How does a working man’s wife bring up a family on 20s. a week? Assuming that there are four children, and that it costs 4s. a week to feed a child, there would be but 4s. left on which to feed both parents, and nothing at all for coal, gas, clothes, insurance, soap, or rent. Four shillings is the amount allowed the foster-mother for food in the case of a child boarded out by some Boards of Guardians; therefore it would seem to be a justifiable figure to reckon upon. But for a woman with 20s. a week to spend it is evidently ridiculously high. If the calculation were to be made upon half this sum, would it be possible? The food for the children in that case would amount to 8s. To allow the same amount to each parent as to each child would not be an extravagance, and we should on that basis arrive at the sum of 12s. a week for the food of six people. That would leave 8s. for all other expenses. But rent alone may come to 6s. or 7s., and how could the woman on 20s. a week manage with 1s., or perhaps 2s., for coal, gas, insurance, clothes, cleaning materials, and thrift?

The usual answer to a question of this kind is that the poor are very extravagant. It is no answer. It does not fit the question. But what matter if only it saves people from thinking? Another answer sometimes given is that everything in districts where people are poor is cheaper, because the people are poor, than it would be in districts where people are rich. Now, is that so? If it were, it might in some degree help to solve the problem.

To take the item of rent:—a single room in Lambeth, 15 feet by 12 feet, upstairs, with two windows—a good room—costs a poor man 4s. a week. A house containing eighteen rooms in South Kensington, for rent, rates, and taxes, may cost a rich man £250 a year. If the rich man were to pay 4s. a week for every 20 square yards of his floor space, he would pay, not £250 a year, but £285. If he were to pay 4s. a week for the same amount of cubic space for which the Lambeth man is paying his 4s., he would pay, not £250 a year, but £500. Added to which he gets an elaborate system of water laid on (hot and cold), baths, waste pipes and sinks from top to bottom of the house. He also gets an amount of coal-cellarage which enables him to buy his coal cheap, and he gets good air and light and space round his house, so that he can keep his doctor’s bills down. He certainly has a better bargain for his £250 a year than the poor man has for his 4s. a week. Therefore it is not true to say that a family can be brought up on 20s. a week in Lambeth because a poor man can make a better bargain over his rent than can a rich man. As a matter of fact, we see that he actually pays more per cubic foot of space than the rich man does.

A comparison might be made in something like the following way:

If the man with £2,000 a year paid one-third of his income in rent, rates, and taxes, he would pay £666 a year, while the man with £500 a year would pay £166, and they would both be better able to afford these sums than the poor man is able to afford his £20 16s. Allowing that each of them has a wife and four children to maintain, there would at least be enough left in both families to give sufficient nourishment to every member. Fewer servants might be kept, there might be less travelling, plainer clothes, and less saving, but enough to eat there would 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?

To find the answer to this question, an analysis was made of the conditions of thirty-one families with three or more children who happened to come within the scope of the investigation. The analysis took the form of a comparison of the death-rate in those families as related to the number of children in each, the household allowance of each, and the amount paid in rent by each. Household allowance was chosen rather than wage, as being necessarily in closer touch with household expenditure than is the actual wage, from which a varying amount of pocket-money for the man is generally taken.

Amount paid in rent was chosen rather than number of rooms, because low rent, though often meaning fewer rooms, may quite as likely mean basement rooms, or unusually small rooms, or rooms in a very old cottage below the level of an alley-way. One good upstairs room may cost as much as a couple of dark and damp basement rooms, and, though that one room may mean horrible overcrowding for a family of five or six persons, it may nevertheless be a wiser and healthier home than the two-roomed basement, where the overcrowding would nominally be less. As a matter of fact, owing to insufficient beds and bedding, the whole family would probably sleep in one of the two basement rooms, and therefore the air space at night would be no more adequate than in one room upstairs, while bronchitis and rheumatism would be added to the dangers of overcrowding.

The percentages given in the little table on p. 26 are calculated approximately to the nearest whole number below.

It is interesting to note that, while the death-rate increases from nothing in the case of families with only three children to 40 per cent. and over in the case of families with ten or eleven children, the intermediate percentages do not follow in numerical order. Families with five children have a worse death-rate than families with six, seven, or eight.

In the same way, if you compare death-rates according to household allowances, the death-rate of families with between 20s. and 22s. a week is actually higher than that of families with less than 20s.

Thirty-one Families with Three or More Children taken within the Investigation.

Total of 186 children; 46 dead; death-rate, 24·7.

Arranged according to Number in Family.

Arranged according to Household Allowance.

Arranged according to Rent.

(See Appendix A, p. 42.)

When, however, the amount paid in rent is the basis of the arrangement, the death-rate rises from 12 per cent. to 40 per cent. as the rent gets less.

It is hardly necessary to point out that the death-rate is a rough-and-ready test, and not to be considered as a close indication. If it were practicable to use the general health of those alive as well as the death-rate, it would be far better. Also, of course, no one of the three arrangements is independent of the other two. Moreover, the numbers are few. The results of the analysis, however, though proving nothing, were considered interesting enough to encourage the making of the same analysis of thirty-nine cases of families with three or more children, taken from the records of the weighing-room at Moffat’s Institute (see p. 28). The two lists were kept separate, as the cases at Moffat’s Institute had been passed by no doctor, and hereditary disease may be considered to be more rampant among them. Added to this the wages are, on the whole, lower than the wages of families within the limits of the investigation.

It is curious that the death-rate in the second table for families paying under 6s. rent is much the same as it is in the first. The great difference between the two tables lies in the far larger death-rate in families paying over 6s. rent shown in the second table, where disease and insecurity and poverty were certainly greater factors.

Thirty-nine Families with Three or More Children taken from without the Investigation.

Total of 223 children; 70 dead; death-rate, 31·3.

Arranged according to Number in Family.

Arranged according to Household Allowance.

Arranged according to Rent.

(See Appendix B, p. 44.)

It is not pretended that the two tables do more than indicate that decent housing has as much influence on children’s health as, given a certain minimum, the quality and quantity of their food. That is to say, it is as important for a young child to have light, air, warmth, and freedom from damp, as it is for it to have sufficient and proper food.

The kind of dwelling to be had for 7s. or 8s. a week varies in several ways. If it be light, dry, and free from bugs, if it be central in position, and if it contain three rooms, it will be eagerly sought for and hard to find. Such places exist in some blocks of workmen’s dwellings, and applications for them are waiting long before a vacancy occurs, provided, of course, that they are in a convenient district. There are even sets of three very small rooms at a rental of 5s. 6d. in one or two large buildings. These are few in number, snapped up, and tend to go to the man with not too large a family and in a recognised and permanent position.

Perhaps the next best bargain after such rooms in blocks of workmen’s dwellings is a portion of a small house. These small houses are let at rents varying from 10s. to 15s., according to size, condition, and position. They are let to a tenant who is responsible to the landlord for the whole rent, and who sublets such rooms as she can do without in order to get enough money for the rent-collector. She is often a woman with five or six children, who would not, on account of her large family, be an acceptable subtenant. If she is a good woman of business, it is sometimes possible for her to let her rooms advantageously, and stand in herself at a low rental—as rents go in Lambeth. But there is always a serious risk attached to the taking of a whole house—the risk of not being able to sublet, or, if there are tenants, of being unable to make them pay. Many a woman who nominally stands at a rent of 6s. or 6s. 6d. for the rooms which she keeps for her own use is actually paying 11s. to 15s. a week, or is running into debt at the rate of 5s. to 10s. a week because of default on the part of her lodgers.

The ordinary housing for 8s. a week consists generally of three rooms out of a four-roomed house where the responsible tenant pays 10s. or 11s. for the whole, and sublets one small room for 2s. to 3s., or of three or four rooms out of a five- or six-roomed house where the whole rent might be 14s. or 15s., and a couple of rooms may be sublet at 6s. or 7s. Some of the older four-roomed houses are built on a terrible plan. The passage from the front door runs along one side of the house straight out at the back. Two tiny rooms open off it, a front one and a back one. Between these two rooms, at right angles to the passage, ascends a steep flight of stairs. Because of the narrowness of the house the stairs have no landing at the top, but continue as stairs until they meet the wall. Where the landing should be, but is not, two doors leading into a front bedroom and a back stand opposite one another, and open directly on to the steps themselves. Coming out of a bedroom with a child in their arms, obscuring their own light from the door behind them, many a man and woman in Lambeth has trodden on the edge of a step and fallen down the stairs to the ground below. There is no hand-rail, nothing but the smooth wall on each side.

Of the four little rooms contained in such a house, perhaps not one will measure more than 12 feet the longer way, and there may be a copper wedged into the tiny kitchen. A family of eight persons using three rooms in a house of this kind might let off the lower front room to an aunt or a mother at a rent of 2s. 6d. a week, live in the kitchen, and sleep in the two upstairs rooms. The advantage of such a way of living is its privacy. The single lodger, even if not a relative, is less disturbing than would be another family sharing another house. When the lodger is a relative, a further advantage is that a child is often taken into its grandmother’s or aunt’s room at night, and the terrible overcrowding is relieved just to that extent.

In some districts four rooms may be had for 8s. a week—on the further side of Kennington Park, for instance. Here the plan of the house is more modern. The stairs face the front door, have a hand-rail and any light which the passage affords. The front room may be 12 feet square, and the kitchen, cut into by the stairs, 10 feet square. There is a tiny scullery at the back, which is of enormous value, as the 10 feet square kitchen is the living-room of the family—sure to be a fairly large one or it would not take four rooms. Upstairs are three rooms. Two at the back will be very small, and the front one, extending the whole breadth of the house, perhaps 15 feet by 12 feet. A family of ten persons, now living in a house like this, lets off one of the small back bedrooms at a rental of 2s., and occupies the four remaining rooms at a cost of 8s. a week. The copper belongs to the woman renting the house, who makes what arrangements she pleases with her lodger in regard to its use.

There are four-roomed cottages in Lambeth where there is no passage at all. The front door opens into the front room. The room behind opens out of the front room. The stairs lead out of the room behind, and twist up so as to serve two communicating rooms above. Here the upstairs tenants are forced to pass through both the rooms of the lower tenants every time they enter or leave the house. The inconvenience and annoyance of this is intense. Both exasperated families live on the edge of bitter feud.

There are two-roomed cottages reached by alley-ways, where both tiny rooms are below the level of the pathetic garden at the door. Here one sanitary convenience serves for two cottages. Here the death-rate would be high, but not so high as the death-rate in the dismal basements.

Where two families share a six-roomed house, the landlady of the two probably chooses the ground-floor, with command over the yard and washing arrangements. The upstairs people contract with her for the use of the copper and yard on one day of the week. The downstairs woman hates having the upstairs woman washing in her scullery, and the upstairs woman hates washing there. Differences which result in “not speaking” often begin over the copper. Three rooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs would be the rule in such a house, the downstairs woman being answerable to the landlord for 13s. a week, and the upstairs woman paying her 6s. Each woman scrubs the stairs in turn—another fruitful source of difficulty. Some of these houses are frankly arranged for two families, although the landlord only recognises one tenant. In such cases, though there is but one copper, there will be a stove in an upstairs room. In some houses the upstairs people have to manage with an open grate and a hob, and nearly all of them have to carry water upstairs and carry it down again when dirty.

On the whole, the healthiest accommodation is usually to be found in well-managed large blocks of workmen’s dwellings. This may be as dear as three rooms for 9s., or it may be as cheap as three very small rooms for 5s. 6d. The great advantages are freedom from damp, freedom from bugs, light and air on the upper floors, water laid on, sometimes a yard where the children can play, safe from the traffic of the street. But there are disadvantages. The want of privacy, which is very great in the cheaper buildings, the tendency to take infection from other families, the noise on the stairs, the inability to keep a perambulator, are some of them. Then there is no such thing as keeping the landlord waiting. The rent must be paid or the tenant must quit. The management of most buildings exacts one or two weeks’ rent in advance in order to be on the safe side. A tenant thus has one week up her sleeve, as it were, but gets notice directly she enters on that week. In some buildings the other people, kindly souls, will lend the rent to a steady family in misfortune. A carter’s wife—one of the cases in the investigation—had her rent paid for ten weeks, while her husband was out of work and bringing in odd sums far below his usual wage, by the kindness of the neighbours, who saw her through. She was in good buildings, paying a low rent, and as she said, “If I’d a-got out of this I’d never a-got in agen.” She paid off the money when her husband was in work again at the rate of 3s. 6d. a week.

The three-quarters of a small house or the half of a larger house are likely to be less healthy than “buildings,” because houses are less well-built, often damp, often infested with bugs which defy the cleanest woman, have as a rule no water above the ground-floor, and may have fearful draughts and no proper fireplace. Their advantages are the superior privacy and possibly superior quiet, their accessibility from the street, and, above all, the elasticity with regard to rent. 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.

Rents of less than 6s. a week are generally danger-signals, unless the amount is for a single room. Two rooms for 5s. 6d. are likely to be basement rooms or very small ground-floor rooms, through one of which, perhaps, all the other people in the house have to pass. One of two such rooms visited for fifteen months measured 8 feet by 12 feet, had doors in three sides of it, and was the only means of exit at the back of the house.

Two sets of basement rooms at 5s. 6d. visited during the investigation were extremely dark and damp. In both cases the amount of coal burned was unusually large, as was also the amount of gas. One of these basements was reached by stairs from within the house, the other from a deep area without. The former was warmer, but more airless, while the latter was impossible to warm in any way. The airlessness of basement dwellings is much enhanced by the police regulations, which insist on shut windows at night on account of the danger of burglary! Both the women in these two homes were languid and pale, and suffered from anÆmia. The first had lost three children out of seven; the second, one out of four.

Four and six paid for two rooms meant two tiny rooms below the level of the alley-way outside—rooms which measured each about 12 feet square. A family of six persons lived in them. Four children were living, and five had died.

The question of vermin is a very pressing one in all the small houses. No woman, however clean, can cope with it. Before their confinements some women go to the trouble of having the room they are to lie in fumigated. In spite of such precautions, bugs have dropped on to the pillow of the sick woman before the visitor’s eyes. One woman complained that they dropped into her ears at night. Another woman, when the visitor cheerily alluded to the lovely weather, answered in a voice of deepest gloom: “Lovely fer you, miss, but it brings out the bugs somethink ’orrible.” The mothers accept the pest as part of their dreadful lives, but they do not grow reconciled to it. Re-papering and fumigation are as far as any landlord goes in dealing with the difficulty, and it hardly needs saying that the effects of such treatment are temporary only. On suggesting distemper rather than a new paper in a stuffy little room, the visitor was met with the instant protest: “But it wouldn’t keep the bugs out a minute.” It would seem as though the burning down of such properties were the only cure.

The fault is not entirely that either of the sanitary authorities or of the immediate landlords. Nor is the blame to be given to the people living in these houses. In spite of being absurdly costly, they are too unhealthy for human habitation. Sanitation has improved vastly in the last dozen years, though there is still a great need for more qualified, authoritative women sanitary inspectors. But no inspection and no subsequent tinkering can make a fundamentally unhealthy house a proper home for young children. The sanitary standard is still deplorably low. That is simply because it has to be low if some of these houses are to be considered habitable at all, and if others are to be inhabited by two, and often by three, families at the same time.

The landlords might use a different system with advantage to the great majority of their tenants. To insist on letting a whole house to tenants who are invariably unable to afford the rent of it is to contract out of half the landlord’s risks, and to leave them on the shoulders of people far less able to bear them. A woman who can barely stagger under a rent of 6s., 7s., or 8s., may at any moment find herself confronted with a rent of 10s. 6d. or 15s., because, in her desperate desire to let at all, she is forced to accept an unsatisfactory tenant. Turned into a landlord in her own person, she is wonderfully long-suffering and patient, but at the cost of the food of her family. If ejectment has to be enforced, she, not the real landlord, has to enforce it. She goes through great stress rather than resort to it. 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; they deplore a stopped-up drain without making an effective complaint, because they are afraid of being told to find new quarters if they make too much fuss. If they could or would take concerted action, they could right a great many of the smaller grievances. But, when all is said and done, these reforms could do very little as long as most of the present buildings exist at all, or as long as a family of eight persons can only afford two, or at most three, small rooms to live in. The rent is too dear; the houses are too old or too badly built, or both; the streets are too narrow; the rooms are too small; and there are far too many people to sleep in them.

The question is often asked why the people live where they do. Why do they not live in a district where rents are cheaper, and spend more on tram fares? 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. Probably they have relatives near by who would not see them come to grief without making great efforts to help them. Should the man go into hospital or into the workhouse infirmary, extraordinary kindness to the wife and children will be shown by the most stand-off neighbours, in order to keep the little household together until he is well again. A family who have lived for years in one street are recognised up and down the length of that street as people to be helped in time of trouble. These respectable but very poor people live over a morass of such intolerable poverty that they unite instinctively to save those known to them from falling into it. A family which moves two miles away is completely lost to view. They never write, and there is no time and no money for visiting. Neighbours forget them. It was not mere personal liking which united them; it was a kind of mutual respect in the face of trouble. Even relatives cease to be actively interested in their fate. A fish-fryer lost his job in Lambeth owing to the business being sold and the new owner bringing in his own fryer. The man had been getting 26s. a week, and owed nothing. His wife’s brothers and parents, who lived near by, combined to feed three of the four children; a certain amount of coal was sent in; the rent was allowed to stand over by a sympathetic landlady to whom the woman had been kind in her confinement; and at last, after nine weeks, the man got work at Finsbury Park at 24s. a week. Nearly £3 was owing in rent, but otherwise there was no debt. The family stayed on in the same rooms, paying 3s. a week extra as back rent, and the man walked daily from south of Kennington Park to Finsbury Park and back. He started at five in the morning, arrived at eight, and worked till noon, when he had four hours off and a meal. He was allowed to lie down and sleep till 4 p.m. Then he worked again till 10 p.m., afterwards walking home, arriving there at about one in the morning. A year of this life knocked him up, and he left his place at Finsbury Park to find one in a fish-shop in Westminster at a still slightly lower wage. The back rent is long ago paid off, and the family, now with five children, is still in the same rooms, though in reduced circumstances. When questioned as to why he had remained in Kennington instead of moving after his work, the man pointed out that the back rent would seem almost impossible to pay off at a distance. Then there was no one who knew them at Finsbury, where, should misfortune overtake them again, instead of being helped through a period of unemployment, they would have nothing before them but the “house.”

It is obvious that, in London at any rate, the wretched housing, which is at the same time more than they can afford, has as bad an influence on the health of the poor as any other of their miserable conditions. 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. or 8s. has been taken for rent, were of first-rate quality and sufficient in quantity, the night spent in such beds in such rooms in such houses would devitalise the children. It would take away their appetites, and render them more liable to any infection at home or at school. Taken in conjunction with the food they do get, it is no wonder that the health of London school-children exercises the mind of the medical officials of the London County Council.

APPENDIX A
LIST OF THIRTY-ONE FAMILIES, WITHIN THE INVESTIGATION, FROM WHICH TABLE OF COMPARISON IS COMPILED.

* These rooms are in buildings, upstairs and sanitary.

APPENDIX B
LIST OF THIRTY-NINE FAMILIES WITH THREE OR MORE CHILDREN, OUTSIDE THE INVESTIGATION, FROM WHICH TABLE OF COMPARISON IS COMPILED