Regeneration Part 11

I saw these women at their evening prayers. The singing was hearty and spontaneous, and they all seemed happy enough. Still, the faces of most of them (they varied in age from forty-six to sixteen) showed traces of life's troubles, but one or two were evidently persons of some refinement. Their histories, which would fill volumes, must be omitted. Suffice it to say that this Home, like all the others, is extremely well-arranged and managed, and is doing a most excellent and successful work.

When the women are believed to be cured of their evil habits, whatever they may be, they are for the most part sent out to service. There are two rooms in the place to which they can return during their holidays, or when they are changing situations, at a charge of 5s. a week. This many of them like to do.

Next door to 'The Hollies' is another Home where young girls with their illegitimate babies, and also a few children, are accommodated.

It is arranged to hold twenty-four mothers, and is generally full. A charge of 5s. a week is supposed to be made, but unless the cases are sent from the workhouse, when the Guardians pay, in practice little is recovered from the patients. When they are well again, their babies are put out to nurse, as at the London Maternity Home, and the girls are sent to service, no difficulty being experienced in finding them places. During the two years that this Home had been open eighty-two girls had pa.s.sed through it, and of these, the Matron informed me, there were but ten who were not doing so well as they might. The rest were in employment of one sort or another, and seemed to be in the way of completely regaining their characters.

I visited this place late at night, and in the room devoted to children, as distinct from infants, saw one girl of nine with a curious history. This child had been twelve times in the hands of the police before her father brought her to the Army on their suggestion.

Her mania was to run away from home, where it does not appear that she was ill-treated, and to sleep in the streets, on one occasion for as long as five nights. This child had a very curious face, and even in her sleep, as I saw her, there was about it something wild and defiant. When the Matron turned her over she did not yawn or cry, but uttered a kind of snarl. I suppose that here is an instance of atavism, that the child throw back for thousands or tens of thousands of years, to when her progenitors were savages, and that their primitive instincts have rea.s.serted themselves in her, although she was born in the twentieth century. She had been ten months in the Home and was doing well. Indeed, the Matron told me that they had taken her out and given her opportunities of running away, but that she had never attempted to avail herself of them.

The Officer in charge informed me that there is much need for a Maternity Hospital in Liverpool.

There are also Inst.i.tutions for men in Liverpool, but these I must pa.s.s over.

THE MEN'S SOCIAL WORK

MANCHESTER

The Officer in charge of the Men's Social Work in Manchester told me the same story that I had heard in Liverpool as to the prevailing distress. He said, 'It has been terrible the last few winters. I have never seen anything like it. We know because they come to us, and the trouble is more in a fixed point than in London. Numbers and numbers come, dest.i.tute of shelter or food or anything. The cause is want of employment. There is no work. Many cases, of course, go down through drink, but the most cannot get work. The fact is that there are more men than there is work for them to do, and this I may say is a regular thing, winter and summer.'

A sad statement surely, and one that excites thought.

I asked what became of this residue who could not find work. His answer was, 'They wander about, die off, and so on.'

A still sadder statement, I think.

The Major in charge is a man of great organising ability, force of character, and abounding human sympathy. Yet he was once one of the melancholy army of wasters. Some seventeen years ago he came into the Army through one of its Shelters, a drunken, out-of-place cabinet-maker, who had been tramping the streets. They gave him work and he 'got converted.' Now he is the head of the Manchester Social Inst.i.tutions, engaged in finding work for or converting thousands of others.

At first the Army had only one establishment in Manchester, which used to be a cotton mill. Now it is a Shelter for 200 men. Then it took others, some of which are owned and some hired, among them a great 'Elevator' on the London plan, where waste paper is sorted and sold.

The turn-over here was over 8,000 in 1909, and may rise to 12,000. I forget how many men it finds work for, but every week some twenty-five new hands come in, and about the same number pa.s.s out.

This is a wonderful place, filled with what appears to be rubbish, but which is really valuable material. Among this rubbish all sorts of strange things are to be found. Thus I picked out of it, and kept as a souvenir, a beautifully-bound copy of Wesley's Hymns, published about a hundred years ago. Lying near it was an early edition of Scott's 'Marmion.' This Elevator more than pays its way; indeed the Army is saving money out of it, which is put by to purchase other buildings.

Then there are houses where the people employed in the paper-works lodge, a recently-acquired home for the better cla.s.s of men, which was once a mansion of the De Clifford family, and afterwards a hospital, and a store where every kind of oddment is sold by Dutch auction.

These articles are given to the Army, and among the week's collection I saw clocks, furniture, bicycles, a parrot cage, and a crutch. Not long ago the managers of this store had a goat presented to them, which nearly ate them out of house and home, as no one would buy it, and they did not like to send the poor beast to the butcher.

In these various Shelters and Inst.i.tutions I saw some strange characters. One had been an electrical engineer, educated under Professor Owen, at Cardiff College. He came into money, and gambled away 13,000 on horse-racing, although he told me that he won as much as 8,000 on one Ascot meeting. His subsequent history is a story in itself, one too long to set out; but the end of it, in his own words, was 'Four years ago I came here, and, thank G.o.d! I am going on all right.'

Why do not the writers of naturalistic novels study Salvation Army Shelters? In any one of them they would find more material than could be used up in ten lifetimes; though, personally, I confess I am content to read such stories in the secret annals of the various Inst.i.tutions.

Another man, a very pleasant and humorous person, who was once a Church worker and a singer in the choir, etc., when, in his own words, he used 'to put on religion with his Sunday clothes and take it off again with them,' came to grief through sheer love of amus.e.m.e.nt, such as that which is to be found in music-halls and theatres. His habit was to spend the money of an insurance company by which he was employed, in taking out the young lady to whom he was engaged, to such entertainments. Ultimately, of course, he was found out, and, when starving on the road, determined to commit suicide. The Salvationists found him in the nick of time, and now he is foreman of their paper-collecting yard.

Another, at the ripe age of twenty-four, had been twenty-seven times in prison. His father was in prison, his eldest brother committed suicide in prison by throwing himself over the banisters. Also, he had two brothers at present undergoing penal servitude, who, when he was a little fellow, used to pa.s.s him through windows to open doors in houses which they were burgling.

I suggested that it was a poor game and that he had better give it up.

He answered:--'I shall never do it again, sir, G.o.d helping me.'

Really I think he meant what he said.

Another, in the Chepstow Street Shelter, where he acted as night-watchman, was discharged from Portland, after serving a fifteen years' sentence for manslaughter. His trouble was that he killed a man in a fight, and as he had fought him before and had a grudge against him, was very nearly hanged for his pains. This man earned 9 in some way or other during his sentence, which he sent to his wife.

Afterwards, he discovered that she had been living with another man, who died and left her well off. But she has never refunded the 9, nor will she have anything to do with her husband.

OAKHILL HOUSE

MANCHESTER

Oakhill House is a Rescue Home for women, which was given to the Army by Mrs. Crossley, a well-known local lady. It deals with prison, fallen, inebriate, and preventive cases. At the time of my visit there were sixty-three inmates, but when a new adjacent building is completed there will be room for more. There is a wonderful laundry in this Home, where the most beautiful washing is done at extremely moderate prices. The ironing and starching room was a busy sight, but what I chiefly remember about it was the spectacle of one melancholy old man, the only male among that crowd of women, seated by a steam-boiler that drove the machinery, to which it was his business to attend. (No woman can be persuaded to look after a boiler.) In the midst of all those females he had the appearance of a superannuated and disillusioned Turk contemplating his too extensive establishment and reflecting on its monthly bills.

The matron in charge informed me that even for these rough women there is no system of punishment whatsoever. No girl is ever restricted in her food, or put on bread and water, or struck, or shut away by herself. The Army maxim is that it is its mission not to punish but to try to reform. If in any particular case its methods of gentleness fail, which they rarely do, it is considered best that the case should depart, very possibly to return again later on.

She added that although many of these women had committed a.s.saults, and even fought the Police, not one of them attacks another in the Home once in a year, and that during her twenty years of work, although she had lived among some of the worst women in England, she had never received a single blow. As an ill.u.s.tration of what the Salvation Army understands by this word 'work' I may state that throughout these twenty years, except for the allotted annual fortnight, this lady has had no furlough.

THE MEN'S SOCIAL WORK

GLASGOW

I saw the Brigadier in charge of the Men's Social Work in Glasgow at a great central Inst.i.tution where hundreds of poor people sleep every night. The inscriptions painted on the windows give a good idea of its character. Here are some of them: 'Cheap beds.' 'Cheap food.' 'Waste paper collected.' 'Missing friends found.' 'Salvation for all.'

In addition to this Refuge there is an 'Elevator' of the usual type, in which about eighty men were at work, and an establishment called the Dale House Home, a very beautiful Adams' house, let to the Army at a small rent by an Eye Hospital that no longer requires it. This house accommodates ninety-seven of the men who work in the Elevator.

The Brigadier informed me that the distress at Glasgow was very great last year. Indeed, during that year of 1909 the Army fed about 35,000 men at the docks, and 65,000 at the Refuge, a charity which caused them to be officially recognized for the first time by the Corporation, that sent them a cheque in aid of their work. Now, however, things have much improved, owing to the building of men-of-war and the forging of great guns for the Navy. At Parkhead Forge alone 8,000 men are being employed upon a vessel of the Dreadnought cla.s.s, which will occupy them for a year and a half. So it would seem that these monsters of destruction have their peaceful uses.

Glasgow, he said, 'is a terrible place for drink, especially of methylated spirits and whisky.' Drink at the beginning, I need hardly remark, means dest.i.tution at the end, so doubtless this failing accounts for a large proportion of its poverty.

The Men's Social Work of the Army in Glasgow, which is its Headquarters in Scotland, is spreading in every direction, not only in that city itself, but beyond it to Paisley, Greenock, and Edinburgh.

Indeed, the Brigadier has orders 'to get into Dundee and Aberdeen as soon as possible.' I asked him how he would provide the money. He answered, 'Well, by trusting in G.o.d and keeping our powder dry.'

As regards the Army's local finance the trouble is that owing to the national thriftiness it is harder to make commercial ventures pay in Scotland than in England. Thus I was informed that in Glasgow the Corporation collects and sells its own waste paper, which means that there is less of that material left for the Salvation Army to deal with. In England, so far as I am aware, the waste-paper business is not a form of munic.i.p.al trading that the Corporations of great cities undertake.

Another leading branch of the Salvation Army effort in Scotland is its Prison work. It is registered in that country as a Prisoners' Aid Society, and the doors of every jail in the land are open to its Officers. I saw the Army's prison book, in which are entered the details of each prison case with which it is dealing. Awful enough some of them were.

I remember two that caught my eye as I turned its pages. The first was that of a man who had gone for a walk with his wife, from whom he was separated, cut her head off, and thrown it into a field. The second was that of another man, or brute beast, who had taken his child by the heels and dashed out its brains against the fireplace. It may be wondered why these gentle creatures still adorn the world. The explanation seems to be that in Scotland there is a great horror of capital punishment, which is but rarely inflicted.

My recollection is that the Officer who visited them had hopes of the permanent reformation of both these men; or, at any rate, that there were notes in his book to this effect.

I saw many extraordinary cases in this Glasgow Refuge, some of whom had come there through sheer misfortune. One had been a medical man who, unfortunately, was left money and took to speculating on the Stock Exchange. He was a very large holder of shares in a South African mine, which he bought at 1s. 6d. These shares now stand at 7; but, unhappily for him, his brokers dissolved partnership, and neither of them would carry over his account. So it was closed down just at the wrong time, with the result that he lost everything, and finally came to the streets. He never drank or did anything wrong; it was, as he said, 'simply a matter of sheer bad luck.'