Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. : Appendix Volume XVI. Report by Mr. A.D. Steel-Maitland and Miss Rose E. Squire, H.M. Inspector of Factories, on the relation of industrial and sanitary condtions to pauperism, together with an additional memorandum on certain other points connected with the Poor Law system and its administration.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. : Appendix Volume XVI. Report by Mr. A.D. Steel-Maitland and Miss Rose E. Squire, H.M. Inspector of Factories, on the relation of industrial and sanitary condtions to pauperism, together with an additional memorandum on certain other points connected with the Poor Law system and its administration. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    LAW RECORDS. ance is made for certain general tendencies by which they are biassed. This is especi- ally the case with labourers in those trades which may be largely followed in any particular locality, A return of occupation, as builder's labourer in Kensington, waterside labourer in Bermondsey, or cabinet maker in Bethnal green, is no guarantee that the applicant has ever followed those trades; much less that he has done so regularly. The opinion of relieving officers, trade union secretaries and others is at one on this point. The difficulty we have experienced is not con- fined to us, and it cannot be better stated than in the account of the investigation of the sickness and mortality experience (1893-7) of the Manchester Unity Friendly Society ^— The Tertiary Division, namely, by occupations, was found to be a much heavier undertaking than either of the two prior distributions. ... In a vast number of cases the emploj-ments were very loosely described, and much time and labour had to be bestowed on this department of the work to obtain authentic information. The chief defect of the particulars given was a tendency to use general terms, such as ' labourer,' ' engineer,' ' fireman,' etc., and a systematic course of correspondence was necessary to ascertain the branches of industry in which the members so described were engaged. These were not at all self-evident in even the more limited classes, as, for example, in lodges in South Wales a ' fireman ' might either be employed at sea, in a coal-mine, in the railway service, at a factory, or a member of a fire brigade. * Furthermore, even where a man who returns himself as a hawker, bricklayer's labourer, etc., has actually been engaged in that trade at the time that he applied for relief, it does not necessarily follow that the occupation caused his pauperism, but only it may be, that it was the last step before pauperism, while if any industrial conditio! was the cause it must be sought further back. Thus, one case examined by us in Camberwell had been a commercial traveller. His health was destroyed by phthisis. Hawking was his last recourse before applying for relief. It is to women, however, that the difficulty that attaches to a change of circumstances applies with the greatest force. Two widows in receipt of parish relief in adjoining houses were, we believe, classed as doing needlework. In both cases their occupation for many years had been laundry work until ulcerated legs and age prevented their continuing it any longer ; in both cases the sewing was only a means of supplementing the allow- a,nce of out-relief. Where, however, the husband or father of a woman is alive, the case is still more involved. If, for instance, the wife or daughter is engaged in laundry work she may be, and not infrequently is, the chief wage-earner, yet the man is legally the applicant and his occupation of ' general labourer ' may perhaps alone be en- tered. As with industrial so with housing conditions, although in the latter case the question of settlement has resulted in an endeavour on the part of Poor Law officials to ascertain the previous residences of a pauper. Even so, however, the informa- tion is meagre and the enquirer is again confronted with the fact that the life of a family in a one room tenement may not be a cause of pauperism, but only an indica- tion that it is imminent. A corroboration of this fact is the statement made to us by the secretary of a distress committee that the general tendency was to pack up tighter, and so to economize expenditure upon rent, when the stress of unemployment was most acute. It is, therefore, prudent to make allowances in view of these facts in the case of applications for Poor Relief where unskilled occupations or congested conditions of housing bulk largely in the returns, and inaccuracies due to influences of this nature will to some extent counter-balance those in the preceding paragraph so far as some classes of occupations are concerned. We regret that the results of the pauper census of 31st March, 1906, taken for the Commission were not available at the commencement of our enquiry. We believe these would have been of immense value in directing at once our attention to certain facts which have been disclosed gradually to us by means of laborious enquiries, made by sample here and there, in Unions to which our previous knowledge of industrial conditions compared with an examination of census figures directed to us. Through the courtesy of the Statistical Department we have been supplied during the last month with the pauper census figures for five of the Unions which we selected, and these have confirmed the deductions we had already made from our own necessarily fragmentary investigations. * An Account of an Investigation of the Sickness and Mortahty Experience of the I.O.O.F. Manchester Unity during the five years, 1893-1897, p. 28. 429. A 2