Homeless Near a Thousand Homes

A Study of Families Without Homes in South Wales and the West of England

Bryan Glastonbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000438123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Who becomes homeless? Why? What stresses and strains do these people face? Does losing a home provoke other problems or is it a sequel to them? How far do government policies and provisions go towards meeting the needs of the homeless? What changes would be desirable? To what extent is homelessness due to housing shortages?

Originally published in 1971, these and other questions are tackled in this study of the development of services for the homeless. It is based on detailed investigation of provisions in South Wales and the West Country and is a study of the lives of over 500 families who, at some stage since 1963, had lost their homes. Hitherto studies of homelessness had been restricted to London or other big urban centres. The questions posed and answered here are much more general, and relevant to all parts of the country at the time.

Information for the survey came from the records kept in Local Authority Welfare, Children's Health and Housing Departments, the Probation and After-Care Service, local offices of the Department of Health and Social Security, and many voluntary organizations. The findings suggest that, in the areas studied, homelessness was worse than anticipated, and that its demands on the social services were similar in range but different in order of priority from those in the metropolis. Poor housing conditions remain an important feature, reinforced by unhelpful attitudes in housing management. Housing shortages are important for large families and those who cannot be self-dependent – more so than for others. Looming over the whole picture is homelessness resulting from broken marriages and family disputes, with the attendant difficulties of unsupported motherhood, poverty, sickness and unemployment.

1 BACKGROUND TO HOMELESSNESS

This chapter begins by looking at three important influences on policy towards the homeless, as it was expressed in the 1948 National Assistance Act. Firstly, the development of relevant aspects of Poor Law policies is discussed. For three centuries before the early 1940s the workhouse was the central provision for homelessness, and many of the local authority staff who established postwar Welfare Departments brought with them years of Poor Law experience. Secondly, housing policies are examined with specific reference to the recognition given to those who, from poverty or other problems, have been classed as unsatisfactory tenants, and to the importance of housing shortages. Thirdly, some attention is paid to the methods employed in helping people made homeless by wartime bombing. With the Poor Law discredited,¹ the experiences of relief services between 1939 and 1945 were in the forefront of plans for dealing with post-war homelessness.

The chapter then proceeds to the passage of the National Assistance Act, and from there traces developments in policy up to the end of the 1960s.

The Poor Law tradition

The relief of the poor, including the homeless, began as a form of charity, with government interest arising very gradually, firstly by authorizing begging, next by encouraging gifts for giving succour to the needy, and then, in 1563, by allowing parishes to introduce a weekly tax for the same purpose. The Elizabethan Poor Law, administered by J.P.s, Overseers of the Poor and vestry officials, established the dual structure of poor relief–domiciliary relief and institutional care.

Domiciliary relief, more commonly called parish or outdoor relief, was always the dominant and erratic part of the system, because Poor Law administrators experienced great difficulty in implementing a balanced programme of benefits for families who continued to live in the community. Although it was always cheaper to support a family in its own home than to provide it with minimal standards of care in an institution, willingness to give domiciliary benefits tended to increase the demand for relief, and led to accusations of exploitation against people who, it was said, had no real need for funds. Worry about the cost and moral basis of outdoor relief prompted some of the recommendations of the 1834 Royal Commission. The administration of the Poor Law was taken out of the hands of parish officials and passed to a central authority. Outdoor relief to the able-bodied–in effect the poorest unemployed–was prohibited for a time, and the principle of less eligibility set upper limits to the standard of relief. ‘The hanger-on’, said J. S. Davy, ‘should be lower than him on whom he hangs’,¹ or, as Thomas Carlyle saw it, ‘If paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers.’

¹ The National Assistance Act, 1948, opens with the words, ‘The existing Poor Law shall cease to have effect’. ¹ J. S. Davy, Principal Officer of the Poor Law Division of the Local Government Board: evidence to the Royal Commission, 1905-9

The Elizabethan Poor Law authorized the provision of residential accommodation for the impotent poor, but it was not until 1722 that parishes were authorized to open, or pay contractors to open, workhouses for the more generally destitute.² The inevitable evils of institutions contracted out to the lowest tender, and run for profit, were ended sixty years later.³ But primitive living conditions continued into the present century because of the policy of less eligibility, because an uncomfortable way of life deterred people from applying for it, and because the cost of good residential conditions–even for the young, old and chronic sick–always exceeded the funds available.

Although the 1834 Royal Commission Report recommended breaking down the workhouse population into separate categories and housing them separately, the years following 1834 saw the most intensive period of building large general-purpose workhouses. Many of the buildings are still in use, commonly as hospitals, some as temporary accommodation hostels.

The Victorian workhouse kept its doors always open for urgent applicants, and for all others after a short warning. Everyone could come and stay without limit.’. . . life in a workhouse has a decided advantage. There can be no worry about the future. . . . When one gets to the workhouse, the worst has happened and speculation and foreboding are gone. There is nothing left to fear except ill-health and death.’¹ Living conditions conforming to the principle of less eligibility were allied to a privilege-based daily routine not altogether unlike prison.² Indeed many workhouses were locked and barred to contain the inmates securely, with hard labour compulsory for the able-bodied. ‘You have got to find work which anybody can do, and which nearly everybody dislikes doing (otherwise) you will have your workhouse crowded up with loafers.’³ But while such a system might have been applicable in a specialized workhouse, it could not survive in general-purpose institutions. ‘The presence in a workhouse of the sick, or of any class in whose favour the ordinary discipline must be relaxed, and who receive special indulgences, has an almost inevitable tendency to impair the general discipline of the establishment.⁴ The House has proved ‘too bad for the good and too good for the bad’.⁵

² 9 Geo. 1 Ch. 7 ³ ‘Gilbert’s Act, 1782’–22 Geo. 3 Ch. 83. ¹ Through a Workhouse Window by R. M. Noordin: Pub. Cecil Palmer 1929, p. 15. ² One of the post-1834 reforms ended corporal punishment for able-bodied adult residents of workhouses. ³ J. S. Davy: evidence to the Royal Commission 1905-9. ⁴ Fourth Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1874-5 ⁵ B. and S. Webb: English Poor Law History, Part 2, p. 972.

For a few years after 1871 the Local Government Board tried to keep the able-bodied under a separate penal regime, but this successfully deterred the genuinely able-bodied, and in practice these ‘Test Workhouses’ took in homeless old men or those with a variety of mental and physical ailments, and acted as overflows for the general houses. Jack London described the regime of a test workhouse in 1902,⁶ and since he gave an unusually detailed customer’s-eye view, some long quotations are included. ‘I asked them what I might expect in the way of treatment if we succeeded in getting into the Poplar Workhouse, and between them I was supplied with much information. Having taken a cold bath on entering, I would be given for supper six ounces of bread, and "three parts of skilly". "Three parts" means three-quarters of a pint, and "skilly" is a fluid concoction of three quarts of oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hot water. . . .

’And I was informed that I was sent directly to bed. "Call you at half after five in the mornin’, an’ you get up an’ take a ‘sluice’–if there’s any soap. Then breakfast, same as supper, three parts o’ skilly an’ a six-ounce loaf. . . .

⁶ Jack London: People of the Abyss, Panther Books, 1963.

’ "Then you’ve got to do your task, pick four pounds of oakum, or clean an’ scrub, or break ten to eleven hundredweights of stone; I don’t ‘ave to break stones; I’m past sixty, you see. They’ll make you do it, though. You’re young an’ strong."’

Jack London found that, in London at least, the number of workhouses was not enough to cope with the level of homelessness.

’After my two unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the White-chapel casual ward, I started early, and joined the desolate line before three o’ clock in the afternoon. They did not "Let in" till six, but at that early hour I was number twenty, while the news had gone forth that only twenty-two were to be admitted. By four o’clock there were thirty-four in line, the last ten hanging on in the slender hope of getting in by some kind of miracle. Many more came, looked at the line, and went away, wise to the bitter fact that the spike would be "full up".’

The workhouses were full because the alternative was worse.

’Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to "move on". You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is a law of the powers that be that you should be routed out. . . . But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days–O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?’

The majority report of the 1905-9 Royal Commission argued that persons needing penal treatment should receive it through the Home Office, not the Poor Law Division, and put the ‘Principle of Restoration’ in place of the ‘Principle of Less Eligibility’. Although there was no rash of legislation following this report, the agreement to make separate provision for, amongst others, state schools, hospitals, old-aged pensioners and the unemployed¹ set the tone for Local Government Board circulars, and was officially acknowledged in section 5 of the Local Government Act, 1929.¹ Ten years later the Minister of Health discussed his duty to see that ‘as soon as circumstances permitted, all assistance which could lawfully be provided otherwise than by way of poor relief should be so provided. This policy, commonly referred to as the "break-up" of the Poor Law, takes its origin from the reports of the Royal Commission of 1905-9.’² He went on to add, however, that the subsequent period ‘has clearly shown that the Poor Law has still an important role to fulfil. . . it still remains the service whose function it is to fill the gaps left by the specialized services with their necessarily limited powers’.³

¹ B. and S. Webb: English Poor Law History, Part 2, p. 545.

But homelessness was not one of the social needs to be exempted in the Majority Report from the Poor Law stigma, and remained part of a category described by Professor Bernard Bosanquet as ‘a failure of social self-maintenance . . . a defect in citizen character, or at least a grave danger to its integrity’.⁴ A modified version of less eligibility continued to be practised in poor law institutions through to 1940, until it was overrun by old and handicapped evacuees and by the rush of victims of bombing.

Families have always been accommodated in workhouses, though it is difficult to find references to them as such, and they were broken up on entry and generally segregated except during restricted visiting hours. Separation was initially by sex, but humanitarian views towards the end of the last century favoured a more extensive break-down, to isolate the sick from the able-bodied, the young from the old. When arrangements were made in the present century for married couples to share quarters, they were half-hearted and sometimes frivolous. A guardian of the poor of the Romford Union described it thus: ‘In our workhouse we had three different classes of inmate to cater for, I mean outside the hospital and mental cases. The three classes were the young and able-bodied, the able-bodied and the infirm. The men a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Background to Homelessness
• 2. People Using Temporary Accommodation
• 3. The Causes of Homelessness
• 4. The Process of Becoming Homeless
• 5. Rehousing
• 6. Housing Standards Before and After
• 7. The Impact of the Social Services
• 8. Summary and Conclusions
• Appendix I Some Special Problems
• Appendix II Homelessness in London
• Index