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107
With the assistance of some members of the Special
Care Committee dealing with Heckfield Place and the
other Avenues, a detailed inquiry into the general conditions
of living in Heckfield Place has lately been made,
and the more detailed knowledge obtained has fully
confirmed the previous opinion held by all workers in the
district as to its lamentable character. Unlike some
slum areas, however, it is less characterised by extremes
of poverty and vice than by a uniformly low standard
of living, the inhabitants generally being mentally,
morally and physically below the standard of the
ordinary working class population. Few of the men are
in regular employment, many probably as the result of
vicious habits or heredity, are of such poor calibre as to
be unable to do steady work. Quite a third of the married
men live habitually on the earnings of their wives and
children, only picking up sufficient to enable themselves
to spend most of their time lounging near the public
house. Among the older men and women drink is
almost the universal evil; gambling is also prevalent,
and is common even among the boys and girls. In one
house a widow with records of drink and immorality is
said to let her room to young people of both sexes for
betting and gambling, and other houses are believed to
be used for the same purpose. In a neighbourhood of
this description, however, it is not always possible to
locate the evils even when known to exist.
The population is both stable and shifting. Families
frequently move, although often only to another number
in the same street, in order to avoid paying rent, or for
other reasons. They also go to equally unsatisfactory
streets in Chelsea or Notting Dale, only to move back
again to this area at a later date.
There is much intermarriage, children when grown
up tending to remain in the area, and, although the
records of infantile mortality are abnormally high, it is
interesting to note that the children who survive,
although often of a degenerate type, cannot be said to