In Darkest England and The Way Out [54]
1d per Quart. Ready at 10 a.m.
A certain discretionary power is vested in the Officers in charge of the Depot, and they can in very urgent cases give relief, but the rule is for the food to be paid for, and the financial results show that working expenses are just about covered.
These Cheap Food Depots I have no doubt have been and are or great service to numbers of hungry starving men, women, and children, at the prices just named, which must be within the reach of all, except the absolutely penniless; but it is the Shelter that I regard as the most useful feature in this part of our undertaking, for if anything is to be done to get hold of those who use the Depot, some more favourable opportunity must be afforded than is offered by the mere coming into the food store to get, perhaps, only a basin of soup. This part of the Scheme I propose to extend very considerably.
Suppose that you are a casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none. Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have perhaps only a few coppers, or it may be, a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny Dosshouse where, in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to what to do, someone who sees you suggests that you should go to our Shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the Casual Ward of the Workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to one of our Shelters. On entering you pay fourpence, and are free of the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late. The company begins to assemble about five o'clock in the afternoon. In the women's Shelter you find that many come much earlier and sit sewing, reading or chatting in the sparely furnished but well warmed room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime.
You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash-house, where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free. Then after having washed and eaten you can make yourself comfortable. You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing. At eight o'clock the Shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern. Two or three hundred men in the men's Shelter, or as many women in the women's Shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each other, in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor--what are you to do with them? This is what we do with them.
We hold a rousing Salvation meeting. The Officer in charge of the Depot, assisted by detachments from the Training Homes, conducts a jovial free-and-easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer, short and to the point; there are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are of those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand, and who are, as they say in all sincerity, "as happy as the day is long." There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and conditions of men; casuals, gaol birds, Out-of-Works, who have come there for the first time, and who find men who last week or last month were even as they themselves are now--still poor but rejoicing in a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer outcasts and forlorn
A certain discretionary power is vested in the Officers in charge of the Depot, and they can in very urgent cases give relief, but the rule is for the food to be paid for, and the financial results show that working expenses are just about covered.
These Cheap Food Depots I have no doubt have been and are or great service to numbers of hungry starving men, women, and children, at the prices just named, which must be within the reach of all, except the absolutely penniless; but it is the Shelter that I regard as the most useful feature in this part of our undertaking, for if anything is to be done to get hold of those who use the Depot, some more favourable opportunity must be afforded than is offered by the mere coming into the food store to get, perhaps, only a basin of soup. This part of the Scheme I propose to extend very considerably.
Suppose that you are a casual in the streets of London, homeless, friendless, weary with looking for work all day and finding none. Night comes on. Where are you to go? You have perhaps only a few coppers, or it may be, a few shillings, left of the rapidly dwindling store of your little capital. You shrink from sleeping in the open air; you equally shrink from going to the fourpenny Dosshouse where, in the midst of strange and ribald company, you may be robbed of the remnant of the money still in your possession. While at a loss as to what to do, someone who sees you suggests that you should go to our Shelter. You cannot, of course, go to the Casual Ward of the Workhouse as long as you have any money in your possession. You come along to one of our Shelters. On entering you pay fourpence, and are free of the establishment for the night. You can come in early or late. The company begins to assemble about five o'clock in the afternoon. In the women's Shelter you find that many come much earlier and sit sewing, reading or chatting in the sparely furnished but well warmed room from the early hours of the afternoon until bedtime.
You come in, and you get a large pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa, and a hunk of bread. You can go into the wash-house, where you can have a wash with plenty of warm water, and soap and towels free. Then after having washed and eaten you can make yourself comfortable. You can write letters to your friends, if you have any friends to write to, or you can read, or you can sit quietly and do nothing. At eight o'clock the Shelter is tolerably full, and then begins what we consider to be the indispensable feature of the whole concern. Two or three hundred men in the men's Shelter, or as many women in the women's Shelter, are collected together, most of them strange to each other, in a large room. They are all wretchedly poor--what are you to do with them? This is what we do with them.
We hold a rousing Salvation meeting. The Officer in charge of the Depot, assisted by detachments from the Training Homes, conducts a jovial free-and-easy social evening. The girls have their banjos and their tambourines, and for a couple of hours you have as lively a meeting as you will find in London. There is prayer, short and to the point; there are addresses, some delivered by the leaders of the meeting, but the most of them the testimonies of those who have been saved at previous meetings, and who, rising in their seats, tell their companions their experiences. Strange experiences they often are of those who have been down in the very bottomless depths of sin and vice and misery, but who have found at last firm footing on which to stand, and who are, as they say in all sincerity, "as happy as the day is long." There is a joviality and a genuine good feeling at some of these meetings which is refreshing to the soul. There are all sorts and conditions of men; casuals, gaol birds, Out-of-Works, who have come there for the first time, and who find men who last week or last month were even as they themselves are now--still poor but rejoicing in a sense of brotherhood and a consciousness of their being no longer outcasts and forlorn