About My Father's Business

FEEDING THE MULTITUDE

I suppose there are people still to be found who have but a vague notion of what it is to be really hungry. They may be conscious of possessing a good appetite now and then, and having the means of obtaining food, and to a certain extent of choosing what they will eat, regard being rather "sharp set" as a luxury which gives additional zest to a dinner, enabling them to take off the edge of their craving with a plate of warm soup, and to consider what they would like "to follow."

Of course we most of us read in the papers of the distress of the poor during the winter, of the number of children for whom appeals are made that they may have a meal of meat and vegetables once or twice a week, of the aggregate of casual paupers during a given period, and of cases where "death accelerated by want and exposure" is the verdict of a coroner's jury; but we do not very easily realise what it is to be famished; have perhaps never experienced that stage beyond hunger – beyond even the faintness and giddiness that makes us doubt whether we could swallow anything solid, and would cause us to turn hopelessly from dry bread. There is no need here to detail the sufferings that come of starvation. They are dreadful enough; but if our charity needs the stimulus of such descriptions we are in a bad way, and are ourselves in danger of perishing for want of moral sustenance.

Those who need assurance of the hunger of hundreds of their poor neighbours need not go very far to obtain it. A quarter of an hour at the window of any common cook-shop in a "low neighbourhood," at about seven o'clock in the evening, when the steam of unctuous puddings is blurring the glass, and the odour of leg-of-beef soup and pease-pudding comes in gusts to the chilly street, should suffice. There is pretty sure to be a group of poor little eager-eyed pinch-nosed boys and girls peering wistfully in to watch the fortunate possessor of two-pence who comes out with something smoking hot on a cabbage-leaf, and begins to bite at it furtively before he crosses the threshold.

Of course, according to modern social political economy, it would be encouraging mendicity, and sapping the foundations of an independent character, to distribute sixpenny pieces amongst the juvenile committee of taste who are muttering what they would buy if only somebody could be found to advance "a copper." But it is to be hoped or feared (which?) that a good many people yet live who would instinctively feel in their pockets for a stray coin to expend on a warm greasy slab of baked or boiled, or on half a dozen squares of that peculiarly dense pie-crust which is sold in ha'porths. This is a vulgar detail; but somehow poverty and hunger are vulgar, and we should find it difficult to get away from them if we tried ever so hard. Even School Boards, peeping out upon the children perishing for lack of knowledge, find themselves in a difficulty, because there is no provision under the compulsory or any other clause for the children who are also perishing for lack of food. The Board beadle does not at present go about with soup-tickets in his pockets; and for the poor shivering shoeless urchins who are mustered in the big brick-built room where they assemble according to law there is no free breakfast-class.

It must one day become a question how they are to learn till they are filled. Grown people find it hard enough to fix their attention on the best advice or the most saving doctrine while they suffer involuntary hunger. The multitude must mostly be fed before they are taught. Even disciples have had a revelation of the Bread of Life in the breaking of bread that perishes. Do we still need a miracle to teach us that?

Happily, efforts are made to give meat to the hungry. During the winter weather food is distributed in various ways amidst some of those poverty-stricken neighbourhoods to which I am obliged to take you during our excursions; but the demand far exceeds the supply, and people suffer hunger at all seasons, though most of all in the time of bleak winds and searching cold.

I want you to come to-day to a kitchen which is open all the year round – the only kitchen of the kind in London which does not close its doors even when the spring-tide brings buds of promise on the shrubs in Leicester Square, and the London sparrow comes out from roofs and eaves, and preens his dingy plumage in the summer sun, as though Great Windmill Street had something in common with its name, and sweet country odours came from the region of the Haymarket.

For, you know, we are still in the district of Soho. I have but just now brought you out of Newport Market, and now we are in a very curious part of this vast strange city. The streets are dim and dingy, but not so squalid as you might have imagined. They are still and silent, too, as of a neighbourhood that has seen better days, and even in its poverty has a sense of gentility which is neither boisterous nor obtrusive.

You will remember that I referred to this neighbourhood of Soho when I spoke of those old French refugees who came and made industrial colonies in London after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. This is the only really foreign quarter of London which has lasted until to-day; but that is to be accounted for by the fact that it became representative of no particular industry, and that, probably from the fact of many of the patrons of literature and art having then town houses about Leicester and Soho Squares, the more artistic refugees took up their abode in the adjacent streets.

From the time when William Hogarth painted his picture of the Calais Gate till only a short time ago, when refugees fled from besieged Paris to find some poor and wretched lodging in the purlieus of Cranbourne Street, where they might live in peace and hear their native tongue, this has been the resort of poor foreigners in London. It almost reminds one of some of the smaller streets of a continental city; and as we look at the queer shabby restaurants, and the shops with strange names painted above them in long yellow letters, we almost expect to find the pavement change to cobble-stones, and to see some queer wooden sign dangle overhead, so like is the place to the small bourgeois quarter that in our earlier days lay behind the Madeleine and the Porte St. Denis.

For here is an actual crêmerie– a queer compound of cook-shop and milkseller's – with a couple of bright dairy cans outside the door, and a long loaf or two amidst the cups and plates and sausages in the dingy window. Over the way you see "Blanchisseuse" in large letters; and next door is a laiterie, which differs from a crêmerie as a café alone differs from a café restaurant with its "commerce de vins" painted in big capitals in front of a long row of sour-looking bottles and a green calico curtain. It is a quaint jumble, all the way to Dean Street, and till we reach the edge of the Haymarket – a jumble of Brown and Lebrun, of Jones and Jean, of Robin (fils) and Robinson; but for all the little musty-smelling cafés, the blank bare-windowed restaurants, the crêmeries, and the boulangeries, there is nothing of a well fed look about the district, especially just at this corner, leading as it seems to a stable-yard or the entrance to a range of packers' warehouses. There is one open front here – is it a farrier's or a blacksmith's shop? – where they appear to be doing a stroke of business, however, for there is a clinking, and a fire, and a steam; but the steam has a fragrant odour of vegetables – of celery and turnips, of haricots and gravy – the clink is that of basins and spoons getting ready, and the fire is that of the boiler which simmers two mighty cauldrons.

Step to the front, and you will see in big white letters right across the house, "Mont St. Bernard Hospice." You may well rub your eyes, for you are in the heart of London, and stand in Ham Yard, Leicester Square, before the soup-kitchen that is open all the year.

There is something very appetising in the steam that arises from both these huge cauldrons, one of which is the stock-pot, containing bones, remnants of joints (not plate-clearings), and reversions of cold meat, &c., from two West End clubs. To this are added vegetables – celery, haricot beans, or barley – making it a fresh palatable stock, not remarkable for meatiness, but still excellent in flavour, as you may find for yourself if you join me in a luncheon here. But the real strengthening gravy has yet to be added, and the cauldron on the left hand is full of it – real, genuine gravy soup, made from raw meat and bones purchased for this purpose. As soon as this has simmered till it is thoroughly ready, the contents of the two cauldrons are mixed, and the result is a delicious stew, which is ready to be turned out into these yellow pint basins, for the hungry applicants, who will sit down at one of these two deal tables, each of which has its rough clean form, or to be dispensed to those who bring jugs, bowls, cans, saucepans, kettles, pipkins – any and almost every receptacle in which they can carry it steaming away to their families.

Let us stand here and see them come in. Here is a poor famishing fellow, who looks with eager eyes at the savoury mess. He has evidently seen better days. There is an unmistakable air of education about him, and as he sits down with his basin and spoon, and the handful of broken bread, which is added to the soup from one of a series of clean sacks emptied for the purpose, the superintendent, Mr. Stevens, scans him with a quick eye, and will probably speak to him before he leaves. There is a foreigner – an Italian, by the look of his oval olive face – who takes his place very quietly, and as quietly begins to eat; and yonder a famished-looking, rough fellow, who has already devoured the basinful with his eyes, and is evidently in sore need. Men, women, and children, or, at all events, boys and girls, come and present their tickets, and receive this immediate relief, against which surely not the most rigorous opponent to mendicancy can protest. The cadger and the professional beggar do not go to the soup-kitchen where nothing is charged, for they do not need food, and will only see a ticket where it is likely to be accompanied by the penny which will buy a quart. Be sure that there are few cases here which are not so necessitous that they are not far from starvation; and many of them represent actually desperate want.

The tickets for obtaining this prompt relief – often only just in time to save some poor creature from utter destitution and crime, and as often administered when a family is without food, and yet clings to the hope of finding work to prevent that separation which they must submit to by becoming paupers – are placed in the hands of clergymen, doctors, district visitors, Bible-women, and those who know the poor, and can feel for them when in hard times they pawn furniture, tools, and clothes, and suffer the extremity of want, before they will apply for parochial relief, and have offered to them the alternative of "going into the house."

The annals of the poor, from which extracts occasionally appear in the newspapers in the accounts of coroners' inquests, prove to what dreadful sufferings many decent but destitute people will submit rather than become recognised paupers; and no system of charitable relief outside the workhouse walls will be effectual or useful which does not recognise and respect this feeling. Who would let the possible accident of some unworthy person getting a gratuitous pint of soup stand in the way of a work such as we see going on here, where one year's beneficent action includes above ten thousand persons relieved? – a large number of whom are temporarily taken into the Hospice, as we shall see presently, while a great contingent is represented by the family tickets, which enable poor working men and women from various districts in London to carry away a gallon of strong nourishing soup, and an apronful of bread to their hungry little ones. You see that great heap of pieces of fine bread – slices, hunches, remnants of big loaves, dry toast, French bread, brown bread, and rolls – all placed in a clean wooden bin, they also come from the two great West End clubs before mentioned, and are so appreciated by the applicants for relief (they being usually good judges of quality) that you may note a look of disappointment if the stock of club bread has been exhausted, and a portion of one of the common loaves bought for the purpose is substituted. The small broken bread in those clean sacks is club bread also – the crumbs from rich men's tables, but clean, and thoroughly good, fit for immediate addition to the soup, which a hungry company of diners consume in a painfully short space of time.

They are not inhabitants of this district, either; comparatively few come from the immediate neighbourhood, though, of course, some poor families of the adjacent streets and alleys, and occasionally foreign workmen – many of them adepts in artistic employments, who are in the land of the stranger and in want – come here and have not only the help of a meal, but the kind inquiry, the further aid that will sustain hope, and enable them to look for work, and find the means of living. Londoners from Kentish Town, Lambeth, Shoreditch, and Chelsea – poor hungry men and women from all parts of the great city – find their way here to obtain a dinner; and it is extremely unlikely that they would leave even the least profitable employment and walk so far for the sake of a basin of soup. Food alone is offered, not money, and there is little probability of imposition when there is so little to be gained by the attempt. But while the great cauldrons are being emptied, let us hear what they do at this "Mont St. Bernard Hospice" at the Christmas season.