Mrs. Pember Reeves

“ He must never smoke, he must never take a glass of ale; he must walk to and from his work in all weathers; he must have no recreations but the continual mending of his children’s boots; he must neither read nor go to picture palaces nor take holidays, if he is to do all that social reformers expect of him when they theoretically parcel out his tiny income. Needless to say, the poorly paid man is not so immeasurably superior to the middle-class man in the matter of self-denial and self-control as he seems expected to be. ”

“ But the poor man, having no expenditure other than food which can be cut down, is obliged, in order to pay one-third of his income in rent, to cut down food.
The chief item in every poor budget is rent, and on the whole and roughly speaking it is safe to say that a family with three or more children is likely to be spending between 7s. and 8s. a week on rent alone. Why do they spend so much when, as we see, it must mean cutting down such a primary necessary as food? ”

“ The appointment of a Public Guardian to cooperate with parents in all ranks of society is the only effective method, not only of preventing the national disgrace of “waste children,” but of doing away with the hardships, the distrusts, the fears and the resentments caused amongst the workers by the present harsh and ill-defined exercise of national Guardianship.
It is to the collective interest of a nation that its children should flourish. They are the future nation. To them the State will be entrusted. To them the work, the duty, the scheme of things will be handed on. ”

“ Even supposing that the children of the poor could magically flourish upon skim milk alone, there is not enough of it on the market to allow its use to be regarded as a universal panacea for hungry babies. In fact, it is worth a moment’s speculation as to whether the whole milk-supply of England is sufficient to insure a quart a day to each English child under five years of age. It is more than likely that, unless the milk-supply were enormously increased, adults would have to go entirely without milk should the nation suddenly awake to its duty towards its children. ”

“ The very facts of their poverty—close quarters and lack of mental interest and amusement, and, above all, lack of money—help to make the limitation of their family almost an impossibility to them.
The other suggestion has been already dealt with in previous chapters. It is always worth while, of course, to teach an improvident and stupid woman to be careful and clever—if you can. But to put down all the miseries and crying wants of the children of the poor to the ignorance and improvidence of their mothers is merely to salve an uneasy conscience by blaming someone else. ”

“ To manage a husband and six children in three rooms on round about £1 a week needs, first and foremost, wisdom and loving-kindness, and after that as much cleanliness and order as can be squeezed in. The case where the man loves order and the woman is careless may also be prolific of strained relations between the parents. But a steady woman who is not as tidy as her husband might wish has many ways of producing a semblance of order which makes for peace while he is there, and the friction is less likely to be intense. ”

“ If the children’s mother be a wage-earner, she can also be sent to prison if her children are not sufficiently cared for. Even the non-earning mother who has only what her husband chooses to give her can be imprisoned if a magistrate decide that any child-neglect is chargeable to her. It would seem reasonable to expect that when the ultimate responsibility for their welfare is undertaken by a rich and powerful State, children should at least be in receipt of sufficient food, shelter, warmth, and clothing. ”

“ Therefore, although any minimum wage scheme which proposes to raise the bottom wages in any trade or trades, or for any group or groups of workers, is a necessary part of legislation, and must be urgently insisted upon in any plan for social reform, no minimum wage legislation now proposed, or likely to be proposed, will deal adequately with the question of all the children of the working poor. Yet unless we do deal with all of them, and deal adequately, the problem of the nation’s children goes unsolved. ”

“ The reason is that these overburdened women have no knowledge, no enterprise, no time, and no cash, to enable them to visit distant suburbs along the tram routes, even if, in their opinion, the saving of money in rent would be sufficient to pay the extra outlay on tram fares. Moreover—strange as it may seem to those whose bi-weekly visit to Lambeth is like a bi-weekly plunge into Hades—the people to whom Lambeth is home want to stay in Lambeth. They do not expect to be any better off elsewhere, and meantime they are in surroundings they know, and among people who know and respect them. ”

“ If the sum of £11,000,000 a year stated to be paid in weekly pennies by the poor to the industrial burial insurance companies were to be spent on better house room and better food—if, in fact, the one great universal thrift of the poor were not for death, but were for life—we should have a stronger nation. ”

“ Thirty shillings, then, is the lowest sum to be faced by the grieving parents. But how is a man whose whole weekly income may be but two-thirds of that amount to produce at sight 30s. or more? Of course he cannot. Sheer dread of the horrible problem drives his wife to pay out 10d., 11d., or 1s., a week year after year—money which, as far as the welfare of the children themselves go, might as well be thrown into the sea.
A penny a week paid from birth just barely pays the funeral expenses as the child grows older. It does not completely pay them in early infancy. ”

“ On the whole, the actual landlord is by no means the monster he is popularly represented to be. He will wait rather than change a good tenant. He will make no fuss if the back rent is paid ever so slowly. To many respectable folk, keeping the home together on perhaps 22s. a week, this is an inestimable boon. It is wonderful how, among these steady people, rent is made a first charge on income, though naturally, given enough pressure, rent must wait while such income as there is goes to buy food. ”

“ We wrangle as to whether their numerous children are an improvidence and an insult to the community, or whether, on the contrary, the poorest class is the only class which, in that respect, does its duty to the nation. One thing is quite certain, and it is that it would be as unthinkable as impossible to bring compulsion to bear on the poor because they are poor. ”

“ It is a fact that a woman the law of whose being is cleanliness and order at all costs may, to a slovenly man, make a most tiresome wife. Her little home may be shining and spotless—as far as anything can be shining and spotless in Lambeth—at [19] the cost of all her vitality and all her temper. She herself may, as a result of her desperate battle with dirt and discouragement, be a scold and an unreasonable being. ”

“ Though fond of the children when they are there, this life of stress and strain makes the women dread nothing so much as the conviction that there is to be still another baby with its inevitable consequences—more crowding, more illness, more worry, more work, and less food, less strength, less time to manage with. ”

“ Moreover, to keep the children of the nation in health and strength is too important and vital a responsibility to be placed entirely on the shoulders of one section of the community—namely, the employers of labour. It is a responsibility which should be undertaken by the only authority which is always equal to its complete fulfilment—the State. ”

“ Houses intended for the use of more than one family should, I consider, be definitely let off to more than one family. Each tenant should deal direct with the landlord.
The tenants might do more for themselves if they understood and could use their rights—if they expected to be more comfortable than they are. They put up with broken and defective grates which burn twice the coal for half the heat; they accept plagues of rats or of vermin as acts of God ”

“ If poverty did not mean wretched housing, it would be shorn of half its dangers. The London poor are driven to pay one-third of their income for dark, damp rooms which are too small and too few in houses which are ill-built and overcrowded. And above the overcrowding of the house and of the room comes the overcrowding of the bed—equally the result of poverty, and equally dangerous to health. Even if the food which can be provided out of 22s. a week, after 7s. ”

“ As it is, the ex-baby is often imprisoned in a high chair, where it cannot fall into the fire, or pull over the water-can, or shut its finger in the crack of the door, or get at the food. But here it is deprived of exercise and freedom of limb, and develops a fretful, thwarted character, which renders it even more open to disease than the rest of the family, though they share with it all the other bad conditions. ”

“ The great bulk of the pennies so urgently needed for other purposes, and paid for burial insurance, is never returned in any form whatsoever to the people who pay them. The small proportion which does come to them is swallowed up in a burial, and no one but the undertaker is the better for it. As a form of thrift which shall help the future, or be a standby if misfortune should befall, burial insurance is a [74] calamitous blunder. Yet the respectable poor man is forced to resort to it unless he is to run the risk of being made a pauper by any bereavement which may happen to him. ”

“ Were there a department of Public Guardianship upon which every parent might rely for counsel and effective help, very many whose difficulty is not the actual housing and feeding of their children would be only too glad to take advantage of its advice. And even amongst the well-to-do, fathers and mothers die or lose their faculties, or are unfit, and the nation’s children are the sufferers. ”

“ AMOUNT SPENT A HEAD ON FOOD—PER WEEK, PER DAY
The remarkable thing about these budgets is the small amount left for food after all other necessaries have been paid for. When it comes to a pinch, food is the elastic item. Rent is occasionally not paid at all during a crisis, but the knowledge that it is mounting up, and that eventually it must be paid keeps these steady folk from that expedient save at the very last resource. A little less food all round, though a disagreeable experience, leaves no bill in shillings and pence to be paid afterwards. ”

“ What person or body of people, however educated and expert, could maintain a working man in physical efficiency and rear healthy children on the amount of money which is all these same mothers have to deal with? It would be an impossible problem if set to trained and expert people. How much more an impossible problem when set to the saddened, weakened, overburdened wives of London labourers? ”

“ She cannot be got away from in two rooms where a light and fire can only be afforded in one, and she may be the greatest trial in an always difficult life. In such homes as £1 a week can buy in London, the women who do not insist upon doing the impossible, and fretting themselves and everybody else because it is impossible, often arrive at better results—with regard at least to the human beings about them—than the women who put furniture first and the peace of the family second. ”

“ Shall they run the risk of burial by the parish, or shall they take Time by the forelock and insure each child as it is born, at the rate of a penny a week? If they decide not to insure, and they lose a child, the question resolves itself into one of borrowing the sum necessary to pay the funeral expenses, or of undergoing the disgrace of a pauper funeral. ”

“ Who could tell, on meeting each of these ladies face to face, more than her official age and the probable state of her husband’s purse?
The children of the street are equally different from one another both in character and appearance, and are often startlingly good-looking. They have shrill voices, clumsy clothes, the look of being small for their age, and they are liable to be comfortably dirty, but there the characteristics they have in common cease. ”

“ Experience shows how fatally easy it is for people to label all poverty as the result of drink, extravagance, or laziness. It is done every day in the year by writers and speakers and preachers, as well as by hundreds of well-meaning folk with uneasy consciences. They see, or more often hear of, people whose economy is different from their own. Without trying to find out whether their own ideas of economy are practicable for the people in question, they dismiss their poverty as “the result of extravagance” or drink. ”

“ When the family have finished what she sets before them, she sees to washing of hands where the age of the washer is tender, and thankfully packs them all off again to afternoon school, having as likely as not called back the one who banged the door to tell him to go out again and “do it prop’ly.” The husband may not like his dinner put aside for him, in which case a second cooking is necessary. So much has to be done each day. The Lambeth woman has no joy in cooking for its own sake. ”

“ The railway arch roofs in a din which reduces the roar of trains continually passing overhead to a vibrating, muffled rumble. From either end of the arch comes a close procession of trams, motor-buses, brewers’ drays, coal-lorries, carts filled with unspeakable material for glue factory and tannery, motor-cars, coster-barrows, and people. It is a stopping-place for tramcars and motor-buses; therefore little knots of agitated persons continually collect on both pathways, and dive between the vehicles and descending passengers in order to board the particular bus or tram they desire. ”

“ The first remedy for this state of things which springs to the mind of the social reformer is a legal minimum wage. The discussion of a minimum wage, which is at the same time to be a family wage, is exceedingly difficult. We realise that wages are not now paid on a family basis. If they were we should not have 2,500,000 adult men receiving for full-time work a sum which the writer has no hesitation in saying is less than sufficient for the proper maintenance, and that on the lowest scale, of one adult person. ”

“ Children do not thrive on food they loathe, and men who are starting for a hard day’s work refuse even to consider the question. What is the mother to do? Of course, she gives them food they do like and can eat—bread and margarine or bread and jam, with a drop of hot weak tea. The women are very fond of Quaker oats when they can afford the luxury, and if milk is provided to drink with it. They can cook a little portion in a tin enamelled cup, and so escape the family saucepan. ”