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39
holds. There was a fireguard in 82 homes. The cupboard
accommodation for food was insufficient in 190 tenements; in 165
there was no separate provision for the storage of coal or coke. This
absence of proper cupboard accommodation presses very hardly
upon the poor. It is difficult for them to keep their food clean or
milk unpolluted when they have to keep their clothes, food and
coke in one and the same cupboard. The cupboard has then to be
used as wardrobe, larder, and coal-cellar. When this is the case,
it is usual to find the women's hats on the top shelf, the food on
the middle shelf, and the coke in the lowest compartment. The
men's best clothes are then placed between the mattress and the
palliasse, where they harbour vermin until these are shaken out on
Sunday preparatory to being worn. Sometimes when the cupboards
are provided, the occupants will not use them alleging that
they are over-run by mice ; in other cases there are no shelves—
these are stated to have been burnt for firewood by previous
tenants and not to have been replaced. In one house the family
kept chickens in the top compartment, food and household utensils
in the middle part. In another house, not connected with the
present enquiry, ducks were kept in a similar situation.
In 119 tenements there was a separate washhouse, in 67 cases
the washing was done in the yard, in 9 instances in the basement,
and in 4 households in the living room. One family used the
public baths of a neighbouring borough.
It is very important that washing accommodation should be
available for every tenement, easy of access and convenient. In
some houses, however, the washing coppers are placed in very unsuitable
situations—as for example under a basement, the approach
to which is by means of steep steps under a low floor—too
precipitous for a woman to use with safety or comfort even when
not burdened with a basket of clothes, and so constructed that it
would be difficult for her to bring the clean clothes out without
soiling them against the ground floor joists or basement ceiling
Further there is sometimes no water laid on in such a basement,
so that as a consequence the copper is hardly ever used. In these
circumstances the woman boils a few things in a pail or bucket on
her own kitchen fire.