“What are all these destinies thus driven pell-mell? Whither go they? Why are they so? He who knows that, sees all the shadow. He is alone. His name is God.”
Have you ever heard of the Potteries? It is a collection of towns in North Staffordshire that, with differing names, varying ambitions, fluctuating fortunes, and distinct rivalries, spread into one another and have a staple trade - the making of china. The people in the Potteries mould and bake and glaze and paint, and do all the other things that have to be done to china and pottery, yet they never grow very rich. Now much good is to happen to the Potteries. The towns are to join together and become a city under another name; they are to wake up their systems of education, and produce the beautiful ware by more scientific processes. Still, at the moment, till these things come about the Potteries are very poor indeed. Work is uncertain, trade is slack. Government regulations about the sanitary conditions of their occupation must be complied with; new houses must be built, and insanitary buildings demolished; indeed, the whole scheme of sanitation reformed.
All the evils that hang about a manufacturing centre are here - in spite of public spirit among the inhabitants and enthusiasm for enlightened progress; in spite of a wooded and hilly country all around, to bring, through nature’s loveliness, rest and refreshment to the weary toiler on his Sundays and holidays. You may imagine that where very few people are rich, and a large number poor, the first thought is for the children.
I do not like exaggeration. Some people must exaggerate an evil or a good, and perhaps we should stick fast in our own self-satisfaction if they did not. Still I am born to play the role of exaggerator badly, from a fatal habit of seeing two sides to a question; and when I tell you that the children in the Potteries offer a grave problem; that, to quote the words of another, “there is an awful waste of young life going on in our cities,” I put simple facts upon paper.
Oh yes, there are the happy and the healthy children too - bright scholars, merry rogues - children who come from tidy homes, the offspring of honest and practical parents. I wave my hand to them when I drive through the dingy towns to some bazaar or meeting, and see them tumbling out of class. I can never forget how I envied them in long years past.
Yet, for the size of the population in the Potteries, the number of weakly children, the number of crippled children, the number of those in want, is staggering.
There is a point to be considered in connection with the condition of the children: almost all the women in the Potteries are at work on the pot banks.
Many thousands of women, married and single, are there employed. They go to work directly they leave school, and their health often breaks down from the heavy unskilled labour which they undertake before they arrive at the flower of womanhood.
They marry at ridiculously early ages. Till within a few days of the birth of a child they work, and they return a week or two afterwards to their occupation, leaving the infant at nurse. They are strikingly ignorant of the simple laws of health, thrift, or domestic management, and half-cooked meals, coarse jokes, blows, and frequent intemperance among their elders.
Yet it is not among the poorest that the worst evils are found. Take one house, for instance. It is jerry-built perhaps, and full of draughts; but it has a top story, a back yard, a kitchen and a parlour. You enter, say at three o'clock in the afternoon, and for a wonder find the mother at home. She remarks that she is busy, but it is almost impossible to gather what she is doing; you merely notice that her dress sleeves are rolled though in a comparative sense wages are high, many homes are in abject poverty.
The consequence is that the children struggle up somehow, and go to school; but what are children without a mother's care? The curious discrepancy between their education in school and their experience has brought many a curly head to puzzling.
Dry facts are drilled into little beings who cry out for food. The importance of work and virtue are impressed upon rickety, solemn-faced infants, who, the moment they are released from school, know only the slipshod existence of hasty, to the elbow, and that there is a large pail of dirty water on the only chair in the kitchen. Certainly there is not a sign of clean clothes about. There is, it is true, a horsehair couch in the corner, and upon this a child of three sits stolidly, sticky sweets in its hand, and its pinched face breaking into sores; a baby lies wailing on a heap of rags beside it. The parlour, on the other hand, has furniture heaped everywhere - a chair upon the table, another couch of sorts propped against the dresser; the room is colder than a cellar.
This is not a typically poor home, but it is a typically thriftless one. In the worst houses - the houses with no back ventilation and in the most appalling sanitary condition —the greatest neatness and cleanliness often prevail. But the excellent back yard of the house I mentioned is choked with refuse and rubbish; and upstairs, if you struggle so far, you will find beds unmade, not even aired, the windows unopened, and, worst of all, the slops unemptied.
There are many houses like this, where children should fear God and honour their parents: homes with a decent front and a bit of lace across the window to satisfy the passer-by; and within, the sickly, the cripple, the child who “never 'eard o' Jesus.”
We optimists hope that another decade's education will alter all this. Domestic economy is in the curriculum of all our best board schools; Bands of Hope promise to make drunkenness disgraceful. Yet we would begin afresh here and now. The desire to “go higher than a god, deeper than prayer, and open a new day,” is upon all workers, even if we chide ourselves for a critical spirit and acknowledge our debt to the past.
With my wish to help the children of the Potteries I went first to consult those working men who revive the heart; to those patient homes where faith and honest hard work have done more than education to preserve the simplicity of thought, the touch of fresh imagination, that make all true workers kin, and where reality of feeling and sincerity of sentiment never lack. Like the children, these plain people carry longest the hall-mark of their Creator. It was to them first, therefore, that I talked of the children and what we might do for them at once.
From talking came action, and the Hanchurch Home was built on the hilly slopes beyond Trentham Park; its view upon a bank of mysterious woods, and beyond to the west, where the sun sets. No factory smoke is here, no sight of chimneys, but everywhere the sweet green grass and hedgerows, the sounds of the beasts in the farmyard nearby, and the ringing laughter of the country children in the lane. The Home has received splendid support from all classes in the Potteries. It was built just as a holiday home: one fortnight for fifteen boys and another fortnight for fifteen girls - that was what I wanted. But the children came very sick and ailing, and we knew that we had to set them up for the life to which they must return.
It became, therefore, rather sadly, a Convalescent Home; yet to the little ones fairyland. It is a place full of queer tales of life and with children coming and going: children, strange compounds of utter innocence and premature knowledge, deeply interesting to the observer.
There is a great lack of shyness among the Pottery children - a certain directness of speech, and a quick instinct as to a friend. They love a story, a jewel, a flash of bright things, the stroking of a fur with head and legs, a little made-up anecdote as to the origin of the beast. Their quaint conceits would fill a book.
From listening to the conversation of their parents’ friends they have usually become acquainted with many public events which have been unheard of in the nurseries of the well-to-do, and they form their own opinions in quite a startling way upon men and things. Their knowledge of religion is culled chiefly from the visits of “Church ladies,” bringing beef tea if they feel ill; or the children have crept into some neighbouring chapel on mission nights, and there, between sucking bad sweets and picking holes in the chairs, they have managed to gather vague information concerning the Higher Powers. There is, however, one touching story of a child who learned to associate the Deity only with the prayers she had been taught in the Hanchurch Home and the kindness of the Sister in charge. She had been with us three weeks. The last night before she left to return to the slums of the Potteries, she was heard to gulp out between her sobs, as she crept into bed: “Good-bye, God l am going home tomorrow.&lrdquo;
There are many instances of appreciation of the happiness that children have had in the Home, and of their love for those who have taken care of them.
One of the children saved up two half-pennies. With the whole penny she went to the market. Round the stalls she walked, looking at each article intently. Then she spied a tiny cup with "Good Morning" on it. Her joy was unbounded when she heard it was to be had for one penny. She bought it, and was soon out of the grimy town, hastening three miles along the country road. She was taking her treasure where her heart was - back to the Home where the sun shone brightly, and where all the golden days in her life had been spent.
It was a present to the Sister in charge, and has been one of her cherished possessions ever since. The little child is dead now.
But not only in the Convalescent Home can one learn to know and to love the Pottery children. In all manufacturing centres there is a terrible feature - the cripples. The neglect of children in early childhood, and the unwholesome surroundings of the mother before child-birth, lead to a large number being born unfit or accidentally becoming so.
I think it was on a hot July day, some two or three years ago, that I grasped the extent of crippled in the Potteries - the needs of the cripples. I left London in the height of its brilliant season, where health and gaiety seemed a sine pa non in all gatherings, to find my bright garden, with its geraniums and long ranges of summer colouring by the lake side, full of broken lives. It was the cripples' treat. The paralysed, the blind, the lame, the twisted, and the maimed, lay for once in blissful content upon the lawn between the flower beds, displaying, in harness with their bodily distortion, remarkable and eager intelligence. Children were here half-tired of life, yet pining to enjoy it better; children neglected educationally, yet thirsting for help to learn.
It was my chance that day, and, with the help and encouragement of others, I took it. The Potteries and Newcastle Cripples’ Guild was formed, and now nearly three hundred cripples are under its supervision. Those who are ill and incompetent are comforted with all forms of invalid aid, and those who are comparatively able in mind and movement have been drawn into the industrial training which, by artificial flower making, metal work, printing, and basket making, bids fair to become important among the many Home Arts and Industries’ revivals in England.
The artificial flower making for girls is a pleasant occupation. They are brought into touch with gay colours and graceful forms, and under the tuition of a French teacher they are coming to rival the perfections of French flower making. These flowers have been sold at sales in London, in Manchester, and elsewhere, and have received universal admiration. It is unfortunate that in the wholesale trade the Guild flowers are largely undersold by German artificial flowers, which at absurdly low prices are poured into this country. The boys are chiefly employed in metal work and in printing. In Newcastle-under-Lyme there is a flourishing cripples’ basket industry. The metal work, thanks to our present teacher, is singularly artistic, and the printing does not lag behind; in fact the Guild is about to print, a book of original verse which will be published in the spring. The leading poets of the day have generously contributed to this book for the sake of the children's need.
To see our crippled children at their work makes the heart ache and yet rejoice: we rejoice at their marvellous skill in taking advantage of the chances we are able to offer them; we grieve for the over-willing spirit which sometimes finds the body too weak for work, however light.
Amongst our cripples, too, there are quaint stories. Alice, a little lame girl, eight years old, was asked why she had not been to the class lately. She replied: “Mother’s been very poorly, and you know I’ve to look after the house and get my father and brother’s snapping (food) ready.” A few weeks ago I called on one of our little fellows at home. He told me they were going to “flit” (move) shortly, “because father thinks a little change will be good for us.” I tried to find out where they were going, but without success, although I could see the lad knew. The next time the secretary called at the house a neighbour told him that they had been compelled to move into the Workhouse The following dialogue took place in the Guild office a day or two ago:
Dolly: “Why don't you have your bad leg off, Lily, like I did?”
Lily: “Why? Two legs are better than one, any day.”
Dolly: “But not two legs like yours. One isn't any good: you have to carry it about with you always; and, besides, look at the trouble! You have to black two boots, and I only black one.”
A little pet of mine, Julia, was in the North Staffordshire Infirmary, awaiting a very severe operation. She heard the doctor tell the nurse to prepare her for the theatre on the following day. She lay in bed thinking of the treat in store, and wondering what the play would be. She told me since, with a grim humour, that “next time she goes to the theatre, she hopes all of her’ll come out of it again.” She left three ribs in the last! Poor little blighted lives! The sense of fun still undiminished, and their pathetic gratitude silent, but unbounded. From the threads we now spin for these children will there be a woven web in the future? We believe and hope everything of the future, and we dare not stay our hand. Truly has it been written, “food and drink, roof and clothes, are the inalienable right of every child born into the light.” But more than that, in spite of adverse conditions, we would keep as long as we may, in the life of each child of the Potteries, the enchantment tangible of a “child-world.”
