About My Father's Business

This refuge at Newport Market had included destitute and starving boys among those who were brought to its shelter from the cruel streets, the dark arches of railways and of bridges, and the miserable corners where the houseless huddle together at night, long before its supporters could make provision for maintaining any of the poor little fellows in an industrial-school. But the work grew, and the means were found, first for retaining some of the juvenile lodgers who came only for a night's food, and warmth, and shelter, and afterwards for receiving them as inmates.

Some of these are sent to the Refuge by persons who are furnished with printed forms of application, or by mothers who can afford evident testimony that they can scarcely live on the few shillings they are able to earn by casual work as charwomen, or by the no less casual employments where the wages are totally inadequate to support a family; while a few lads have themselves applied for admission because they were orphans, or utterly destitute and abandoned by those on whom they might be supposed to have a claim.

A portion of the old building, which has been adapted to the purpose, and has been added as the need for increased space became pressing, is now devoted to the dormitories, play-room, and school-room of some fifty to sixty of this contingent of the great army of friendless children; and at the time of the last Report fourteen had but just left to be enlisted in military bands; two had become military tailors; situations had been found for others; while one had been regularly apprenticed to a tailor in London.

There are frequently several boys ready for such apprenticeship, for tailoring is the only regular trade taught, the time of the lads being occupied in learning to read, write, and cipher, to acquire the outlines of history and geography, and to take a place in the military band which is at this moment making the cranky old building resound with its performance on clarinets, hautboys, cornets, "deep bassoons," and all kinds of wind instruments, under the direction of an able bandmaster, who keeps the music up to the mark with a spirit which bespeaks confidence in the intelligence of his pupils.

This confidence is not misplaced, for during the past year eleven youthful recruits have been drafted from among these boys into the bands of various regiments, while there are above ninety applications still on the books for more musicians who have chosen this branch of the military service. It is a matter of choice, of course; and there are some who prefer to become sailors, or to go into situations and learn the trade of tailoring, that their instructors may be able to recommend them to respectable masters as apprentices.

But let us walk through the kitchen, and ascend the short zig-zag stairs which lead us by a passage to the school-room, where most of the boys are at work with their slates. Very few of the little fellows are more than thirteen years old, and some of them have been but a short time at school; but even those who came here totally uninstructed have made admirable progress, and some of the writing-books containing lessons from dictation are well worth looking at for their clean and excellent penmanship and fair spelling; while in arithmetic the boys who have been longest under tuition have advanced as far as "practice." There is nothing superfluous in school-room, work-room, or play-room – indeed, one might almost say that they are unfurnished, except for desks and forms and plain deal tables. The play-room is a lower portion of the old slaughter-house, with a high ceiling, to a beam in which is fixed a pair of ropes terminating in two large wooden rings by which the youthful gymnasts swing and perform all kinds of evolutions, while a set of parallel bars are among the few accessories.

It is evident that nothing is spent in mere ornament, and that the expenditure is carefully considered, though recreation, and healthy recreation too, is a part of the daily duty, which is regulated in a fashion befitting the rather military associations of the place. Even now, as the cheery superintendent, Mr. Ramsden, who was lately quartermaster-sergeant of the 16th Regiment, calls "Attention!" every boy is quickly on his feet and ready to greet us; and what is more, the boys seem to like this kind of discipline, for it is kind in its prompt demand for obedience, and the regularity and order includes a kind of self-reliance, which is a very essential part of education for lads who must necessarily be taught what they have to learn in a comparatively short time, and are then sent out where order and promptitude are of the utmost service to them. Economy is studied, but the recollection of the cheery kitchen suggests that there is no griping hard endeavour to curtail the rations necessary to support health and strength. In fact, the boys are sufficiently fed, warmly clothed, and are encouraged both to work and play heartily. Breakfast consists of bread and coffee; dinner of meat and vegetables three days in the week, fish on one day (Wednesday), pudding on Monday, soup on Friday, meat and cheese on Saturday; tea or coffee with bread and dripping, while on Sundays butter is an additional luxury both at breakfast and tea; and on Thursdays and Sundays tea is substituted for coffee at the evening meal. All the boys are decently and warmly clothed, and though only some of their number "take to music" as a profession, and choose to go into the military bands, they all receive instruction. They are taught to keep their own bunks and dormitories neat, and, in fact, do their own household work; while, morning and afternoon, personal trimness is promoted by the military "inspection" which is part of the discipline. There is half an hour's play after breakfast, another quarter of hour before dinner, three-quarters of an hour for "washing and play" after dinner, a quarter of an hour before tea, and from an hour and a half to two hours for boot-cleaning and play before bed-time, besides out-door exercise daily, except in wet weather, when drill and gymnastics take its place. They also go to Primrose Hill on Tuesday and Saturday afternoons, there to run in the fresh air and disport themselves in cricket, or such games as they can find the toys for, by the kindness of the committee or generous visitors. Even with these recreations, however, they find time to go through a very respectable amount of work in the fourteen hours between rising and bed-time; and the letters received from lads who have left the school are an evidence that they remember with pleasure and with gratitude the Refuge that became a home, and to which they attribute their ability to take a place which would have been denied to them without the aid which grew out of pity for their neglected childhood.

Here is a short epistle from one of the juvenile band, at Shorncliffe Camp, written a year or two ago: —

"I now take the pleasure of writing these few lines and I hope all the boys are all well, and all in the school and please Mr. Ramsden will you send me the parcel up that I took into the school it was laying in the bookcase in the school-room and I hope that all the boys are all getting on with their instruments and the snips with their work and I should like you to read it to the boys and I wish that you would let – answer it and I am getting on with my instrument very well, and I will be able to come and see you on Cristamas season."

This is a characteristic schoolboy letter, which shows how much boys are alike in all grades. The following is another letter from Shorncliffe: —

"Dear Sir,

"I received your kind and welcome letter along with mothers, and I wrote back to tell you we have all been enlisted and sworn in, and we expect to get our clothes next week and we all feel it our duty to express our deeply felt gratitude to you Mr. Dust and the Committee, and we are all very happy at present please give our respects to Mrs. Ramsden Sister Zillah Mr. McDerby Mr. Mason Mr. Goodwin Miss Cheesman and please remember us to all the boys. Leary is on sick furlough since the 15th of Decr. and has not returned yet and Brenan, Lloyd Graham McCarthy Henderson and all the others are very jolly at present and been out all the afternoon amongst the snow. So I conclude with kind thanks to one and all and believe me to be Dear Sir

"Your late pupil —"Band – Regt."

The following will show how the memory of the old slaughter-house and the school in Newport Market remains after the boys have left and have entered on a career. It is addressed from Warley Barracks: —

"Dear Sir

"I now take the opportunity of writing to you hoping you and all the rest of the school and the sister also. It is a long time since I left the school now and I dont suppose you would know me if I was to come and see you I was apprenticed out off the school along of J – R – to Mr W – in 1869 I think it was as a Tailor. I should like you to write and tell me if you know what rigment J – H – belong to his school number was 34 and mine was 35 me and him was great friends when we were in the school and I should like to know very much were he is. When I left the School Mr. L – was Supperintendant and I dont suppose I should know you sir if I was to see you I shall try to come down and see the School if I can on Christmas for I shall be on pass to London for seven days and I should like to know where J – H – is so as I should be able to see him. I have a few more words to say that is the school was the making of me and I am very thankful to the school for it so with kind love to you all

"I remain your humble servant,"Band – Regiment,"Warley Barracks, Essex.

"J – H – number was 34 and mine was 35.

"Excuse me addressing this Letter to you as I dont know anything about you sir."

There is something pleasant indeed in letters like these; and I for one am not surprised that the boys should go to their musical practice with a will.

They are just preparing to play something for our especial delight now, and so burst out, in a grand triumphant blast, with "Let the Hills Resound," after which we will take our leave, and, we hope, not without melody in our hearts. Just one word as we go through this kitchen again. Two West End clubs supply the Newport Market Refuge with the remnants of their well-stocked larders. Did it ever occur to you how many hungry children and poor men and women could be fed on the actual waste that goes on in hotels, clubs, inns, dining-rooms, and large and ordinary households every day? M. Alexis Soyer used to say that he could feed ten thousand people with the food that was wasted in London every day; and I am inclined to think he was not far wrong. At all events, an enormous salvage of humanity might be effected if only the one meal daily which might be made of "refuse" pieces of meat and bread, bones, cuttings of vegetables, cold potatoes, and general pieces – was secured to the thousands to whom "enough" would often indeed be "as good as a feast." To people who know how much that is really good for food – not the plate-scrapings and leavings, but sound and useful reversions of meat and bread and vegetables, bones, and unsightly corners of joints – is either suffered to spoil or is thrown at once into the waste-tub, both in hotels and private houses, the additional knowledge that there are hungry children in every district in London to whom a bowl of nourishing soup or a plate of minced meat and vegetables would be a boon, may easily be a pain, because of the inability to suggest how to organise the means of utilising what one is tempted to call undeserved plenty.

FEEDING THE MULTITUDE

I suppose there are people still to be found who have but a vague notion of what it is to be really hungry. They may be conscious of possessing a good appetite now and then, and having the means of obtaining food, and to a certain extent of choosing what they will eat, regard being rather "sharp set" as a luxury which gives additional zest to a dinner, enabling them to take off the edge of their craving with a plate of warm soup, and to consider what they would like "to follow."

Of course we most of us read in the papers of the distress of the poor during the winter, of the number of children for whom appeals are made that they may have a meal of meat and vegetables once or twice a week, of the aggregate of casual paupers during a given period, and of cases where "death accelerated by want and exposure" is the verdict of a coroner's jury; but we do not very easily realise what it is to be famished; have perhaps never experienced that stage beyond hunger – beyond even the faintness and giddiness that makes us doubt whether we could swallow anything solid, and would cause us to turn hopelessly from dry bread. There is no need here to detail the sufferings that come of starvation. They are dreadful enough; but if our charity needs the stimulus of such descriptions we are in a bad way, and are ourselves in danger of perishing for want of moral sustenance.

Those who need assurance of the hunger of hundreds of their poor neighbours need not go very far to obtain it. A quarter of an hour at the window of any common cook-shop in a "low neighbourhood," at about seven o'clock in the evening, when the steam of unctuous puddings is blurring the glass, and the odour of leg-of-beef soup and pease-pudding comes in gusts to the chilly street, should suffice. There is pretty sure to be a group of poor little eager-eyed pinch-nosed boys and girls peering wistfully in to watch the fortunate possessor of two-pence who comes out with something smoking hot on a cabbage-leaf, and begins to bite at it furtively before he crosses the threshold.

Of course, according to modern social political economy, it would be encouraging mendicity, and sapping the foundations of an independent character, to distribute sixpenny pieces amongst the juvenile committee of taste who are muttering what they would buy if only somebody could be found to advance "a copper." But it is to be hoped or feared (which?) that a good many people yet live who would instinctively feel in their pockets for a stray coin to expend on a warm greasy slab of baked or boiled, or on half a dozen squares of that peculiarly dense pie-crust which is sold in ha'porths. This is a vulgar detail; but somehow poverty and hunger are vulgar, and we should find it difficult to get away from them if we tried ever so hard. Even School Boards, peeping out upon the children perishing for lack of knowledge, find themselves in a difficulty, because there is no provision under the compulsory or any other clause for the children who are also perishing for lack of food. The Board beadle does not at present go about with soup-tickets in his pockets; and for the poor shivering shoeless urchins who are mustered in the big brick-built room where they assemble according to law there is no free breakfast-class.

It must one day become a question how they are to learn till they are filled. Grown people find it hard enough to fix their attention on the best advice or the most saving doctrine while they suffer involuntary hunger. The multitude must mostly be fed before they are taught. Even disciples have had a revelation of the Bread of Life in the breaking of bread that perishes. Do we still need a miracle to teach us that?

Happily, efforts are made to give meat to the hungry. During the winter weather food is distributed in various ways amidst some of those poverty-stricken neighbourhoods to which I am obliged to take you during our excursions; but the demand far exceeds the supply, and people suffer hunger at all seasons, though most of all in the time of bleak winds and searching cold.

I want you to come to-day to a kitchen which is open all the year round – the only kitchen of the kind in London which does not close its doors even when the spring-tide brings buds of promise on the shrubs in Leicester Square, and the London sparrow comes out from roofs and eaves, and preens his dingy plumage in the summer sun, as though Great Windmill Street had something in common with its name, and sweet country odours came from the region of the Haymarket.

For, you know, we are still in the district of Soho. I have but just now brought you out of Newport Market, and now we are in a very curious part of this vast strange city. The streets are dim and dingy, but not so squalid as you might have imagined. They are still and silent, too, as of a neighbourhood that has seen better days, and even in its poverty has a sense of gentility which is neither boisterous nor obtrusive.

You will remember that I referred to this neighbourhood of Soho when I spoke of those old French refugees who came and made industrial colonies in London after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This is the only really foreign quarter of London which has lasted until to-day; but that is to be accounted for by the fact that it became representative of no particular industry, and that, probably from the fact of many of the patrons of literature and art having then town houses about Leicester and Soho Squares, the more artistic refugees took up their abode in the adjacent streets.

From the time when William Hogarth painted his picture of the Calais Gate till only a short time ago, when refugees fled from besieged Paris to find some poor and wretched lodging in the purlieus of Cranbourne Street, where they might live in peace and hear their native tongue, this has been the resort of poor foreigners in London. It almost reminds one of some of the smaller streets of a continental city; and as we look at the queer shabby restaurants, and the shops with strange names painted above them in long yellow letters, we almost expect to find the pavement change to cobble-stones, and to see some queer wooden sign dangle overhead, so like is the place to the small bourgeois quarter that in our earlier days lay behind the Madeleine and the Porte St. Denis.

For here is an actual crêmerie– a queer compound of cook-shop and milkseller's – with a couple of bright dairy cans outside the door, and a long loaf or two amidst the cups and plates and sausages in the dingy window. Over the way you see "Blanchisseuse" in large letters; and next door is a laiterie, which differs from a crêmerie as a café alone differs from a café restaurant with its "commerce de vins" painted in big capitals in front of a long row of sour-looking bottles and a green calico curtain. It is a quaint jumble, all the way to Dean Street, and till we reach the edge of the Haymarket – a jumble of Brown and Lebrun, of Jones and Jean, of Robin (fils) and Robinson; but for all the little musty-smelling cafés, the blank bare-windowed restaurants, the crêmeries, and the boulangeries, there is nothing of a well fed look about the district, especially just at this corner, leading as it seems to a stable-yard or the entrance to a range of packers' warehouses. There is one open front here – is it a farrier's or a blacksmith's shop? – where they appear to be doing a stroke of business, however, for there is a clinking, and a fire, and a steam; but the steam has a fragrant odour of vegetables – of celery and turnips, of haricots and gravy – the clink is that of basins and spoons getting ready, and the fire is that of the boiler which simmers two mighty cauldrons.

Step to the front, and you will see in big white letters right across the house, "Mont St. Bernard Hospice." You may well rub your eyes, for you are in the heart of London, and stand in Ham Yard, Leicester Square, before the soup-kitchen that is open all the year.

There is something very appetising in the steam that arises from both these huge cauldrons, one of which is the stock-pot, containing bones, remnants of joints (not plate-clearings), and reversions of cold meat, &c., from two West End clubs. To this are added vegetables – celery, haricot beans, or barley – making it a fresh palatable stock, not remarkable for meatiness, but still excellent in flavour, as you may find for yourself if you join me in a luncheon here. But the real strengthening gravy has yet to be added, and the cauldron on the left hand is full of it – real, genuine gravy soup, made from raw meat and bones purchased for this purpose. As soon as this has simmered till it is thoroughly ready, the contents of the two cauldrons are mixed, and the result is a delicious stew, which is ready to be turned out into these yellow pint basins, for the hungry applicants, who will sit down at one of these two deal tables, each of which has its rough clean form, or to be dispensed to those who bring jugs, bowls, cans, saucepans, kettles, pipkins – any and almost every receptacle in which they can carry it steaming away to their families.

Let us stand here and see them come in. Here is a poor famishing fellow, who looks with eager eyes at the savoury mess. He has evidently seen better days. There is an unmistakable air of education about him, and as he sits down with his basin and spoon, and the handful of broken bread, which is added to the soup from one of a series of clean sacks emptied for the purpose, the superintendent, Mr. Stevens, scans him with a quick eye, and will probably speak to him before he leaves. There is a foreigner – an Italian, by the look of his oval olive face – who takes his place very quietly, and as quietly begins to eat; and yonder a famished-looking, rough fellow, who has already devoured the basinful with his eyes, and is evidently in sore need. Men, women, and children, or, at all events, boys and girls, come and present their tickets, and receive this immediate relief, against which surely not the most rigorous opponent to mendicancy can protest. The cadger and the professional beggar do not go to the soup-kitchen where nothing is charged, for they do not need food, and will only see a ticket where it is likely to be accompanied by the penny which will buy a quart. Be sure that there are few cases here which are not so necessitous that they are not far from starvation; and many of them represent actually desperate want.

The tickets for obtaining this prompt relief – often only just in time to save some poor creature from utter destitution and crime, and as often administered when a family is without food, and yet clings to the hope of finding work to prevent that separation which they must submit to by becoming paupers – are placed in the hands of clergymen, doctors, district visitors, Bible-women, and those who know the poor, and can feel for them when in hard times they pawn furniture, tools, and clothes, and suffer the extremity of want, before they will apply for parochial relief, and have offered to them the alternative of "going into the house."

The annals of the poor, from which extracts occasionally appear in the newspapers in the accounts of coroners' inquests, prove to what dreadful sufferings many decent but destitute people will submit rather than become recognised paupers; and no system of charitable relief outside the workhouse walls will be effectual or useful which does not recognise and respect this feeling. Who would let the possible accident of some unworthy person getting a gratuitous pint of soup stand in the way of a work such as we see going on here, where one year's beneficent action includes above ten thousand persons relieved? – a large number of whom are temporarily taken into the Hospice, as we shall see presently, while a great contingent is represented by the family tickets, which enable poor working men and women from various districts in London to carry away a gallon of strong nourishing soup, and an apronful of bread to their hungry little ones. You see that great heap of pieces of fine bread – slices, hunches, remnants of big loaves, dry toast, French bread, brown bread, and rolls – all placed in a clean wooden bin, they also come from the two great West End clubs before mentioned, and are so appreciated by the applicants for relief (they being usually good judges of quality) that you may note a look of disappointment if the stock of club bread has been exhausted, and a portion of one of the common loaves bought for the purpose is substituted. The small broken bread in those clean sacks is club bread also – the crumbs from rich men's tables, but clean, and thoroughly good, fit for immediate addition to the soup, which a hungry company of diners consume in a painfully short space of time.

They are not inhabitants of this district, either; comparatively few come from the immediate neighbourhood, though, of course, some poor families of the adjacent streets and alleys, and occasionally foreign workmen – many of them adepts in artistic employments, who are in the land of the stranger and in want – come here and have not only the help of a meal, but the kind inquiry, the further aid that will sustain hope, and enable them to look for work, and find the means of living. Londoners from Kentish Town, Lambeth, Shoreditch, and Chelsea – poor hungry men and women from all parts of the great city – find their way here to obtain a dinner; and it is extremely unlikely that they would leave even the least profitable employment and walk so far for the sake of a basin of soup. Food alone is offered, not money, and there is little probability of imposition when there is so little to be gained by the attempt. But while the great cauldrons are being emptied, let us hear what they do at this "Mont St. Bernard Hospice" at the Christmas season.