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floor of No. 9, Pump Court, but some of the occupants state that
they send their washing out. The two washing coppers appear to
be quite insufficient to meet the needs of the 20 families who inhabit
the Court. The wash-house walls are dirty, the floor is broken in
places ; around one copper the cement is broken.
The clothes may be dried in the narrow yard of the Court, or
more often in the living rooms on lines attached to nails driven into
the walls of the rooms. There are 5 water closets in the yard of
the Court and placed against its west wall. In some of these
closets the walls are dirty, the pans foul, the flooring broken, the
seats dilapidated or fouled, or the cistern leaking. Privacy may
be obtained by a retaining string attached to the door. One closet
has a leaky wooden roof. The water closet accommodation—
5 closets for 71 persons—is insufficient.
It must not be inferred that the whole of the foregoing defects
are present in every tenement or in every water closet.
There is one dust receptacle for the use of all the tenements—
a large galvanised bin roughly 3 ft. by 3 ft. by 2 ft., much dilapidated
with no bottom, an open top, and a hole in front patched up with
a piece of metal placed inside the bin.
The water supply consists of a large stone cistern, near No. 5,
Pump Court, with a wooden cover made of wooden planks irregu—
larly assembled, dirty and littered with paper, sticks, ashes and
bits of rope. Inside this large cistern there is a smaller cistern,
receiving water from the main, and having a wooden cover. This
cistern has dimensions 3 ft. by 2 ft. by 2 ft. The tap placed at the
south end was leaking at the time of inspection. This tap discharges
over a gully yard.
There are no baths provided by the owners in these tenements,
no gas or electric light for lighting. There are no kitchen ranges;
the cooking facilities usually consist of open fire grates with ovens.
In both these sets of tenements the conditions of housing are
not compatible with the standards of clean and healthy living which
may now be reasonably requested by the working classes.