About My Father's Business

Only those who are personally acquainted with such a district can conceive what is the condition of the children of its streets, and yet every ordinary wayfarer of the London thoroughfares may note to what a life some of them are committed. About the outskirts of the markets, round the entrances to railway stations, cowering in the shadows of dark arches, or scrambling and begging by the doors of gin-shops and taverns, the boys – and what is even worse, the girls – are to be seen daily and nightly, uncared for, till they have learnt how to claim the attention of a paternal government by an offence against the law. When once the child, who is a mere unnoted fraction of the population, has so far matriculated in crime as to warrant the interposition of the police, he or she becomes an integer of sufficient importance to be dealt with by a magistrate. Let an infancy of neglect and starvation lead to the reckless pilfering of a scrap of food from a counter, or the abstraction of something eatable or saleable from a market-cart or a porter's sack, and the little unclassified wretch is added as another unit to a body recognised, and in some sense cared for, by the State. As a member of the great "criminal class," the juvenile thief becomes of immediate importance. Even though the few juvenile criminal reformatories be full, the gaol doors are open, and the teachings of evil companionship are consummated by the prison brand. The individual war against society gains strength and purpose, for society itself has acknowledged and resented it. The child has entered on a career, and unless some extra legal interposition shall succeed in changing the course of the juvenile offender by assuming a better guardianship, the boy may become an habitual thief, a full-fledged London ruffian; the girl – ?

It was with a deep sense of the terrible significance of this question, that a small party of earnest gentlemen met, twenty-seven years ago, in that foul neighbourhood to which I have referred, to consider what should be done to rescue the deserted and destitute girls, some of whom had already been induced to attend a ragged school, which was held in a dilapidated building that had once been a stable.

These thoughtful workers included among them two men of practical experience; one of them, Mr. H. R. Williams, the treasurer of the present institution, the other the Rev. William Tyler, whose bright genial presence has long been a power among the poor of that district, where even the little ragged children of the streets follow him, and lisp out his name as the faithful shepherd, who both gives and labours in one of the truest "cures of souls" to be found in all great London. To them soon came the present honorary secretary, Mr. J. H. Lloyd, a gentleman already familiar with teaching the poor in a neighbouring district no less wretched and neglected. They were the right men for the business in hand, and therefore they began by moving sluggish boards and commissions to put in force the sanitary laws – and, in spite of the opposition of landlords with vested interests in vile tenements let out to whole families of lodgers from garret to basement, and of the malignant opposition of owners of hovels where every abomination was rife, and pigs littered in the yards, while costermongers shared the cellars with their donkeys – insisted on the surrounding streets being paved and drained, and some of the houses being whitewashed and made weatherproof.

Nothing less could have been done, for the terrible cholera epidemic was already raging in that tangle of courts and alleys. Application was at once made for a share from the Mansion House Relief Fund, and the committee had to use every available shilling in order to supply food and medicine, blankets and clothing, to the wretched families; to visit whom, a regular relief corps was organised, carrying on its beneficent and self-denying work, until the plague began to be stayed. Then with scarcely any money, but with unabated hope and fervid faith, this little company of men and women began to consider what they should do to found a Refuge for the children (many of them orphans, and quite friendless) who were everywhere to be seen wandering about, or alone and utterly destitute in the bare rooms that had been their homes. There were already certain institutions to which boys could be sent, for then, as now, the provision for boys was far greater than for girls. This is one of the strange, almost inexplicable conditions of charitable effort, and at that time it was so obvious which was the greater need, that the committee at once determined to commence a building on a waste piece of land which had been purchased close by, and to devote it to the reception of thirty destitute girls, who should be snatched from deadly contamination, and from the association of thieves and depraved companions.

Surely, if slowly, the work went on, the plan of the building being so prepared that it could be extended as the means of meeting the growing need increased. Almost every brick was laid with thoughtful care, and when subscriptions came slowly in, the funds were furnished among the committee themselves rather than the sound of plane and hammer should cease; till at last, when the King Edward Ragged School and Girl's Refuge was completed, a large edifice of three spacious storeys had superseded the old ruinous stable amidst its fœtid yards and sheds, and, what was more, the building was paid for, and a family of children had been gathered within its sheltering walls. At the time of my first visit to the institution no more than twenty had been taken into this Refuge; but every foot of the building was utilised until the money should be forthcoming to add to the dormitories, and enable the committee to fulfil the purpose that it had in view.

In the large square-paved playground forty happy little members of the infant-school were marching to the slow music of a nursery song; and the numbers on the books were 196, in addition to 304 girls who came daily to be instructed in the great school-room, where they were taught to read, and write, and sew. A hundred and twenty boys were also being taught in the Ragged Church opposite, while seventy children over fifteen years of age attended evening classes, forty-two young men and women were in the Bible class, and a penny bank, a library of books, and a benevolent fund for the relief of poor children in the neighbourhood, were branches of the parent institution.

This, however, was seven years ago, and since that time so greatly has the work flourished, that the Ragged and Infant Schools have premises of their own on the other side of the way; and the great building having been completed by the addition of an entire wing, its original purpose is accomplished, and it is "The Girl's Refuge," of the King Edward Certified Industrial and Ragged Schools, Albert Street, Spitalfields.

It is to the receipt of munificent anonymous donations that the committee owe the completion of the building, and in order to extend the usefulness of their Refuge they have certified it under the provisions of the Industrial Schools Act of 1866. That this was in accordance with their ruling principle of making the most of every advantage at their command may be shown by the fact that when the School Board, almost appalled at the need for making immediate use of any existing organization, began to send cases to existing "Homes," only eight of these institutions could receive the children, and in these eight no more than forty-four vacancies existed for Protestant girls. The consequence of opening the King Edward Refuge under the Act was that it received nearly all the cases of the year, and that in the twelve months it was certified ninety new inmates after found an asylum within its walls.

If you were to go there with me to-day, you would not wonder that the supporters of this institution were anxious to erect another building in some part of London, where another hundred lambs straying in this great wilderness could be taken to the fold. Passing through the neat dormitories, with their rows of clean white beds; peeping into the big toy cupboard, where the kindly treasurer has recently placed a whole family of eighty dolls, and other attractive inventions to induce children to play, some of whom have never known before what play really meant; looking at the lavatory with its long rows of basins let into slate slabs, and each with its towel and clean bag for brush and comb; noting the quiet "Infirmary," with its two or three beds so seldom needed, and remarking that from topmost floor to the great laundry with its troughs and tubs, a constant supply of hot water provides alike for warmth and cleanliness, I begin to wonder what must be the first sensations of a poor little dazed homeless wanderer on being admitted, washed, fed, and neatly clothed. Why, the two kitchens – that one with the big range, where most of the cooking is done, and the other cosy farmhouse-looking nook, with its air of comfort – must be a revelation to all the senses at once. Then there are the highly-coloured prints on the walls, the singing of the grace before meat; the regular and wholesome food; the discipline (one little rebel is already in bed, whither she has been sent for misconduct, and an elder girl demurely brings up her slice of bread and mug of milk and water on a plate); the provision for recreation; the occasional visits of parents (many of them unworthy of the name) at stated seasons; the outings to the park, the Bethnal Green Museum, and other places; the Christmas treat; the summer presents of great baskets of fruit; the rewards and prizes; the daily instruction in such domestic work as fits them for becoming useful household servants. What a wonderful change must all these things present to the children of the streets, whose short lives have often been less cared for than those of the beasts that perish! Everywhere there are marks of order, from the neat wire baskets at the foot of each bed in which the girls place their folded clothes before retiring to rest, to the wardrobe closets and the great trays of stale bread and butter just ready for tea. Everywhere there are evidences of care and loving kindness, from the invalid wheel-chair – the gift of the treasurer to the infirmary – to the splendid quality of the "long kidney" potatoes in the bucket, where they are awaiting the arrival of to-morrow's roast mutton, three days being meat dinner days, while one is a bread and cheese, and two are farinaceous pudding days.

As we sit here and sip our tea – for I am invited to tea with the committee – and are waited on by three neat and pretty modest little women – one of them, a girl of eight, so full of child-like grace and simplicity, that there would be some danger of her being spoiled if she were not quite used to a little petting – who can help looking at the inmates now assembling quite quietly at the other end of the room, and thinking that in some of those faces "their angels," long invisible because of neglect and wrong, are once more looking through, calm, happy, and with a hope that maketh not ashamed. Do you see that still rather sullen-looking girl of thirteen. She came here an incorrigible young thief – her father, a tanner's labourer, and out at work from five in the morning – her mother bedridden – her home was the streets – her companions a gang of juvenile thieves such as haunt Bermondsey, and make an offshoot of the population of a place till recently called "Little Hell."

That girl, aged ten, was sent out to beg and to sing songs, and was an adept in the art of pretending to have lost money. There is the daughter of a crossing-sweeper, who cut his throat, and yonder a child of nine, driven from home, and charged with stealing, as her sister also is, in another Refuge; and close by are two girls, also sisters, who were found fatherless and destitute, wandering about famishing and homeless, except for a wretched room, with nothing in it but two heaps of foul straw. I need not multiply cases: and but for the known power of love and true human interest, in which the very Divine love is incarnated, you would wonder where some of these children obtained their quiet docile manner, their fearless but modest demeanour, their bright, quiet, sweet faces.

One case only let me mention, and we will go quietly away, to think of what may be done in such a place by the discipline of this love and true Christian interest. Do you see that emaciated little creature – the pale, pinched shadow of a child sitting at a table, where some of her companions tend her very gently? She is the daughter of a woman who is an incorrigible beggar. She has never known a home, and for four out of her eight years of life has been dragged about the street an infant mendicant; has slept in common lodging-houses; and in her awful experience could have told of thieves' kitchens, of low taverns, and of the customs of those vile haunts where she had learnt the language of obscenity and depravity. But that has become a hideous, almost forgotten dream, and she is about to awaken to a reality in a world to which the present tenderness with which she is cared for is but the lowest threshold. It is only a question of a month or two perhaps. One more bright sunny holiday with her schoolmates in the pleasant garden of the treasurer, at Highgate – whither they all go for a whole happy day in the summer – and she will be in the very land of light before the next haytime comes round. She wants for nothing – wine and fruit and delicate fare are sent for her by kind sympathetic hands; but she is wearing away, not with pain, but with the exhaustion of vital power, through the privations of the streets. From the Refuge she will go home – a lost lamb found, and carried to the eternal fold.

But another building has been found; a large, old-fashioned mansion in St. Andrew's Road, close to the Canal Bridge at Cambridge Heath, and there the more advanced inmates of this original home in Spitalfields are to be drafted into classes whence they will go to take a worthy part in the work of the world, so soon as the necessary subscriptions enable the committee to increase the number of lambs rescued from the wolves of famine and of crime.

WITH THE SICK

The memory of the pleasant summer holiday remains with many of us when we have come back again to the duties of the work-a-day world, and it will be good for us all if the gentle thoughts which that time of enjoyment brought with it remain in our hearts, to brighten our daily lives by the influences that suggest a merciful and forbearing temper.

It is perhaps remarkable that few of the charitable institutions at places to which holiday-makers resort are to any commensurate extent benefited by the contributions of those visitors who, while they are engaged in pursuing their own pleasures, seldom give themselves time to think that as they have freely received so they should freely give. Considering that while we are engaged in the absorbing business of money-making, or in the exacting engagements of our daily calling, we can afford little time for the investigation of those claims which are made upon us to help the poor and the needy, it might not altogether detract from the higher enjoyment of a period of leisure if we devoted a few spare hours to inquiring what is being effected for the relief of suffering in any place wherein we take up our temporary abode.

With some such reflection as this I stand to-day on the spot which to ordinary Londoners is most thoroughly representative of the summer "outing," without which no true Cockney can feel that he is content – a spot, too, which has become, for a large number of English men and women, and notably for a whole host of English children, the synonym for renewed health and strength – the head of Margate jetty.

It is a strange contrast, this moving crowd of people, with their bright dresses and gay ribbons fluttering in the breeze; the smiling faces of girls and women amidst a toss and tangle of sea-blown tresses; the green sparkle of the sea beneath the shining sky; the voices of sailors, the shrill laughter of boys and girls coming from the sands below; the gleam of white sails; the flitting wings of fisher-birds; the gay tumult of the High Street; the traffic of hucksters of shells and toys – a strange contrast to the scene which may be witnessed in and around that large building which we passed only yesterday as the Margate boat stood off from Birchington, and passengers began to collect coats and bags and umbrellas as they saw friends awaiting them on the landing-stage of this very jetty.

It seems a week ago; and just as these few hours seem to have separated us far from yesterday's work, and the routine of daily life, does the short distance along the High Street and past the railway station seem to separate us by an indefinite distance from the sickness and pain that is yet in reality so near. Even as we think of it in this way, the division is less marked, the contrast not so strange, for in that building Faith, Hope, and Charity find expression, and bring a cheerful radiance to those who need the care of skilful hands and the sympathy of loving hearts.

The name of the place is known all over England, for within its walls are assembled patients who are brought from the great towns of different shires, as well as from mighty London itself, that they may be healed of that dread malady, the most potent cure for which is to take them from the close and impure atmosphere of their crowded homes, and exchange the stifled breath of courts and alleys for the boundless æther of the sea.

For the building, to visit which I am here to-day, is the "Royal Sea-Bathing Infirmary, or National Hospital for the Scrofulous Poor, near Margate," and there are at this moment 220 men, women, and children within its sheltering wards. Stay – let me be accurate. I said within its wards; but here, as I pass the gates and the unpretentious house of the resident surgeon to the broad sea front of the building, I note that under the protecting screen of the wall that bounds the wide space of grass-plot and gravel-paths a row of beds are placed, and in each of them a patient lies basking in the warm sunlit air; while a little band of convalescents saunter gently, some of them with the aid of crutch or stick, with the enjoyment of a sense of returning strength. If I mistake not, there are two or three "Bath chairs" crunching the gravel paths a little further on, and down below upon the space marked out and separated from the outer world upon the beach, the two bathing-machines of the establishment are occupied by those for whom convalescence is growing into health.[3]

The full meaning of such a change can only be realised by those who know how terrible a disease scrofula becomes, not only in the deadly insidious form of consumption, but in the various deformities and distortions of the limbs of which it is the cause; and in those cases where, to the pain and depression of the disorder itself is added some terrible affection of the skin, which the sensitive patient knows can scarcely fail to be repulsive to those who witness it, unless, indeed they have learnt to regard it only as a reason for deeper compassion and for more earnest consolation.

Almost every form of the disorder is to be seen out here in the wide northern area of this inclusive building, which has long ago been bought and paid for, along with the three acres of freehold ground on which it stands.

Of the deep sympathy with which it has been supported by those who early learned to take an interest in its beneficent work, the fountain which has been erected in the centre of the green to the memory of the late Rev. John Hodgson, one of its trustees, is a mute witness. Mr. Hodgson laboured earnestly to secure those casual interests which might be obtained from the vast number of persons who visit Margate every year. In order to make the most of small regular contributions, he appealed for "five shillings a year," and since his death in 1870 this fund has increased, so that in one year nearly 6,000 subscribers had contributed £1,405 7s. 4d. Never was holiday charity more appropriately applied, as anybody who will visit the institution itself may witness in those long wards beyond the open passage, to which the card of Dr. Rowe, one of the three visiting surgeons, has directed me.

Since the first establishment of the institution, seventy-seven years ago, when sixteen cases were treated as a beginning, above 29,000 patients, from London and all parts of the country, have received relief; and to-day the number in the institution (taking no account of a contingent of "out-patients") includes 42 men, 50 women, and 120 children, none of whom are local cases, but all from other parts of England, whence they come frequently from a long distance.

In each of the six wards, of which four are on the ground floor, there is a head-nurse and an assistant, with six helpers for the children's, and four for the adult department, beside the night nurses, who sit up in case of any emergency. There is accommodation for 250 sufferers and for the 40 nurses, attendants, and domestics required for the service of the hospital; so the 220 patients there now, represent the approaching period when a new wing will have to be added, even if only the urgent cases are to be admitted.

The year's list of occupants of the 250 beds shows a total of 721 patients, of whom 614 had been discharged in January, 399 being either cured or very greatly benefited, 171 decidedly benefited, and only 44 obviously uncured; a very large amount of actual gain to humanity, when we reflect on the conditions of the disease to remedy which the institution is devoted.

If out of 721 cases 399 are either cured or have received such marked benefit as to render their ultimate cure highly probable, it is an achievement worthy of the earnest work of which it is the result, a contribution to beneficent efforts well worth the £7,966 which has necessarily been expended in the provision, not only of the appliances which give comfort and rest, but of the generous food and drink which, with the glorious air from the sea, is the medicine necessary to build up the feeble frames and renew the impoverished blood of those to whom meal-times come to be welcome events in the day, instead of merely languid observances.

Down in the kitchen, with its great cooking range and its capacious boilers, there are evidences of that "full diet" which is characteristic of the place; and it is difficult to decide which are the most suggestive, the long row of covered japanned jugs which hang conveniently to the dresser-shelf, and are used for the conveyance of "gravy," or the mighty milk-cans standing in a corner, ready to be taken away when the evening supply comes in from the Kentish dairies. Half a pound of cooked meat for dinner is the daily allowance for each man and for every boy over fourteen years of age, while women and girls receive six ounces, and children four ounces. Breakfast consists of coffee and bread-and-butter, varied in the afternoon by tea, and supper of bread and cheese for adults, and bread and butter for children. Roast and boiled meat is served on alternate days, with accompanying vegetables, and there are three "pudding days" for those who can manage this addition to the fare; while every man and woman may have a pint of porter, and each child a pint of table ale, at the discretion of the doctors. This, of course, represents the ordinary diet, in which specific differences are made for special cases where other or daintier food is required. Perhaps I should have said that this is the scale adopted in the refectory, a large airy room, to the long table in which the patients who are able to "get about" are now advancing with a cheerful premonition of dinner. There is no space to spare, and there are at present no funds to spend in additional building, so that this great airy refectory is used as chapel and assembly room. The Bread of Life, as well as the temporal bread, is distributed here; and those who would object to the necessity may either contribute to build another room, or may come and learn how every meal in such a place, and for such a cause as this, should become a sacrament. Many varieties of the forms taken by scrofulous disease may be seen here; and yet the hopeful looks, the cheerful influence of the bright summer weather, the green glimpses of the sea through doors and windows, and the fresh bracing air, impart to these sufferers an expressive lively briskness, which somehow removes the more painful impressions with which we might expect to witness such an assembly.