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engaged in regular work, and a number of the women are prostitutes. During the year under
consideration the Council received formal complaints of the annoyance caused to residents in St.
James Square by the frequent occurrence of drunken brawls in the neighbouring streets and houses
of Notting Dale. Indecent conduct and the use of houses in the area as brothels have also been
alleged. At their meeting on December 5th, 1911, the Council accordingly recommended the
appointment of a Special Committee, with power to co-opt members from outside the Council, to
consider the conditions prevailing in Notting Dale. Several meetings of the Special Committee have
been held, a number of witnesses have been examined, and a proposal has been considered that
furnished rooms in debased areas like Common Lodging Houses should be licensed annually. By
these means an improvement in the quality of the furniture and bedding supplied in furnished rooms
would no doubt be secured, but for reasons which are sufficiently obvious the standard of cleanliness
would still fall very far below that of the Common Lodging Houses, whilst drunkenness, immorality
and violence would continue unchecked.
The success of the conduct of Common Lodging Houses is mainly due to the fact that they
do not admit married couples, and with the separation of the sexes one of the most frequent causes
of violent drunken brawls has been removed; in houses let in furnished rooms women are knocked
about by the men they live with, lie drunk on their beds in the daytime and fight amongst themselves.
The inmates of licensed lodging houses also sleep in comparatively large common dormitories,
at 9 a.m. they are obliged to leave their beds and go to the common kitchen, with the result that
the sleeping rooms remain empty throughout the day with the windows wide open. Since there
are no " married couples " the deputy can enter the dormitories at any hour, whilst the absence of
occupants during the day affords him the opportunity for the necessary cleansing and sweeping.
Before mid-day the beds have been made, and on the foot of each one the empty chamber pot
stands throughout the day as evidence that all bedroom slops have been removed.
In a house containing six furnished rooms occupied by six "married couples" the conditions will
always differ widely from those which prevail in the Common Lodging Houses. The keeper cannot
reasonably claim to intrude on the privacy of married couples at any hour of the night or day, he
has no common kitchen for the use of his lodgers when their rooms are being cleaned, and even if
he succeeded in turning them out, he could not enter six rooms at intervals during the day
to see that they had not returned to bed. The County Council expedient for securing the
cleanliness of chamber utensils, cannot be applied to rooms which are occupied by day as well as by
night, and in general it may be said that the facilities for the maintenance of order which exist in
Common Lodging Houses are conspicuous by their absence in furnished rooms. Young children
and infants contribute materially to the dirtiness of the bedding and the rooms in furnished tenements,
whilst the storage, cooking and service of food in a room which is occupied throughout the 24 hours,
create insanitary conditions which cannot arise in the dormitories of Common Lodging Houses.
There remains the question of drunkenness which may, without hesitation, be accepted as the
chief cause of the evils that exist in Notting Dale.
In Common Lodging Houses the introduction of alcohol into the dormitories is prohibited, and
the control of the keeper over the inmates of a single common kitchen is sufficient to prevent its
being made the scene of drunken debauches. In furnished tenements, on the other hand, no means
are likely to be devised which would be adequate to prevent lodgers from taking liquor to their
rooms and drinking throughout the greater part of the night. It is under these conditions that
drunken quarrels between men and women arise, and lead in the end to the uproar which disturbs
the residents in St. James Square.
During the past two or three years certain reformers have made it their business to describe
the occupants of furnished rooms as belonging to the "Common Lodging House type." At first
this description appeared to be as harmless as it is undoubtedly accurate, but it is now known to
have been devised for the express purpose of lending colour to the assumption that the same
methods of control would meet with equal success in furnished rooms and Common Lodging Houses
alike, merely because the users of both happen to belong to the same disorderly class. Since the
conditions of life in the two classes of lodging are fundamentally different, any such assumption is
without justification. The effects of an annual licence, as has already been stated, will do little
or nothing to prevent disorder, and what is really needed is the segregation of the socially unfit in
institutions under State control.
If such a measure is impracticable, then the community must continue to harbour debased
persons in its midst, and put up with the consequences of its own inability to do more than place
the control of their homes and their morals in the hands of lodging house deputies.