Squires in the Slums

Settlements and Missions in Late Victorian Britain

Nigel Scotland

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857731616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Settlements were a distinctive aspect of late-Victorian church life in which individual philanthropic Christians were encouraged to live and work in communities amongst the poor and set an example for the underprivileged through their own actions. Often overlooked by historians, settlements are of great value in understanding the values and culture of the 19th century. Settlement missions were first conceived when Samuel Barnett, the incumbent of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, in the East End of London, sought to introduce them as a major aspect of Victorian church life. Barnett argued that settlers should be incorporated into London communities that suffered from squalor and poverty to live and work alongside the poor, to demonstrate their Christian faith and attempt to enhance social conditions from the inside. His first recruits were Oxford undergraduates and when Toynbee Hall was founded in Oxford in 1884, his radical vision of adapting Christian morality towards tackling social deprivation had begun. By the end of the Victorian era more than fifty similar institutions had been created.
Whilst few settlements lasted beyond the Victorian period, by injecting Christian ethics into trade unions, local government and the community, they had a huge impact which is still felt in the way these organisations operate today.

1

LONDON’S DESPERATE NEED

In 1896 the future Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram,¹ who knew more about the working poor of the city than most, famously said, ‘It is not that the church of God has lost the great towns; it has never had them’.² The roots of this alienation in the nation’s capital lay in the early years of the century when large numbers of people drifted from the Essex and Kent countryside into areas of North-East London and South of the Thames. Here they were joined in localities such as Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and Whitechapel by growing numbers of immigrants from France and other European countries. It was computed that in the closing years of the nineteenth century there were not less than 60,000 Jews in London.³ In an effort to house them numerous sub-standard dwellings, often without careful planning, were run up in a very short space of time by speculative building contractors with little thought for the social or religious needs of the new communities. What at the beginning of the century were small villages clustered round a parish church on the outskirts of the city, suddenly in the space of a generation, became a sprawling mass of many thousands of people with no church and no priest to minister to them and offer any sort of Christian framework for their existence.

In 1890 William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, published his most celebrated book, In Darkest England and the Way Out. ‘Darkest England’, he asserted was to be found above all in London’s East End, an area containing 980,000 men, women and children roughly equivalent to the entire population of Scotland.⁴ Using statistics taken from Charles Booth’s sociological survey, Life and Labour in the East End of London, he estimated that there were 17,000 inmates in workhouses, asylums and hospitals, 11,000 ‘loafers, casuals and Criminals’, 74,000 ‘very poor’ and 100,000 ‘starving’. These he called the ‘Submerged Tenth’ because across the nation as whole there were others in smaller towns and cities who were in comparable circumstances and together they represented a tenth of the total population.⁵ Booth stated that if destitution existed everywhere in East London proportions, the country would have thirty-one times more starving people than there were in and around Bethnal Green.⁶ Thomas Kelly has argued that John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, which was published in 1862 and was the first of a series of trenchant attacks on the social and economic system of the time, also had a wide impact and greatly influenced those who later established settlements and missions.⁷

The truth of the matter was that the Church of England was essentially a rural Church whose structures were designed to fit the medieval village community with its squire, farmers and fixed hierarchy. It was in consequence ill-equipped to cope with the rapid growth of towns and cities which accompanied the industrial revolution. As The Record put it in January 1882, ‘urgent reforms were required to re-locate the church’s human, financial and physical resources to cope with changes in society, and to combat godlessness in the areas where Christianity was reported “not in possession”’.⁸

Inadequacy of the Parochial System

A major problem in the Church of England’s organisation was its parochial system of small parishes dotted across the landscape. In a country where communities were relatively small, numbering anything from a few hundred to perhaps two or three thousand, the time-old system worked well enough. In a burgeoning urban sprawl, such as was emerging in London, it proved to be totally inadequate. In 1855 Lord Shaftesbury observed that the parochial system ‘is no doubt, a beautiful thing in theory and ... of great value in small rural districts, but in large towns it is a mere shadow of a name’.⁹ The Bishop of London, Archibald Campbell Tait, declared in his visitation address in December 1866 that ‘the ordinary parochial machinery is quite inadequate to meet the needs of a dense population’.¹⁰ Although many, including bishops such as John Ryle of Liverpool,¹¹ recognised the rightness of Shaftesbury’s judgement, the problem was they were wedded to the past and could not envisage the national Church without its parishes and the status that it conferred on the local vicar or rector. A highly regarded clergyman who spoke at the Church Congress in 1881 declared that if the parochial system was brought to an end in large towns, ‘we at once become Congregationalists’.¹² William Walsham How, who was to play a significant role in the emergence of Settlements and Missions in London, told a meeting at the Mansion House in 1880 that Churchmen ‘could not set the parochial system aside if they would, and they would not if they could. (Hear, hear) Their plan was to supplement it’.¹³ When it came down to it however, many clergy were unwilling to see their parish divided or supplemented. Working parties set up by the Convocations of Canterbury and York in 1889 and 1892 found that most of the clergy whom they interviewed were opposed to the division of parishes.¹⁴ A further problem was that it was not always easy to create new parishes. Indeed until the 1843 Act of Parliament, new Church of England parishes could not be established without separate acts of Parliament. K.S. Inglis pointed out that from 1880 to 1900 the average annual number of new parishes was only 35.¹⁵

Lack of Church Accommodation

If the parish system was lacking so too was the amount of church accommodation and perhaps nowhere more so than in London. For example, in 1811, it was pointed out by the then Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, that in St Pancras and St Marylebone there was church seating for only one-ninth of the population. In 1814 Dr William Howley was appointed Bishop of London and soon realised that there was church seating for only one-tenth of London’s population. In 1815 Richard Yates published his damning pamphlet entitled The Church in Danger in which he stated that in London 953,000 souls were left without the possibility of parochial worship. Horace Mann, who reported on the findings of the 1851 Census of Religion, reached the conclusion that there were a million working people who could not have attended church even if they had wanted to. He speculated that a further 2,000 churches and chapels were needed in urban areas. Successive bishops did their best to plan and adopt strategies that would go some way towards meeting the crisis of reaching the capital’s poor with the Christian message. In 1866 Archibald Tait, who was then Bishop of London, reported that the number of churches in the diocese had increased to 1,127 from 980 in 1862. But he went on to say that a further 194 were still needed, together with 325 new clergy and a proportionate staff of Scripture Readers.¹⁶

The paucity of Anglican church accommodation was further exacerbated by the pew system. This allowed families and individuals who could afford to do so to rent pews in their local Anglican church. Not only did this reduce the number of seats available, it also alienated the poor who were often relegated to rough benches at the back of the building. In his report Mann gave reasons why the labouring myriads absented themselves from public worship. One of these was that they disliked the social distinctions in churches, the division into respectable pews and free seats, and regarded religion as a middle-class luxury.¹⁷ The other side of the issue was the fact that the more respectable found it difficult to sit at close quarters with the unwashed. A curate, who worked in Stepney and enjoyed good relations with the poor in his care, nevertheless opposed the abolition of the pew system: ‘though it is a painful thing to mention, the dirt of some of the people, and the fleas that we see, would prevent many persons going’.¹⁸ Strictly speaking pew rents were only supposed to be charged where Parliament specifically allowed them which usually meant those churches that were built after 1800.¹⁹ The practice of pew rent, although in most instances illegal,²⁰ became widespread. St Philip’s Clerkenwell became the first church in London to abandon the practice of renting pews.

In view of this state of affairs it was small wonder that church attendance in the metropolis was in decline. Charles Booth gave the following figures for church attendance in East London and Hackney in churches and chapels for Sunday 24 October 1892. Out of a total estimated population of 909,000, the attendances were Church of England 95,750, Congregational 20,000, Baptist 26,000, Wesleyan 19,100, Other Methodists 11,400, Presbyterian 4,000, Other denominations 7,500 and Roman Catholics 7,000.²¹ Compared to the attendance for the country London’s East End represented a bleak picture. In 1903 the Daily News published a census of London church attendance. It showed that attendance had fallen from 535,715 in 1886 to 396,196.²²

Social Conditions

The social conditions of the poor in most of the parishes both in the East End and south of the river were harsh and unhealthy. It was well-known that the Christian Socialist novelist, Charles Dickens, often went to places such as Shoreditch in order to capture the atmosphere for his scenes of poverty. The author of an article in The Illustrated London News entitled ‘Dwellings of the Poor in Bethnal Green’ wrote that the condition of the poorer neighbourhoods of this wide and populous district have ‘for years been subject to all the foulest influences which accompany a state of extreme filth and squalor’.²³ The same writer went on to state that Hollybush-place, Green Street, Pleasant Place and other neighbourhoods which 25 years previously had been a relatively healthy outlying village, ‘now consist of ruinous tenements reeking with abominations’.²⁴ Commenting on the water supply of the area he wrote,

The water for some fourteen or fifteen houses is frequently supplied from one tap in a dirty corner, where it runs for only a short time every day; and the places are mostly undrained. Add to this the decay of vegetable matter, the occasional evidence of the presence of pigs from the adjacent houses which have back yards (these have none), and that sickly odour which belongs always to human beings living in such a state, and the result will represent a score of places extending over Bethnal Green parish for more than a mile in length and half a mile in breadth.²⁵

The state of drinking water in south London was equally as bad. In 1849 Charles Kingsley recalled having gone down to the cholera districts of Bermondsey together with Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Walsh. What they encountered he put in a letter to his wife.

I was yesterday ... over the cholera districts of Bermondsey; and, oh, God! what I saw! People having no water to drink- hundreds of them- but the water of the common sewer which stagnated, full of dead fish, cats and dogs, under their windows. At the time the cholera was raging Walsh saw them throwing untold horrors into the ditch, and then dipping out the water and drinking!! ... and mind these are not dirty, debauched Irish, but honest hard-working artisans. It is most pathetic, as Walsh says, it makes him literally want to cry-to see the poor souls struggle for cleanliness, to see how they scrub and polish their little scrap of pavement and then go through the house and see ‘society’ leaving at the back poisons and filth-such as would drive a lady mad, I think, with disgust in twenty four hours.²⁶

Archibald Tait, who was Bishop of London from 1856–68, was well acquainted with the deprivation of the city’s East End and, together with his wife, he regularly visited the cholera districts.²⁷ In 1866 when the River Lea was infected and ‘conditions became very bad indeed’, he called a meeting of the clergy of Bethnal Green, Stepney, and Spitalfields. Together they endeavoured to make a series of recommendations that would assist the sanitary authorities. Tait’s wife, Catharine, later hired a house in Fulham in which to take care of some of the many orphaned girls from the area. The ‘Home’ later became established as St Peter’s orphanage.²⁸

Tait was also only too well aware of the problems associated with deprivation and squalor, and the ways in which they created a downward spiral of hopelessness, ignorance and a lack of self-respect. On one occasion he highlighted the issue in a graphic account of a conventional district in the East End of London, containing a population of 10,000 of whom 4,000 were Jews.

Not one in a hundred habitually attends a place of worship. Of 228 shops in the district, 212 are open on Sunday. About seventy, however, are closed on Saturday the Jewish Sabbath. Not half the Gentile adults can read. Half the women cannot handle a needle. Our mothers’ meeting has seventy members, half of whom, though living with men and having families, are unmarried, and this is the proportion throughout the gentile district. Nine families out of ten have but one small room in which to live, eat and sleep. Not one family in six possesses a blanket or a change of clothing. Not one in four has any bedding beyond a sacking, containing a little flock or chopped straw (a miserable substitute for a mattress). Not one in twenty has a clock, – not one in ten a book. Many houses are in the most wretched condition of dirt and filth, walls, ceilings, floors and staircases broken and rotting. Drunkenness, brawling, blasphemy, and other sins are fearfully prevalent.²⁹

The Challenge of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London

Sensational accounts of the horrors of inner-city life were not felt to be helpful by everyone who was engaged in working in the nation’s slum areas. Nevertheless one such report stirred the churches of several denominations to action in a way that few had done before. This was a penny pamphlet entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor published in October 1883 by a Congregational minister, the Revd Andrew Mearns (1837–1925).³⁰ Mearns, who had been appointed secretary of the London Congregational Union in 1876, was deeply disturbed at the conditions in London’s East End. The Bitter Cry was not altogether original since part of its evidence was taken from a more racily written tract produced by G.R. Sims entitled How the Poor Live.³¹ In the preface to a later edition, Sims wrote, ‘I have the permission of the author of The Bitter Cry to say that from these articles he derived the greatest assistance while compiling his famous pamphlet’. Mearns had no wish to undermine the existing efforts of the churches and the various home mission societies, he simply wished to highlight the ways in which the situation was becoming increasingly more despe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. London’s Desperate Need
• 2. Samuel Barnett and the Founding of Toynbee Hall
• 3. Oxford Colleges in the East End
• 4. Cambridge South of the Thames
• 5. Public School Missions
• 6. Nonconformist Settlements
• 7. Women’s Settlements
• 8. University Hall, a Non-Sectarian Settlement
• 9. What the Squires Achieved
• Notes and References
• Bibliography