Next to the question of hair the matter of feet is the most crucial. Boots are an insoluble problem, for they are always worn out. The most shapeless and terrible apologies for shoes are met with in the doss houses and the street, broken in the soles, bursting out at the sides, with huge cracks across the instep that chafe the skin and set up running sores. The cheapest pair of the most secondhand kind is beyond the means of this type of outcast to purchase, for, as the external condition deteriorates, so the earning capacity dwindles, and the danger of being arrested as a beggar increases. Many of them replenish their footwear from the scourings of dust bins. In the early morning you will often find a furtive figure turning over the refuse of the roadside. Crusts of bread are taken, and all kinds of garbage; but the treasure trove is a shoe, and if a pair is salved from the wreckage, physical contentment is assured.
The feet of the woman tramp, or street vendor—it is the same thing—are very pitiful to see. They are almost nonhuman in their shapelessness. Callosities, horny growths, bunions, destroy their contours, running sores are perennial and the efforts of Nature to escape the pain of contact with rough leather, result in distortion of the bone. Ingrowing nails are common; how should it be otherwise? The care of the feet calls for plentiful hot water and requisite toilet accessories; and these women, of whom I write, have not the means to wash their sores. There is, of course, due bathing accommodation in the casual ward of a workhouse, but as I shall show, the thing that survives longest and most fiercely among the destitute, is a passionate fear of restriction, the horror of detention within four walls, under a strange roof. For this reason before they will ask a night’s lodging of the Poor Law Guardians they will push endurance to an inhuman limit.
This is especially the case with the outcasts of the London streets. These women who have taken to the road and go out into the country have accustomed themselves to the casual ward, have assimilated every twist and turn of the law, and know to a nicety what they must do, and what the master has not the power to enforce.
There are some doss houses which are licensed by the L.C.C. Of these the Salvation Army Shelter in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, is the largest. There for the sum of fivepence an outcast, however dilapidated, dirty, starving, or afflicted, can get a clean, warm bed. My night in Hanbury Street was one of the most poignant experiences of my adventures, and I shall deal with it at length later on. At the moment I am concerned to show how and where the outcasts sleep when they have sunk below the economic level of the licensed lodging house.
For those who have no money, not even a copper, there remains St. Crispin’s Dormitories. This Shelter, in the neighbourhood of Spitalfields, is run by charitable Catholics. The accommodation of necessity is frugal. A number of boxes run the length of the room, each box is provided with a mattress, pillow and blanket, and to obtain a box, women walk for miles and queue up early in the evening. Here there is considerable difficulty in keeping the place free from vermin, for very many of the lodgers have that long, matted hair which I have already described. St. Crispin’s is open from October to May. During the summer months it shuts down, for when the weather is warm a night on the Embankment or in one of the many open spaces of London is not insufferable. It is when the world is freezing and the wind cuts to your very soul that you cry out blindly for a bed. At such a time a dog kennel would seem hospitable: and yet all through the winter months hundreds of outcast women spend the night huddled in doorways, under arches, or keep themselves from freezing by that everlasting walking about.
The accommodation offered to women by the Metropolitan Board of Guardians is extremely limited. In the whole of London—North, South, East and West—there is but one casual ward where the destitute female can find a bed. The reasons for this limitation are interesting. Since the War, women’s casual wards have been handed over to the other sex. Paddington was a last female trench; now this has gone, and only Southwark remains. It follows, therefore, that to get a bed you must often—indeed, most frequently—traverse the length and breadth of London. For how shall it profit the outcasts at Highgate to know that on the other side of Lambeth Bridge a cubicle awaits them?
This male invasion of casual wards, intended for women, is an outcome of the fear of the authorities that an ex-service man should be discovered bedless and starving in the streets. This would arouse a very general indignation, and a steady fire of middle class criticism would be directed against the powers that be; it is the middle class, far more than the Socialist or Communist groups, that authority always fears. Were a man, who had fought in his country’s cause, found on the Embankment in the last stage of exhaustion, letters to the Press would rain down from all parts, the whole question of unemployment would be raised, and the old taunt of ingratitude flung in the teeth of the particular Cabinet responsible at the time.
There have been very few cases reported of ex-soldiers and sailors driven to the last gasp of endurance; and in order to prevent, so far as possible, such a contingency, the women’s wards of the workhouses have been taken
