Below is a sample of the information I took from Notebooks B/77 and B/80 in the Booth Archives at the London School of Economics. The notebooks are the combined work of Reverend Arthur Osborne Jay of Holy Trinity, Old Nichol Street, and his curate, Rupert St Leger, who did the original door-knocking and questioning, using Charles Booth’s own questionnaire. The surveying was undertaken in the Old Nichol slum, East London, between February 1889 and March 1890.
There’s something relentless about lists; detail upon detail is piled up here – a catalogue of misery, made all the more powerful by the cool, disinterested nature of the inquirers. In the Nichol, many residents chose not to answer their door; others objected to being questoned about their financial circumstances and their health problems. Hence the gaps, and the lack of detail apart from names, for some of the multiple-occupancy buildings.
Sometimes, the resident did invite the visitor in, for an extended interview. People were dying slowly, killed by poverty; yet no one on the Booth survey team thought to interview the landlords, leaseholders, sweat-shop workers, and the tiers of the population who made a good living from high rents and low wages.
These and all the other notebooks (46 for the East End alone) used to compile Booth’s 17-volume Life and Labour of the People in London can be found in the LSE Library. Much of the survey work can be found on the LSE’s recently relaunched Booth website http://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/13/-0.1191/51.5009/100/0
Notebook B/77
New Nicholl St [sic] May 1889
No 1
• Freeth, elderly widowed mangler of 37 yrs in the Nichol. “Very reserved.”
• Burks, widowed mantle maker, 2 children, earns 5 shillings a week but sometimes 3 and a half shillings. ‘Rats infest the room by daylight.’
No 2
Moleman. “Jews. Very friendly.”
No 3
• Clapp, widow, five children, washerwoman, and her father in his 70s, a basket weaver. “Very civil and poor.”
• Knight
No 4
• Bates. “Child came to door and said ‘Not today’ to visitor. Grandmother lying down”… On second visit, “very poor indeed… upholsterer, wife and five children, two with measles, wife weakly.”
• Wykes, silk winder for Vavasseur [silk merchants], widow, very ill, 2 children in the orphanage. She is about to go into hospital.
• Seaward
No 5
• Dixon, an old established shop premises.
• Leagers, an [alcohol] abstainer, “wife a noisy, vulgar woman.”
No 6
• Litmann, wife and seven children. “Very decent.”
• Ellis
Pub — The Admiral Vernon
No 7
• Noble, a widow, in bed on the floor with rheumatic gout, does needlework when she can, one son disabled through accident, another at a sawmills, one grandchild with them, been here nine years, “very poor.”
• Church, a hawker.
No 10
• Spall, car-man, in bed with rheumatism, wife and 8 children, only one at work, one very ill, “not expected to live”. Here 9 years, “Have been assisted medically.”
• Bordon, French-descended weavers, elderly man and wife both at work at their looms.
No 11
Jonas, watercress-seller in summer, sweep in winter, wife and 5 children.
No 12
• Hall, works in the brandy vaults, has a grown-up son at the Docks. “Were all having tea very comfortably by a large fire, and the visitor joined them. Well-disposed and intelligent.”
• Wells. Gout and unable to work. Wesleyan.
• Richardson
No 13
Banks, upholsterer, has whole house.
No 14
Cork
No 15 Vavasseur & Co, silk merchants
No 18
• Schenks. Landlord is Hacker.
• Hageley
No 19
Clark
No 20
• Berry
• Wyatt
No 21
• Hardy
• Bullen. Newly arrived.
No 22 is a public house, The Five Inkhorns
No 23
• A corner shop
• Vogel, German baker with an English wife.
No 25
• Hoy
• Burman, a 75yr old weaver, twice married, no family, in fair health and working at his loom. He says that Vavasseur employs 40 weavers.
No 26
• Davis and rheumatic wife, with five children. “Wretched home – windows broken, floor rotten, walls crumbling, eaten alive with bugs, chimney smokes fearfully. Furniture consists of two bedsteads, a table with a very ragged cloth on it and two or three other necessaries. Rent 3 shillings and ninepence. Are in arrears and pay off 3d weekly back rent. Mrs Thompson owns the house and is very strict regarding rent. Puts their goods in the back yard.”
• Jones, in first floor front. “Paints Christmas card sheets. Had 40 dozen to do. Takes him 2 days, from 9am to 11pm and only gets 2 shillings and 6d for them, out of which he finds his own paints, costing about 7d. Works for Taylor & Smith of Brick Lane. Widower aged 65. No children. Lives alone. Here 3 years. Rent 2 shillings and ninepence. A vile room. Ceiling quite black.”
• Corsham, a bill poster. Been here 7 years. “Wretched room – paper hanging from ceiling in ribbons. 2 large holes in the floor, very smoky. Rent 4 shillings – owes 3 months.”
• Barr, slippermaker, gets 4 shillings per dozen, and they sell at 4 shillings 11d a pair at least. It takes himself and his wife 16 hours to do a dozen pairs, and earns about 22 shillings a week, working 16 hrs a day. “Wretched room – walls and ceiling damp and mouldy and room full of dense smoke. Parts of ceiling fallen away. Very poorly furnished. Rent 3 shillings and 6d.”
No 27
• Collins
• Lillie
• Giles, a widow who makes stokers’ mitts. “A vile room – cannot have a fire on account of smoke from chimney.”
• Stearbridge
No 28
• Taylor
• Graystock. Flower-stand maker. Total abstainer. Wife drinks.
No 29
Skinner, wood chopper; wife recently delivered of a baby and very weak, works at fancy-box-making when able. “Wretched home – 1 bottomless chair and a bed almost the only furniture.”
No 31
Cleeve, brushmaker, 7 children, rheumatic, works for [John] Grimwood [of nearby Church St].
No 32
• Barnes, man and wife, “friendly.”
• Ball
• Top floor “occupied by a large family, 2 men, and six women and girls. Saw two young men and some girls. One of them said his name was Stevens, and that he would be at Father Jay’s club on the Wednesday. Is said to be a fighting man. Girls are flower girls. Rooms filthily dirty and other lodgers complain of their dirty and noisy habits.”
• Lampey
Nos 34 and 35
Sisters of the Church, and Mrs Hutton, their housekeeper. [The Kilburn Sisters’ Orphanage of Mercy Mission Rooms/soup kitchen.]
No 36
• Wall, blind, deaf, neuralgic widow, run over 4 years ago; and her family. Some are in the workhouse.
• Akens
• Dudley
No 37
• Howes
• Warley, widow, belongs to the Phoenix Order [masonic lodge]. “Complained of the danger of Old Nichol Street and mentioned recent cases of robbery there.”
No 38
• Deakins, wife and child. “Very dirty room, child no boots. Expects property … by deed of gift, he having befriended one of the partners in the Chancery suit now pending. Is to have a block of buildings if his friend succeeds in the suit. Wife showed visitor a lot of documents and a deed of gift on parchment. Man has done 17 days in Holloway Gaol for contempt of court, and has been waylaid and kicked and stabbed (according to wife) by the emissaries of the opposite party for the part he has taken in the case. Wife says the [Church of England] Sisters’ store is abused by people who beg the clothes and then sell them.”
• Warner
No 39
• Mears
• Cook, a shop
No 40
• Robinson, widow, “room indescribably filthy and miserable. Very dirty old woman hobbled forward and expressed her strong objection to visitors.”
• Hastings, a blacksmith.
• Archer, railway porter, “decent and intelligent but said to drink.”
No 41
Abbott
No 42
• White
• Woodcock
• Williams
• Hewitt
No 43
Harding, a hawker, sells oleographs in the street, trade “very slack…Very rough, dirty room, gets help from a mission room near by.”
Notebook B/80
Half Nicholl St [sic]
No 2
• Greengrocers
• Humphreys, “an old soldier. Wife Roman Catholic, has bad face, blood poisoning, decent people, get on, not good to wife.”
• Carver
• Harwood
• Pomeroy, street seller, and family.
No 4
• Jackson, “decent and industrious.”
• Gavigan, wife of a former optician who is now in Hanwell Lunatic Asylum as he had “a tendency to suicide.”
• Mrs Ashton
• Hersey, who says “people used to be allowed to take 3 rooms and sublet, but this was altered because the chief tenants, while exacting the rents from the subtenants, did not pay the landlord. Hersey seems a nice respectable old man.”
No 6
The Callans, “a bad lot… Very rough and rude. Drink heavily.”
No 7
* Knight, fancy-box-maker, “busy at work and very unfriendly. Woman here the same. Seems to have given visitor a bit of her mind, and spoke of his [Father Jay’s] club as a place that she should not like her husband to go, on account of the ‘sparring’ [boxing].”
No 18
Strahan’s [lettings agent] office. He says it’s hard to get the rent out of them, and they have no goods worth seizing. “Very nice little man. Had a large loom in his room. Lives in King Edwards Road [Hackney].”
No 20
• Coquard, weaver for Vavasseur, over 80, lived there since 1849, the year of the cholera, and recalls the “horror of that time, when every house in the street had its shutter up.” Huguenot descent. Breathing hard. Born in Bethnal Green, brought up in Spitalfields. He remembers the long weavers’ rooms being divided up to make more rooms to let. His second wife died 5 years ago, “she had deserted him. Neighbours say his first wife hung herself in the room in which he still lives.”
• Sestar, an engineer, he and his son, a boxer, both belong to Father Jay’s club.
No 24
• Parsons, a hatter, whose wife, 67, has been laid up for three years with rheumatic gout, “a very talkative, cheerful woman although suffering with great pain. Says [Reverend] Spurgeon has same symptoms as herself, and so had Lord Palmerston… The house belongs to Mrs Lock (widow) who lives in the court. Rents collected by an agent.”
No 26
• Watts, a shellfish-stall-holder in Shoreditch, also a chestnut stand. Wife bed-ridden by bronchitis and heavily pregnant. “Wife’s first husband used to stand in front of Shoreditch Church and open carriage doors for wedding parties. Well-known character. Wife’s great grievance seemed to be the way in which her last child was buried by a local undertaker. Charged her 30 shillings; owed him 8 shillings of it and was not inclined to pay it because of inferior style. People made remarks.”
No 28
• Howson, “an elderly cabinet maker and cousin of the late Dean Howson. From Appleby in Westmoreland and came to London aged 25 after tramping 300 miles through Britain in search of employment, for 36 weeks, once walked 60 miles in 12 hours. Is an Oddfellow, and was also a Forester, and got travelling pay from both orders. He presents their card to local officer at each place and gets a 1d a mile allowance. Is now a convert and regular churchgoer. Wife rheumatic, also religious.”
No 32
Courtney, a Frenchman, objects to [Father] Jay’s club on account of “sparring – says many others do so too.”
No 38
Usher, blacksmith, £man and wife both drunkards. Room in a most filthy condition – stink dreadful… sheets black. Man in bed when visitor called, recovering from effects of drink. 2 dirty little children playing about.”