ST. JAMES: As one enters a blind court, the unsavoury mephitic air peculiar to rooms where people sleep and live in common, seldom wash, and rarely change their clothes, is offensive enough, and inside the rooms, and on the narrow, dark, unventilated staircases, the noxious exhalations make one long for the outer air and the vitalising oxygen.
The occupants—labourers, quay rangers, hawkers, and men in uncertain employment—would with difficulty be induced to pay more than 1/6 per week to be 'housed' at night.
They do not attempt to make 'a home'.
ST. JUDE'S: This district with its thickly clustering old houses, and rookeries, its dank courts and blind alleys, its 'dark entries' and back-yard shed dwellings, common lodging houses and tramps’ retreats, its thieves’ haunts and prize fighters’ quarters,long had a reputation as the abode of the utmost squalor and misery, abject poverty, personal improvidence, and social wrong. Bull Paunch Lane, the home of the dog fanciers, the prize fighters and their trainers, cag-mag butchers and loafers, has disappeared before the march of streets improvements, and the broad new thoroughfare of Lawford Street has swept away many a vile rookery and den of filth, and let in a wholesome current of air into streets in passing through which one was glad to keep a handkerchief to his mouth to escape the noxious fumes of vitiated air issuing from every court and alley and passage.
Eighteen years ago it must have contributed a large contingent to the extraordinary assemblage held one night in Major Tireman’s Chapel, St. Philips, when the Society of Friends’ Mission gave a 'Thieves Tea', at which between 300 and 400 accredited thieves and their associates were present, the police having been won over by the Quakers to give their promise not to enter Unity Street till the curious gathering had moved off.
All night orgies, which often preceded the morning prize fights, have disappeared with the suppression of these illustrations of the 'noble art' and the restriction of the hours of closing public houses.
In 1874, when Mr. Mark Whitwill laid the foundation stone of the British Workman in connection with the New Street Mission there, several houses had to be pulled down for the new building.
In getting rid of the tenants there were turned out of one small room a man and wife and four children, and fourteen fowls found beneath the bed, where the accumulated filth and feculent matter were more than a foot deep.
In another room there lived an old man and woman, who slept on sacks in two of the corners, and in a third these costermongers kept their donkey; while to the top room, the roof of which was in some places open to the sky, an old, blind man, nightly made his way to sleep on bare boards. Most of the close, pent-up, unventilated single rooms in St. Jude’s are in New Street, Wade Street, Great Ann Street, Pinnell Street, and Brick Street.
Compared with these, Great George Street is locally an aristocratic quarter, whose inhabitants consider they are falling in the social scale if they are by any means driven into some of the adjoining streets.
Here is a pitiable picture of a home in one of three cottages in a court between? West Street and St. Jude’s. The husband is a labourer at one of the largest works in the city, has been ill, but is now in full work at; 6 shillings per week. He has a wife and five children; the wife, a tailoress, and the only article of furniture left in the living room is her sewing machine.
She has been confined only six weeks ago, and is stated to be out looking for work. The cottage has two rooms, rent 2/- per week. Nearly every window pane is smashed in, and partially, protected with rags and paper; the front door has been battered in, and the panels falling outlet the draught direct into the living room. on the filthy floor of which, on some dirty rags, in a three inch deep soap packing box is the tiny baby, six weeks old; there is a little fire in the grate, and the children, with scarcely enough rags to cover their nakedness, are as black as the floor and walls.
They are in charge of an elder girl. What the bedroom can be like for this family of seven is not difficult to guess.
The two adjoining cottages, each occupied by labourers and their families of children are pictures of comfort. One labourer on the Quay earned about 18/- a week, but has little work in the summer. Yet the house is full of furniture, the walls covered with pictures, and the four children clean and tidy. 2/6 a week is paid for the two rooms, and the occupants have limed the outside and papered the inside themselves; and have a good fowl’s house well stocked opposite the door.
The wives of the two men join in a little mercantile enterprise of a curious kind. They buy American flour bags at large flour mills at the rate of 2/3 a dozen, and clean and sell them at 2d. each, to be made into under linen and sheets. They thus gain 3d. per dozen, but they also make them into articles of clothing for themselves and sell them, and we were shown sheets and pillow cases made of this material looking as good as new.
Climbing one of the dark, unventilated staircases we have described in a court off Little Ann Street, in a tenement house, we find occupying a top room, a man, wife, and four children, eldest 13 years, youngest 6 months. The husband supported the family by making butcher’s skewers, and he has to make a thousand small skewers for fifteen pence, out of which he finds the wood.
Our first visit to the elfin match-box makers is in a court off a thoroughfare, on the wall of which the intelligent visitor is informed 'This is Wade Street'. Climbing up the lofty staircase of a tenement house we enter a room rented at 1/2 per week by a labourer, his wife and three children. The man has been out of work for a long time, and the wife, as usual in these cases, has to struggle to earn the bread for the family.
The rough table and the floor covered with hundreds of pieces of slenderly-shaved wood used for the match boxes, show at once how she earns the money. She tells us she is able sometimes 'when her baby is good' to make three gross a day. She thus earns sixpence, but this is only achieved by the work of many hours. But she is very industrious, and the room and single bed are clean compared with all the surrounding homes, and on the wall is a picture of a girl in a snowstorm.
THE STICK CHOPPERS’ HOME AT NIGHT: Our visit is on an evening when an unusually large supply has just come to hand from an unloaded vessel and the stick choppers are working far into the night, sawing and cleaving wood and preparing bundles for sale in the morning. In nearly every case the women are doing the work, but here is one industrious man sawing away at some heavy timber for his wife to chop in the morning.
The room is about 7 ft. square, and the lamp throws an uncertain light on the floor which appears, at first, to be covered with nothing but splintered wood already chopped. But examination shows on one pile of sticks, close to the fire grate, what appears to be a bundle of dark rags. This proves to be two children lying in their clothes on their uneven bed, and as sound asleep as though they were on a bed of down.
In the next house the floor of the living room is covered with wood which has fallen from the chopping block, seated on the ground before which is the eldest daughter, a brawny-limbed girl of 19. Her bared arms are as big and sinewy as a blacksmith’s, for she is constantly cleaving wood, and in the cart, the shafts of which we have stumbled over in the dark outside the door she could pull four or five cwt. of timber. She is dexterous at her work, for though the large basket is piled up with tied bundles, her younger sister cannot keep pace with her as strip after strip of wood flies from the chopping block.
The ruddy glare of the fire, aided by the red ochred walls, throws a cheery glow over the room. There are some pictures on the walls and the mother apologises for the untidiness of the place and the fact that 'the other pictures are not put up' because the room has just been ochred out.
Under recent regulations formulated by the Watch Committee, and now sanctioned by the Home Secretary, all children under eight years of age will be prohibited from selling any article in the streets, and those under 13 years will be prohibited from being employed after nine o’clock in the evening from April to October, and after eight o’clock in the evening from October to April.
This will remove what has been for some years past a crying disgrace to the city - that of children of five and six years selling articles in the streets till 10 and 11 o’clock at night, often in the winter.
On the books of the River Street Board School there are 320 children, 260 of whom are present during the week, and of these—the poorest class of children, some of these without shoes and stockings, the average attendance is 190.
About one-half of this number are known to sell articles in the streets at night; and the School Board Officer has had to remonstrate with the parents for beating with the strap of children of tender age who have not earned the required amount of money in the streets. The dull, stupid boys attend with the most regularity, the smartest ones being often kept away for the purpose.
ST. AGNES: There are now only a few tumbledown cabins left to mark the place where the colony of 'Squatters' held possession of the Newfoundland Gardens and these are to come down next March. Several of this remnant are already closed, and they serve,to show the wretched straits to which some of these poor people were driven in housing themselves in homes which look unfit for pigs to be littered in.
In one of them died the wife of the old man whom the Rev. E. A. Fuller, wading through the water, rescued by carrying him on his back through the flood of 1882. In olden times, the ground was let in garden allotments, the holders of which first built tool houses and then summer houses there; gradually a fire grate and chimney were added, and then squatter after squatter took possession, some living in the wooden structures at first, and then replacing them with brick cabins.
Whenever the man who leased the ground and sub-let it to the squatters saw a chimney appear, he added a shilling or two to the yearly rent of the garden ground, and so long as no 'upstairs' was constructed the squatters were unmolested.
Upwards of a hundred cabins were thus erected, and the colony gradually increased to 500 or 600 people, who bred fowls and ducks and pigs, and were famous for monster vegetables. Lanes and avenues were formed through the squatters’ land and St. Nicholas road now stands on what was Beehive Lane, the broad Newfoundland road cuts what was Middle Lane.
Then there were Taylor’s Lane, Hancock Lane, and the 'Lane by the Pump', where there was a noted spring of splendid water.
ST. PHILIPS: Within the memory of old people whom we met there, the spaces now occupied by the Midland Railway station, the Batch, Kingsland Road, and the thoroughfare to the 'Barley Fields' and the Marsh, were covered with green fields and blooming orchards. with lanes edged with hawthom and meadows dotted with cottages embowered in honeysuckle.
One lady, now paying 1/3 a week for a single room, has vivid memories of 'Dead Man’s Lane' leading from the Batch to Barton Hill, through fields where cattle were grazing. For many years she kept a large school in a cottage in Unity Street; and even now, in her one room with bare furniture, and a humble pallet covering nearly half the space, she has a 'school for infants'.
As factory after factory was erected, the fields were turned into market gardens; where Trinity Almshouses now stand there was a vegetable market.
The demolition of the houses on the left of the Narrow Plain has not only cleared the neighbourhood of fearful rookeries, but it has thrown open to view St. Philips churchyard now about to be enclosed with a light railing, and turned into a public garden.
In one block of houses in Lower Cheese Lane we entered ,some curious little homes of parishioners aged 70 to 90. The houses, we believe, belong to the parish vestry, and are let in single rooms to these old people at 7d. per room including water. The Salvation Army agents have a monster place of meeting in their 'Warehouse' in Lucky Lane, It is a loft over Mr. Cooksley’s nail factory, and the officers state that sometimes as many as 1,200 persons assemble there.
You can have a chat and gossip at Dr. White’s Almshouses with old 'Templars' who have played in the meadows on the site of the present Railway Station, a quarter of a century before the Great Western Railway was built, and have walked through the city gates into the fields across the green turf before it was excavated for the artificial bed of the river now the New Cut.
In those early days, too, its narrow lanes and crooked alleys, its low-arched and cavemous-looking courts, intersected with dark passages and back entrances to old houses, were accredited with sheltering gangs of thieves, who prowled the city at night, returning with plunder, which, till it could be melted down, was concealed in the spaces beneath headstones over the graves in the old churchyard, where, even within the last twelve years, portions of silverplate have been discovered.
Probably the greatest disaster that ever befell the poor of Temple was the collapse of the colossal undertaking of Messrs. Fiozel in 1879-80. The Counterslip Refinery constantly extended its buildings till it covered an immense space abutting on the river.
It had 25 steam boilers—directly employed between 600 and 800 men—could turn out 1,200 tons of sugar a week, and was estimated to influence the every day life and welfare of between 2,000 and 3,000 people.
Gradually the trade fell off, and sorrow and suffering were carried into hundreds of homes when the news of the crash came.
Edward Colston’s birthplace: Colston’s house, which is still a substantial, well preserved building—thanks to its walls which are nearly three feet thick— is now used as a large basket manufactory by Mr. Reece, nearly opposite White’s Almshouses. Colston is stated to have been born here on November 2nd, 1636, and though much of his life was spent near London, he returned to Bristol in 1681, and had a sugar refinery at the Old Mint (St. Peter’s Hospital).
THE 1882 FLOODS: The 'Jerry built' houses of Baptist Mills held together pretty well till there came the great flood of October 24th 1812, when constant rain, followed by extraordinary tides, caused the Froom to rise 15 feet above its ordinary level.
The water was pent up behind the Stapleton Road and Mina Road bridges till their parapet walls fell, and the flood devastated the whole neighbourhood. At the same time the embankment wall of the Lower Ashley Road bridge suddenly yielded to the pressure and the water poured like a torrent into the streets and houses.
It was three feet above the roadway of the bridge, and 12 feet above the ordinary level of the river. In one house the water rose to a level of 9ft. 6in., and in another near the embankment it poured into a ground floor room in such a torrent that had not the inmates escaped to their bedroom they would all have been drowned.
The mud and filth deposited after the water had receded left the place so damp and unwholesome that the occupants lived upstairs for nearly six months. In the mead between this spot and Mina Road bridge, a youth, with his horse and cart, was carried away by the current, and the poor boy lost his life, while a carter named Porter only escaped by climbing a tree and his horse and dray were also carried down the stream.
In the streets. policemen lit the gas lamps from boats, with which they rescued scores of people from the bedrooms of houses which showed signs of collapsing, and two of which fell in shortly after nearly a dozen persons had been removed from one of them.
Clergy and others of the district spent the night in rescuing people or conveying food to them. At the St. Werburgh’s end of the district it was found next morning that the flood had swept clean through some of the houses and the gingerbread structures falling in, left only the outer walls standing. The families who had lost nearly all their belongings, crowded into the up -lying streets—two or three in a house, till the flood had entirely subsided, when many of them returned; and with the charity from the Mayor’s fund, they restocked their houses and set about drying the houses.
The Sanitary Authority condemned some of these dwellings, and branded the district with iron 'Scare posts' showing how much each street (off Lower Ashley Road) was below flood level, 5ft. 4ft. 6in.. etc.
REDCLIFF: We believe it was more than 40 years ago that the first house was set back in Redcliff Street for the much desired street improvements; during that period the character of the place has so changed that the visitor would not recognise in the palatial modern factories the picturesque old street of thirty years ago, with its overhanging eaves, ancient house fronts and quaint gables.
The improvements swept away some of the vilest dens in the city, veriest hot-beds of immorality and vice, beneath the shadow of the stately church. The construction of Phippen Street, the levelling of the roadway in old Redcliff Pit, and subsequently the laying-out of the Harbour Railway, demolished the worst of these wretched courts, particularly Queens Head Court which was rank with foul dens of shame, where almost nightly men and women quarrelled and fought.
Behind the Ragged School in Pile Street stands the humble house where was born in 1752 the ill-starred Chatterton—'The sleepless soul that perished in his pride'. He was the posthumous son of the master of the adjoining school. On a tablet in front of the dwelling is the inscription 'This house was erected by Giles Malpas, gent, for the use of the master of this school, in December, 1749'.
The courts left on the north side are occupied by very poor people, many of them Out of work, while their wives chop sticks. The tone of the place has greatly improved, though a medical man assures us that 'peace and goodwill' does not always prevail there. The houses are very old and we find in one narrow court a labourer paying 1/6 a week for two rooms in disrepair, with ceilings falling in. He has a wife and two children, and only gets three or four days’ work a week.
Though much remains to be done in Tennis Court, and Bryant Street, Redcliff Hill, a great improvement has been effected; here Alderman Cope Proctor has bettered the homes of the poor. One side of Bryant Street has been renovated; Orchard Square and adjoining houses, with Redcliff Square have been put in a state of repair, and in Redcliff buildings, the Redcliff Vestry have shown the neighbourhood model houses for the poor in the improvements they have effected.
BEDMINSTER: It is a quarter of a century ago that the Rev. Dr. Doudney, 'Old Jonathan', commenced his preaching in his temporary wooden church in Princess Street, but after a few years found the poverty too great to carry on his work without the aid of a soup-kitchen—which he has since built on a most complete scale.
Every winter, hundreds of the very poor are thankful for its timely help; the outcry for more work meets one in the crowded homes, but the keen struggle is unseen till one is brought in close contact with it in the poorest dwellings of Stillhouse Lane, Whitehouse Street, Water’s Place, the Piggery, and Doveton Street.
Dr. Doudney also has a mission hall in William Street worked by the curates and Mr. Lockyer; and a Ragged School, with average attendance of 150 poor children, who twice a week are provided with soup made by means of steam boilers to the extent of 800 quarts each day and thick slices of bread distributed on Wednesdays and Fridays.
At the Ragged School we were present at a soup supper to 150 men Out of work, and old people, to whom Dr. Doudney gave a history of the soup kitchen. The supper, with the gifts of 2 oz. of tea and a loaf of bread, resulted from a present of £5 from an old Bedminster man in Australia.
BRIGHTBOW COTTAGES: The walls of some of these old low-roofed, quaint-looking houses are nearly two feet thick, In 'The Paddock' or East Street Place, they skirt the old stream - the Malago - which, after burying itself beneath modern streets, shoots under the Causeway, through what used to be 'Old Bedminster Bridge' and flows in the open, about ten feet wide, where this river of the Avon rises and falls with the tide, sometimes to the extent of four or five feet.
At flood times, it has overflowed the banks and inundated the houses here, and in October 1882, entering the houses, it extinguished the fires and drove the inmates to the upstair rooms.
Few visitors would suspect the presence of the stream close to the houses on the broad thoroughfare leading from the fine, new, 60-ft. bridge which now spans the Avon, and it is worth turning into the Paddock to see this rustic street scene, with its curious old dwellings, In one corner is a miniature farm, with whitelimed outbuildings and wire netting for poultry and pigeons; piggery and stables equally cared for, and the 'homestead' itself, on the south bank of the Malago, looking as bright as fresh paint can make it.
HOTWELLS: The tea garden, with the hanging woods of Leigh, were crowded with gay holiday keepers, while omnibuses running every quarter of an hour (before the advent of trains) conveyed hundreds to the gay promenade on the west side of the old lock of the basin, But the construction of the Portishead Railway destroyed one of the most accessible means of outdoor enjoyment Bristol people had within reach.
The new lock and the river-side improvements cut away picturesquely situated houses and favourite spots on the north side of the river at Rownham,, and contributed still more to denude the Hotwells of its ‘vantage spots’ where the citizens formerly passed many a pleasant hour.
Where neat dwellings once lined the way, on the water front strips of rail-enclosed spaces of all shapes and angles have been left, exposing the back slums of houses; there is left to view from the water side an indescribable mass of dingy bricks and mortar, forming neither fronts nor backs of houses, and showing so many blotches that the place looks 'wrong side out 'In Jacob’s Wells, where groups of showmen’s vans and 'high flyers' remind us that here for forty years during the last century stood the Theatre whose 'gorgeous lamp of copper gilt' and ‘farthing candles—chandeliers of tin' excited Chatterton’s satirical lines—'Avarice sat brooding in her white-washed cell, And pleasure had a hut at Jacob’s Well', now stand the model lodging-houses of the Industrial Dwellings Company, started through the efforts of Miss Winkworth and others.
The Jacob’s Wells buildings were opened in 1877 and Brandon Buildings in 1879. There are about eighty 'Iets' in all; some containing four rooms, with scullery, washing copper, water closet, and coal bin, for rents varying from 5/6 to 6/- a week, free of rates and taxes; others of three rooms, with coal bin and water closet, at rents varying from 3/3 to 4/6; and single rooms from 1/3 to 2/6.
