The homes of the Bristol poor / by the special commissioner of the Bristol Mercury.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The homes of the Bristol poor / by the special commissioner of the Bristol Mercury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/122 (page 13)
    Hill's plan, of cleansing the dwellings and gradually improving the character and tone of the occupants was followed out with the best results. Good water and proper closet accommodation were provided, and the principle of a family living in one room was accepted, provided tha number in each room was limited. Quite a revolution has been effected in the moral tone of the place, and the occupants more or less work daily for their living. The houses have eight rooms, and, taking one of these dwellings as a sample, it is occupied as follows : Top rooms, one woman, two girls ; next floor, one woman, husband, wife, and child ; next, two youDg women, man and wife ; ground floor, husband aod wife—total 13. The houses are whitelimed periodically, and kept whole- some. Near these, however, is a wretche.d court of house, belonging to a landlord in a distant part of England. The dwellings show every sign of neglect and decay, and one old Irishwoman told us she paid 2s. 6d. per week, but the house was not fit for a pig to live in. The surface drainage is bad, and on Friday stagnant water from house slops was lying about. The windows are broken ; some of the houses are closed altogether, and io another only two rooms of three are habitable, and the occupants, an old man and his wife, living there for nine years, complained to us badly of nothing being done to the inside of the house. Attempts made to purchase this court of houses have failed, owing to the high price demanded, notwithstanding that some of the houses are shut up and unoccupied. The last eoemy seems to have seized the place as his own, the merry sound of children's voices is not heard there, old people chiefly occupy the crazy dwellings, and the natural decay of old age threatens soon to bring houses and occupants alike to an end, A veritable human hive, teeming with young life, multiplying in such numbers that one naturally wonders when the inmates will swarm and settle in some new home, next comes under attention in a large tenement house on the Rope walk, taken on our way to Eedcross street. It is a remarkable con- trast to the moribund court just described. Here nearly all the rooms are full; there is young life in abundance, but it is so melancholy aud compressed for want of room to breathe freely that the place is almost as quiet and joyless as the court of old houses and old people we have just left The rooms are full of children, whose buoyant spirits seem never to have had free play. The merry shout of mingled voices, such as one might hear any day in passing Muller's Orphanage, would be a surprise in this home of many children. The house comes under the regu- i lations of houses let in lodgings or occupied by more than one family, and is therefore inspected and whitelimed, and ceilings and stair walls are in a fair condition ; and well this is so, for 28 people live there. A staircase leads to four moderate size rooms on the first floor. In the first live and sleep a quay labourer, his wife, and five children, three under five years and the eldest eight years ; husband earns 3s. 6d. to 4s. a day when in full work, and though his employment is irregular the children manage to get a bit somehow or other ;'' and two beds and two pictures give sufficient semblance of a home to suggest what might possibly be done in a promising case for a three-roomed cheap dwelling. Next room—husband, wife, and six children under 10 years of age, three of whom go to school; family been living here four years, never had any sickness; furniture, one bed, two chairs, table, and a form ; third room (same floor—husband, wife and four children; fourth room, husband and wife oaly. On the upper floor the three rooms are much smaller, and are occupied by a hus- band, wife, and three children. This possession of three rooms, indifferent as they are, and one used as a back yard, at once makes a difference. There is more animation in the children, the domestic cat is to be found on the floor, and the wife her- self is full of spirits and playful banter about her extra room for visitors, and the efforts of her old man to make the walls tidy by covering them with papers, showing sample patterns of many seasons and rivalling Joseph's coat for their many colours. The contrast between the fashionably designed papers and the grimy parts of the wall not yet covered was striking, Most of the people here seemed to be earning fair wages, and despite the one bed, the damp clothes hung from a line near the ceiling and the peculiar smell of vitiated air from causes we have already described, signs were not altogether absent of an effort to make the place a bit tidy , and on either side of the mantelpiece of one room in which seven people lived and slept were coloured pictures of Gladstone and Garibaldi, suggesting that one must go even to a lower stago than that of a man with his wife and five children living in one room to find poor men's politics altogether unknown. But our description of this dwelling of the poor would hardly be complete if we failed to speak of the dull, dreary, dead monotony of the life led in these one-room tenements—over- crowded with children and under-furnished with any of the decent necessaries of existence. The shadow of care which has settled down on them seem3 unbroken by any play of social sunshine, and there is little or no room for the sweet, subtle, tender influences of home in a life the surroundings of