THE COTTAGES OF THE AGRICULTURAL POOR IN ENGLAND.

Southland Times, Issue 1210, 15 February 1870, Page 3

THE COTTAGES OF THE AGRICULTURAL POOR IN ENGLAND.

(From the Scotsman, Nov. 22.) The second report of the Commissioners on the employment of children, young persons, and women in agriculture i contains incidentally a considerable amount of information on the presentdisgraceful condition of the dwellings of agricultural labourers in England. Mr Fraser, who reports from Norfolk, Essex, Sussex, and G-loucestershire, says : — ! " The majority of the cottages that exist in rural parishes are deficient in almost every requisite that should constitute a home for a Christian family in a civilised community. They are deficient in bedroom accommodation, very few having three chamber*?, and in some parishes the larger proportion only one ; they are deficient in drainage and sanitary arrangements ; they are imperfectly J supplied with water ; such conveniences as they have are often so situated as to become nuisances ; they are full enough of draughts to generate any amount of rheumatism ; and in many instances are lamentably dilapidated and oat of repair. The natural history, so to call it, of these miserable, ruinous dwellings is very various. Some of the worst are parish cottages, either erected in the time of the old Poor-law, or bequeathed to the parish as a last home for its aged paupers, which there are no funds to repair. Another almost uniformly bad class are the cottages run up by squatters on the waste, or held upon a lifehold or copyhold tenure, and which have not yet fallen into the lord of the manor. Others have been put up by speculative builders of the flimsiest materials. Others are converted stables or farmhouses, attesting in the one case the conquest of the railway over the road, in the other the change in the phase of agricultural life which has merged half-a-dozen petty occupations into one large holding. Some belong to small proprietors too indigent to have any money to spare for their improvement ; some to absentee or embarrassed landowners, the former of whom are unwilling to improve an estate which they never see — the latter, in addition to being unable, are equally unwilling to improve a property from which they get no advantage." Dorsetshire and Stiropsmre are condemned as the worst counties. Mr Edward Stanhope speaks of a village in Dorsetshire as follows : — "The parish of Batcombe (with an acreage of 1109) has within its limits twenty-three cottages occupied by agriculturallabourers, of which ele^enhave one bed-room only, and in five of these families with three or more children are sleeping (Evid. 59.) In the forty-two parishes comprised within the unions of Cerne and Wimborne, no less than 314 (or 16 per cent.) of the cottages had one bed-room only, and 113 of these contained a family with three or more children (Evid. 59 ) What is called a second bed-room is often, too, a mere apology for it, and is sometimes described as 'a closet not closed ' from the bed-room." Of the manner in which the hoppickers are housed during their temporary sojourn in Kent, the same gentleman says : — "It is not uncommon for growers to provide straw and hurdles, and to leave the pickers, immediately on their arrival, to buiid up any sort of shelter which their ingenuity can suggest. In other cases, an old barn is thrown open, and they are left to occupy it as they can, with such partitions between families or bins' companies as they may be disposed to put up. , Sometimes ' hurdles are put between the beds, leaving them to twist straw in if they like. They seldom do so. 1 (Bvid. 142.) In. several cases that came under my notice, at least fifty men, women, and children were living in onelarge temporary hut, without any attempt at partitions. In another the ' lean-tos' round a barn, in which the owner would have been ashamed to put his cattle, were utilised for the purpose." Mr E. F. Boyle, reporting from Somersetshire, gives the following particulars: — " At Butcombe a cottage was shown to me, in which a man and wife and a family of little children live, a mere lean-to against the wall of another house, with open thatch, and the sky visible through the thatch in many place?. In Chilliugton were some nearly as bad. The worst cottages are generally the small freeholds, inhabited by the persons who own them, and who, being unable to make more money than absolutely necessary for their immediate wantg, are too poor to afford repairs of any kind. Next to these the worst class of buildings are generally those belonging to small proprietors, such as tradesmen in towns, who have invested in them as a money speculation, and to make it pay are forced to charge a high rent and spend little in repairs. The best cottages are usually those belonging to the larger proprietors." The reason for this appears to be that the larger proprietors do not like to have on their estates cottages that look disreputable. But there is no hope held out that respectable cottages can be made

remunerative. Upon this point Mr Boyle says : — " A gentleman of large landed possessions in the far west, who has been building and repairing his cottages all through along tenure of the property, was good enough to let me see bis cottage account, and join me in a very careful perusal of it. The conclusion we came to was, that after the valu.i of repairs had been deducted, and a calculation made of arrears of rent unpaid, there was no balance left for the proprietor at all, for the repairs swallowed up the whole of the rent. His cottages were let for various sums, some as low as £1 a-year, few more than Is Od a week. Consequently, for every new cottage he builds he is out of pocket by the value of that cottage ; for say he builds a cottage of the value of £125, and lets it at £3 ayear, he only makes 2£ per cent on his outlay, and a sum equal to that is to be j allowed for the average annual value of | repairs." Of the evil effect of such dwellings as the poor now inhabit, there can be no two opinions. Mr Hugh Seymour Tremenheere, one of the Commissioners, reports as follows : — " Greatly as any legitimate increase of the peeuuiary resources of that large proportion of the laborers in agriculture throughout the country which is in the receipt of the lower rates of wages might be expected to further the progress of effectual education among their children, the good results of such education must be liable to be counteracted in all the, unhappily, still very numerous cases in which the laborer's dwelling is of such a kind as to cause great and serious discomfort, and to make the decencies of life all but impossible." The other Commissioner, Mr Edward Carleton Tufnell, makes bad cottages a result as well as a cause of defective education. He thinks that, if properlyeducated, laborers would demand better cottages. That in their present state they do not in many cases appreciate decent dwellings, even when offered. We learn from Sir George Jenkinsou, I who, in the course of a speech at an agricultural dinner, said that — "If you built a palace and furnished it to match, you would scarcely induce, them to leave these places, into which you would hardly put a pig to live. He had at that moment cottages unoccupied t through, the refusal of laborers to leave their own hovels." The Earl of Ki.nberley speaks more strongly : — " We have, given a very good cottage to a laborer, and we find that he does not appreciate it at all. He puts his apples into one room, does not inhabit another, and would put his pig into another if we would let him." The Eev. J. Cane, Eector of Weston, Nottinghamshire, says : — " Where there are three bedrooms I often find that the third is very little used." And a report to the Biggleswade guardians, says: — ~ • v ' - " In several of the cottages with two bed-rooms, the father, mother, and children were huddled into one room, and the other bed-room is let to lodgers." The best solution of the difficulty appears to be offered by the Rev. H. T. Young, of Stoken Church, Oxon, in the following words : — " I would remark that the cottage accommodation for the laboring poor is, generally speaking, so bad that it cannot be sufficiently condemned. Horses and cattle are often provided with a more substantial dwelling than the laboring poor. lam well aware of the stereotyped answer made to every remark about cottages — viz., that it does not pay to build them, nor does it pay to build farm buildings, but a landlord could not let his farm without them, they being, so to speak, the fixture and furniture of the farm ; he is obliged to build them, and I think there ought to be cottage accommodation on every farm sufficient for the laborers employed on it, just as there is sufficient stable room, &c., &c, for the requisite number of horses, &c, &c." We append one more extract to show that dwellings constructed or used without the slightest regard to decency are not confined altogether to the lowest class of laborers. Mr Henry Tremenheere, in . his report upon Cumberland and Westmoreland, says : — "The sleeping accommodation in the farmhouses has long been a disgrace to these counties, and although some improvement has taken place in this respect within the last twenty years, the same stairs often lead to the rooms of both the male and female servants. Only a few t years ago, in one of the largest farmhouses of the district, belonging to .one of its principal landed proprietors, the men and women servants slept in the same room, the men at one end and the women at the other, with not even a curtain to separate them ; and in another case a farmer, apologising for the domestic arrangements of his house, said he had done ths best he could for the protection of his female servants by putting curtains to their beds." Eor cases like this there is no excuse offered.