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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, |
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