Down and Out in Paris and London (30 page)

damage to a man’s self-respect.

The other great evil of a tramp’s life is enforced idleness.

By our vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he

is not walking the road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the in-

tervals, lying on the ground waiting for the casual ward to

open. It is obvious that this is a dismal, demoralizing way of

life, especially for an uneducated man.

Besides these one could enumerate scores of minor

evils—to name only one, discomfort, which is insepa-

rable from life on the road; it is worth remembering that

the average tramp has no clothes but what he stands up in,

wears boots that are ill-fitting, and does not sit in a chair for

months together. But the important point is that a tramp’s

sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically dis-

agreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever. One

could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine than walk-

ing from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours

a day in the cell and on the road. There must be at the least

several tens of thousands of tramps in England. Each day

they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy—enough

to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up

dozens of houses—in mere, useless walking. Each day they

waste between them possibly ten years of time in staring at

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

cell walls. They cost the country at least a pound a week a

man, and give nothing in return for it. They go round and

round, on an endless boring game of general post, which

is of no use, and is not even meant to be of any use to any

person whatever. The law keeps this process going, and we

have got so accustomed to it that We are not surprised. But

it is very silly.

Granting the futility of a tramp’s life, the question is

whether anything could be done to improve it. Obviously it

would be possible, for instance, to make the casual wards a

little more habitable, and this is actually being done in some

cases. During the last year some of the casual wards have

been improved—beyond recognition, if the accounts are

true— and there is talk of doing the same to all of them. But

this does not go to the heart of the problem. The problem is

how to turn the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into

a self-respecting human being. A mere increase of comfort

cannot do this. Even if the casual wards became positive-

ly luxurious (they never will)* a tramp’s life would still be

wasted. He would still be a pauper, cut off from marriage

and home life, and a dead loss to the community. What is

needed is to depauperize him, and this can only be done by

finding him work—not work for the sake of working, but

work of which he can enjoy the benefit. At present, in the

great majority of casual wards, tramps do no work what-

ever. At one time they were made to break stones for their

food, but this was stopped when they had broken enough

stone for years ahead and put the stone-breakers out of

work. Nowadays they are kept idle, because there is seem-

Down and Out in Paris and London

ingly nothing for them to do. Yet there is a fairly obvious

way of making them useful, namely this: Each workhouse

could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen garden, and

every able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be

made to do a sound day’s work. The produce of the farm

or garden could be used for feeding the tramps, and at the

worst it would be better than the filthy diet of bread and

margarine and tea. Of course, the casual wards could never

be quite self-supporting, but they could go a long way to-

wards it, and the rates would probably benefit in the long

run. It must be remembered that under the present system

tramps are as dead a loss to the country as they could pos-

sibly be, for they do not only do no work, but they live on

a diet that is bound to undermine their health; the system,

therefore, loses lives as well as money. A scheme which fed

them decently, and made them produce at least a part of

their own food, would be worth trying.

[* In fairness, it must be added that a few of the casual

wards have been improved recently, at least from the point

of view of sleeping accommodation. But most of them are

the same as ever, and there has been no real improvement

in the food.]

It may be objected that a farm or even a garden could

not be run with casual labour. But there is no real reason

why tramps should only stay a day at each casual ward; they

might stay a month or even a year, if there were work for

them to do. The constant circulation of tramps is some-

thing quite artificial. At present a tramp is an expense to

the rates, and the object of each workhouse is therefore to

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

push him on to the next; hence the rule that he can stay

only one night. If he returns within a month he is penal-

ized by being confined for a week, and, as this is much the

same as being in prison, naturally he keeps moving. But if

he represented labour to the workhouse, and the workhouse

represented sound food to him, it would be another matter.

The workhouses would develop into partially self-support-

ing institutions, and the tramps, settling down here or there

according as they were needed, would cease to be tramps.

They would be doing something comparatively useful, get-

ting decent food, and living a settled life. By degrees, if the

scheme worked well, they might even cease to be regard-

ed as paupers, and be able to marry and take a respectable

place in society.

This is only a rough idea, and there are some obvious

objections to it. Nevertheless, it does suggest a way of im-

proving the status of tramps without piling new burdens on

the rates. And the solution must, in any case, be something

of this kind. For the question is, what to do with men who

are underfed and idle; and the answer—to make them grow

their own food—imposes itself automatically.

Down and Out in Paris and London

XXXVII

A word about the sleeping accommodation open to a

homeless person in London. At present it is impossible

to get a BED in any non-charitable institution in London

for less than sevenpence a night. If you cannot afford seven-

pence for a bed, you must put up with one of the following

substitutes:

1. The Embankment. Here is the account that Paddy gave

me of sleeping on the Embankment:

‘De whole t’ing wid de Embankment is gettin’ to sleep

early. You got to be on your bench by eight o’clock, because

dere ain’t too many benches and sometimes dey’re all taken.

And you got to try to get to sleep at once. ‘Tis too cold to

sleep much after twelve o’clock, an’ de police turns you off

at four in de mornin’. It ain’t easy to sleep, dough, wid dem

bloody trams flyin’ past your head all de time, an’ dem sky-

signs across de river flickin’ on an’ off in your eyes. De cold’s

cruel. Dem as sleeps dere generally wraps demselves up in

newspaper, but it don’t do much good. You’d be bloody

lucky if you got t’ree hours’ sleep.’

I have slept on the Embankment and found that it corre-

sponded to Paddy’s description. It is, however, much better

than not sleeping at all, which is the alternative if you spend

the night in the streets, elsewhere than on the Embank-

ment. According to the law in London, you may sit down

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

for the night, but the police must move you on if they see

you asleep; the Embankment and one or two odd corners

(there is one behind the Lyceum Theatre) are special excep-

tions. This law is evidently a piece of wilful offensive-ness.

Its object, so it is said, is to prevent people from dying of ex-

posure; but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die

of exposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris there is no

such law. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine

bridges, and in doorways, and on benches in the squares,

and round the ventilating shafts of the Metro, and even in-

side the Metro stations. It does no apparent harm. No one

will spend a night in the street if he can possibly help it, and

if he is going to stay out of doors he might as well be allowed

to sleep, if he can.

2. The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher

than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the

lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of

them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence.

A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five

in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo

had been there often. I asked him whether anyone could

possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was

more comfortable than it sounded—at any rate, better than

bare floor. There are similar shelters in Paris, but the charge

there is only twenty-five centimes (a halfpenny) instead of

twopence.

3. The Coffin, at fourpence a night. At the Coffin you

sleep in a wooden box, with a tarpaulin for covering. It is

cold, and the worst thing about it are the bugs, which, being

Down and Out in Paris and London

enclosed in a box, you cannot escape.

Above this come the common lodging-houses, with

charges varying between sevenpence and one and a penny

a night. The best are the Rowton Houses, where the charge

is a shilling, for which you get a cubicle to yourself, and the

use of excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown

for a ‘special’, which is practically hotel accommodation.

The Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and the only

objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules against

cooking, card-playing, etc. Perhaps the best advertisement

for the Rowton Houses is the fact that they are always full

to overflowing. The Bruce Houses, at one and a penny, are

also excellent.

Next best, in point of cleanliness, are the Salvation Army

hostels, at sevenpence or eightpence. They vary (I have been

in one or two that were not very unlike common lodging-

houses), but most of them are clean, and they have good

bathrooms; you have to pay extra for a bath, however. You

can get a cubicle for a shilling. In the eightpenny dormito-

ries the beds are comfortable, but there are so many of them

(as a rule at least forty to a room), and so close together,

that it is impossible to get a quiet night. The numerous re-

strictions stink of prison and charity. The Salvation Army

hostels would only appeal to people who put cleanliness be-

fore anything else.

Beyond this there are the ordinary common lodging-

houses. Whether you pay sevenpence or a shilling, they

are all stuffy and noisy, and the beds are uniformly dirty

and uncomfortable. What redeems them are their LAIS-

Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com

SEZ-FAIRE atmosphere and the warm home-like kitchens

where one can lounge at all hours of the day or night. They

are squalid dens, but some kind of social life is possible in

them. The women’s lodging-houses are said to be generally

worse than the men’s, and there are very few houses with

accommodation for married couples. In fact, it is nothing

out of the common for a homeless man to sleep in one lodg-

ing-house and his wife in another.

At this moment at least fifteen thousand people in London

are living in common lodging-houses. For an unattached

man earning two pounds a week, or less, a lodging-house is

a great convenience. He could hardly get a furnished room

so cheaply, and the lodging-house gives him free firing, a

bathroom of sorts, and plenty of society. As for the dirt, it is

a minor evil. The really bad fault of lodging-houses is that

they are places in which one pays to sleep, and in which

sound sleep is impossible. All one gets for one’s money is a

bed measuring five feet six by two feet six, with a hard con-

vex mattress and a pillow like a block of wood, covered by

one cotton counterpane and two grey, stinking sheets. In

winter there are blankets, but never enough. And this bed

is in a room where there are never less than five, and some-

times fifty or sixty beds, a yard or two apart. Of course,

no one can sleep soundly in such circumstances. The only

other places where people are herded like this are barracks

and hospitals. In the public wards of a hospital no one even

hopes to sleep well. In barracks the soldiers are crowded,

but they have good beds, and they are healthy; in a common

lodging-house nearly all the lodgers have chronic coughs,

0

Down and Out in Paris and London

and a large number have bladder diseases which make them

get up at all the hours of the night. The result is a perpetual