Not very far from the London Docks, and within a stone’s throw of that refined and odoriferous thoroughfare known as Leman Street, Whitechapel, there is situated a large, fine building, with entrances commanding two streets, and a summit that towers very nobly among the adjacent roofs. Once upon a time the Royal Brunswick Theatre stood where that house now stands, and vestiges of the old structure still linger in the form of some pillars or columns at the main entrance, and various underground avenues, in whose atmosphere, despite forty years of very strong marine flavouring, there seems to lurk to this hour a kind of ghostly smell of ancient orange-peel. The house is known far and wide as the Well Street Home for Sailors, and I once accepted an invitation from the manager to overhaul the premises, and judge for myself to what extent the Home improves upon the comforts and privileges the sailor flatters himself he may obtain at a common seamen’s boarding or lodging house. I must own that I approached the place with a certain amount of foregone prejudice. Establishments known as Harbours of Refuge, Seaman’s Sheet Anchor, Ports of Call, and the like, all mariners who will not sham piety for the sake of a coat, or a plug of tobacco, or a meal of bread and meat will keep to windward of. Jack objects to this kind of classification. He dislikes to be dealt with as something apart from the ordinary run of mortals; to be preached to in language which the minister may fondly imagine to be the dialect of the sea; to have tracts doled out to him in the form of marine allegories, as if he could comprehend no other allusions to life and death, and sin and virtue, than those which referred to heaving billows and storm-driven barks and broken tackle; and when ashore, to make one of a flock of seamen, to meet nobody but seamen, to go to prayers in a church filled with seamen;—to be treated, indeed, as if he ought to carry a badge or number on his back, as if his whole class were socially tabooed. So, thinking this Well Street Home to have something of the old unpleasant and ill-judging form of charity mixed up in its composition, and considerably disturbed in mind by the first four lines of its forty-seventh annual report, I entered the Dock Street entrance, never doubting but that I should meet with plenty of features to account for the sailor’s preference for the grimy, frowsy, and squalid lodging-houses, of which there were some dozens in the neighbourhood.

I found myself in a very large hall filled with seamen. There was perhaps hardly a nationality that was not represented. Englishmen and Scandinavians were plentiful; but in numerous places were black and yellow skins, the sight of which carried the mind thousands of miles east and south, and brought up visions of skies different indeed from the brown heavens which were careering in gloomy folds over the chimney-pots visible through the windows. In a few moments I was joined by the manager, and we proceeded to inspect the premises. In a manner it was like surveying St. Paul’s Cathedral. Big as the building looked outside, it seemed four times as large again when I began to roam about it. Room led into room, wing conducted into wing, until methought Whitechapel itself might seem to lack area enough for the accommodation of this most ramified and capacious interior. Behind a glass front stood a porter wading through several huge piles of letters in search of those expected by some dozen men, who eagerly waited while he looked.

“The correspondence here must be enormous,” said I, “judging by those samples.”

“It is enormous,” answered the manager. “Thousands upon thousands of letters and telegrams are received and distributed in the course of the year.”

We entered a large room with a circular counter in it, behind which were several clerks hard at work over their ledgers, while a number of seamen were drawing or paying in money.

“This is the bank,” said the manager; “here we receive such moneys as the men choose to deposit, and credit them with the wages which they have to receive from the ships they have been discharged from. Here, too, we cash their allotment notes, and what we do in that way you may guess by looking at that long box there, that is full of allotment notes which are maturing at various dates.”

“But,” said I, “I thought the allotment note was only made payable to a relative or to a savings-bank. This is not a savings-bank?”

“Oh,” he exclaimed drily, “there are two kinds of allotment notes. One is, as you say, payable only to a relative or a savings-bank; the other is an illegal document, sanctioned by the Board of Trade, February, 1868—here it is in the corner: you see their imprimatur?” said he, handing me one of the notes.

“What is the meaning of this,” said I, “at the bottom of the note?—‘Caution.—The Merchant Shipping Act does not provide summary remedy in the case of this note.’”

“Only a confession that a blunder was made,” he answered, “when the Act was passed. The advance note was said to encourage crimping; accordingly the allotment note was substituted. The seaman protested, as he found the note practically useless. Instead of rescinding or modifying the Act, an illegal concession was made by the issue of notes payable to anybody, like the old advance note. The issue is sanctioned by the Board of Trade, who compromise with their official conscience by giving the holder of the note to understand that he cannot recover upon the note by summary remedy. The old advance note was made payable three days after the man had sailed in the ship; in the present note the shipowner protects himself by making the note payable fifteen days, or in some instances thirty days, after the man has sailed. This may not increase the risk, but the delay in payment causes the holder to charge a heavier rate of interest for cashing the note, so that practically the Act leaves the sailor as much at the mercy of the boarding-house keeper as he was in the days of the advance note. We have hitherto charged nothing for cashing these notes; but we shall have to do so in self-protection, for we are perpetually losing money by them, and the law, which sanctions their issue, yet deprives the holder of all means of recovering on them.”

So much for British maritime legislation, thought I. Here are people, willing to pay the sailor the amount his note is worth without any deduction whatever, obliged to own that they can no longer act in this liberal manner, because the law prevents them from dealing with the dishonest clients who rob them! Will the day never come when the hidden part of our gigantic marine interests will be capably represented in the House of Commons?

“And pray,” said I to the manager, “where are your bedrooms?”

He led me a short distance, and presently we came to a stand at the bottom of what I may call a shaft of galleries of a very curious skeleton-like appearance. The highest tier was probably about seventy feet. Every fibrine-looking gallery or platform ran the whole length of the wing, and was flanked on either hand with rows of little bulkheaded rooms called cabins, all of them numbered, and every one containing an exceedingly comfortable wire-wove spring mattress, slung by a species of metal triangle from the ceiling. I found that there were three of these gallery shafts situated in wings of the building, and capable of comfortably accommodating and bedding between five and six hundred persons. One of those gigantic ranges of cabins, dedicated to the late Admiral Hope, struck me as exceedingly handsome and curious. The lower berths here are devoted to the mates and captains. They are large, airy, superbly ventilated; but these are the characteristics of all the cabins. At one end of this fine division is a marble tablet inscribed to Admiral Hope, with handsomely carved coloured flags on either side. To see these cabins, the manner in which they are poised one above another, the stairs leading up to them, the delicate tracery of the platforms, and observe the seamen coming out of their rooms and descending the steps fifty and sixty feet above your head, is to get a new theory of human existence. I never saw anything more comfortable, more clever, more strange. I mounted to one of these galleries with the manager, and seeing a cabin door open put my head in. The place was in gloom, and I was about to withdraw, when to my astonishment I observed what looked like two little half-moons glimmering in the dusk. I stared, and was amazed to find a negro lying upon a chest, reading. I saw the whites of his eyes the moment he rolled them up to look at me, but the rest of him being black was not to be discerned at once. I asked him what he was reading.

“The Bible,” said he, showing the book.

He was newly arrived at Hull from Barbadoes, he said, and had come to London to look for a berth as steward aboard a ship bound to the West Indies. He was a handsomely spoken, well-mannered young fellow, pronouncing his words with the finish of a man of culture.

We next visited the dining-room. This was a great department with rows of tables stretched along it, all covered with white linen and hospitably furnished with good glass and cutlery. At a large centre heating contrivance stood a carver flourishing an immense knife over a big pile of joints of roast beef. Sirloins, ribs, topsides, were mixed up, but the manager said that did not matter, as there would be little enough to be seen of them presently. A number of waiters ran in and out, setting dishes of potatoes, vegetables, puddings, bowls of soup, and such matters, on the table, and it needed nothing but a loving cup and a flourish of trumpets to make the thing look like a civic feast. Presently a bell was beaten, the seamen came tumbling in, and in a trice every table was crowded, and all hands eating their hardest.

“There is plenty of independence here, apparently,” said I, looking round at the rows of “shell-backs”—and I appreciated the term when I marked the taut curve of their shoulders—working away with spoons and knives and forks.

“Independence!” exclaimed the manager. “Why, no hotel confers more privileges. We are in reality a club. We were originally called a Home, and have stuck to the name; but I think it would be better had we borne the title of Club, for there is something in the sound of a home that savours of charity, and charity is a thing most seamen object to.”

“What are your charges?”

“Fifteen shillings a week to the men, and eighteen shillings to mates, who eat in a room to themselves.”

“Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed, “that you give these men a bedroom apiece and feed them after the fashion I now see for fifteen shillings a week?”

“Yes,” said he, smiling at my surprise. “And we go a little further even than that; for if a sailor arrives here without clothes or means, we dress him and put money in his pocket, and repay ourselves by deducting the amount, without a farthing of extra charge, from the allotment note he receives from the ship in which, in numerous instances, we procure him a berth.”

“And may the men do as they like here?”

“As if they were in their own house. We close at half-past twelve; but there is a night porter, and a man is admitted at any hour.”

“So that, practically, this is nothing but a first-class hotel worked at a cost that enables the very poorest seamen to use it?”

“Exactly. Our sole object is to provide the sailor with a comfortable home while he is on shore, help him in every way that he will allow, and so keep him clear of the boarding-house people—the wretched men and still more wretched women—who prey upon him, drug him with vile drinks, cruelly rob him, and often turn him adrift with scarcely a stitch on his back. Come, sir; more remains to be seen.”

He took me downstairs into a ready-made clothing shop belonging to the Home.

“The tailors in the neighbourhood,” said he, laughing, “more especially those who pay women commission to bring sailors to their shops, don’t love us for this invasion of their rights or wrongs; for our charge for clothes is very little above the price they cost us, and a man may get here for two pounds ten a suit he would have to pay eight or nine guineas for to a boarding-house tailor. I may say the same thing of the bar we have opened. There were some murmurs at first among the directors; but, sir, we found lemonade and coffee would not do. They drove the sailors to the public-houses; for the men would have their glass, and if they could not get it here they would go to low places for it. Jack must be treated sensibly, as a man with brains. To stop his grog at sea is one thing, but to put him upon cold water ashore is merely to drive him to those who live by plundering him. The result of opening a bar here has been to extinguish half the public-houses in the neighbourhood, and you may believe me when I say that our people know their business too well to suffer any approach to intemperance in this Home.”

“Well,” said I, “I came here expecting to find a lot of false and mischievous sentiment mixed up in the administration of the place. I see that Jack’s character is understood among you. You treat him as a rational man, and he respects you for it. No wonder the same people return again and again.”

“There is no need for a man to do anything here he does not like,” said the manager. “We have serious, sober, steady fellows among us; for them there are prayers morning and evening, and all may attend who will. But there is no obligation to be present. So at church—yonder it is, close to the Home, you see—we muster a good congregation; but there is no compulsion. Whatever can be done to reclaim those who need it, to help to set men right, to teach them to lift up their thoughts, we attempt; but there is no forcing of religion—nothing to induce hypocrisy on the one hand, nor to excite aversion on the other. We say, ‘My lads, here are your opportunities, take them if you will; but take them or leave them, we wish to do our duty by you, to make your lives ashore happy and comfortable, to keep you to windward of the low and nauseous snares which are everywhere set about for you, to come between your simplicity and the acts of the miscreants who find their account in your easy-going natures.’ That is about the amount of our theory,” said the manager; “and if we are not greatly successful, it is because the job we have set ourselves to perform is a very, very large one.”

From the dining-room we went to the basement, where I was shown a number of capital bath-rooms, fitted with a plentiful supply of hot and cold water; a laundry and drying-rooms; store-rooms filled with joints of meat, loaves of bread baked on the establishment, white as milk and of a flavour that made one think of farmhouses and Mrs. Poyser; sacks of flour, potatoes, and other things of that kind; and an immense kitchen, with a wonderful array of ovens and boilers for cooking by steam; everything as polished and bright as a new bell, and not the smallest feature anywhere discernible that did not exhibit the completest signs of anxious and attentive supervision. This Well Street building may be called a Home, and in a sense may answer to that character, but in reality it is nothing but a fine, admirably managed marine hotel or club, filled with bedrooms a good deal more comfortable than many a one in a hotel that a man has had to pay five or six shillings a night for; providing liberal meals in the shape of breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, and furnishing the seaman with all the comforts of a first-rate club for the extraordinary moderate charge of fifteen shillings a week. What does such an institution replace—or rather what is it designed to replace? I suppose there is no part of the sailor’s shore doings more talked about and less understood than the life he leads at the greasy little boarding-house kept by a crimp or a tailor, or, worse still, by old women and abandoned daughters. I stood gazing at one of these houses—a broken-down bit of a hole, with an evil, swaggering look in the posture of its door, and with dirty, stained white blinds in the windows—and thought what a wonderful, dreadful book might be made of the scenes that had taken place in it. A sailor-man was at my side, and I fell into a short talk with him.

“Do you regularly stop at the club?” I asked.

“Yes; it is my home whenever I am in London. I have used it for years, and so have scores of the men you see.”

“A pity all sailors are not equally alive to their own interests,” said I. “Here they are made really comfortable for a few shillings a week; money is advanced to them, clothes furnished to them at cost price, a hundred little comforts placed within their reach, and friends are at hand to help them to a berth if they find difficulty in getting a ship.”

“Perfectly true,” said my companion.

“What attraction beyond the privileges and happiness a residence in this club-house offers can they discover,” said I, pointing to the miserable little boarding-house we confronted, “in such a den as that?”

“Most of the men you find in such places are forced into them,” replied the man. “All about here is filled with touts and runners and their bullies. Sailors are watched coming ashore. They may want to put up at this Home; but the boarding-house runners are at hand to tumble ’em into cabs, drink is given them, the girls—and such girls!—are called in to help, and if the men are obstinate they are fallen upon and beaten; and, to such an extent is this kind of intimidation carried on, that, however anxious a man may be to rescue a shipmate from the hands of those rascals, he’ll think twice before he does it, for so sure as he attempts to interfere and bring a man to this Home, so sure is he of being fallen upon and half killed when he’s alone and the night’s come. There’s not a policeman hereabouts but is full of stories of such work.”

“And what, pray, is the sailor’s life in the low sort of lodging-house?”

“A vile debauch, as a rule, caused by the temptation thrust upon him. It would be difficult to make respectable people understand how he’s robbed. I knew a man who was brought to one of these dens and asked to ‘shout’—that is, to stand a drink all round. He did so, and was made drunk. Next day he was charged for eight ‘shouts,’ the people swearing he had ordered the liquor, and that it was not their fault if he was too intoxicated to remember. That’s only one sample. Abandoned women are kept in the pay of the slop tailors to bring seamen to their shops and press them to buy, and a single purchase at such places is enough to ruin a poor man. There are, no doubt, respectable boarding-houses, but they are few and far between; the most of them are kept by rascally men and women, who, taking the sailor as a simple-hearted fellow, fresh from a spell of salt water, and willing for a bit of a frisk, ply him until they have peeled him, and then kick him out. It was not long ago that a pencil-scrawl was brought to this Home. It had been chucked out of a lodging-house window by a man to a friend who was passing. It stated that the people of the house had stolen all the writer’s clothes, and it begged the manager to send up a suit that the man might get away.”

“Such things must be known to sailors?” said I.

“Ay,” he replied, “and a good deal more.”

“And yet many of them persist in putting up at those haunts?”

“I can’t account for it,” said he. “Here’s such a chance as any gentleman with plenty of money in his pocket might be glad to take; and yet there are sailors who’ll carry their bags or chests to the lodging-houses, as certainly knowing that they are going there to be robbed of all they have as that their feet are upon dry ground.”

I have only ventured to write down a very little part of what I was told about these lodging-houses. I will not pretend to be ignorant of much of the inner life of those places; but I own that some of the stories related to me filled me with horror and astonishment that such deeds should still be doing in this enlightened age of marine progress. But is it not strange that so truly valuable an institution as this Well Street Home, which counts bishops, marquises, admirals, and captains in abundance among its directors, should be deliberately neglected, and even viewed hostilely, by the Board of Trade, whose efforts to promote the interests of the sailor it helps to a degree no one would credit without close and careful investigation of its theory and practice? Why, for instance, should the Board of Trade decline to licence a shipping-master in connection with this Home? Surely the directorate should abundantly guarantee the character of the duties such an official would discharge. What conceivable object can the Board of Trade have in objecting to the Home endeavouring, by legal means, to obtain employment on board ship for the numerous highly respectable men who use the institution, and who must often want help to obtain a berth? The Home asks for no State help; it is self-supporting; it has extinguished a number of low public-houses and crimps’ haunts in its neighbourhood; it is doing a great work; and no man who values the sailor can read the list of gentlemen whose names are associated with it without an emotion of gratitude to them for the generous, wise and humane part they are playing. Surely it is the duty of the State to co-operate with the endeavours which the working of this Home exemplifies, and to omit nothing that may tend to lighten the labours of its exemplary officials and advance the truly national purpose for which it was originally established.