The Down and Out King - 22

WILLIAM

Dry bread in the morning, ditto at night,

Keep up your pecker and make it all right.

Certainly the meals are paltry and mean,

But the beds are nice and clean;

Men, don't tear the beds, sheets, or rugs,

For there are neither lice, fleas, or bugs

At this little clean union at Trysull.

But still at this place there is a drawback,

And now I will put you on the right track,

For I would as soon lodge here as in Piccadilly

One of Sam’s favourite subjects is about the vices that he sees within
our walls.

“Foremost among indoor pauper vices I place larceny. There never yet was an establishment of any size or age in which abuses did not prevail, simply because no system of management can be devised free from flaws.

“My own particular workhouse is an old one, and therefore abounding in defects. It was built before the requirements of such places were thoroughly understood. In consequence, some of its sections are too large, and others just as much too small, while a number of necessary offices are altogether wanting. Further, there are no architectural arrangements for completely isolating the various departments, and for preventing subordinate officials and their pauper deputies from prowling all over the place whenever they feel so inclined.

“Certain necessary offices being wanting, so also are the officers. There are, therefore, no arrangements for supervising and checking a good many proceedings. Certain people connected with the place, indeed, have become so accustomed to peculation that they have come at length to
look upon its exercise as very much a matter of right.

“Perhaps no form of workhouse larceny is so objectionable as that which deals with the food of the inmates. The supplies are strictly in proportion to the numbers to be fed, such and such a quantity of potatoes, flour, oatmeal, meat, etc., per head being issued daily. Thus, if a subordinate officer should appropriate a certain quantity of the raw stuff, the portion of each individual would be correspondingly reduced; and if his or her pauper assistants made raids on the cooked
food, the individual shares must undergo still further diminution.

“Now, not a morsel more than is absolutely necessary to support life in a state of health is handed out to the cook. Theft of food, then, on anything like a large scale, must inevitably produce much suffering and injury to the majority of the inmates.

“However, larceny in large establishments never attains the magnitude which it is capable of attaining until a master-mind takes its direction; and master-minds are just as uncommon in larceny as in any other walk of life. Such a one is not long in gaining the confidence of the various groups, and in convincing them of the manifest advantages attending a united and systematic action. Methods are arranged for removing the goods from the house in the safest way, and for disposing of them to the best advantage with the safest customers.

“There are countless ways of smuggling articles out of a workhouse. Here much depends on the quality of the persons engaged in the transaction. Manifestly it is much easier for a highly placed
official than for a subordinate; while any subordinate, however mean, has many more facilities at his disposal than a pauper.

“A very common method is by coming to an understanding with the contractors or their men. Then the stores are either delivered short of quality, or the full amount is deposited in the house and a
portion conveyed away - often at the moment by the vehicles that brought them. No other method, indeed, can well be adopted where the plunder is bulky, unless the plunderers are absolutely reckless; and in the latter case they are sure to be observed, and exposed in very short space.

“Different days are selected for the raids on the different sorts of food - one day for the meat, another for the flour, a third for the vegetables, a fourth for the meal, and so on.

“Tuesday, let us suppose, is one of the porridge or gruel days. The paupers will receive precisely the same quantity morning and evening - say a pint and a half on each occasion. But the quality? A pound of meal to a gallon of water is the regulation amount; but on the raiding-day the proportion is known to have been seventy pounds of meal to one hundred and twenty gallons of water, or half short.

“The paupers complain; but of what use is that? The master admits that there is some justice in the complaint. He calls for the cook, and receives a plausible excuse which he does not care to search
too closely, orders that the thing shall not occur again, and then forgets all about it. Next day the gruel is all correct, and the next, and the next, until the raiding-day returns, when what has just
been described is repeated.

“It is the same with the meat, which is stolen on one of the days when there is soup for dinner; and the same with everything eatable.

“Of course this sort of thing cannot take place without the notice and connivance of the paupers employed in the kitchen. Of course, also, the said paupers do not fail to take full advantage of what is going on. Seeing their superiors steal the raw food, they do just the same with the cooked food.

“The pilferers are envied. At the same time there is hardly one who suffers by their conduct who does not say to himself, 'If I were in the place of one of these people, I would do precisely the same
thing. My turn may come some day; and it would be a folly in me were I to do aught to spoil the game by which I hope to profit as they.'

“Besides the way of thinking just described, there is the common repugnance to playing the part of informer. There are two or three supposed informers always undergoing the tyranny of the dishonest, and the general persecution of their fellows, in every badly conducted workhouse. And in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the poor fellows are no informers at all, but mere scapegoats on whom the real informers - themselves in all likelihood thieves jealous of rivals - have contrived to fix suspicion.

“Now and again, when the half-starved begin to grumble too loudly, the grumbling is very effectually put down by those interested, in the following ingenious way. They fix upon a few of the loudest-tongued, and soon find the means of subjecting them to all the pains and penalties awarded by pauper communities to people really guilty of the detested practice of informing.

“As to complaints to higher authorities, they are seldom of any avail except to bring trouble, and plenty of it, down on the heads of the complainants. Poor Law Inspectors deputed to investigate such matters invariably demand evidence of a sort which paupers cannot give. An assertion that the gruel has been thin, or the soup not the thing, though supported by three-fourths of the paupers in the house, goes for nothing, taken alone. The pauper has no means of testing the precise thinness of the one or the other; no means of comparing the stuff he finds fault with, with food of the right sort.

“For my own part, I do not see why instruments on the principle of the hydrometer, for testing the density of soup and gruel, should not be placed in every pauper refectory, to be used by a selection of the more intelligent inmates previous to every soup and gruel meal. The testing would not occupy three minutes, and, with a duly kept record of results, would go far towards extinguishing dishonesty of this kind.

“Dishonesty of another kind might be even more easily dealt with. I do not see why small pauper officials, employed to measure out soup, etc., should be allowed to give diminished quantities, for no other purpose than that they may be enabled to sell the surplus, at the end of the meal, to those who can afford to purchase.

“Again, if the weighing out of raw food were conducted at all times under the supervision of a deputation of inmates, changed from time for reasons unnecessary to mention, much depredation would be prevented.

“As things go, anyone complaining, no matter how just the cause, is set down as an ill-conditioned, grumbling, quarrelsome subject. He resents, of course, which is exactly what is wanted; therefore he incurs all the blame of the dispute. This is duly represented in the proper quarter - with the proper result, namely, that he is ever after regarded in that quarter as all that certain people represent him, and his complaints are henceforth treated with supreme contempt. Meanwhile, his life is made miserable in the house by all the ways which vindictive officers know how to employ. His tasks are made hard. He is called upon for extra work, when such is required. Finally, nothing that he does ever gives satisfaction.

“Theft is especially rife among the Ins and Outs; and they have more opportunities of displaying their dexterity than would readily be imagined. Indoor paupers gradually acquire various little things, as
books, pocket-knives, writing materials, sets of chessmen, and so on. Much of this kind of property is carried constantly about the person - stuffed into the breast, or stowed away in pockets which the poor creatures construct in their clothes wherever it is possible to place them.

“Such property, therefore as cannot be crushed into pockets is stowed away in the beds.

“When an In and Out is about to discharge himself, he ascertains quietly which bed contains the more valuable articles; and, let the owner watch as he will, the thief will contrive to get at his hoard and strip it of whatever has excited his cupidity.

“One of the peculiarly dangerous vices of indoor paupers is their habit of shifting the blame of their own misdeeds on to the shoulders of others. They are always watching one another, and always betraying, too. This is done - sometimes in vindictiveness, sometimes in envy, and sometimes in sheer malice - for the mere sake of doing mischief to their neighbours. Tale-bearing, as already mentioned, is a common vice; and the grand object of the tale-bearers is to fix the odium of
their actions on somebody else.

“Curiously enough, one particular individual is spontaneously selected by all the members of the gang. Possibly three or four of them agree on ascribing the offence to him; but in most cases there is no such pre-arrangement. The individual is, as a rule, a man who will have nothing to do with the gossips, or who has won the hostility of one or other of them. This one - the person provoked - then goes whispering from man to man, 'Such and such is a tale-bearer; beware of him.' That is sufficient. The other gossips hasten to take up the cry; thus it soon becomes general.

“Afterwards the odium in which the unfortunate man has been held dies rapidly away. It is soon generally admitted that a mistake has been made, and that the man never did anything of the kind attributed to him. When matters reach this stage, the rascally talebearers look out for another scapegoat, who, when it suits them, has to undergo precisely the same treatment.

“And these scoundrels are allowed to do this with perfect impunity. The officers of a workhouse, from the porter with his uniform and twenty-five pounds a year, upwards, are all of the most lordly description. Without exception, they regard all paupers as of quite an inferior order of beings - creatures much lower in the scale of creation than the pigs which fatten at their expense. They are not admitted to have rights - not even the right to cherish feelings of any sort. It never enters an officer's head that, there can be gradations of character in a workhouse. In his high and mighty view,
there is no better or best among its inmates, but all stand alike on the same exceedingly low level. They are all alike repulsive - wretches who have no just claim to life, since it merely enables them
to be burdensome to the ratepayers. It is their duty, considers the officer, to accept their task-work and modicum of food, and the contumely that accompanies them, with clasped hands and on bended knees.

”These high-minded officers - task-masters at forty pounds a year and so on - quite forget that if there were no paupers there would be no workhouses, and not the smallest necessity for such comfortable posts as those they hold.”

Reading and copying out this section made my blood run cold. He is quoting quite a bit of information about the kitchen thievery that he has had from me. But I am not intending to be one of those who tells tales. I could not bear the punishment that comes to that sort of man which he
has so graphically described.