The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (9 page)

To the immense relief of all concerned, the 1850 Irish potato crop finally survived. However, it did not yield as much as it had done before the outbreak of the fungal virus and many communities continued to exist in great hardship. By this time, over one million people had died as a result of the worst famine to occur in Europe in the 19th century. As the statistics on page 63 show, the amount of contributions towards passages out of the country steadily increased into the 1850s and, although the worst of the famine was over, the Irish continued their exodus in the hope that a better life could be found elsewhere. Their migration was helped immeasurably by competition between the steam-boat companies who slashed their prices in order to attract more custom. Passage from Cork to London, which normally cost around 10 shillings, could be obtained for as little as one shilling. There were even reports of some companies bringing passengers over to the British mainland for no charge whatsoever.

Chapter 10

The McCarthy Family

One Irish family that took advantage of the new, rock-bottom prices were destined to become Dorset Street’s most influential residents. In 1848, Daniel McCarthy and his pregnant wife Margaret, boarded a ship sailing from Cork harbour and left their homeland behind them. After a brief stay in Dieppe (where it is likely Daniel sought work in the Docks), the McCarthys, who by now had a baby son named John, arrived in England.

Daniel had previously been used to agricultural work so the family initially made for Hertfordshire, where it was hoped that permanent farm work could be secured. However, this was not to be and for the next five or so years, the family travelled across London and the home counties, picking up menial jobs wherever they could. However, like so many of their countrymen before them, they were eventually forced into the metropolis permanently, where work, however demeaning and badly paid, was in greater supply.

The McCarthys settled in Red Cross Court, in Southwark. This mean yard was a typical London address for impoverished Irishfolk fleeing the famine in their homeland. It had originally been the back yard of the Red Cross Inn – a hostelry on Borough High Street. However, as the population of The Borough exploded in the early 19th century, the yard was built over. Two-storey cottages lined its perimeter and a row of dilapidated stables ran down the centre. By the 1860s, the occupants of Red Cross Court were far too poor to keep horses so the stables served as stockrooms for oranges that were bought at Borough Market and sold cheaply on the streets by the Court’s inhabitants.

By the time Daniel and Margaret McCarthy arrived in Red Cross Court, their family had increased significantly. Joining John were four brothers: Denis, Jeremiah, Timothy and Daniel. In 1865, a daughter named Annie was born. During the following years, Red Cross Court became something of a Mecca for members of the McCarthy clan. By 1881, there were McCarthys living at numbers 1, 4, 9, 10 and 12 plus two more McCarthy families living at number 2 and 24 May Pole Alley, which was situated next door. By this time Daniel and Margaret had moved across the river to Whitechapel where they lived out the rest of their lives in quiet obscurity. However, their eldest son John harboured grand ideas about his future and set about laying plans to escape the grinding poverty of London’s slums – plans that were to be more successful than probably even he would have imagined.

Like the Borough across the river, Spitalfields – and roads such as Dorset Street in particular – became an attractive destination for impoverished Irish immigrants because it offered insalubrious but cheap accommodation and was close to the potential workplaces of the City, the Docks and, of course, the market. Many of the working-class Irish immigrants found work as costermongers, buying fruit and vegetables from the market and taking them round the streets on a barrow to sell to the residents. During his investigation into how London’s poor lived and worked, Henry Mayhew studied the Irish costermongers in depth. At the time, it was officially estimated that there were 10,000 Irish street-sellers in London. However, Mayhew reckoned the figure to be higher. He noted, ‘of this large body, three-fourths sell only fruit, and more specifically nuts and oranges; indeed the orange season is called the “Irishman’s Harvest.” The others deal in fish, fruit and vegetables... some of the most wretched of the street Irish deal in such trifles as Lucifer-matches, water-cresses, etc.’

In addition to street-selling, many Irish immigrants who had previously been employed on farms took to labouring in the building trade. Some took casual labouring work at the docks, while others took on the back-breaking work of excavating and wood chopping. When work was thin on the ground (as it often was), both men and women would take to the streets and beg.

This hand-to-mouth existence meant that accommodation was hard to find. Families barely had enough money to feed themselves, let alone enough to find rent money for a reasonably furnished room. Consequently the common lodging houses that lined Dorset Street (and many other streets in Spitalfields), experienced an unprecedented boom. However, their burgeoning business was soon to come under the scrutiny of social reformers, journalists and ultimately, the Government.

Chapter 11

The Common Lodging House Act

By the beginning of the 1850s, the already pitiful plight of the poor in Spitalfields had been exacerbated to an almost unbearable degree by the arrival of the Irish immigrants. The area was now among the poorest in the whole of London and was beginning to attract the attention of the press. In 1849, the journalist Henry Mayhew visited Spitalfields in search of acute poverty for an article he was writing for the
Morning Chronicle
newspaper. He was particularly touched by the plight of the old silk weavers, who he found living ‘in a state of gloomy destitution, sitting in their wretched rooms dreaming of the neat houses and roast beef of long ago.’ Mayhew went on to note that the remaining Spitalfields weavers seemed resigned to their reduced circumstances and no longer had the energy to do anything about it: ‘In all there was the same want of hope – the same doggedness and half-indifference as to their fate.’

Spitalfields was not the only area of the metropolis that was experiencing poverty on an unprecedented scale. Across the river, the ancient area of Bermondsey was experiencing similar problems, as this heartbreaking excerpt from a coroner’s report on the death of a poverty-stricken young woman shows: ‘she lay dead beside her son upon a heap of feathers which were scattered over her almost naked body, there being no sheet or coverlet. The feathers stuck so fast over the whole body that the doctor could not examine the corpse until it was cleansed. He then found it starved and scarred from rat bites.’

Similar accounts of abject poverty began appearing regularly in the London press. Under particular scrutiny once again were the already notorious common lodging houses which, according to the journalists who visited them, had plumbed even greater depths. The scathing press reports, combined with the report from the Royal Commission forced Parliament to address the common lodging house problem and an act was passed in 1851 in a bid to improve the situation.

In their wisdom, the politicians responsible for drawing up the act came to the conclusion that the common lodging houses caused problems not because of the wanton lack of facilities and the type of person that frequented them, but because they lacked supervision and clear rules and regulations. The new act stipulated that every common lodging house should have clear signage outside stating what the building was used for. Inside, every sleeping room should be measured. From these measurements, the number of beds allowed in each room would be calculated and a placard hung on the wall stating the allocation. Beds were to have fresh linen once a week and all windows were to be thrown open at 10am each day for ventilation purposes. All lodgers had to leave the lodging house at 10am and would not be allowed back in until late afternoon. These regulations were to be enforced by the local police.

While the regulations imposed by the Common Lodging Houses Act were well meaning, they were at best badly thought out and at worst laughable. Measuring the rooms to allocate beds was all very well and good if only one person was going to sleep in each bed. However, it had been a long-standing practice for people to share beds in order to save money, thus doubling or even tripling the room capacity on particularly cold nights. The fact that each room had a sign stating the number of beds allowed was of virtually no use because few inmates could read and those that could were not about to report their only source of shelter to the authorities. Fresh bed linen once a week would have been a good idea if the act had also made the laundries obliged to take it in. In reality, few self-respecting laundries would touch lodging-house bed linen as it was often riddled with vermin, which infected the whole laundry.

In winter, the throwing open of all windows during the day made the unheated rooms bitterly cold. The fact that lodgers were thrown out on the street at 10 in the morning may have made for a quiet day for the lodging house management, but was cruel to the lodgers, many of whom were sick and malnourished. They had to take all their belongings and walk the streets for up to six hours in search of money for their bed for the next night. In the case of Spitalfields, the police knew only too well what type of characters inhabited the lodging houses and officers were unwilling to walk into the ‘lion’s den’ for fear of being attacked. Consequently, few lodging houses were inspected regularly.

The Common Lodging Houses Act of 1851 had many failings, but probably its biggest fault was that it did not provide any regulation on the way the proprietors made their money. Consequently, prices for a bed were self-regulating. Anybody could go into business running common lodging houses, so long as they had a suitable property at their disposal. In Spitalfields, the downward slide of the local economy meant that by the mid-19th century, property prices were at an all-time low as no self-respecting house-hunter would even consider living there. The elegant master weavers’ homes that had been so lovingly designed and furnished in the 1700s were now suffering from severe neglect. Roofs leaked, plaster fell off the walls, the kitchen ranges were clogged with grease and floorboards began to fall away. In 1857,
The Builder
magazine reported on the collapse of a house in Dorset Street, which resulted in the death of a child and warned that virtually every house in the street was in a similarly dangerous state of decay.

Consequently, these houses (which had once only been within the reach of the reasonably wealthy) could now be picked up for next to nothing. The combination of inexpensive property and a huge demand for cheap housing made Spitalfields one of the key areas for men and women keen to make their living from the misfortune of the poor. Most of the new landlords were previously itinerant entrepreneurs who acquired their property with money won by gambling on the horses or, as Henry Mayhew described, ‘by direct robbery.’ Furnishings were often obtained from hospitals or houses in which contagious disease had been rife. The furniture from this type of place was cheap as no one else wanted to risk buying it for fear of infection. Aspiring property magnates with little or no collateral soon hit on the idea of selling shares of their business in order to raise the start-up capital. Advertisements appeared in the newspapers offering a 4% return to investors in common lodging houses. Once a project had a sufficient number of investors, the property was converted and quickly let out. Most of the investors in this type of scheme lived far away and had little or no idea of how their ‘customers’ were being treated. If they had, it is doubtful they would have slept easily, as this description by Henry Mayhew clearly illustrates:

‘Padding-kens (common lodging houses) in the country are certainly preferable abodes to those in St Giles, Westminster or Whitechapel; but in the country as in the town, their condition is extremely filthy and disgusting; many of them are scarcely ever washed, and to sweeping, once a week is miraculous. In most cases they swarm with vermin. Except where their position is very airy, the ventilation is very imperfect, and frequent sickness the necessary result. It is a matter of surprise that the nobility, clergy and gentry of the realm should permit the existence of such horrid dwellings.’ Mayhew then goes on to describe the lodging houses in glorious detail: ‘One of the dens of infamy may be taken as a specimen of the whole class. They generally have a spacious, though often ill-ventilated kitchen, the dirty dilapidated walls of which are hung with prints while a shelf or two are generally, though barely, furnished with crockery and kitchen utensils. In some places, knives and forks are not provided, unless a penny is left with the deputy or manager till they are returned. Average numbers of nightly lodgers is say 70 in winter, reducing to 40 in summer, when many visit the provinces... The general charge to sleep together is 3d per night or 4d for a single bed. There are family rooms that can be hired and crammed with children sleeping on the floor...