HOMELESS WOMEN IN LONDON

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 41, 12 November 1936, Page 3

HOMELESS WOMEN IN LONDON

Experience of the Under-

world

Glimpses of “London’s underworld” were given by Mrs. Cecil Chesterton, founder of the Cecil Houses for Homeless Women in London, in a talk at Manchester recently.

Nine years ago, said Mrs Chesterton, there was no choice for a homeless woman between a dosshouse and cheap hotel accommodation, with the exception of a few lodging-houses run for profit, where the beds were small and often dirty and washing facilities negligible. To test conditions for herself she determined, to spend a fortnight without any money except that which she could earn by casual jobs. The first night she had to walk eight miles before she could, find shelter. This was at a Salvation Army lodging for destitute women—the only lodging-house where she was provided with hot water for washing. Afterwards she found the adjutant had made an entry against her assumed name: “Don’t believe her story,” but added that in the adjutant’s opinion she had not been in prison and did not drink 1

Among the jobs the speaker obtained were cleaning steps, washing up in Soho .restaurants, charring and selling matches. A discovery she made was that it costs money to be clean, and that if it was a choice between buying a meal and having a wash she bought a meal. Often after hours of walking she felt and looked dazed. It was a look many destitute women had, a look sometimes mistaken for drunkenness or drug-taking.

When the Cecil Houses were established it was found that, contrary to the expectations of the L.C.C., women lodgers did not steal the sheets or tear up the blankets, and that they lived together without fighting and quarrelling. All Cecil Houses were provided with baths, and although at first some of the older women did not care to have baths it was presently found that in a house of fifty women there was an average of twenty baths each night and another twenty each morning. The Cecil Houses, said the speaker, were self-supporting, and she believed all social service was best run on that principle.