No manufacturing district can escape the defects of its quality, but "The Potteries," from several special causes, is unutterably unlovely. 

The traveller passing from one end to the other would see no interval between the six towns of which it is composed, and Tunstall ends, as Longton began, the pilgrimage, in a view of the walls of manufactories lining the main streets and the side streets — the conical tops of smoking ovens peeping over and behind them — with frequent interludes of two-storeyed shops and rows of cottage houses. 

The tale is continued even to Golden-hill, beyond Tunstall, and, if you are again deluded by a name, to Silver-dale, which lies outside the strictly Potteries area, forges and collieries only take the place of potters' ovens and mill chimneys. And as for the classic suburbs of " Florence " and " Etruria " — vassals to Longton and Hanley — or even the more modern, if equally modest, claim of " Dresden," they are merely sly and deliberate examples of the irony of nomenclature. [footnote 1]

Starting from Longton, which rejoices in a Town Council, you run into the arms of Fenton Local Board, pass thence through the domain of the Corporation of Stoke - upon - Trent, are handed on to the County Borough of Hanley, and having thus reached the zenith of municipal glory, pass with a gentle descent through the incorporate town of Burslem, to end the journey within the realm of the Tunstall Local Board.

This seven-mile main road — which has two intervals, each of half-a-mile's length, of villa houses — cuts through the centre of the towns and townships in which the pottery workers work and live. The footpaths are fairly well paved, the roads are possibly all that the principles of Macadam and the ministrations of a steam-roller can make them ; but the clayey subsoil keeps the rain-water on the surface, and the mud of the roads is blackened blacker by the droppings from the jolting coal-carts which pass along the thoroughfares to the manufactories. 

These coal-carts are followed by poor and ragged little boys and girls, sent out by their mothers — and often accompanied by them — to pick up in baskets, buckets, or folded dress-fronts, the small coal which falls from the carts. Occasionally, a tolerably large lump is furtively loosened, and when the next jolt in its charity sets it free, there is a scramble for the prize.

The Potteries is in its interests and definite characteristics just as much one town as Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham. Its powers and action, however, are split up between six separate governing bodies, and the opportunity of natural amalgamation which was offered by the formation of Count Councils under the Local Government Act of 1888 was allowed to pass. 

Hanley did, indeed, take unto itself the dignity of a County Borough, by virtue of its superior population, but for any good that this act did to the rest of The Potteries, Hanley might just as well have set up to be a Republican State. But Hanley is in every respect, save population, acreage, and rateable value, precisely like Burslem, as Tunstall is like Longton, and as all are like each other.

The effect of thus having an industry (whose products are undoubtedly beautiful, but the production of which involves conditions that are undoubtedly not) straggling through the whole length of the district, is that the whole partakes of the character of its worst part, and there are no oases of a purely residential character. 

Birmingham has its Edgbaston, but The Potteries is all Soho. The residential quarters lie outside it — Wolstanton and Newcastle barely escape The Potteries (and all its "works") by the providence of nature in setting them on a hill — and the favoured spots for those who are not compelled to live where they work lie farther out, to Trentham, Stone, and Sandon to the south, and northwards even unto Alsager and Congleton in Cheshire. 

Possibly the greatest advantage incidental to living in The Potteries is the hope of being able to make enough money to live out of it.

TOPOGRAPHICAL

The topography of The Potteries is very varied, 

You may pass down a street to find that its exit is barred by a mound of ashes, higher than the houses, gathered from furnace fires long since extinct, or of shale, raised from a coal-pit. 

The coal-pit is probably disused, and a dome of bricks covers the shaft on a neighbouring mound. 

You may pass up a road, and discover through an interval in the rows of houses that the playground of the children at the "backs" verges on a yawning marl-hole, deeper many times than the houses. 

These pimples of pit-mounds and these pock-marks of marl-holes scar the features — otherwise none too fair — of The Potteries. 

Man's faith cannot move pit-mounds, so houses are built on the lower slopes, and the monarch of the range stands an eternal sentinel at the back doors. 

But the deep places of the earth may be made level, and the marl-hole which yields no more marl is filled up, in the course of time, by cart-loads of broken pots and shards, with an occasional variation of cinders, from the manufactories. 

Dirty women and dirty little children may be seen sifting the contents of these carts before the dust of their falling has cleared away. They wait there all day for the carts, but what they hope to find is a mystery, as manufacturers sometimes pay for the privilege of thus getting rid of the rubbish of their works, and at any rate give it away. What they have taken from the earth they thus give back to it. 

When a marl-hole is nearly filled up, it swims within the ken of the speculative builder, and a row of cottage houses soon rests upon its foundation of fifty yards of broken pottery. 

One wonders whether Macaulay's New Zealander will stay long on the ruins of London Bridge, to the neglect of the archaeological research which excavations in The Potteries might satisfy.

SHORD-RUCKS AND MARL-HOLES

Each town has thus its ups and downs of building levels. 

The exigency of the presence of a pit-mound or of a " shord-ruck " in the centre of a plot of ground may demand that the space left unoccupied shall be filled up with more broken pots, until that particular piece of ground has reached an independent and exclusive level of its own, without reference to its neighbour. Its neighbour may be a plot of virgin ground, hitherto undefiled, yet on a much lower level. Or, to vary the metaphor with the matter, a few cottages may rest on mother earth, yet no longer enjoy nature's equality, for around and above them stretch acres of broken shards, whose advancing tide must one day engulf them, so that a street may pass over their chimney-tops.

The Potteries is thus, and inevitably, mainly a place of muddy, squalid streets, insignificant public buildings, smoky atmosphere, pot - works, and higgledy-piggledy rows of small houses. 

Nine-tenths of its population are of the working-class, and its well-to-do live mostly in their little colonies outside. 

The character of a neighbourhood must inevitably have some effect on the dwellers within it, but, apart from a certain habit of thought which may be styled "independence" — the result of the self-contained character of the district and its trade — the inhabitants of The Potteries bear up well against the aesthetic disadvantages of their surroundings.

THE WORKER AT PLAY

Each town has its free library ; schools of art flourish amongst them, and remind one of the innately beautiful side of the trade in which they are engaged ; musical societies, which have successfully competed with some of the best choral combinations in the country, have many adherents and supporters ; and Hanley holds one of the best of the provincial musical festivals.

Like most Midland centres, it is devoted to "sport," but unfortunately takes it in a form which yields little. 

The attentions of the bookmaker are by no means scorned, with the inevitable moral effect ; but probably an even equal amount of harm, physical if not moral, is done by the religious worship which is paid at the shrine of the successful " forward," " half-back,"— or " goal-keeper," for choice. 

It will probably be regarded as unenlightened heresy to say so, but one certainly fails to see, in the absence of conviction from the enthusiasts, what "sport" can possibly lurk in the occupation of several thousands of men standing in a sodden field in the football and rainy season to watch twenty-two men enjoying an exhilarating game in which only twenty-two men can take part. 

One cannot look too austerely upon the few available amusements of the working-class, but it is unquestionable that many a flat-presser, working all week in a hot and dusty shop, has accelerated his death by watching the performances, on a Saturday or Monday afternoon, of the heroes of his local football team. 

It is, moreover, their exploits that furnish his main theme of conversation during the working week, and it is a sad reflection that the only retribution that overtakes the two groups of eleven men each, who are the cause of all this absorption of doubtful advantage, is that their portraits are published as special supplements to "football editions." 

This excessive passion for watching other people enjoy themselves (a sadly perverted form of "hero-worship") when contrasted with the intellectual and industrial aspirations of their fathers, who sought education all the more earnestly because of the difficulties in the way of acquiring it, and were all the more zealous trades unionists because the Law looked on trades unionism out of the corner of its eye, probably accounts in no small measure for the apathy towards trades unionism among the younger generation of the pottery workers of to-day. It also suggests the aphorism that possibly everything is worth struggling for, but nothing is worth the struggle. For the rest, a small section satisfies its sporting instincts by pigeon - flying ; and there are again a few others who, "struggling towards the light," find their aesthetic desires solaced by brass band "contests" — a term appropriately applied to these vigorous exhibitions.

THE HOMES OF THE POTTER

Coming now to the homes of the workers, generalisation is no longer possible. 

Nothing in modern social advancement is more remarkable than the way the "working-class" has developed within itself, and established different grades. 

The aristocracy is divided into the "smart set," and the intellectual or simple aristocrat ; the middle class varies more in its manners than its money : but there is a much greater range from the lowest to the highest among the millions of workers whose earnings average from 10s. to 50s. per week than amongst those whose incomes vary from £1000 to £10,000 per year. 

The masses, in fact, have classes of their own, and it is precisely because of the narrow margin which is allowed for gradation that the differences in their ranks are so well marked.

Amongst the working potters, the higher branches — throwers, turners, and firemen — earning £2, 10s., and in some cases considerably more per week, keep up a home which time and opportunity may allow to pass, without much noticeable change, into that of the manager, or even the small manufacturer. 

The hollow - ware presser, engaged on " good work," and earning £2 per week, can keep up a very decent average artisan's home ; 

the oven-man at thirty shillings a week, the printer at twenty - seven, and the flat-presser at eighteen to twenty - five, have perforce to be content with what they can get and their money will buy. 

But individual habits and family conditions finally settle the rank to which the worker belongs. A sober and thrifty flat-presser, with the aid of the earnings of his children able to work, keeps open a small and moderately comfortable home.

THE WIFE IN THE FACTORY

If, on the other hand, he has a large family of young children, is of careless and improvident habits, and has a wife who works as transferrer, or in the warehouse, at 15s. to 18s. a week, the home becomes neglected, and the whole family may sink to the lowest level of its class. 

Probably this matter of the wife working because none of the children are yet old enough to work, in order to increase the family earnings, just when her attentions are most urgently required at home, accounts a good deal for the fact that many families, in which the parents are in regular work, though not in receipt of high wages, live in houses whose condition, externally and internally, suggest that they are occupied by those in the most casual and precarious employment. 

The mere fact of a wife working at all is an incentive to domestic disorder and squalor. She lives an independent life, forms a circle of acquaintances of her own, and when work is done is much more inclined for the continuation of her independence elsewhere than at home. 

The husband comes to regard her as a pillar of the household of equal importance to himself, on the same grounds — if he is out of work, she will help to keep it going — and so he concedes to her as her right the same indulgences and enjoyment as he takes himself. 

She goes her way " after hours," and he goes his, and it is no unusual thing for wife and husband, each with their following, to meet in the same public-house and treat each other. 

The result of all this to the home is easily imagined. So potent a factor in the production of domestic disorder is this question of the working wife and mother, that it is not too much to say that, given a husband earning low wages in one of the badly - paid branches of the trade, and a wife going out to work, with a small family at home 

— nothing but the most exemplary virtues on the part of husband and wife can keep a decent home decently together. The conditions are such, however, as to make the commonest virtues difficult, and so the cause reacts on the consequence.

In a series of articles of remarkable interest dealing with the housing of the poorer working-class in The Potteries, published in the Staffordshire Sentinel during October 1900, Father O'Rourke, of Hanley, is quoted as saying :

" ' I have seen among my own people, the Irish, six sleeping in one bed — three at the foot and three at the head.' 

And while on the question of dirty homes, Father O'Rourke expressed himself very clearly on the subject of female labour in the factories. 

' I don't see how it is possible,' he said, 'for a woman to properly attend to her household duties and to go out to work all day. I know cases where more is lost by want of attention in the home than is actually earned by the woman herself on the pot-bank — that is, more is lost in cash, apart from any consideration of comfort which the hand of a woman can impart to all domestic arrangements.'"

DOMESTIC WAYS AND MEANS

There are probably a thousand houses in The Potteries in which disorder and dirt are the direct outcome and result of the wife and mother working all day, and bestowing half-an-hour's care on the house whilst " tidying herself up " for the recreation of the evening.

The bulk of the working population, however, lives fully up to the average of their class with their earnings. 

There are scores of rows of houses, built within the last ten or twenty years (but often, unfortunately, "jerry" built), with two living-rooms and a kitchen-scullery downstairs, and two or three bedrooms, whose occupants are respectable and cleanly, whose earnings range from 25s. to 35s. per week, and whose rents vary from 4s. to 5s. 6d. 

If there is a son or daughter of working age, earning 6s. to 10s. a week, and the wife is a domestic woman, the household goes on fairly easy with the combined earnings — though the working daughter is careful to assert her right to the satisfaction of an excusable vanity by hypothecating enough for her Sunday finery — often tawdry and flimsy enough, but, even so, showing pathetically the desire, and the limitations for its satisfaction, of a relief from the drab of the working week. 

But there is no margin for holidays, illness, accidentals, or spells of out-of-work — it is a constant struggle to keep the home together in ordinary comfort, and any slight variation in either earnings or spendings will disturb the balance. 

These conditions, with slight variations, according to family conditions, prevail in the case of about half the working population ; about one-eighth belongs to a higher class, where the heads of the family work in the better paid branches ; and the remaining three-eighths overlap into a class which lives in dirty, overcrowded houses, is dependent on the pawn-shops at frequent crises, is in regular but ill-paid work, or only fitfully employed, and embraces the merely unfortunate, and the idle and dissolute, all undergoing pretty much the same vicissitudes with varying degrees of merit. 

How they are housed will be seen by quotation from recent investigations.

A few days before Lord Rosebery, when addressing a meeting of the Christian Social Union, in the Holborn Town Hall, upon the impending elections in November 1900, for the new municipalities of London, advised that two questions should be put to intending councillors — 

(1) "Are you a builder, and, if so, what have you built ? " and 

(2) " Are you a property-owner, and, if so, what sort of property do you own ? " 

 

— the Staffordshire Sentinel commenced a series of articles dealing with the housing of the people in The Potteries, and advised that this inquiry, even more concise and direct than those suggested by Lord Rosebery, should be addressed to candidates for municipal honours in the County Borough of Hanley : 

" Are you the owner of any slums ? " 

The articles, which clearly showed that The Potteries abounded in the malodorous attributes of a great city, considerably astonished and shocked The Potteries people, whose one fault is probably that of being too self-satisfied to indulge in introspection. 

The Special Commissioner commenced his articles by saying :

" Much is said of London, its wickedness, its immorality, its over-crowded homes, its dens of vice. On a smaller scale, 
The Potteries possesses all these ; yet there are not wanting people who would shut their eyes to the truth, and go merrily on until the sore shall have so spread that nothing shall be able to stay its wide-reaching and evil effects."

POTTERY SLUMS

The process by which houses become dilapidated, and tenants become resigned to the dilapidations, thus saving the compunctions of the slum landlord, could not be better described than in the following passage : —

"In many cases, time was when these quarters were inhabited by a respectable working-class population, by women and men who took a pride in their homes and in their children too. 

But the time came, when, owing to the greed of a landlord, or the unscrupulousness of an agent, or from some other cause, one house, or perhaps a row of houses, was allowed to get out of repair. The tenant asked for improvements, but nothing was done. Then, when the artisan could patch up no longer, he left, and the next state of that dwelling was worse than the first. 

The new-comer was one who cared nothing for the pride of home. To live, to live anyhow, was the only consideration. . . . 

The same thing happened, perhaps, two doors away, and respectable people living between felt that they were sinking with the neighbourhood. They must either move, or find the level of their neighbours. So they moved, and others, very different, filled their places, and thus the quarter degenerated, and the class of inhabitants sank lower and lower, until no self-respecting person could dwell in the vicinity. 

As time went on, more people drifted that way. 

There were rooms, or part of rooms, to be had cheaply here. With the majority there was no care for decency, and insanitary lodgings did not frighten them. They 'dossed' here at night; during the day no one could find them. 

Meanwhile the landlord went on receiving the rent, which he had increased, as he, or his agent, understood that lodgers were taken in. He was not worried to put the place in repair by the tenant now. If they did not like it they could ' clear out ' ; there were plenty of the same class waiting to come in."

A snapshot of the interior of these habitations is here developed :

" A room 11 feet square. 

In it there are two bedsteads, standing close together. A mattress rests on both. There is a little boy in the room, and, when questioned, he tells you that his father and mother and himself and seven brothers and sisters — ten in all — pass the night in the room. 

Ask him how so many manage to sleep in so small a space, and he explains that they lie lengthwise and crosswise, adding, while a tear slowly finds its way down his blackened face, ' I don't sleep much, but I 'ave to stop quiet.' 

The only covering by night is the clothes these poor wretches wear by day. The stench is horrible ; the mattresses are sodden. 

There is no means of ventilation except through the broken pane of glass in the window, boasting at night the cover of a paper bag. The windows do not open ; they have not opened for years. If you attempted to move them, they would fall out into the roadway. What a sight for the doubting Thomas [a Town Councillor] breathing sweet air outside ! "

"ROOM TO LET"

The moral of Lord Rosebery's warning that no Londoner should vote for those who had any interests of their own to serve could not be better enforced than by the following passage : —

" It is a hard job to fight overcrowding in The Potteries, I am told. There are so many vested interests that you can hardly advance an inch without treading on somebody's toes. 

' Vote for workmen's dwellings to be erected ! No member of the Council will vote for the erection of new property in Hanley if it is ever likely to come into competition with their own.' 

Thus said a well-known member of our civic body."

Then follow detailed descriptions of the interiors of these dwellings — details of thirteen persons, amongst them adults of both sexes, sleeping in two rooms no larger than cupboards ; of families already overcrowded in two rooms taking in another family to lodge. In rickety tenements, with the walls covered by filth, and an absence of sanitary arrangements as completely primeval as could be wished, the Commissioner 

" asked for the name of the landlord, but failed to get it. The rents, I was told, were collected by an agent, and that agent was Mr --- , one of the best-known men in the Borough."

In some of these hovels, lodgers are admitted on payment of 4d. per night. The accommodation offered by the " bedrooms " having, after all, a final limit, " beds are made up " downstairs on the floor — a euphemism which merely means that the space is let. It is true that the clientele is mainly of the loafing class ;

" But there is also another class, and a pretty numerous class, too, who do not hesitate to patronise 'cottage lodging-houses.' Their work is carrying and drawing ware. For a day's work they receive 2s. 9d.; but it is casual labour. 
When they have been paid at night they have no further claim upon the manufacturer. To-morrow may bring nothing to their coffers, nor the next day ; so they ' doss ' for 4d. per night on floor, bench, or table."

The sanitary inspectors have all their work cut out, for

" Longton has always some outbreak of infectious disease which must be attended to, and throws a large amount of extra work upon the department. But even in the brief space that is left for house-to-house inspection, they must take care how they tread, for the slums of Longton are the choice investments of many of its most prominent citizens."

THE CIVIC CONSCIENCE

Who owns these things, and takes money for them ? 

The newspaper says again : 

" As to the landlords, it is painful to have it pointed out that so much of the worst property in our towns is owned by leading townspeople, some of them bearing a name for philanthropy and religion." 

The cynic would have expected it. Some of the worst property in Hanley, where the tenants were ruefully contemplating the necessity of "flitting" because the building was unsafe, where "the rain comes in, and there is not a whole pane of glass in the window" of the bedroom, was the property of — The Hanley County Borough. This body had " adopted " the vital clauses of the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890.

Such are the revelations made by the courageous conduct of a newspaper, fulfilling its highest function, though fluttering complacent local dove-cotes. 

It tells, of course, the worst side of the tale, but black shades off into grey, and only higher up does white prevail. 

The Potteries is not singular in being a provincial district possessing slums, nor are all its landlords of the type of Mr Bernard Shaw's Sartorius ; nor are the poorer tenants of the poorer houses all dirty and vicious, and addicted to the habit of breaking the window-panes in the early and more frivolous stages of Saturday night dissensions, and of taking down the back-doors and uprooting the staircases in an emergency for fuel. 

But it is precisely because of these negations, and differences, and qualifications, twisting themselves through the general mass of facts, that the complications of the social problem are to be seen ; and the problem is not to be solved by the cheery boast of a Pottery Mayor, speaking of the newspaper revelations upon an occasion when most mundane affairs take on a couleur de rose, that 

" He did not know of any slums in The Potteries, and if there were any he did not want to know where they were. There were houses in Florence fit for a prince to live in " 

— for a prince of " Florence," probably, though hardly of Firenze. 

In proportion as the civic conscience thus sleeps soundly after dinner, the voice of the reformer must speak above conversational pitch.

LOOKING FURTHER AFIELD

The whole social problem is honeycombed with contradictions and difficulties, and the mention of one complication in the social life of The Potteries microcosm — that of female labour, to the neglect of the home, leading to the contemplation of a question which summons up a hundred other questions that are root-fibres in the general social growth — only shows with what difficulties the path of the reformer is beset.

The politician has had his day with representative government, religious liberty, freedom of the Press, and the removal of general and obvious political disadvantages ; and his work, though not completed, now merges into that of the social reformer. 

The very recrudescence of " Imperialism," rightly understood and properly directed, involves a recognition of the brotherhood of Englishmen as a stage in the far-off millennium of the brotherhood of man ; and is the expression of the feeling that if England is to stand well either with or against the world, she must develop and increase the well - being of those who live within her borders, who are and who make England. 

And in this sense the action of the Legislature, whether in spreading education, cleansing slums, or in protecting industrial workers, is as truly Imperialistic as any Royal declaration read from the steps of the Exchange.

Otherwise, Imperialism merely means the growth of a prize-apple with a rotten core. But to lament, as a recent writer has done, [footnote 2] that an advanced political party with an historic name should put its hand to other work with so much of its old work done, is to lament that the crop should be gathered after the seed has been sown. 

That a great work has had to be done in clearing the barnacles from the hull of the ship of the Commonwealth is not to say that alterations are not required above the water-line. 

And because political disabilities, appealing to the liberal-logical mind — going halfway down to first principles — as crying for removal, have been largely removed, we cannot shut out the claims of a more subtle perception, in which expediency and a wider sense of human responsibility are blended. 

To give all men an equal chance in life so far as rests with the political rules of the game is not to say that in life's handicap some of the shorter - winded shall not be given a better sporting chance. 

Life is too greatly tangled for the ancient associations of a name — Liberal or Conservative — to fetter the action of those who come into the world seeing much work done, but much yet to do. If, for instance, we are frightened by the cry of the sacredness of the individualism of the adult, and are reminded that our effete grandmotherly care should be limited to the young and the feminine, we may for the moment forget " political principles " in the recollection that over the adult was thrown the protecting mantle of the State in the reign of a petulantly parental monarch who courted a revolution rather than court the will of his people ; and if William the Fourth signed an Act of Parliament which decreed that his meanest subject should not be paid his wages in pig's liver — however much he might appreciate that delicacy — but in the coin of his realm, we may take comfort in the fact that the "independence" of the individualistic adult was settled so long ago.

"— YE HAVE DONE IT UNTO ME"

Whether the thread is gradually disentangled by a public will acting through a Government as its instrument, or by capricious philanthropic effort, is immaterial. What is material is that, if need be, a Government should serve the purposes of man, and not man serve the purposes of a Government fancifully limited to certain functions because the outlook of a political party, narrowed to its age, did not contemplate a more distant horizon ; for the aims and limits of a Government made by man are as artificial as the Government itself, and a Government to answer man's needs should be as expansive as man's conception of his own needs or of his duties to others.

It must be inevitable, in any state of society, and under any form of government, that when the highways of obvious political principle have been traversed, the mazes of social life and its disorder shall be explored ; and in England at least one may hope that the national spirit of compromise, — which is progressing to a Social Democracy whilst its Monarchy takes deeper root [footnote 3] — will round off the corners of logical difficulty when they obtrude too sharply ; for the social problem no more than the human character can be mapped out with the rectangular regularity of a chessboard.

Not the least of the tasks before the social reformer is that of the decent and cleanly housing, even of the unclean poor —

" When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each sex, like swine."

The work can only be finally accomplished by the permeation of education through the general mass, but its greatest immediate hope lies in the fact that it has come to be a part of the creed of the pessimist, and is no less a refuge for his higher instincts than it is the duty of the professed Christian.

THE END