“Yes, General,” replied William’s dutiful son.
Within a month the cheap food depots were up and running, first at West India Dock and then at Clerkenwell and Marylebone. They sold potatoes and meat pies for threepence and two jam rolls for a penny. But the food depots were more than just food stalls. Each shop had a long dormitory attached to it where for fourpence a man could get hot water, soap, and a towel, as well as a good night’s sleep in a warm hall.
The establishment of the food depots opened a floodgate of other innovative ideas on caring for the poor. William and Bramwell set up the first labor exchange in England at 36 Upper Thames Street, London, directly behind the Salvation Army’s international headquarters. Men who needed a job could fill out an application listing their skills, and employers could come and find new employees. In the first two months it was open, two hundred unemployed men were matched to jobs.
While this was going on, William tried to support Catherine in any way he could. She had agreed to the surgery to treat her cancer, but recovery from the operation was a painful process, especially since she refused to use morphine to dull the pain. In fact, after the operation William watched sadly as Catherine grew weaker and weaker. Staff Captain Carr was assigned to change the dressing on Catherine’s wound, which would take many months to completely heal. Before the wound had fully healed, however, William and Catherine received the news that the operation had not been successful. The cancer was continuing to spread.
Still, William knew that his wife was not one to miss an opportunity, and in her bedridden state, she wrote hundreds of letters of encouragement to officers all over the world. At first she wrote them in her own hand, but as her muscles became weak, she dictated them to Captain Carr.
Meanwhile William was becoming more restless than ever about his plans for social change in England. In 1889 ten thousand London dockworkers went on strike in the hope of a guaranteed wage of sixpence an hour and a five-day workweek. Most of the men on strike did not have enough money saved to feed their families for more than a few days, and the situation soon became desperate. William, who was in full sympathy with the dockworkers’ plight, ordered the Salvation Army to supply nearly 200,000 cut-price meals.
The dock strike went on for a month, and out of it a dockworkers’ union was formed. The union eventually persuaded the rich dock owners to give in to the demands of the men. The crisis passed, but the aid the Salvation Army gave to the workers seeking a decent living wage made the army the heroes of the working poor.
All of this happened just as William approached his sixtieth birthday, which was on April 10, 1889. The event was celebrated in grand style at the Salvation Army’s Congress Hall. The celebration began with a parade, complete with brass bands, followed by a traditional English dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes. William sat under an enormous banner in the hall that read, “God Bless Our General.”
Although Catherine was too ill to join William at the dinner table, she insisted on coming along, and she sat in an adjoining room listening to the speeches. Somehow, toward the end of the evening, she summoned up the strength to make her way into the dining room and say a few words. As William listened to her speak, tears came to his eyes. He thought back on all that the Salvation Army had achieved, and he knew it would not have been possible without Catherine’s steadying hand.
With his birthday celebration behind him, William decided to move Catherine to the ocean in the hope that it would be a restful environment for her. He left the day-to-day work in Ballington’s hands and rented a small house in Clacton, on England’s southeast coast.
William thought he needed a rest, too, but after a week at the small house, he was his usual restless self. Although the cheap food depots were functioning well, William grew frustrated at the idea that there was more he should be doing. Sitting beside the sea one day, puzzling over what to do, the idea of writing a book came to mind. This would be very different from anything he had written before. It would be a book about the evils of poverty in England and the extraordinary difficulties poor men and women encountered when they tried to better themselves.
The book idea energized William, and he rushed off a letter to W. T. Stead asking him to help him in the writing of the manuscript. In May 1889 W. T. and William met to plan out the book. They agreed that the first thing they needed to do was gather facts. Without them it would be impossible to stir people into action. A newly published book entitled The Life and Labour of the People of London and written by a man named Charles Booth proved a very helpful starting point. It contained many statistics on the poor in London, and William sent out a team of Salvation Army officers to gather still more facts. Several weeks later piles of surveys and statistics cluttered every available space in William’s office.
As he read a report prepared by Frank Smith, William grew more and more convinced he was on the right track. The report described the circumstances of twelve men who had been found sleeping on the Embankment on the nights of June 13 and 14, 1890. William read the first story aloud to W. T.:
No.1. “I’ve slept here two nights; I’m a confectioner by trade; I come from Dartford. I got turned off because I’m getting elderly. They can get young men cheaper, and I have the rheumatism so bad. I’ve earned nothing these two days; I thought I could get a job at Woolwich, so I walked there, but could get nothing. I found a bit of bread in the road wrapped up in a bit of newspaper. That did me for yesterday. I had a bit of bread and butter today. I’m 54 years old. When it’s wet we stand about all night under the arches.”
“Grim, isn’t it?” William said to W. T. when he had finished reading. “But then, you know as much about this as I do. We have to find the best way to communicate this to the general public. So many of them are tucked up in bed by ten o’clock each night, and they have no idea there is a whole seething undermass of people outside their doors with nowhere to sleep. Listen to this—it’s another man.”
No. 5. Sawyer by trade, machinery cut him out. Had a job, haymaking near Uxbridge. Had been in the same job lately for a month, got 2 shillings and 6 pence a day…. Has been odd jobbing a long time, earned 2 pence today, bought a pen’orth of tea and ditto sugar but can’t get any place to make the tea; was hoping to get to a lodging house where he could borrow a teapot, but had no money.
William shook his head. “They go on and on. We know there are thousands of such stories being played out every day in London. Here’s a tailor who tried to sleep under cover in Covent Garden and got moved on by the police, and another man whose father was a clergyman. He was down on his luck after his employer went broke. And another man who minds horses and sells match boxes. He made threepence all day. And look, this report says, ‘There are women who sleep out here. They are decent people, mostly charwomen and such like who can’t get work.’”
“Yes, you’re right,” W. T. said. “There are hundreds of sad stories like these, and Charles Booth’s book exposes many of them. Your book will have to be different. To be any use, it’s going to have to offer solutions as well as outline the problems. Let’s face it, most respectable people assume that the Poor Laws work well and that these people are too lazy to take advantage of them.”
“Well, listen to this,” William said as he continued scanning the paper in his hands. “‘Earned nothing yesterday, slept at a casual ward; very poor place, get insufficient food, considering the labor. Six ounces of bread and a pint of skilly for breakfast, one ounce of cheese and six or seven ounces of bread for dinner. Tea same as breakfast—no supper.’
“Now that’s the real state of the Poor Laws. The law says that the state is legally responsible for providing food and shelter to every man, woman, or child who is utterly destitute. But how cruel the standard is. You can’t claim you are destitute until you have nothing whatsoever to claim as your own. Piece by piece every stick of furniture must be sold, and any tools of your trade have to be sold or pawned as well. You can’t even own a teapot. Only then will the state allow you to stay in a workhouse. And once you go into the workhouse, there’s no way to get out.
“Or if you still have an ounce of self-respect and flicker of hope of finding a job, the only option is the casual ward. That soon becomes a nightmare, too. Under the existing regulations, if you go to a casual ward on a Monday, you have to stay inside the compound until Wednesday morning. In that time you have to either break half a ton of rocks a day or untwist four pounds of rope so that it can be used to caulk ships. Either job is grueling. Indeed, I’d like to challenge our readers to do that on an ounce of cheese and a couple of slices of bread a day. Besides, the worst complaint the men have is that they can’t get out to look for a job, so they leave the casual ward no better off than when they arrived.”
“I agree,” W. T said. “Small wonder that there are only eleven hundred thirty-six beds in the casual wards for all of London, and many of those go empty. The authorities seem to go out of their way to make them the most unhelpful—not to mention unhealthy—places on earth. With these stories and others like them that your officers are collecting, I think we can offer both the facts of the matter and the feelings that go along with poverty. I mean, how many Englishmen know that 10 percent of the population lives in desperate poverty?”
“Good, we must get straight onto it then. I just wish I could think of a suitable name for the book, something that’s eye-catching,” William said.
A week later William opened a package from Bramwell. Inside was a newly published book written by Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer who had found David Livingstone in the interior of Africa. William started reading right away. The book opened with the story of Stanley and a group of guides from Zanzibar hacking their way through dense and seemingly impenetrable jungle half the size of France. Soon the men began to despair that there was any way through it, and as they met cannibals, slave traders, and disease along the way their gloom grew. It was a vivid picture of the obstacles that were reflected in the book’s title, In Darkest Africa.
The more William thought about Stanley’s book, the more comparisons he made to London. Weren’t both places under a dense cloud causing men to despair? Malaria might claim lives in Africa, but what about London? Wasn’t the River Thames nicknamed The Great Stink, with its 370 sewers spewing filth into the river between Westminster and London Bridge? In the summer the gooey black sludge was six feet thick all the way across, and it stunk so badly that the House of Commons library had to be closed. But what about all the poor people who lived along the banks of the river? They didn’t have the luxury of fleeing from the foul smell. Surely the cholera epidemics in London were every bit as devastating as the malaria in Africa. And didn’t some rich slumlords prey on their tenants as willingly as any slave trader dealt in human misery?
“Yes,” William mumbled to himself, “we are captivated by human squalor and suffering on another continent, but we are not as willing to confront it at our very door. If Stanley can have his In Darkest Africa, then I shall write In Darkest England!”
Chapter 13
Echo Around the World
William’s title was a hit with W.T., and the two men started work writing the book. William began with the introduction, making the comparison to Henry Stanley’s book many times. It was not long before another book he read gave him more ideas on helping the poor. This book, entitled Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle, had been written forty years before. William read one particular paragraph that captivated his imagination: “There are not many horses in England, able and willing to work, which have no due food and lodgings and go about sleek coated and satisfied in heart…the human brain, looking at these horses, refuses to believe in the same possibility for Englishmen.”
