About My Father's Business

It is well, then, that this Institution should stand as a landmark of that free charity which takes help where it is needed most; and this qualification is the more obvious when we turn from the sick wards to the accident wards, and remember that three great railway termini are close at hand, and others not far off; that all round that teeming neighbourhood men, women, and even children, are working at poor handicrafts, which render them liable to frequent injuries, and that in the crowded streets themselves – from the great busy thoroughfare of Holborn, to the bustle and confusion of the approaches to the stations at King's Cross – there is constant peril to life and limb.

There is something so remarkable in the external appearance of the building, such a military look about its bold front, such a suggestion of a cavalry yard about the broad open area behind this tall wooden entrance gate, that you begin to wonder how such a style of architecture should have been adopted for a hospital. The truth is that like many – nay, like most of our noblest work – this great provision for healing the sick began by not waiting for full-blown opportunities. The need was there, and the means that came to hand were used to meet it. This building was originally the barracks of that loyal and efficient regiment, the "Light Horse Volunteers," and so excellently had those gallant defenders of king and constitution provided for their own comfort and security, that when in 1842 the premises were vacant, and the lease for sale, the governors of the Royal Free Hospital became the purchasers, the long rooms were easily turned into ample, cheerful, and well-ventilated wards, and the various outbuildings and offices were quickly adapted to the reception of patients.

But the hospital had at that date been working quietly and effectually for above fourteen years. Fourteen years before its inauguration in Gray's Inn Road, this "free" hospital, which was not then "royal," had been commenced in Greville Street, Hatton Garden, and the immediate incident which led to its foundation is so suggestive, so inseparable from the recollection of the want which it was designed to alleviate, and from its own generous recognition of the unfailing freedom of true charity, that it might well be the subject of a memorial picture. Alas! it would be a tragic reminder of those days before any provision was made for extending medical aid to sufferers who had no credentials save humanity and their own deep necessity. It would be a grim reminder to us, also, that some of our great charities established for the relief of the sick are still trammelled with those restrictions which demand recommendations, to obtain which the applicant is often condemned to delay and disappointment. It would show us that our hospitals are not yet free.

Those of my readers who can remember the entrance to the broad highway of Holborn nearly fifty years ago – stay, that is going back beyond probable acknowledgment, – let me say those of us who knew Smithfield when it was a cattle market, who had heard of "Cow Cross," and been told of the terrible purlieux of Field Lane; who had occasionally caught a glimpse of that foul wilderness of courts that clustered about the Fleet Ditch; had read of Mr. Fagin, when "Oliver Twist" was first appearing in chapters, and had dim recollections of nursery tales about Bartlemy fair and "hanging morning" at the Old Bailey; those of us who remember the cries of drovers, and the lowing and bleating of herds and flocks in the streets on Sunday nights; the terrible descent of Snow Hill; the confusion and dismay of passengers and vehicles on the steep incline of Holborn Hill; the reek of all that maze of houses and hovels that lay in the valley; those of us, in short, who can carry our memories back for a few years beyond the time when the new cattle market was built at Islington, the pens and lairs of Smithfield demolished, the whole Holborn valley dismantled, only a remnant, a mere corner, of Field Lane being left standing after the great viaduct was built – can imagine what the church of St. Andrew was like when, with its dark and dreary churchyard, it stood on the slope of Holborn Hill, instead of being as it now is in a kind of subway. That churchyard, with its iron gate, was reached by stone steps, which were receptacles for winter rain and summer dust, the straw from waggons, the shreds and sweepings from adjacent shops, the dirt and refuse of the streets.

On those steps a young girl was seen lying one night, in the winter of 1827 – lying helpless, lonely, perishing of disease and famine.

The clocks of St. Andrew, St. Sepulchre, St. Paul, had clanged and boomed amidst the hurry and the turmoil of the throng of passengers; had clanged and boomed till their notes might be heard above the subsiding roar of vehicles, and the shuffling of feet, till silence crept over the great city, and more distant chimes struck through the murky air, tolling midnight. Still that figure lay upon the cruel stones, under the rusty gate of the churchyard, as though, unfriended and unpitied by the world, she waited for admission to the only place in which she might make a claim in death, if not in life.

Not more than eighteen years old, she had wandered wearily from some distant place where fatal instalments of the wages of sin had done their work. She had come to London unknown, unnoted, to die. That she had come from afar is but a surmise; she may have been a dweller in this great city, lost amidst the stony desert of its streets, friendless with the friendlessness of the outcast or the wretched, to whom the acquaintances of to-day have little care or opportunity to become the solacers of to-morrow; she may have crept to that dark corner by the churchyard gate, amongst the rack and refuse of the street, as a place in which she, the unconsidered waste and refuse of our boasted civilisation, could most fitly huddle from the cold. She was not left actually to die there, but two days afterwards she passed out of the world where she had been unrecognised. Not without result, however.

Among those who had witnessed the distressing occurrence was a surgeon, Mr. William Marsden, who for some time before had repeatedly seen cause to lament, that with all our endowed hospitals, our great medical schools, and the advance of scientific knowledge, the sick poor could only obtain relief by means of letters of recommendation and other delay, until the appointed days for admission. The sight that he had witnessed awoke him to fresh energy. He determined to establish a medical charity, where destitution or great poverty and disease should be the only necessary credentials for obtaining free and immediate relief. His honest benevolent purpose did not cool; in February in the following year (1828), the house in Greville Street was open as a free hospital, and it was taken under the royal patronage of George IV., the Duke of Gloucester becoming its president.

King William IV. succeeded George IV. as the patron of this free hospital, and one of the earliest manifestations of the interest of our Queen in public charitable institutions was the expressed desire of her Majesty to maintain the support which it had hitherto received, and to confer upon it the name of the Royal Free Hospital.

It need scarcely be said that the late Duke of Sussex took a very strong interest in this charity, and at his death it was determined to erect a new wing, to be called "the Sussex" wing. This work was completed in 1856; and in 1863, by the aid of a zealous and indefatigable chairman of the committee, above £5,000 was raised by special appeal for the purposes of buying the freehold of the entire building, so that it is now, in every sense, a free hospital, with a noble history of suffering relieved, of the sick healed, the deserted reclaimed, the sinful succoured, and those that were ready to perish snatched from the jaws of death.

Since the foundation of the modest house in Hatton Garden in 1828 above a million and a half of poor sick and destitute patients have obtained relief, and the average of poor patients received within its wards is now 1,500 annually, while 45,000 out-patients resort thither from all parts of London. The relief thus afforded costs some £8,000 a year, and this large sum has to be provided by appeals to the public for those contributions by which alone the continued effort can be sustained.

Standing here within the "Moore" ward, so called after the energetic chairman before referred to, I cannot think of any appeal that should be more successful in securing public sympathy than these two statements – First, that many of the inmates have been immediately received on their own application; and secondly, that, bearing in mind the sad story which is, as it were, the story of the foundation of the hospital, this ward is occupied by women. Many of them are persons of education and refinement, who yet would have no asylum if they had not been received within these sheltering walls, others may be poor, ignorant, and perhaps even degraded, but divine charity is large enough to recognise in these the very need which such an effort is intended to alleviate. Here at least is a peaceful retreat, where in quiet reflection, in grateful recognition of mercies yet within reach, in the sound of pitying voices, and the touch of sympathetic hands, the weary may find rest, the throes of pain may be assuaged.

Here are the two fundamental rules of the hospital, and they form what one might call a double-barrelled appeal not to be easily turned aside: —

IN-DOOR PATIENTS

Foreigners, strangers, and others, in sickness or disease, having neither friends nor homes, are admitted to the Wards of this Hospital on their own application, so far as the means of the charity will permit.

OUT-DOOR PATIENTS

All sick and diseased persons, having no other means of obtaining relief, may attend at this Hospital every day at Two o'clock, when they will receive Medical and Surgical Advice and Medicine free.

Even while I read the latter announcement the out-patients are assembling in the waiting-room, on the right of the quadrangle; the dispenser, in his repository of drugs, surrounded by bottles, jars, drawers, and all the appliances for making up medicines, has set his assistants to work, and is himself ready to begin the afternoon's duty; the consulting-physician of the day has just taken his seat in one plain barely-furnished apartment, the consulting-surgeon in another, while the resident house-surgeon has completed his first inspection of in-patients, and is ready with particulars of new cases.

These rooms, where patients assemble, and doctors consult, are on the right of the pleasant quadrangle, with its large centre oval garden plot, containing a double ring of trees; and here also is the reception room for "accidents" and urgent cases – a very suggestive room, with styptics, immediate remedies, and prompt appliances ready to hand, but like all the rest of the official portion of the building, very plain and practical, with evidence of there being little time to regard mere ease or ornament, and of a disregard of anything which is not associated with the work that has to be done. It is the same with other apartments, where it is obvious that no unnecessary expenditure is incurred for mere official show.

The business of the place is to heal by means of food, of rest, and of medicine, and there, on the left of the quadrangle, a flight of steps leads downwards to a wide area, where, in the kitchens, the domestic servants are busy clearing up, after serving the eighty-eight rations which have been issued for dinner – rations of fish, flesh, and fowl, or those "special diets" which are taken under medical direction. There is something about this kitchen, the store-rooms, and offices, with the steps leading thereto, and the cat sitting blinking in the sun, which irresistibly reminds me of the heights of Dover and some portion of the barrack building there; the old military look of the place clings to this Gray's Inn Road establishment still, and the visitor misses the wonderful appliances and mechanical adaptations of some more modern institutions, not even lifts to convey the dinners to the wards being possible in such an edifice.

There is some compensating comfort in noting, however, that the nursing staff is so organised as to secure personal attention to the patients, and that the arrangements are touchingly homely, not only in regard to the simple furniture, the few pictures and engravings, and the little collection of books that are to be found in the wards, but also in the matter of sympathetic, motherly, and sisterly help, which is less ceremonious, but not less truly loving, than is to be found in some places of higher pretensions.

Here, on the ground floor, the twenty-two beds of the men's severe accident ward are always full, and some of the cases are pitiable, including maiming by machinery, railway accidents, or injury in the streets. The "Marsden Ward," adjoining is devoted to injuries of a less serious kind, so that there many of the patients can help themselves. In the women's accident ward there are three or four children, one of whom, a pretty chubby-faced little girl of five years old, has not yet got over her astonishment at having been run over by a cab the day before yesterday, picked up and brought into this great room where most of the people are in bed, only to hear that she is more frightened than hurt, and is to go home tomorrow. There are some other little creatures, however, suffering from very awkward accidents, and they seem to be petted and made much of, just as they are in the women's sick ward above, where a delicate-faced intelligent girl, herself improving greatly under prompt treatment for an early stage of phthisis, is delighted to have a little companion to tea with her at her bed-side, the child being allowed to sit up in a chair, and the pair of invalids being evidently on delightfully friendly terms. There is a lower ward, with half a dozen little beds devoted solely to children, who are, I think, all suffering from some form of disease of the joints. Alas! this class of disease comes of foul dwellings, of impure or stinted food, of want of fresh air and water; and it brings a pang to one's heart to note the smiling little faces, the bright beaming eyes, the pretty engaging grateful ways of some of these little ones, and yet to know how long a time it must be before the results of the evil conditions of their lives will be remedied at the present rate of procedure; how difficult a problem it is to provide decent dwellings for the poor, in a city where neighbourhoods such as that which we have just traversed have grown like fungi, and cannot be uprooted without pain and loss which social reformers shrink from inflicting. Thinking of this, and of all that I have seen in this Royal Free Hospital, I am glad to carry away from it the picture of this child's ward and its two young nurses, though I could wish that the walls of that and all the other wards were a little brighter with more pictures, that a fresh supply of books might soon be sent to replenish the library, and that the flowers, that are so eagerly accepted to deck the tables of those poor sick rooms, and carry thither a sense of freshness, colour, and beauty, may come from the gardens and greenhouses of those who can spare of their abundance. To keep the eighty-eight beds full requires constant dependence on public contributions, and yet when we think of the work that is going on here, not the eighty-eight only, but the whole number of 102 should be ready for applicants, who would, even then, be far too numerous to be received at once in a hospital which, with a royal freedom of well-doing, sets an example that might be hopefully followed by other and wealthier charities for healing the sick.

WITH THE PRISONER

What is the first greeting which a convict receives when he or she is discharged from prison?

Imagine, if you can, the shivering, shrinking, bewildered feeling of the man or woman who, after, undergoing a term of penal servitude, some of it passed in hours of solitary confinement, has all this great city suddenly opened again, with its wilderness of streets, its crowd of unfamiliar faces, its tremendous temptations, its few resources for the friendless and the suspected, its great broad thoroughfares, where on every side may be seen evidences of wealth and plenty; where the tavern and the gin-shop offer a temporary solace to the wretched; and where, also, in every neighbourhood, there are evil slums in which vice finds companionship, and the career of dishonesty and crime can be resumed without difficulty or delay.

Those who have stood outside the walls of Clerkenwell or Coldbath Fields prison, and have watched the opening of the gates whence prisoners emerge into a freedom which is almost paralysing in its first effects, will tell you how the appearance of these poor wretches is greeted in low muttered tones by silent slouching men and women who await their coming. How, after very few words of encouragement and welcome, they are taken off to some adjacent public-house, there to celebrate their liberation; and how, almost before a word is spoken, the male prisoner is provided with a ready-lighted pipe from the mouth of one of his former companions, in order that he may revive his sense of freedom by the long-unaccustomed indulgence in tobacco.

I should be very sorry to cavil at these marks of sympathy. They are eminently human. They do not always mean direct temptation – that is to say, they are not necessarily intended to induce the recipient to resume the evil course which has led to a long and severe punishment. That the result should be a gradual, if not an immediate, weakening of that remorse which is too frequently sorrow for having incurred the penalty rather than repentance of the sin that led to it, is obvious enough; but what else is to be expected? Not many men or women come out of gaol with a very robust morality. Without entering into the question how far our present system of prison discipline and management is calculated to influence the moral nature of culprits who are under punishments for various crimes, scarcely ever classified, and never regarded in relation to the particular circumstances under which they are committed or the character and disposition, the social status, or the mental and moral condition of the offender, it may be broadly and barely stated that our penal legislation is not effectual in promoting the reclamation of the criminal.

Even if some determination to begin life anew, to avoid associations that have led to infamy and disgrace to accept any labour anywhere in order to obtain an honest subsistence, has been working in the mind of a convict during the period of imprisonment, and under the advice and remonstrance of the chaplain and the governor, what is to sustain such half-formed resolutions? Supposing even that the discharged prisoner has been so amenable to the regulations of the gaol that he or she has had placed to the credit account that weekly "good-conduct money," which, when the term of punishment has ended, amounts to a sum sufficient to provide for immediate necessities, where is employment to be looked for? In what quarter is the owner of a few shillings – which may have to last a week or more – to seek a lodging and a meal, and that companionship which must be one of the keenest longings of the newly-released and yet solitary and half-dazed creature, who is ready to receive with grateful avidity any friendly greeting that promises relief from the long monotony of the gaol?

Surely, then, there can be few conditions which appeal more forcibly to Christian beneficence than that of the captive who is released after having undergone a sentence of penal servitude, part of which has been passed in solitary confinement. Whatever may have been the impressions made upon the mind during the period of punishment, and the influence exercised by instruction or exhortation, the very fact of regaining liberty, the excitement of freedom, and the uncertainty of the first steps a man or woman is to take outside the prison walls, will always involve a danger, before which a very large proportion of released convicts will succumb.

What, then, is being done in order to extend a helping hand to these, who are among the most destitute and unfortunate; who, even if they have relatives, may be ashamed to seek their aid, or are doubtful of the reception that awaits them, while the only companionship which they can claim at once, and without question, is that which will surround them with almost irresistible incentives to a lawless life?

In the very centre of this vast metropolis, at the point where its great highways converge, and yet in a modest quiet house standing a little back from the roar and turmoil of the main street, we shall find what we seek. Here, on the doorpost of No. 39, Charing Cross, is the name of "The Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society," and in two or three offices on the first floor – one of which is, in fact, a reception-room for the discharged prisoners themselves – the work for which there is such a constant and pressing need is steadily carried on, under the direction of a very distinguished committee, of whom the treasurer is the Hon. Arthur Kinnaird, and the first honorary secretary, Mr. W. Bayne Ranken, who is assisted by Mr. S. Whitbread and Mr. L. T. Cave. In looking at the names of the gentlemen who are concerned in this admirable effort, you will have noticed that some of them are also associated with other charitable organisations which we have visited together, and notably with those of that Soho district where we last joined in the musical diversions of the Newport Market Refuge. As we enter this front office at Charing Cross, we have a pleasant reminder of that occasion, for we are welcomed by the indefatigable performer on the cornet, who, when we last met him, was making "the hills resound" in the upper room of the old slaughter-house, and carrying all his juvenile military band with him in one resonant outburst of harmony that awoke the echoes as far as Seven Dials. To-day he is carrying out his ordinary secretarial and managerial duties, as officially representing the Society, about which he can give us some information worth hearing.

But there are other visitors for whom preparation has already been made in the next room – men dressed decently, and yet having a certain furtive, unaccustomed bearing, as though they were not at the moment quite used to their clothes or to public observation. Some of them are not without a truculent half-defiant expression lurking beneath their subdued demeanour; others have an open, keen outlook; and a few others, again, both in the shape of their head and the peculiar shifty expression of eye and mouth, and one might also say of hand, would at once be characterised by the experienced observer of London life as men who had "been in trouble" more than once. On the table of the front office the object which has at once attracted our attention is a perfectly new carpenter's basket containing a decent set of tools, and the man for whom it is intended will be here for it by-and-by to take it away, just as the shoemaker who has just gone out has carried with him "a kit," with which, in addition to a little stock of money, he is about to begin the world afresh, under the auspices of his friends, one of whom – either a member of the committee, or the secretary, or one of the visiting agents – will keep him in view, and give him an occasional encouraging call while he remains in the metropolitan district. If a situation should be found for him in the provinces, either the clergyman of the district, or some other friend of the Society, is informed of his previous history, and has a sincere interest in his well-doing. In no case have the London police anything whatever to do with watching or inspecting discharged prisoners under the care of the Society; and, on the other hand, it is a standing rule that where situations are found for these men and women, the employers are informed of their previous history, though any recommendation of the Society may be regarded as a strong inference that their protégé is trying to redeem lost character.

It must be remembered that a report of each of those who are under the care of the Society is made at the office once a month, either by the man or woman in person, or by one of the visiting agents or correspondents of the committee of management; and that, though the police are forbidden to interfere with them, except on strong suspicion that they are about to commit a crime, the most accurate and careful record of their mode of life and conduct is kept at the offices of the Society. Should they fail to observe the regulations which the Society demands, they are liable to police surveillance instead of friendly, encouraging, and confidential visitation; and it needs scarcely be said that this liability is often of itself sufficient to make them desire to retain the aid and protection which has been extended to them.