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Helping the Poor

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Helping the Poor Helping the Poor Helping the Poor Friendly visiting, dole charities and dole queues Robert Whelan based on research by Barendina Smedley Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society London First published October 2001 © The Institute for the Study of Civil Society 2001 The Mezzanine, Elizabeth House 39 York Road, London SE1 7NQ email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN 1-903 386-16-0 Typeset by Civitas in New Century Schoolbook Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk Contents Acknowledgements vi Authors viii Introduction: Hand-outs and Leg-ups 1 Section 1: The Visiting Charity The Charity Organisation Society 1. The Organisation of Charity 9 2. Preaching the ‘Gospel of Social Reform’ in West London 24 3. The Fulham and Hammersmith Committee and Its Cases 39 Section 2: The Dole Charity The Mansion House Fund 4. From West End to East End 51 5. Lord Mayor Aid 59 6. The Aftermath 85 7. Moralities and Mathematics 90 Appendices Appendix 1 Applications for Relief Received by the Fulham and Hammersmith District Committee of the COS, November 1879 - October 1880 99 Appendix 2 The 27 Extant Fulham and Hammersmith Casebooks 137 Appendix 3 The Charity Organisation Society by Miss Octavia Hill 164 Notes 166 Index 182 v Acknowledgements This book has been made possible by a generous grant from the Wincott Foundation. The author would like to express his thanks to the trustees. The research on which the book is based was carried out by Barendina Smedley in the archive of the Charity Organisation Society (now the Family Welfare Association), held in the London Metropolitan Archives. The archive has been accessed by kind permission of Helen Dent, the present director of the Family Welfare Association. Further research was carried out by Yvonne Rigby. The author would like to express his thanks to those who participated in the anonymous refereeing process, and whose comments have been most helpful. Jacques Blanchard’s painting ‘Charity’ is reproduced on the front cover by courtesy of the Courtauld Institute Gallery, Somerset House, London. vi For my mother Violet Whelan who was born in Hammersmith in 1914 and remembers Sister Lizzie Authors Robert Whelan is the Deputy Director of Civitas. He was educated at the John Fisher School, Purley, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. His books include Choices in Childbearing, Commit- tee on Population and the Economy 1992; Broken Homes and Battered Children and Teaching Sex in Schools, Family Education Trust 1994 and 1995; The Cross and the Rainforest, (with Joseph Kirwan and Paul Haffner), Acton Institute and Eerdmans 1996; and, for the Institute of Economic Affairs, Mounting Greenery 1988, Making a Lottery of Good Causes (with Roger Cummins) 1995, The Corrosion of Charity 1996, Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate (ed.) 1998, Wild In Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage 1999, and Involuntary Action: How Voluntary is the ‘Voluntary’ Sector? 1999. Barendina Smedley was educated at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she read history and wrote her doctoral thesis on local enforcement of the Tudor reformations. She lives in London, where she writes about history, art and related subjects. Previous publications include short histories of Lord North Street, Westminster and Holy Trinity, Ely, as well as articles for The Times, the Spectator and other journals. viii Introduction Hand-outs and Leg-ups The charity, if charity it may be called, of doles and patronage is mean and delusive... But the charity of personal help and organised good sense calls out the best efforts of giver and receiver. C.S.Loch1 n 1914 George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion introduced to the Ipublic the character of Alfred Doolittle, a dustman with original views on welfare: DOOLITTLE I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle-class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: ‘You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.’ But my needs is a great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more ... Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving.2 Modern audiences, who would scarcely be shocked by Eliza’s use of ‘bloody’ in the famous tea-party scene, might find this harder to follow, since the idea of making any distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor has vanished from modern welfare policy. In 1914, however, audiences would have picked up immediately on the reference to one of the main strands in the discussion of ‘the social question’, which could be said to have dominated the debate on the relief of poverty for hundreds of years.3 From the time of the Protestant Reformation, when the monasteries were dissolved and the church’s role as the main provider of welfare was curtailed, the responsibility for meeting the needs of the sick and needy had been shared between charitable associations, formed by civic-minded men and women, and the poor law. One important question which welfare providers set themselves to address, from the time of Elizabeth I, whether they were in the public or the private sector, was how to deal with ‘sturdy beggars’, those who could work but preferred to remain idle if they could get a hand-out. For hundreds of years both poor law guardians and charitable trustees struggled to find ways to ensure that help went only to those 1 2 HELPING THE POOR who needed it, while those who could stand on their own feet were encouraged to do so. To err by being too open-handed would result in the corruption of those on the border between self-sufficiency and dependency by turning them into paupers. To err in the other direction would mean that cases of genuine need would be left to suffer. It seems to be an eternal dilemma, and we are still wrestling with it. Each generation places the emphasis differently, and there are certainly few grounds for believing that we have made a better job of it than our ancestors. One of the most frequently heard criticisms of the modern welfare state is that it contains perverse incentives which lead to welfare dependency. The feckless, the idle and the improvident are actually treated better than the prudent and the industrious—what used to be called ‘the working poor’. People who are struggling to pay their way and support their families can find that their next-door neighbours enjoy a more comfortable lifestyle by staying in bed all day. Fear and Loathing of the COS If we were looking for an example of a system at the other end of the spectrum which treated the poor harshly and imposed rigorous conditions on any assistance given, many welfare analysts would cite the Charity Organisation Society. Founded in 1869, it epitomised, from the very start, the view that alms carelessly given are worse than no alms at all.4 It urged people to think before giving money to those requesting assistance, and it instigated a rigorous policy of enquiring into the backgrounds of applicants, and pursuing every alternative before parting with a penny. The Charity Organisation Society was constantly accused of hard-heartedness. In an oft-repeated phrase, it was said to be all organisation and no charity, more concerned with detecting fraud than with meeting needs. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, as support for a universal welfare system overwhelmed the old fears about pauperising low-earners, so the COS found itself becoming the object of intense criticism by the advocates of alternative approaches. It has since attracted to itself all the opprobrium directed against systems which were thought to leave people to ‘stew in their own juice’ rather than compromise the sacred principle of independence, in the same way that all stories about bad landlordism in the 1960s tended to get attached to Peter Rachmann. In the 1960s and 1970s, when welfare statism was at its height, the COS was demonised as the epitome of everything that was cruel, paternalistic and (worst of all) judgmental in welfare policy. It became inescapably linked to a policy of separating the deserving from the undeserving poor, which was regarded as INTRODUCTION 3 thoroughly discredited and morally objectionable. Writing in 1967, T.H. Marshall admitted that he found it hard to be objective about the COS, as their philosophy was ‘repugnant to the modern mind’,5 while David Owen, in his magisterial history of English philanthropy, described the COS as an organisation whose ‘procedures and tactics seem unbelievably dated and ... so contrary to the direction in which the British community was to move that sympathetic understanding does not come readily’.6 However, the 1980s saw the growth of scepticism regarding the rights-based, cradle-to-grave welfare model of the post-war world, and a willingness to consider other options. At the same time, scholars have begun to re-appraise the COS, in an attempt to separate fact from demonology. In their book Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship, published in 1984, Raymond (now Lord) Plant and Andrew Vincent argued that we should consider ‘what they actually said’,7 rather than making unfavourable assumptions about what members of the COS believed.
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