Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 January 1879 — WOE IN BRITAIN. [ARTICLE]

WOE IN BRITAIN.

A Picture of the Distress Which Prevails in the City of Sheffield—lnstances of Frightful Destitution. [Sheffield Cor. of the London Dailv News.] Whatever the cause maybe, there can be no question of the severity of the decadence of trade which has brought many thousand skilled workmen to the verge of destruction. At present the most highly-skilled men are not actually begging their bread, although many of them are in almost as evil a case, for there are exceptions to the stagnation which oppresses the greater part of the town. Many oldestablished houses, famous for their special productions, are still working full time nearly full time, and their workmen continue as prosperous as ever, as do some of those employed in the manufacture of Bessemer steel. But the body of puddlers and other ironworkers are driven to terrible straits. Their case is not that of men who, having enjoyed a period of prosperity, are suddenly deprived of income, and compelled to fall back on the little stor£ of accumulated earnings which would keep them going till times grow better. It is far worse than this with the Hallamshire operatives, who, instead of being stricken down with a sudden blow, have seen their resources gradually drained from them.

It is now about two years and a half since the depression of the iron trade set in seriously. Wages, after some little resistance, fell, but this change proved only the forerunner of greater misfortune. Another decline in wages was quickly followed by a decline in the quantity of work. For a while employers strove to keep their v'ork going in the hope that trade would mend, but at last found that they must put their men upon half time. This was borne bravely enough by all but the most improvident, but when the three w’orking days per week were reduced to two, ahd at last to one, it became no longer possible to support life on the meager earnings. Bit by bit furniture and clothes went their way to the pawnbroker’s, until at last the iron worker, reduced to one day’s work per week, found himself face to face with a gaunt specter of a wife, with barely rags enough to suffice for decency, a hungry brood of children, and bare walls. Terrible stories are told of the privations endured during the bitter weather of the last few weeks. A hideous, but apparently well-author-ized, account appears in the Sheffield Independent of a familwat Hillsborough actually stealing grains from a cart and devouring them, a narrative which recalls the ghastly stories of destitution in France toward the close of the old regime. Nothing quite so shocking as this has yet come under my notice, although I have seen signs to-day in the district named, as if in mockery, Brightside, as much calculated to excite surprise as pity. In one house I visited I found a widow absolutely in rags. The skirt of what was once a gown was vandyked, as it w r ere, round the bottom, her feet protruded through her wretched boots, and a few lumps of coal only added to the chilly look of the stone floor, and the walls and windows stripped of every vestige of blind or curtain. Two little children were finishing a mess of cold boiled rice, and a third was huddled up close to the mockery of a fire. Yet there were signs that the cottage had I once been at least comfortable. On a table, which, besides a stool, comprised the entire furniture of the parlor or kitchen, the dwelling-room of the cottage, were a few of those garish and hideous articles that English workpeople either buy at fairs or make for themselves with crewel or chenille. Thfese poor so-called ornaments the pawnbroker had refused to have fanythingto do..with. They represented no intelligible sum of money, and like one or two framed prints of equal value served to render emptiness more ghastly. The sole resource of the entire household was the labor of the eldest son, whose earnings last week reached 7s. 6d., of which 3s. Bd. was required for rent. In a neighboring house, in Carlisle street East, I found a sad sight indeed. Five little children, of Whom the eldest was hardly 9 years old, and the youngest a baby, were here alone. The father had gone on some errand, and is the man on whose wife an inquest was held some days since, and whose case excited profound sympathy. It seems that the-poor, halfstarved woman, who was suckling the wan and leaden-looking baby I saw laid on a table out of the reach of the younger children, received news of some work for her husband, and flew to meet him with the joyful news, but, having reached the last stage of exhaustion, sank down in the street. Succor was promptly afforded, but too late, for the poor creatore ultimately died, as the jury decided, “of starvation.” The husband has, I believe, work now, and the appearance of all the children except the baby testifies to the self-deny-ing care of the mother they have lost, and also to the efficiency of the means taken to afford help to the children by the authorities of the town. Round the corfier from Carlisle street East I turned into Fornsett street—a little more sheltered, perhaps, from the biting blast which swept over from the moors—and I found so many cqses of misery that it would be tedious, if not sickening, to recapitulate them all. One woman, with three married and three unmarried children, was kneeling on the floor scrubbing it, and literally without a shoe to her foot. Inquiry elicited the fact that there was one pair of shoes in the family, but that these were passed on to the member who was going out, and that her daughter had gone to the “ tip ” to pick up coals and cinders, for the coals distributed to her among others had come to an end. She had no furniture. Everything she had was “fastened,” i. e., pawned. Times had been bad so long that everything had gone, and her husband was ill upstairs, lying on the floor with nothing but a blanket to cover him. I was assured that hardly any of the people had bedsteads or bedding, and the next house I determined to see for myself. Here I was received by a fair-haired and by no means ill-looking man, had it not been for his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. There was not a vestige of furniture in the room, nor of fire in the grate. In the room overhead I saw his family—a wife and five children, the last of whom was born a week ago. The whole family had evidently slept on the floor, for a couple of blankets still lay spread in the corner furthest from the stair-top. Over the fire cowered the mother, round whom the children sat watching, with wistful looks,

the cooking of some coffee and the frizzling of a bit of bacon. The husband is an iron-puddler, one of those attracted from Staffordshire to Sheffield by the hope of higher wages. A poor woman, a few doors further off’, told me that her two youngest children died in her arms from cold and exposure, for she was obliged to take them with her when she went to seek odds and ends on the “ tip.”