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| A Trip Out for the Girls |
| Robert Sheracy, an early investigative journalist, came to Leeds in 1896 to witness, and report on, the plight of the cloth workers in the city. |
| In the one downstairs room of a house in one of the lowest neighbourhoods in Leeds, I found an old slipper-maker at his tea. Although it was then past ten at night, his five little children were up and with him. As his wife explained: `They've got to be there, when there's something to eat going. Father chucks them a bit of bread now and again, and so they likes to be there'. |
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It was a crowded scene, and one wondered how a man could live and work in such a room. Yet here this man had worked for thirty years, and never less than fourteen hours a day. "Many a week", he said, "I have to work on Sundays also". Most of Saturday is wasted, as on Saturdays he has to carry the week's work to the shop, to have it inspected and paid for. He declared that his life was a miserable one, and that the trade had never been worse. "Work my very best, I can't earn 4d. an hour". It was a good week with him when he earned 18s, and out of this he had to pay 2s 8d. for rent, and 9d a week for findings. These findings would consist of paste (1.5d), hemp (6d), sandpaper, ink and white wax (1.5d). |
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He was a man naturally of a jovial temperament, which only made his misery show more lamentably. He showed me a neat pair of patent leather slippers which he had just finished. "There's craft in that shoe; there's artisanship, there's work. We put 14d work of work in for 9d, to see if we can't win the trade back". And he added that he had spent two hours thirty minutes in making these slippers. He would receive 9d for this work. The slippers would be sold at retail for 3s. |
| He laughed when I asked him what pleasure he enjoyed in life. "There's no such thing as pleasure for me. I go from my bed to my seat, and from my seat to my bed, though now and again I may get, say, an hour over my paper". He laughed again when I asked him if he was able to save anything. "Not a blessed halfpenny", he said; and his wife added that she could never make out how they managed to get along on his wages. |
| She did the baking, and home baking was a comfortable thing. Some weeks she might get about 3d worth of meat for the family dinner, but that was not often. Bread and tea was what they mainly lived on, and plenty of "working man's beef - "that is to say onions". "There's grand stuff in onions", said this cheerful yet most unhappy man, who, in conclusion, told me that he meant to go on working his hardest until he could work no more, and that then, he supposed, they would find room for him in the workhouse . . . |
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| I visited the club of the Jewish Tailors' Union, in Regent Street, in the notorious Leylands, a club which occupies a room which was once a Baptist chapel. I e |