The secret world of the Victorian lodging house

I jolted awake. In an instant I was at the window. A chill moon lit the back yard. But there was no movement, nothing amiss. What had woken me? Then the gate moved on its hinges, opened a few inches, then closed with a chug against the bricks. That was it - the gate banging. I crossed the room, back to the bed, my feet cold on the linoleum. Then I heard it: a clatter of aluminium.

Now there was light under my door, feet on the stairs, my mother’s voice near and my father’s further away. Then I was out on the stairs, my heart skittish to be up at this unknown hour, down the three flights of stairs, along the hall which was chill with the night air and into my mother’s back at the door of the kitchen. I pushed my head between her hip and the jamb of the door.

Jack lay amid the ruins of the table, its four legs like those of a stricken spider, its back broken and about him pans and sieves, pots, jars and ladles, once housed on the shelves he had brought cascading from the wall.

The demolition of the kitchen was never broached and after a while I began to think I had imagined the whole thing. Circumstantial evidence, however, confirmed my recollection: a new deal table appeared in the kitchen the next day. Besides, Jack was a prodigious drinker, given to concluding his evenings in the most inhospitable places. On one occasion he was found comatose with his back resting against the door of a telephone box and on another across the bonnet of Austin A30. The kitchen incident was akin to the evening he embraced the motoring revolution.

In the following days and weeks the lodgers continued to sit around the walls of the living room waiting for their dinner while shielded from my view by their open newspapers, as close together as Roman soldiers with their shields locked together in turtle formation. They read the Manchester Evening News, the Cork Weekly Examiner, the Irish Independent and the Western People, while Radio Eireann undulated in the background.

On one occasion, irked by the bookish atmosphere, I took a poker from the fire and sough to obliterate Harold Macmillan’s moustache from the front page of the Inishowen Independent. In a flurry of flames and flapping the room filled with smoke and the entire newspaper was consigned to the hearth. My father’s ire wilted in the face of the Inishowen man’s indulgent laughter and some of the lodgers supported my actions, adding that “burning is too good for that Macmillan”.

As always, they forgave me. They continued to give me half-crowns on pay day and to take me to High Mass, when occasionally during the homily my guardian would step outside to suck deep on a Sweet Afton. Back home, I marvelled at their big boots, encrusted in ochre clay, their trousers, stiff with mud, the odour of wet wool and damp earth they exuded when recently home from work and the smell of brilliantine and stale Guinness from their blue Sunday suits. Almost weekly, one of them disappeared, off to Kilburn or Digbeth, to be replaced by another from Connemara or Kilkenny.

But most of all, I wondered why these men lived with us and not in their own homes, with their own wives and children. Who were these fourteen men my mother fed in relays each evening?

When I asked my father said they were lodgers, men who had left home to find work in England. For as long as I can remember they have fascinated me. Rootless, yet of a specific time and place, they lived in a twilight realm, neither at home nor settled away from home. Without the financial or social responsibilities of adults, in many ways they exemplified the ideals of working class masculinity - tough, strong and independent.

When I began my research for the book, I was dismayed to find little mention of the lodging house in the standard social and economic histories of the time, where they appeared only as a footnote to major developments. Yet, paradoxically, it’s impossible to peruse any local newspaper of the period without finding some mention of this ubiquitous institution and its links with crime, prostitution, drunkenness, disease, squalor, juvenile delinquency, violence and murder. To cite but one example: Jack the Ripper’s victims all lived in an area in which every second house was a lodging house and at least two of his victims lived in such places.

The very term “common lodging-house” raised the hackles of the respectable. Investigative journalists who ventured into them were sure of a rapt readership. The world they described was no less exotic than that of the Kalahari Bushmen and Maasai warriors; yet the lodger and the lodging house were as much features of Victorian life as the beggar and the pub. They were at the heart of every one of Britain’s cities and towns and were central to working class life.

As early as 1749 the worst part of one of London’s most notorious rookeries, the streets around George Street and Church Lane, attracted the attention of Henry Fielding. The area, he said, contained “a great number of houses set apart for the reception of rogues and vagabonds who have been lodging there for two pence a night”. He goes on to mention one woman “who alone owns seven of these houses , all with miserable beds from cellar to garret... these beds are several in the same room, men and women, often strangers to each other lie promiscuously. Gin is sold to them at a penny a quart.”

By the mid-19th century lodging houses were a feature of every city and town and formed a system of accommodation linking most parts of the country and making them accessible to travellers of small means.

The lodging house I grew up in the 1950s was one of the last of its kind. Social and economic changes, developing patterns of migration and innovations in the building industry, reduced the demand for the navvy. But the lodging house, the abode of Britain’s itinerant workers, has a long and fascinating history, little of which is available to the general reader. I hope my book helps to fill that gap.

Joseph O’Neill, born and brought up in Manchester’s large Irish community, is a freelance writer and broadcaster. His work appears in all Britain and Ireland’s leading family history and genealogical magazines. His books include Crime City (Milo Press), a history of Manchester’s Victorian underworld and The Manchester Martyrs (Mercier Press) which deals with the development of Irish nationalism and Britain’s last public multiple execution. His Manchester in the Great War (Pen & Sword) was published earlier this year to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the war. The Secret History of the Victorian Lodging House (Pen & Sword) is his sixth book.