The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor the History of London, Dr Ian Stone – Website – Blog – Youtube
The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor The History of London, Dr Ian Stone – Website – Blog – YouTube Slide 1 – George Duckworth was no stranger to the poverty of Victorian east London. Although educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had, in 1892, began working with the philanthropist and social reformer, Charles Booth, investigating the living and working conditions of inner London. As he walked round the streets of Spitalfields with Sergeant French of Whitechapel Police, in March 1898, Duckworth found plenty of destitution to record in his notebook. Slide 2 – At the Roman Catholic Convent of Mercy and Providence Night Refuge, on the corner of Artillery Lane and Bell Lane, where now there is student accommodation and several small businesses, he saw thirty men and two women, ‘a set of scoundrels’ according to Sergeant French, queuing at separate entrances for a bed for the night. It was only 1 PM and the doors would not be open for another three hours. Bell Lane was one of the most overcrowded areas in all London. On average, 800 people were crammed into each acre here, compared to about fifty people per acre in London as a whole. Slide 3 – Duckworth noted that Dorset Street, just around the corner, was filled with thieves, prostitutes and dirty, unkempt residents; it was, he thought, the worst street he had seen so far in his perambulation of London. Little Paternoster Row was hardly any better: here, in a street with broken windows, he found ragged women and children wearing toeless boots. Duckworth believed that for vice, it would have been hard to find worse streets anywhere in London and that, on the whole, the people who lived in this area were vicious, semi- criminals.
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