Poverty in 19th Century Victorian Britain’s towns and cities was everywhere,
and if you watched my video about the ‘Crawlers’ - who really led the most pitiful
existence - you will be well aware of just how bad life could be for those who fell
through the cracks of society and onto the streets. If you were a Victorian and found
yourself living a ‘street life’ – grafting for daily bread and board or begging for money
– then you could (if you still had some coins left after eating) avoid the rain, bitter cold or
dangers of the night by paying to stay in a shelter of three varieties – a Penny ‘Sit-Up’,
a Two-Penny ‘Hangover’ or a Four Penny ‘Coffin’. They sound too strange too be true
– bizarre and shocking to us today, but they did exist, and offered a solution 'of sorts'
to the spiralling problem of homelessness, destitution and slums in the metropolis.
In the Victorian era, philanthropists and missions started work to assist the poor,
- in the case of the Salvation Army - with soup, soap and ‘salvation’ for the slums
of the East End. Shelters were employed as a means of support for the homeless and,
by today’s standards of the welfare state, you may well be astonished that the poor
were offered such rough and clearly inadequate housing as assistance – though,
if you could afford it, this was evidently viewed by ‘clients’ as a better alternative to
a night in a casual ward in return for hard labour - or on the street,
where the police would move you on if they saw you sleeping.
The ticket price was cheap, but the costs could be dear – your time in a shelter would
would be spent in the fellow company of the poor and pitiful, but misfortune may bring
all manner of squalor, beastly characters, pickpockets and mischief-makers. You were
surely never safe from those under the influence of drink or a quick-fingered thief.
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The Penny ‘Sit-Up’ was one of the first and operated by the Salvation Army to provide
respite from the streets for destitute clients, who were mostly homeless men but,
at times, women and children are known to have used them too. What made this shelter
unique was that in exchange for a penny, clients would be allowed to sit on a bench
in an all-night hall, which may or may not include food or heating depending on your
luck. But, they were not allowed to lie down and sleep on the bench! Some shelters
even employed monitors to ensure people didn’t take advantage by sleeping,
because this wasn’t permitted by the entry ticket price.
A Penny ‘Sit-Up’ was the cheapest homeless shelter at that time and the discomfort
people must have suffered is reflected in the low tariff. This, and the general filth and
foul atmosphere makes them hardly an appealing prospect to modern eyes,
but it was dry and, at the very least, wasn’t a wet doorway.
The Reverend George Edwards, a vicar from Southport in Lancashire published a paper
detailing his investigations into the homeless and the lodging houses which
they had to endure. He didn’t merely describe a Penny ‘Sit-Up’, but he actually
spent a night in one disguised as a vagrant – a night he described as ‘the longest of my
life’. A night so bad that he called this lodging house in Preston:
‘The House of Despair’. He describes his stay in his own words:
“You enter it in the evening, when the day is done. Already there are some twenty or
twenty-five men there. The room is literally bare, with nothing in it, nothing!
No fireplace, no stove, no hot water pipes, no sink, no water, no beds, no chairs,
no blankets, no mattresses - nothing, nothing whatever for the furnishing of the
room except a small, very small oil lamp, very dimly lighted, and four long wooden
kneelers about two inches off the floor sloping upwards towards the back.
Two of these at either ends of the room, and the other two running right down the middle
of the room back to back. What are they for? This surely is not a house of prayer?
No, these are pillows, wooden pillows, and presently the floor of this room will be
covered with bodies lying feet to feet in two double rows down the length of the room.
When you enter some are eating their bit of food; but remember, there is no stove,
no warmth, no fire here, only a (washing) boiler in the yard, where you may get hot
water. There are no cooking utensils; every man carries his own drum under his coat
behind his back - just an old tin of some sort with a wire handle. When your food is
eaten there is nothing to do but lie down on your length of the floor, some six feet by two
feet, and then if your limbs ache with lying down on the hard boards sit up, and if you
are privileged to have one of the select spots against the wall, you can lean against
that if you will. If you are wet through you sit or lie in your wet rags till they dry, that is all!
Think of it! Ten, twelve, fourteen hours thus. Thirty to sixty men thus, night by night,
in misery, wretchedness, filth of body, and starvation. The conversation is in the dull,
hopeless undertone of exhausted men, except when it flashes forth now and again
in the tone of revenge, hatred and bitterness against us who have condemned them to
this. It is always heavily laden with oath or blasphemy, and is of begging, pinching,
roguery, trickery, cruelty, at the best of the criminal courts, their prisoners and judges.
The leaden weight of exhaustion and despair is only lifted when a man is dead
drunk. And so these men try to settle themselves to sleep. Sleep? Were human
beings, God indwelt, ever meant thus to rest, in dirt, in degradation, in depression
indescribable? No clean horse-box with freshly-strewn straw, this! No well-drained
pig-sty with abundance of bedding, warmth and food, this! No rat-hole, this,
where father, mother, and baby rats may live together and seek their meat from God!
But a vermin-infested room, bare of aught but men's bodies clad in rags - bodies which
are not washed or groomed or cleaned from one twelvemonth to another, except when
forced to go to casual ward or gaol. Bodies which are half-starved, emaciated, lean.
Bodies which carry the germs of horrible disease, yet which are untended,
uncared for. Bodies which, because they are so poor, so poor in rich life blood,
are thereby fit and proper food for the tramp's, the dirty beggar's worst enemy
- lice. Little crawling, clinging, biting lice, which breed in twenty-four hours in the
seams of your clothes next your skin, and live upon you
- biting, biting, feeding, feeding, like the gnawing worm of hell.”
“The atmosphere! Figuratively speaking, you could cut it with a knife! You yourself sleep
next to an old decrepit man, who cannot always control his bodily actions;
his trousers stink – stink!; you will carry the stench in your nostrils for a week.
Sixty thus, and if not quite thus, all unwashed, all with the smell of the
unwashed. Add to this, rank tobacco smoke of all blends, some unknown even to
connoisseurs, such as 'kerb-stone twist' (old chews), old cigar ends, 'o.p.s.'
(other people's stumps), and old dried tea leaves. Add to this foul breath (some very
foul), add also the stale atmosphere of the room itself when empty, and remember
scarce any ventilation during the night except the occasional opening of the door
into the yard, and you may think you imagine what you never will
- till you experience it.”
“Thus the poorest of the poor live by night in Preston, thus the local authorities allow
them to live, thus we Christian men through our ignorance, our party strife,
and our fear of business-like reform suffer it, and shame on us all.”
“It is the cause of this great national evil of needless degradation I wish to fight;
not any one result, disgusting though it be. Yet be it known in Preston that the
'Penny sit up' is a Lancashire disgrace - a disgrace
to the soul and spirit of man, and not a cause for pious rejoicing.
“My mate when stranded has gone to beg for bread to many a house in Preston,
at which instead of being helped he has been told, "Take this ticket to the Shelter
in Shepherd Street; we've nothing to give you; we send all our broken meat to the
Shelter." Do these people know what the Shelter or the ‘Penny Sit-Up’ is like?
Have they ever been there? Do they know that this broken food is placed in a basket
on the floor of the room and scrambled for, in a wild mad rush of angry blaspheming
men? These are facts, indisputable - and one further, - do they know that these poor
men, because they have slept the night in Shepherd Street Mission Shelter,
and thereby, I suppose, touched the fringe of Christian sympathy, are refused
admittance in the morning to a neighbouring doss-house of no great
refinement, lest their living freight gathered the night before in Shepherd Street Shelter
should fall off them! The Shelter has, I believe, been open now for some few years.
Doubtless the owners and instigators feel they are doing a good work for the very
poor, and this makes me hesitate in saying anything; but I am convinced such a place
only brings men down permanently to a lower level than the doss-house,
and encourages them to stay there. If in those years it has not been possible to put a
fire in the room, to put in American cloth covered bunks like the Salvation Army have,
to put forms round the room, provide some rugs, to humanise and put a touch of
home into the place, to light the place up with real Christian hope and effort - I say
deliberately it would have been much better for everyone,
to have closed the shelter long ago."
A more expensive ‘upgrade’ to the Penny ‘Sit-Up’ was a Two Penny ‘Hangover.’
This was a shelter - at times unheated - where the clients were provided a rope to
lean on so that they can fall asleep on a bench without the risk of falling out
or hitting your head on the bench in front of you. The rope would be strung from
wall to wall and early every morning it would be loosened or cut as a wakeup call
– everyone being promptly turned out onto the streets once more.
It’s been suggested that the saying ‘Sleep Tight’ derives from this, but it’s actually
closer to meaning sleep ‘safely’ than having anything to do with this type of Victorian
shelter. The practice apparently continued into the early twentieth century and indeed
George Orwell alludes to it in his book 'Down & Out in London and Paris':
“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.”
A Four Penny ‘Coffin’ is adequate description for all you need to know about
the accommodation that was on offer here. Upon hearing its name, spending the night
in the ‘Coffin House’ must have been an unsettling feeling to say the least,
but, if you could afford the upgrade, was it a welcome choice in comparison to sitting
on a bench or leaning on a rope? Well, clients were provided with a coffin-shaped
wooden box so that they could sleep lying-down. At least this was an improvement
on the one and two penny options – even if you would be packed into a tightly fitting
box in rows like sardines and wakeup with all manner of aches and pains.
Anyone taller than average must have suffered even more. This shelter offered at
least the possibility of getting some sleep, as well as tea, bread and a tarpaulin sheet
and, whilst scarcely material that could be considered comfortable, was at least
better than no cover at all. George Orwell also described the Four Penny ‘Coffin’:
“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 enclosed in a box, you cannot escape.”