Cellars of Shame

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 335, 21 April 1928, Page 10

Cellars of Shame

SLAVERY IN LONDON

Sweated Children of Poor

OLAVERY of the worst kind is being carried on' under U our noses. The victims are helpless. Nobody heeds their curses; nobody hears the anguished cry of the mother compelled to goad her own little ones on to the treadmill of perpetual toil,” writes H. S. Doig in a London newspaper.

"TF ever 1 get a chance to hit that : -x thing,” said Abraham Lincoln, ! speaking of the institution of slavery in the T'nited States, I will hit it damned hard.” He did, and fought the American Civil War that the slaves might be free. is there no one among our younger statesmen who will register a similar oath to help the child slaves in the sweating dens of England? I think I can promise him that the j Recording Angel will deal with his ! imprecation as he did with the oath I of Uncle Toby when he blotted it out j with a tear. The other day I saw some of these i child slaves in the basement of a mean house in a mean street in the East End of London, not far from j Sidney Street. It. was a dark, damp, ill-lit vault, with cobwebs on the ceilings and mildew on the walls, but it was the home of a half-starved family of aliens, struggling to wrench a pitiful living by desperate labour and extreme toil. Terrible Alternative The father was a tailor, who made up costumes for a fashionable West End establishment. He had worked his fingers to the bone for a sweating employer and had left him in despair. He could not draw the "dole,” which would have given him almost opulent ease, because "the old man” had reported him to the employment exchange as having “left of his own accord.” For the same reason he could not be put on the register which might enable him to find another job. He had therefore to undercut his employer and to sell his products as cheaply as possible lest he, in turn, might be undercut by somebody else. | So this unhappy fellow had to ] press his whole family into the task j and to make a workshop in the wretched cellar in which they lived. There were the father and the mother, pale, pasty-faced and abject, a tuberculosis daughter of about sixteen and four or five other children, down to an undersized little tot of seven, who had also to take her share in the allotted task. Poor Little Babe! They fed and slept in the same room in which they worked, save the tuberculous daughter, who couched in a lobby which led to the sink. All day and far into the night this miserable family slaved and toiled to pay the exorbitant rent of their wretched abode and to win a diet not much better than prison fare. The average price this man earns for making an entire garment complete with lyjitonholes and trimmings seam and gusset and band,” is not more than Gs, and the finished article sells in the West End for more guineas than he gets shillings. He has to supply his own needles pins and thread and to pay fr jr the gas to heat the iron ho uses for pressing. His wife must assist him, the tuberculous daughter sews the buttonholes, and the little tot of seven weeping with fatigue, must sit up into tile small hours pulling out basting threads and winding them again on a reel to avoid even the smallest waste. This babe goes ieaden-eyed a* d weary to school, where, under the conditions, it has not much better chance of learning anything useful than a half-wit. Heartbreaking Torture Even when the children come home to their scanty and hurriedly prepated mid-day meal, these stunted, rickety, over-driven little slaves must work. They must show a profit to the wretched father who has no choice but to sweat them. Why does a man like this find himself compelled to exist under such horrible conditions? It is largely due to the weakness and loopholes in the legislation that Parliament intended to eradicate sweating. In the ordinary workshop in this trade a minimum wage an hour must be paid, but what happens is that the employer works a man for two or three hours, then "stands him off” for the rest of the day, so that the pressers may get on with their job. It is to avoid this exasperating and heartbreaking torture that tile wretched employee converts his „wn living-room into a "family workshop’ and sweats his own children. If the fashionable buyers of the garments made in these dreadful decs knew the conditions in which thev were produced, they would start uack in horror and affright. I saw a rich and heavy piece of material tised as a blanket on the mattress of the coughing child. This is the usual custom throughout these family workshops, not only in the East End of London, but in the slums of Leeds and Bradford and Manchester and Birmingham. Many of the workers in the trade are aliens, Poles and Czeeho-Slovaks. who manage somehow to get smuggled into this country. Often they speak little or no English, and having no chance of other employment must take what is offered to them by their upscrupulous compatriots who have smuggled them In. Another spoke in this vicious circle is the young women. They regard it merely as a temporary occupation on the road to marriage. For this reason they will not join the trace union. They have been sweated from childhood up. They are dull, often practically illiterate, and they cannot realise that they are keeping down the wages even of the men they hope to marry and fastening the shackles of slavery on the little children who are following on their down-at-heel footsteps. The existence of these wretched people, apart from the suffering inflicted on their hopeless children, is a serious menace to the health and wellbeing of the country. They c t ry infection like rats in tortuous and underground passages. They breed like flies, for each child is self-supporting almost from the time it can toddle. Clothes for the bonny children of comfortable homes FTOMB TO SYMONDS STREET ON v "' TUESDAY.

go out from these wretched pest-dens with no mark to suggest their tainted origin. The girls who work in this souldestroying trade cannot all marry. Driven out by younger rivals, they drift out upon the world with defective intelligence and weakened morale, and become an easy prey to unscrupulous and vicious men. It is difficult to see any remedy, except the abolition of the “family workshop” and that is not an easy thing to do. V/an ted—a Wilberlorce It should be made illegal to make garments wholesale on contract in any room in which people eat and sleep, and the sanitary authorities should be empowered to carry this regulation into effect. Two generations ago Charles Kingsley inspired the chords of public opinion and ended the barbarous employment in mines and factories of young children and saved little five-year-old boys who were driven up narrow chimneys by bullying masters. Who will come forward with the courageous ardour of a Wilberforee, a Lincoln or a Plimsoll and rescue these child-slaves of the sWeated tailoring trade from the sordid and tortured existence that is little better than a protracted death?