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Whitechapel - Coggle Diagram
Whitechapel
Housing, overcrowding and crime.
Rookeries
- Rookeries were common in the slum areas of Whitechapel.
- They were areas filled with lodging houses, where very poor people stayed in overcrowded conditions.
- There could be as many as three people in one apartment, sharing very little space.
- In Whitechapel in the late 19th century, there were 233 common lodging houses, also known as ‘doss’ houses.
- These contained as many as 8,000 people. Poor people would pay for a room in a lodging house for either one or two nights.
- Each day they would work to earn the money for a room for the following one or two nights.
- One family would stay in one room, sleeping on the bed and on the floor.
- A well-known rookery of lodging houses in 1870, was Flower and Dean Street.
- The houses on Flower and Dean Street were in a terrible condition.
- They had outside toilets, but buckets and pots were also used indoors, which caused very bad smells and disease.
- As a result of the living conditions on Flower and Dean Street, it gained a reputation for housing thieves, drunkards and sex workers, and being an area of London that was feared even by the police.
- The 1871 census showed that there were 902 lodgers staying in 31 of the ‘doss houses’ on Flower and Dean Street.
Whitechapel workhouse
- Those who could not afford a bed for the night, or were young, old or sick, could go to a workhouse.
- Some people only went to a workhouse as a last resort, because of the strict rules enforced in them.
- These rules included what they could eat (porridge, cheese, bread, potatoes and occasionally meat), how they worked, the time they went to bed and the time they had to get up.
- Families were separated in the workhouses, and adults and children were only allowed to see each other once a day.
- For many, staying at a workhouse was humiliating.
- The workhouses can be described as places of constant hunger, poor sanitation, frequent illness, poor sleep and violence.
- The Whitechapel workhouse was at South Grove.
- At the centre of Whitechapel was Buck’s Row, where a workhouse infirmary for the sick was located.
- Across the road from there, at St Thomas’ Street, there was a ‘casual ward’ with spaces for 60 people who wanted a bed for just one night.
- The rules were very harsh as inmates were expected to work to earn their bed for the night.
- This work included tasks such as breaking stones, chopping wood, picking oakum (picking apart the fibres of old rope), working in the kitchens and cleaning the workhouse.
- The aim of this work was to deter people from staying at the expense of the taxpayers who funded the Workhouse Union.
The Peabody Estate
- In 1879 an area of Whitechapel called Royal Mint Street contained a large number of lodging houses.
- The land was bought by the Metropolitan Board of Works, a government organisation, who wanted to demolish them. In 1875, Parliament passed the Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act as part of the slum clearances.
- This land was then sold on to the Peabody Trust, which was a charity set up by the wealthy American banker George Peabody.
- The trust wanted to design and build new flats that would offer affordable rents to tenants.
- Weekly rents started at three shillings (15p) for a one-room flat and six shillings for three rooms.
- On average, labourers earned 22 shillings per week.
- By 1881, 287 flats had been built that housed 30,000 Londoners who had previously lived in the slums.
- The new Peabody Estate provided better living conditions, including:
- improved ventilation
- brick walls so that lice could not live in them
- shared courtyards
- shared laundry rooms
- shared bathrooms with a bath
- shared kitchens
- Tenants of the Peabody Estate flats were selected carefully to ensure they would look after the housing. George Peabody insisted that these flats should benefit Londoners who were poor, of moral character and good members of society.
- However, the rents were too high for some people in Whitechapel.
- Those who got behind with their payments were thrown out, which caused overcrowding elsewhere in the district.
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Immigration
- The population of Whitechapel changed regularly because of the casual work available for migrants living by the docks, as well as temporary accommodation available in lodging houses.
- The changing population led to fears of crime and tensions within the community.
- For centuries Irish and Eastern European migrants, including Jewish people from Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire had settled in Whitechapel after their boats arrived at the East End docks.
- In Whitechapel, they were able to find jobs, cheap places to sleep and communities of similar people.
Irish migrants:
- Irish migrants had been settling in Whitechapel since the 1840s and by c.1870 there were well-established Irish lodging houses.
- It was mostly Irish workers who were employed at the docks as ‘navvies’ (navigators); doing labouring jobs on canals, railways and roads; or working as dockers on the Thames.
- They were characterised as being drunk and violent.
Jewish migrants:
- After 1881, Russian Jewish people started to come over to England in large numbers, in order to avoid persecution following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
- Between 1881 and 1891, 30,000 Russian migrants arrived in London.
- However, they found it hard to integrate because of differences in language (they spoke Yiddish) and differences in cultural factors such as religious holidays, food and clothing.
- They also observed Sabbath rituals on a Saturday, when they were expected to work.
- As a result, Jewish people tended to live in self-segregated communities, or ghettos, in East London.
- Many Jewish migrants started to work in sweatshops making clothes and shoes for Jewish employers, where conditions of work were poor and wage levels were low.
- This caused great resentment from other traders, who could not fairly compete on price.
- The segregation of Jewish migrants from other communities caused them to be targets of prejudice and anti-Semitism.
- They were also distrusted by the Whitechapel police.
- More information on Jewish life in Europe before World War Two can be found in this article - Jews in pre-war Europe.
- Irish, Jewish and Eastern European migrants commonly lived in the lodging houses of Whitechapel.
Socialism and anarchism
- Some people in Whitechapel were worried about political ideas such as a socialism and anarchism being brought over to London by migrants, especially from Eastern Europe.
- The idea of anarchism was developed by Russian revolutionaries.
- Some Jewish migrants brought the idea of socialism to London with them and set up socialist organisations such as the International Working Men’s Educational Club and a newspaper, Worker’s Friend, in Whitechapel.
- British politicians and the English media saw both the idea of anarchism and Jewish immigration as a threat.
- When the third victim of Jack the Ripper, Annie Chapman, was found in the yard of the Berner Street theatre, where the Worker’s Friend was printed, the Whitechapel community blamed the murders on a Jewish man.
- Rumours circulated that a Russian anarchist, Nikolay Vasiliev, was responsible for the murders.
- However, it is unlikely that he ever existed.
- There was never a connection found between the political anarchists and the murder of Annie Chapman, but the police were distrustful of the community because they were unable to speak Yiddish and so were not able to monitor the community.
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