourers and General Dwellings Company in 1867.

These trusts operated on the principle of a 5 per cent return on investments; a level of profit than many London builders would not consider viable or worthwhile. In this they were helped by the government who, under the terms of the Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Acts passed in 1866 and 1867, allowed them to take out long-term loans at just 4 per cent. Anthony Wohl argues that these `unpublicized subsidies' were vital to the model dwelling However, while rents were not pitched at the peak of what the market would stand they were not subsidized either: if the middle classes were seen to be bailing out the working classes they would have fallen foul of the rhetoric of `self-help' that was espoused by the COS and its supporters like Octavia Hill. Thus, once again attempts of providing homes for the poor were to some extent undermined by a refusal to break the golden rule of Victorian giving: that of not `demoralizing the recipient'. 61 Wohl has suggested that the Peabody Trust was still able to offer accommodation to those at the lower rungs of the social ladder, albeit not the `residuum' that so terrified some contemporaries, and this is evident from the occupations of those listed as tenants in 1891.61 However, the main beneficiaries of the model dwelling movement were still the `respectable' working man and his family not the poorest inhabitants of the `abyss'

The Peabody Trust was not the only benevolent philanthropist housing agency operating in the capital and was in fact one of over 30 such organizations building homes throughout London, many of which are still standing a century or more later.62 Arguably, the Peabody Trust, by taking advantage of cheap land made available by the Cross Act and loans under the Labouring Classes Dwelling Houses Acts, transcended the line between private and public: Wohl describes it as a 'semi-public body' and we might view it as an important stage in the development of council housing.63 The model dwelling movement therefore represents the forerunner of state-sponsored social housing but they did not effectively tackle the vast need for new housing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Indeed as M. J. Daunton has noted, the `contribution of philanthropic and local authority activity to the housing stock was, in quantitative terms, negligible before 1914, accounting for a mere 1 per cent.64 As a result many poorer Londoners were unable to benefit from the charitable entrepreneurship of Peabody and his imitators.

DOSSERS, CASUALS AND DOWN-AND-OUTS: THE REALITY OF HOUSING CONDITIONS BEYOND THE MODEL DWELLING

For those who could not secure a regular income sufficient to both maintain a patina of respectability and pay the rent necessary to occupy a flat in a model dwelling or a room in a respectable terrace, the lodging or `doss' house provided a safety net above the final degradation of the workhouse. Doss houses, like those in Thrawl Street, Whitechapel, where Polly Nichols lived, were home to a community of loafers, down-and-outs, and those who had been brought low by a series of circumstances both within and beyond their control. According to the American writer Jack London (who explored the East End in 1902 under the pretence of being a stranded sailor), these low lodging houses were described, with heavy irony, as the `poor man's hotel'.65 In 1886 Howard Goldsmid had similarly assumed the guise of a `dosser' to investigate the reality of life in these coffee houses' of East London.66 Both men were disturbed, as Mearns and Sims had been, by what they saw: the cramped conditions, poor food, drunkenness and bad language, all of which - in their eyes - reflected the degree to which the inhabitants had descended into the `abyss'

For many, a bed (or a part of a bed in extreme cases) in a lodging house was as good as it got and the much-derided landlords that provided them were crucial in the `economy of makeshifts' that maintained London's poor.' The builders of model dwellings - ostensibly the architects of social reform through housing - could not afford to let their neat and tidy flats to those at the very foot of the housing ladder. Until the municipal authorities began to take the lead in social housing in the aftermath of the Great War, the provision of cheap accommodation rested with the slum landlord. Jack London made a distinction between the larger lodging houses and those `little private doss-houses' that were, he declared, `unmitigated horrors"' The larger houses, such as the one in Middlesex Street that Jack London visited, had subterranean communal areas, which served as communal spaces to sit and chat, drink tea or coffee and make food. Above was a 'smoking room' that was lit until ten - allowing the residents to read the many rules and regulations governing their stay.

Once a guest had braved the smell of the kitchens and had his fill of pipe smoke and conviviality he would retire to his bed for the night. At Cooney's in Thrawl Street, 1866, a bed cost 4 pence a night; by the time Jack London paid for a `cabin' in Middlesex Street in 1902 the fee was 5 pence.69 This bought one a bed in a shared room with little space to undress and no privacy whatsoever. This was simply a place to sleep - if sleep was possible among so many strangers - there was no place to store possessions or engender any real sense of `home' in these larger lodging houses. These were not `homes' but simply shelters: they offered no hope of improvement (as the model dwellings did) but merely protection from the streets or the horror of the workhouse. As such they were populated by a cross-section of society's `unfortunates'. Goldsmid acknowledged that not everyone who sought the refuge of the doss house was a 'loafer' - there because of his or her lack of desire to do an honest day's work. The occupants of the Beehive lodging house in Brick Lane came from diverse backgrounds:

Many have seen better days; respectable artisans whom the waves of trade-depression have overtaken and submerged; clerks elbowed out of a berth by the competition of smart young Germans; small shopkeepers ruined by the poverty of the workingfolk among whom their business lay; even professional men - land surveyors, solicitors, surgeons - are now and then to be found among the motley crowd in a `kip-house' kitchen.70

At Middlesex Street the population was exclusively male when Jack London visited it and was made up of those aged between 20 and 40. Older men found it hard to earn even the small amounts needed to pay for a night's lodgings. The experience of the area's prostitutes, including almost all of the Ripper's victims, was similar. Mary Nichols was killed in Buck's Row as she sought the four pennies she needed to pay for her `doss' and Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes were also murdered as they went in search of the money to pay for their accommodation, having drunk what they had previously earned on those nights. The lodging houses took in the detritus of the neighbourhood, however drunk or beaten down they were. As long as they could pay they were welcome. Goldsmid described the scene in the nearby vicinity of the Beehive: `When closing-time comes, and the dram-shops and gin-palaces have sent their contingent to reinforce the representatives of sinning and suffering humanity that crowd the unwholesome street, Thrawl Street is a thing to shudder at, not to see.'71

However bad the lodging houses of the East End were they compared favourably, in the eyes of the working-class poor, with the casual wards of the Poor Law Union workhouses. The English Poor Law has a long and well-trodden history which I am not going to engage with at any length here, except to suggest that by the 1880s it was palpably unable to cope with the pressures thrown up by a century of industrialization, population growth and migration.' In Whitechapel the workhouse was run with rigid efficiency (in that it deterred all but the really destitute or sickly from its doors). The clerk of the Whitechapel Union, William Vallance, was a subscriber to the COS principles of self-help and resistance to charitable donations. When the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren wrote to the capital's Poor Law Unions to request their help in distributing tickets for overnight accommodation in lodging houses (in the wake of the homeless' `occupation' of Trafalgar Square and St James' Park) Vallance answered that while the Board of Guardians for Whitechapel would accommodate any houseless poor that appeared before them seeking shelter, they would not become `the almoners of private benevolence' by distributing charity tickets. It was the workhouse or no house for Vallance and his union.73

The Whitechapel Casual Ward, for the temporary homeless, was situated in Thomas Street and in January 1888 it had beds for 44 men and 25 women who were fed on a very basic diet of bread, gruel and cheese for which they were expected to work at picking oakum, carrying coal and cleaning around the wards. Inmates could enter between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. depending on the season and were discharged at 6.30 a.m. if they were able. The fear of the `house' that was shared by many of the working class throughout the nineteenth century is sometimes hard to imagine from the perspective of those used to a state-funded benefit system. We need to remind ourselves that those who took refuge in the workhouse were not merely accepting poor food and hard labour. They were surrendering their freedom and sense of self: once inside the workhouse they wore workhouse clothes, obeyed workhouse rules and lost their rights to vote if they had them. Families entering the workhouse were separated: fathers on one side, mothers on another, children taken away, educated, fostered or apprenticed out if parents remained for any length of time. It is hard, even given the harshness of the mid-Victorian penal system, to imagine a worse fate than turning to a London parish for help in the late nineteenth century. Which in part explains the encampment at the foot of Nelson's Column.

THE `WEST END RIOTS' AND THE ROLE OF THE POLICE

The summer of 1887 was notably warm and rough sleeping must have seemed much more attractive than the confines of the workhouse. However, the gathering of so much human flotsam and jetsam in the very heart of the Empire was distressing for its wealthier inhabitants and problematic for the policing authorities, because of previous troubles in the square. In February of 1886 a rally called by the Fair Trade League, a protectionist organization that urged its supporters to resist the attempts of `the foreigner to rob you', provoked a counter demonstration by the recently formed Social Democratic Foundation (SDF).74 Led by the well-heeled anti-Semite Henry Mathers Hyndman, the SDF espoused a variation of Marx's revolutionary socialism and gained support from several notable radicals of the age (including William Morris, the future Labour MP William Lansbury and Marx's daughter, Eleanor).