Lost archive that shows pitiful poverty of the real Artful Dodgers: Touching portraits of London's Victorian street children taken by photographer Horace Warner, who took up their plight.
Dead End Street: The Spitalfields Nippers growing up in one the most deprived and dangerous areas of London.
Their boots barely hang together. Their clothes are ragged hand-me-downs. And for most a hot bath is a distant memory. But in the eyes of these children there is a self-possession and a quiet confidence that belies the appalling circumstances in which they grew up.
Barefoot: Nine-year-old Charlie Long lived in a workers' eating-house run by his parents.
These London youngsters lived amid deprivation, violence and squalor that defies imagination today. At the beginning of the last century, thousands existed in abject poverty on streets that are now among the most fashionable and expensive in the capital.
Photographer Horace Warner took these portraits to highlight the conditions. He was the Sunday School Superintendent of the Bedford Institute, one of nine Quaker missions in the East End fighting alcoholism and prostitution.
They were called the Spitalfields Nippers, scavenging for rotten fruit in the bins behind the market in East London, dressing in rags that might be shared between ten siblings, and lucky to have a pair of boots in even the coldest weather.
Adelaide Springett was so ashamed of her tattered boots, she took them off for this 1901 photograph
Photographer Horace Warner took these portraits to highlight the conditions. He was the Sunday School Superintendent of the Bedford Institute, one of nine Quaker missions in the East End fighting alcoholism and prostitution.
At first, all he wanted to do was record the children’s lives, but in 1913 around two dozen of the photographs were used by Quaker activists to raise funds for poor relief. The rest of Warner’s archive was preserved by his family after his death in 1937, and has remained unseen in public until now.
His heart-breaking pictures evoke the appalling poverty like no other photos of the time. But Warner was not the only one who attempted to tell the world about the Spitalfields Nippers.
Photo on the right: Puss 'n' boots:
Jeremiah Donovan, six, was nicknamed Dick Whittington because of his pet cat. But the newspaper vendor's son did not find London's streets paved with gold.
The Daily Mail’s brilliant campaigning journalist Fred McKenzie filed a shocking report in 1901, a description of just one road around the district’s famous Christ Church, an architectural gem designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor.
Running west from the church, alongside the market hall, was Dorset Street. Now demolished, today it is remembered as the scene of Jack the Ripper’s fifth and last killing — but violent death was commonplace on the road notorious as ‘the worst street in London’.
Every house had seen a murder. At one tenement, there had been a murder in every room.
‘Policemen go down Dorset St in pairs,’ wrote McKenzie. ‘Hunger walks in its alleyways, and the criminals of tomorrow are being bred there today. Boy thieves are trained as systematically as they were in the days of Oliver Twist.
‘Children’s first lessons are in oaths and crimes. They learn ill as they sip at their mothers’ gin, and you can see them aged six and eight, gambling in the gutterways.’
Not all were petty villains, though. If they had younger brothers and sisters, it fell to the elder children to mind the baby, as well as boiling the laundry in metal cans and hanging the rags out to dry.
Many nights, especially in the summer, the children slept on the streets. If they had parents, and their parents had money, they might doss down on the bare floorboards of a lodging-house room, which could be rented for a shilling a night: 12 people, adults and children, each with a penny apiece, had just enough money for one night’s shelter.
Washday: Two children, their toes poking out of their boots, tend a fire in a battered tin brazier to heat buckets and bowls of water in which to scrub clothes. The clean garments would be hung on lines strung across the street
One way for children to earn a few coins was to sell firewood. They would go to factories and shops, begging for packing-cases, pallets and tea-chests. Chopped into sticks, wood could be sold on the street in bundles for a ha’penny.
Today, a one-bedroom flat off the main Commercial Road in Spitalfields will fetch £450,000; two-bedroom apartments go for up to £750,000. Compare that to the earnings in 1901 of a cook in an East End restaurant — working from 7am to 10.30pm Monday to Saturday for £1 a week.
Respectable people did not dare go near these streets. If a horse-drawn cab cut through Spitalfields, dozens of urchins would surround it, baying for pennies.
And if on a Saturday night a gentleman with too much drink inside him should stray into the ‘desperate backstreets’, he would be set upon by ‘gutter-wolves’, the savage muggers who would kill for a pocketful of change. One method was to seize a victim and bend him backwards till his spine snapped.
A familiar face in these hard streets, Horace Warner eventually earned the trust of the people and persuaded the children to sit for his astonishing portraits.
Adapted from Spitalfields Nippers by Horace Warner, published by Spitalfields Life Books, £20.
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