In the past, various people have had their own opinion of the area
around Conisbrough. Below is an article that was printed in "The
Christian Budget" in 1899. The opinions expressed within the article
may well have been true at the time of almost any Mining settlement where an
itinerant work-force was employed.
THE WORST VILLAGE IN ENGLAND
In the fourth of his series of revelations the Special
Commissioner of THE CHRISTIAN BUDGET tells the story of the mining community
in Denaby Main, in Yorkshire.
He describes a village where nearly all the men, and most of the women,
devote their high wages to betting, where religion is forgotten, home life
is shattered where immorality and intemperance are rife, where wives are
sold like cattle, and children are neglected.
Apparently incredible, it is yet but plain fact, and shows the
ultimate effects of gambling on human character.
Sheffield, October 25th
I am sitting down to write this article in numb
despair, for the community I have to describe is so repulsive that many who
have never been near it will probably refuse to credit the story.
Denaby Main, in South Yorkshire, is not to be taken as
a fair sample of the mining villages in the Midlands and the North.
It does not stand alone, for there are others as bad; but happily
they are in the minority. If
the dreams of some social reformers are true, Denaby Main ought to be a
paradise. Every man there has
ample work, wages are very high and each family can have a house to itself
for a very low rent. The
eight-hour day has been granted.
The country around ranks amongst the most beautiful in England,
undulating, well timbered, with bright streams running through it.
In Denaby Main no adult need be hungry or ill clad save through
deliberate choice; none has to go begging for work; none can complain of
inadequacy of wage. It ought to
be an ideal community, but instead it is almost a Hell upon Earth.
The gambling craze has seized hold on it, and on the district around.
With gambling has come a long train of other evils, until today the
name of the place is passing into a byword.
Denaby Main is a mining village with about eight
thousand inhabitants, situated some seven miles from Doncaster, on the way
to Sheffield. The whole of the
land is divided between two proprietors; the Colliery Company is the larger
owner and exercises practically despotic powers in the village.
It owns all the houses, having specially erected them for its men.
There is street after street of little two-storied buildings,
evidently put up in very cheap style.
The miners are charged between four and five shillings a week (as a
rule) for these, and as their rent is stopped from their wages, the Company
is sure of making no bad debts.
But the men have little to complain about in the matter of wages.
An expert miner there can easily make his seven or eight shillings a
day, and in some households, where father and sons are all employed, the
income amounts to from five to eight pounds a week.
Yet, not withstanding this high wage, a very large
proportion of the families have not a Penny Left on Monday morning.
The regular method of living in Denaby is to pay debts on Saturday
and get things out of pawn, spend all the remainder of the wages on Saturday
night and Sunday and start pawning on Monday morning again.
On Saturday afternoon and evening, in particular, the place is like a
pandemonium. When the men get
their wages, many of them start playing pitch and toss with it.
I know one case where the man lost all his money in this way -several
pounds -before he could even reach the public house.
Then he drew out his watch.
“Coom on”, he cried, “I beant done yet.
Who'll toss me thirty bob on this?”
The first rush on Saturday is to the public house.
The Colliery Company, with a philanthropy worthy of all praise, has
resolved that the poor fellows shall not have far to go.
It has built a great public house of its own, and put a manager in
charge. The profits of this
place must be enormous; rumour places them as at 50 per cent on the money
invested. The house is full
continually, and on Saturdays and Sundays, in particular, the scenes that go
on around it are Amazing in their Grotesque Horror.
Not long since, the already extensive premises were increased by the
addition of great taproom, or “boozy”, as it is locally called.
At five o'clock on Saturday the house is, by old custom, closed for
an hour, to make the men go home and give their wives some of the money.
Many of the best inhabitants of the place defend the
Colliery Company for building and managing this public house.
They say that if it did not, other people would start public houses,
which would be under less control than it is.
And if profits are to be made through the drink, why should not the
Company have the profits as well as any others? No doubt the Company, in all
its relations with the people, does what appears to it to be right and fair.
An old Irishman who lived in the neighbourhood once
well summed up the situation.
He was so troublesome on Saturday night that the policemen had to take
charge of him. Then, going
along with the constable, he turned reflective.
“This is a Funny Place”, he said.
“First we go to the office to get the money, then the Company gives
us a place where we can pay the money back to it, and then, when the money's
gone, it provides you to take care of us”.
There is no need to describe the scenes in the villages on Saturday
and Sunday, the drinking and tossing everywhere, the foul language from
children and adults of both sexes, the attacks on policemen when they tried
to arrest a specially indecent or dangerous wretch.
“Don't let him take you Bill”, they cry.
“Kick 'is 'ead in”. That
may be imagined. On Monday
morning the village wakes up.
The drinkers, of course, do not go to work on that day.
Work on Monday, when they can earn all they want in four or five days
a week? Not they. Saint Monday
is sacred, and often Saint Tuesday too.
But on Monday morning the wives start their work.
They begin the Weekly Procession to the Pawnshop that continues till
Saturday morning. They want
money not so much for food as for drink and bets.
There is no secret at all about the gambling at Denaby
or in the neighbouring township of Mexborough.
The bookmakers stand openly at certain well-known spots and they are
the best-known characters in the village.
They were, most of them, once pitmen themselves, and still wear the
rough pitmen's dress.
On the most moderate estimate, at least half of the
Women of Denaby are Fierce and Persistent Gamblers.
Their one question is, “Do you know anything for today? Have you a
tip for us?” They will have money, at any cost.
Towards the end of the week some of the houses are stripped of almost
everything on which money can be raised.
Then hawkers step in and find their opportunity.
Some of these make a business lending shillings to the women,
eighteen pence being paid back on Saturday, or fifty per cent interest.
The debt is charged as “groceries” or “vegetables” when necessary, to
save trouble with the husbands.
But it is rarely the husbands can make trouble for they are too deeply
bitten with the mania themselves.
Strange things are taken to the pawnshop in search of money.
“If they have nothing else, they can put in a shift (i.e. a
petticoat) or a sheet”, one pawnbroker told me.
“What is the use of our trying to stop?”
the women cry if you talk with them.
“If we don't do it, the men will.
We might as well spend the money as anybody else.
A Short Life and a Merry One, say we”.
The betting and the drinking go together, and it is
hardly possible to separate them in considering the subject.
What is the effect of it all on the life of the people? Careful
enquiry has convinced me that among its main results have been the sacrifice
of children, ruin of home, destruction of the most elementary morality.
The ruin of the children is especially sad.
The first thing that impressed me when walking down the main street
of Denaby was the large number of children with sore eyes.
I saw more opthalmic girls in the street in twenty minutes than I see
in the slums of London in twenty days.
“We have had an epidemic of it about for some months”, people in the
village told me, as though that explained everything.
Yes, but why do epidemics of opthelmic primarily come? Because home
life is defective and because the children are not properly and individually
cared for. This is a point on
which I suppose every authority about children is agreed.
“It's the dirt as does it,” one man frankly told me.
“Our women folk are too busy with the bookmakers to care for the
bairns.” I could see that for myself.
The proportion of ragged and dirty children amazed me.
When I remembered that all of their parents were earning high wages,
the rags that covered them could be only accounted for by the one
explanation.
But if physical shortcomings were all, it would not be
so very bad. Children can put
up with much, and they do not complain too loudly when their mothers
regularly stint their meals, or give them crusts daubed with dripping for
dinner instead of meat and potatoes.
But the injury goes down deeper.
The moral nature of the children is warped.
I am told by those who mix freely with them, and whose duties make
them know as a whole intimately, that an enormous proportion of them seem
quite without the usual childish sense of honour.
One need only listen in the street to their language.
Brought up from babyhood amidst oaths, they learn to Swear as they
learn to talk. They can pour
out the most horrible language with a fluency and abundance that leave some
experienced adults hopelessly behind.
The boys seem to take to betting more readily than the girls, and one
local teacher tells me that he found a pupil, eleven years old, making a
book amongst the boys of his class.
These children are taught, almost as soon as they can toddle the way
to the pawnshop and to the bookmaker, and it is safe to say that four-fifths
of them enter the pawnshop far more often than they go to church.
As a general -though not universal -rule, where the
wife gambles there is at once the ruin of the home.
This rule, as I have said, does not always apply, and in some cases,
where the women have not gone to the greatest lengths in the craze, they can
still care something for comfort.
But it applies in nine cases out of ten.
There are families in Denaby, with incomes of about three pounds a
week, where the only furniture in the living room is a box and a table, the
box serving as a chair. One
finds little of the Keen Yorkshire Love of Home and of home treasures there.
Perhaps part of the reason of this is that many of the miners at
Denaby are not Yorkshiremen, but a rather rough set of immigrants from
everywhere.
The place has sprung up so quickly that it has not had
time to develop those qualities of local patriotism, which do so much in
other districts. Nine years ago
it had only sixteen hundred people; since then the inhabitants have
increased five-fold.
The lack of home life is accompanied by most utter
thriftlessness. Many of the
people get their stock from hawkers who come round, or from vendors of meat
who run in with barrows on Saturday nights.
The Colliery Company has limited the number of shops by refusing
houseroom to newcomers. There
is a co-operative store, which pays back a dividend of not less than five
shillings in the pound. But the
co-operative store shares the general lowness of tone in one respect.
It does what is a rare thing for industrial co-operative societies to
do. It has an off-licence and
Sells Enormous Quantities of Liquor, making about one-third of its total
profit from its beer and wine trade.
The general lowering of the moral tone of the people is
remarkable. As one tradesman in
the district, who admitted to betting himself, put it to me, “I'm sick of
the place. It's all very well
for a man to have a bit of his fancy, but when it comes to women, it's a bit
too thick. An besides, its real
bad for business. We find in
our business that the women who gamble much will stick at nothing.
They'll cheat and lie, and do anything to get a sixpence.
You can't trust them in Denaby.
The only way to do is to take in the things they order on Saturday,
and not to leave the goods unless they plank down the money.
Betting folks, are the worst folks we have.”
This testimony does not stand alone.
The miners themselves joke together about “Packy's Puzzle”, a maze of
streets meeting together, in which every house is alike.
The chief merits of “Packy's Puzzle”, according to some of the
miners, is that you can get a hawker to leave you some valuables while
staying in one house, and then change into another and he will never be able
to find you again.
Marriage Ceremonies Considered Unnecessary
There is a point on which I touch on with some
hesitation, but yet which any description of the general demoralization
would be incomplete without mention.
Various people in the neighbourhood, miners, shopkeepers, and others
in responsible position, all independently mentioned one thing to me in
conversation. “You know”, they
said, “marriage ceremonies are generally considered unnecessary here.
Our people live 'in tally’; they don't see why they should bother
church or registrar”. Of the
various estimates of the number of couples living together unmarried, none
was lower than one half of the miners.
A Wife Sold for a Shilling
If all the stories about the village are true, one
finds that there is some ground for the old French tales of Englishmen
selling their wives. Of several
stories that came to my ears, I quote one as a sample.
“Joe G. got tired of his
wife and sold her to his lodger for a shilling.
Then he went out looking for lodgings, but as he couldn't find any,
he came back to his old house and asked his old wife to take him in”.
“You must ask my new man,” she said.
The new husband was quite willing; so Joe came as a lodger into his
old home. For some time the
arrangement worked very well, till at last the new husband started
ill-treating the woman. Then
Joe and his wife joined together again, attacked the new husband, gave him a
good threshing and threw him out of doors and set up once more as husband
and wife again.” Joe and his wife are living in the village today, they say.
Love of literature, love of the beautiful, seem almost
entirely absent from the minds of the people.
The women have not even self- respect enough to spend money on dress.
Beer and betting are their all.
I doubt if there is another place in the country of the same size
where less literature is sold.
Where are the Churches?
In Denaby we have a remarkable example of what betting
will lead to, of how it will corrupt every part of Life.
Are we willing to have it do the same for all England? Today it is
easy enough to laugh at the danger, but an England which can suffer a Denaby
to exist without protest is not safe from itself becoming a Denaby.
Where are the Churches? It may be asked.
There are churches in Denaby, but they seem to hardly touch the local
plagues. In this place the
churches are not in possession.
Yet surely here is as great a field for missionary endeavour as ever land
presented.
By Our Special Commissioner,
The Christian Budget,
November 8th 1899.