'Rogues and Vagabonds'

Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815-1985

Lionel Rose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138950900
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317361367
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this lively social history, first published in 1988, Lionel Rose explores in detail the plight of the street poor between 1815 and 1985. He describes the Victorian 'Rogues and Vagabonds' who made elicit peddling, begging frauds and other petty crime their profession. He considers the relevant legislation and systems for coping with the street poor, from the 1824 Vagrancy Act and accompanying improvements in policing, through the casual ward systems of the workhouses and the role of common lodging houses, to the development of Social Services in the 1940s and local authority provision of accommodation. This title will be of interest to students of history, criminology and sociology.

1 Migrants, itinerants and the Vagrancy Law 1815–20

Imagine that some stratospheric time machine has whisked you back to hover over the British Isles in the period just after the Napoleonic Wars. From your vantage point the highways and byways resemble the tracery of blood vessels, and the human traffic is the life blood flowing to the vital organs. For the body economic of Britain those vital organs are the growing town of the early industrial revolution, and time-lapse photography (to stretch our technological metaphor a little further) reveals, in the decades after 1815, a strong current from the Northern and Midland counties towards those towns. In the coal-less South the movement is much more sluggish, but London exerts a powerful regional pull as the ‘great Wen’. From the Scottish Highlands, where the crofter clearances are taking their toll, there is a flow towards the industrialising Lowlands and into England, as well as a transfusion to the overseas colonies. From overcowded and impoverished Ireland periodic potato blights, notably the disaster of 1821–2,¹ begin sending a continuous stream of emigrants (assisted by the development of cheap steam-packet services from 1818²), who concentrate in Lancashire and the South-west corner of Scotland, but progressively spread out to other urban centres, where they form distinct colonies in the dark and dangerous slum ‘rookeries’, like the notorious St Giles district of London.

The time-lapse sequence will also reveal blurry streaks, caused by more transitory passages: seasonal migrations of harvesters, including a high proportion of Irish who cross over in the late summer, travel extensively for work, and return home in the autumn;³ navvies pursuing construction projects, such as housing, canal and, later, railway undertakings; unemployed ‘tramping artisans’, like shoemakers and ironfounders, searching about for work in an era long before employment exchanges and the telephone; and paupers and convicted vagrants being deported to their home parishes under the Settlement and Removal Laws. Pedlars, and migratory beggars and thieves add to this mélange of transients, and the whole flow-rhythm is affected by trade cycles and military and naval operations. The city of Bath, lying on the route of the Irish inflow from South Wales and Bristol towards London, witnessed the whole parade of itinerants. As S.S. Duncan, a Bath resident, observed in 1834:

Failures of manufacturers, destruction of machinery, combinations &c, send many hundreds on the tramp. Soldiers’ wives and children are scrambling in all directions after regiments ordered to new stations. Sailors ramble from port to port to find captains for certificates of service, or to find new or old ships, or to pass public examinations at public boards for pensions or prize money &c. Wives are hunting for runaway husbands (rarely the reverse); children for runaway parents. Agricultural labourers are occasional wanderers for employment.

And, he believes, a general mood of restlessness, generated by the economic and political ferment of that time, ‘makes many leave the home of their youth with diminished anxiety … and easily led away to vice and shame.’⁴

The economic depression between 1815 and 1820 provoked widespread disorder, exacerbated by the new Corn Laws which protected the interests of the preponderantly land-owning Parliamentarians by barring foreign corn imports and keeping bread artificially expensive. Demonstrations, Luddism and calls for a widening of the franchise and the overthrow of the land-owning monopoly of power became the Radical response. Vagrancy increased as Napoleonic War veterans, some disabled, returned home demobilised and jobless; unemployment and astronomic bread prices sent many on the tramp to beg and steal to survive.⁵ The ruling class blinkered themselves to the economic causes of vagrancy, preferring instead to see it as symptoms of the lower classes’ own moral delinquency. In 1828 a Surrey magistrate, Randle Jackson, insisted dogmatically that there was no connection between unemployment and vagrancy, as vagrants were a sub-criminal class, a fixed element that persisted irrespectively of trade conditions.⁶ He was, perhaps, faintly justified to the extent that workshy ‘sturdy beggars’ had been execrated since Tudor times – ‘thieves and caterpillars in the commonwealth’ Ralph Holinshed called them in 1586⁷ – as intimidators of country folk in isolated hamlets, and a cheating menace in the towns. Henry Fielding, the famous novelist and London magistrate, wrote feelingly in 1753 of their ubiquity in ill-policed Westminster:

… there is not a street in that liberty which doth not swarm all day with Beggars and all night with Thieves. Stop your coach at what shop you will, however expeditious is the Tradesman to attend you, a Beggar is commonly beforehand with him; and if you should not directly face his Door, the Tradesman must often turn his head while you are talking to him, or the same Beggar or some other Thief at hand will pay a visit to his shop!⁸

In 1806 the later eminent London magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, surmised that among England’s 10,000,000 people there were some 70,000 tramps, beggars, gypsies and the like, together with 10,000 wandering performers and dubious pedlars, and 10,000 lottery ticket touts, whom he termed ‘lottery vagrants’⁹. The landowners conveniently blamed the existing Poor Law for sapping the labouring classes’ moral fibre and creating a nation of shiftless scroungers. The Speenhamland system of outdoor relief and the subsidy of low wages out of the rates (which the landowners had to pay) was branded as the chief canker,¹⁰ but the Tories who ruled till 1830 did not dare dismantle it, as they were loathed for their harsh repression of radical unrest up to 1820, and it was their Corn Law which made the continuation of Speenhamland a necessary buffer against possible revolution. Between 1820 and 1825 trade conditions improved in the towns (though farm labourers remained economically depressed) and, coincidentally, the Tory régime took on a more liberal tone, typified in the replacement of the repressive Lord Sidmouth by the reforming Robert Peel as Home Secretary in 1822. Though political agitation had died down, Peel was confronted with a mounting crime wave, which had exercised Parliament for at least a decade. Criminal commitments quadrupled between 1806 and 1826, though the population had grown by less than half;¹¹ his answer was to improve the system of policing, and to make the law more respected. In regard to the latter he accelerated the reform of the archaic criminal code, whose very savagery on paper – about 200 offences, including many nonviolent crimes against property, were technically liable to the death penalty – had made it unenforceable in the courts. Updating the penalties would improve their enforceability, and Peel effected numerous reforms between 1823 and 1827, to be complemented by his creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.¹²

The 1824 Vagrancy Act (preceded by the temporary 1822 Act) belongs in this context of rationalisation of the criminal law, for it was to make a clean sweep of the 27 pre-existing Vagrancy Acts, extending as far back as Edward III’s reign. It must also be viewed in the context of Parliament’s concern about the mounting costs of public relief to the destitute, for ratepayers were groaning not only under the burden of the Poor Law, but also the rapid increase in the rate of ‘passing’ (that is, transporting) paupers and convicted vagrants back to their places of origin. Here, I shall outline the structure of anti-vagrancy law and the passing system just prior to the 1822 Act.¹³ The law defined three grades of offender, in ascending order of seriousness, as the ‘Idle and Disorderly’, ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’ and ‘Incorrigible Rogues’. The first included those who neglected to provide for their families, wilful idlers and those who begged within their parishes of settlement. The second included those who wandered outside their parishes to beg (professional itinerant beggars), men who deserted their families so that they had to fall back on parish poor relief, varieties of travelling entertainers and fortune tellers, and ‘reputed thieves’ and ‘suspect persons’ frequenting public places. The last refers to suspicious characters who loitered about and were deemed to be up to no good, though nothing specific could be proved against them. ‘Incorrigible rogues’ were recidivists previously convicted as ‘rogues and vagabonds’.

Idle and disorderly offenders could be jailed by magistrates for up to a month; rogues and vagabonds were liable to be whipped, jailed for up to six months and then ordered to be passed to their home territory; likewise, incorrigible rogues were floggable and liable to up to two years’ jail, with the possibility of impressment in the armed forces and even transportation. (The whipping of female vagrants had been abolished in 1792.¹⁴) To encourage the mopping up of this pestiferous breed, anyone who effected the arrest of a vagrant was entitled to a ten shilling reward from the rates.

As we shall see in a later chapter, lodging houses were notorious vagrant haunts, and the law empowered Justices to institute ‘privy searches’, or swoops against them, four times a year to haul in concealed offenders.

There were in fact two parallel but distinct systems of passing. The first came under the Poor Law régime, and originated from 1662; it empowered justices to order the removal of paupers – that is, those dependent on parish poor relief – back to their parishes of settlement. The complaining parish had to pay the cost of the entire journey back – which could be the length of England – and a deputed parish official had to escort the pauper all the way. An anomaly of the English removal laws was that they only applied to paupers who had a parish of settlement in England. Scots and Irish who had acquired no settlement in an English parish (for example, by length of residence, or renting of a substantial property) could not be removed, and might remain a charge on the ‘foreign’ parish’s poor rate!

The other passing system came under the vagrancy law rubric, as noted above. Prior to 1814, the offender must have served at least seven days in jail or (if a male) received a whipping before a pass order was made. The Justice specified the most direct and convenient route back to the offender’s home territory. Since 1744, convicted Irish and Scots vagrants could be returned home, too. Scotsmen were conveyed to the border and dropped there. Irish were conveyed to specified western ports – Bristol and Liverpool were the main ones – and the financial burden fell on those ports to ship the vagrants over to any point on the Irish coast. Unlike the ‘Settlement Law’ removals, each parish en route had to pay its share of the cost of conveying vagrants through its territory. Each parish constable escorting the vagrants would hand them over at the boundary to a neighbouring parish officer.¹⁵ In practice, magistrates would arrange for one escort all the way to the county boundary before the transfer, and the cost would come out of the county rate. Hence was born the ‘pass-master’, a private contractor to whom the conveyance of vagrants was farmed out. It was therefore far more advantageous to any single parish to get a ‘foreigner’ convicted and passed as a beggar than as a pauper it had first relieved; not only would it have to pay only a fraction of the removal cost, but it could get rid of any Scots and Irish destitutes, too.

From the late eighteenth century it was evident that the vagrancy law passing system was being widely abused; scroungers were using it to get a free ride back home, or to any parish they claimed was their parish of settlement, and the costs of passing began to spiral.

An early inquiry into the scale and causes of London mendicancy had been mounted by the philanthropic Society for Bettering the Conditions of the Poor in 1803, but its findings and recommendations were only to be examined again in detail by a Select Committee on Mendicity in London appointed at the instigation of George Rose MP in 1815.¹⁶ This Parliamentary interest in beggary was prompted by the only too visible signs of it during the post-Napoleonic Wars period, with the economic distress and high bread prices, and the costs to London parishes of giving some kind of ‘casual’ relief to the destitute arrivals who had no settlement there. It was doubtless also associated with the current concern about the scale of juvenile delinquency: the 1803 enquiry reckoned that two thirds of London beggars were children, and the 1815 Select Committee’s Report alluded to the ‘urgency of the evil’ of begging by children, who were ‘in the course of becoming the very worst of criminals’. Other evidence also highlighted the ‘Irish dimension’ in beggary and juvenile delinquency. (The 1803 investigation indicated that a third of all London beggars were Irish.) Observers were apt to contrast the shiftless Irish with the ‘industrious’ London Scots who, it seems, rarely appeared before the courts as beggars. Conspicuous Irish colonies had established themselves in various ‘rookeries’ around London, chiefly in St Giles, St Marylebone and St Andrew’s parish Holborn. Poverty, improvidence, drunkenness, brawling, physical incapacities, neglect of their children, and a high level of unemployment were all ascribed to them by contemporary observers. But for all their ignorance and squalor they certainly seemed to have kissed the Blarney Stone when it came to telling tales of woe to philanthropic visitors. Montagu Burgoyne, who was associated with a charity for assisting destitute Irish in London, told the Committee:

… you can never believe one word they say; they have so much ingenuity and so much imagination that they will make a story which on inquiry turns out to be without foundation; their tale of distress has touched the humanity of several persons, and they have sent for these people, and given sums of money to some of them, frequently to those who deserve it the least.

Another witness, Edward Wakefield, said of his visit to the St Giles Irish, ‘I suppose I was amongst the greatest thieves in London’.

It would be desirable here to explain something of the background to the Irish, to explain their alleged predilection for charitable relief. Unlike England, Ireland had no parish poor law system until 1838. Traditionally, destitute Irish had obtained relief locally through church charity, or by outright begging; this was socially acceptable and a necessity in Ireland itself.¹⁷ Overcrowding on the land and harvest failures drove legions into part-year or full-time begging and charity-seeking. Of Ireland’s eight million people in 1838 it was alleged that two to three million begged or were totally destitute for part of the year at least.¹⁸ Contemporary English observers were struck by the fecklessness and helplessness of the low-class Irish, and their influx into Britain was commonly viewed ‘as an example of a less civilised population spreading themselves as a kind of substratum beneath a more civilized community’.¹⁹

The stereotype of the shiftless and scrounging Irishman was firmly fixed, but how true was it? English and Scottish textile manufacturers and mine-owners found Irish workers more adaptable and venturesome. They were readier to move around to seek work than the English, and much of the apparent ’vagrancy’ was in fact the seasonal movement of Irish harvesters and the migration of Irish navvies to new construction projects. They filled an important gap in the contemporary need for a mobile, footloose labour force.²⁰ Many of the allegations that the Irish threw themselves disproportionately on local poor relief were based on prejudice, not fact, and some local analyses have shown that the numbers of Irish-born on poor relief only matched their proportion of the local population.²¹

Beggary was a side-effect of the arrival each year of thousands of Irish seasonal workers, viewed by the English as little better than animals: they poured in at rock-bottom fares packed as ‘living ballast’ in empty coal vessels returning from Ireland, ‘huddled together like pigs and communicating disease and vermin on their passage’. The menfolk came first, followed separately by their wives and children, who begged their way to the districts they believed their menfolk had found work – even when reunited they customarily begged in the surrounding towns and villages while the men worked in the fields.²²

References to a significant Irish presence among charity recipients and in the casual wards of the workhouses will crop up in the narrative; the Irish did have many vices, but we must take a balanced view and remember that as newcomers here they were bound to be bottom of the heap and among the neediest.

The 1815–16 Select Committee criticised the vagrancy laws because they technically imposed the same penalties on all kinds of offender, the genuinely distressed and the crafty scrounger alike.

In practice, however, the enforcement of the law varied widely; some magistrates were tough, others lenient. Many magis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Migrants, itinerants and the Vagrancy Law 1815–20
• 2 Pass abuses and the Vagrancy Act of 1824
• 3 Mendicity Societies, and poor law casual relief to the 1840s
• 4 A gallery of beggars (I) sick lurkers, praters and screevers
• 5 A gallery of beggars (II) children
• 6 Crypto-beggars: pedlars, crossing-sweepers and buskers
• 7 ‘Dens of infamy’: thieves’ kitchens and tramps’ lodging houses
• 8 Model lodging houses, the Sally Ann and Rowton’s
• 9 Lodging house society
• 10 An outline of the casual ward system, 1842–1914
• 11 ‘The vicious shilling’: indiscriminate charity and its enemies, from 1860
• 12 The freedom to itch, and the itch to be free
• 13 A statistical capsule: tramp levels, trade and seasonal cycles
• 14 Men’s tramp ward underlife to 1939
• 15 The ‘perambulatory dustbin’: homeless women and their shelter to 1939
• 16 Child vagrancy to 1939
• 17 Vagrancy Act enforcement to 1914
• 18 The First World War and the inter-war Depression
• 19 Casual ward developments 1918–45
• 20 Some vagrant types and conditions between the wars
• 21 Begging and charity between the wars
• 22 Vagrants, crime and the Vagrancy Act 1935
• 23 Britain 1945–70: the roofless, the rootless and the Welfare State
• 24 Homelessness and the official response 1970–85
• 25 From lodging house to bed and breakfast hotel: the story to date
• 26 ‘Horizontal meffers’ and other contemporary vagrant types
• 27 ‘Lazy lewd loiterers’: the Vagrancy Act to date and the inglorious history of ‘Sus’
• ‘Trampoloquia’: a select glossary of tramp cant
• Select bibliography and abbreviations
• Notes and references
• Index