TAKING THE CENSUS.

Evening Star, Issue 8529, 30 May 1891, Page 2 (Supplement)

TAKING THE CENSUS.

IN THE LONDON SLUMS. [FbOM OUB SFEOMX. (JOBRK3PONDKNT.) London, April 10. The oensus, which was taken last Sunday will, it is hoped, be mure accurate than such statistics usually are. Great pains were gone to this time in order to ensure exactitude amongst the lower classes at the E-*st End. The Jews (Russian and Polish), who have always before given a heap of trouble with their returns (believing they portended taxation), were on Saturday approached through their rabbis, who called on them to give the information required graciously, if only as some return for the asylum England granted them. It is not merely the very poor and ignorant who are troublesome in a matter like this census. I was eating a sandwich and drinking a "Burton and bitter" at a Fleet street bar on Saturday afternoon. This sanctuary is presided over by a massive and motherly matron known as "Mother Dunn." An office boy, the only other visitor, is explaining the census paper to the old lady. He got on all right till he asked Mrs D whether she was deaf, blind, or halt. After some thought the dame said she'd got a carbuncle on her thigh. The ofljce boy shook his head sapiently. " Well, what about it!" Mrs & queried sharply. " You'll have to show that to your landlord, so as he may swear to it." The old lady turned purple. "Me show my—oh 1 welll never—to my landlord. The owdacious, ondecent oreatures to ask euch a thing (here she tore up the census paper), Let 'em come to me, a reapeotable woman too, and uk my time of life, and ask it, and I'll give 'em what for !" I don't doubt she did.

A ' Daily News' man gives the following experiences of enumerating in the slums : " No, sir ; ain't sin none of 'em. and when I do see 'em they'll 'ave to fill np their censers paper theirselves," " What! Not filled up your paper yet!" —" No, that 1 ain't; I ain't no scholard myself, and my ole man been abed these three year, and it'd be all the same if he was up. He can't read nor write, and I don't know nobody as can. " Well, I'll fill it up for you."

The old lady looks as though she has found a friend indeed, and she toddles along towards her room with more than the aprigbt'iness of three-score years and twelve. But suddenly she halts, and a Bhade of per plexity has come over her, " Ye' ain't such a thing as a bottle o' hink abont yer, sir, 'ave yer!" •• No, I haven't really. Havn't you any ink?"—"No, nor no pens aeither, They comes and borrers yer hink, and they never brings it back,'' she added ; but I think it was only a pretence put forth for the sake of appearances, and I doubt very much whether the old couple ever had a bottle of ink in their lives. While the stranger is bethinking himself as to whether there was or is not anything in the official instructions on the use of pencils instead of pen and ink, the old lady dives into a neighboring doorway on a borrowing expedition herself, and presently cornea forth triumphantly displaying a pea. "Qota pen, but ain't got no hink," she exclaims, and vanishes into another doorway a litle way further along, and from this she presently emerges, fully equipped for the Registrar-General and all his demands. Had I been the General Inquisitor himself, the filling up of th'it paper could hardly have been a more solemn and serious piece of business. But it was evidently a disappointing proceeding after all, The ridiculous document took no notice of just the most important matter in all the world to them. Here was the old man bedridden, and the wife, over seventy-two years of age, fagging away at a heavy sewing maohine for a shilling a day j and this extraordinary census paper asked never a question as to why the Spitalfields Guardians wouldn't make the slightest allowance to the old oonple out of the house, but was particularly anxious about their sex and the parish they were born in far away in the early century. The vivacious old woman "s'posed aome't 'd come of it," but evidently wasn't over sanguine. But it is trystiug time with my " mate s " as the people called him, and we are soon on our beat in a district of East London that might be somewhere in the alums of Warsaw or Cracow, so many of the people having a foreign cast of countenance and speak a gutteral patois. Truth to tell, however, most of the interest of this neighborhood has been eliminated by the reverend emissaries of the Chief Rabbi, who have been along here the day before and have filled up the people's papers for them in a manner which leaves little to be done but collect them. Just now and again is an amusing little point, as, for instance, when the landlord of a house, with several tenants in it, presents the various schedules from which one woman's name is omitted. It does'nt matter, however. The landlord knows all about her. He sends for her to come immediately, but in the meantime her name is so • and - so, she cornea from Poland, Bhe occupies one room, and her age is sixty-two. The schedule is filled up accordingly, and then comes a message that the lady herself cannot come, but there is a slip of paper with her name and her country and her age—sixty, " Oh, come, we're getting along like a house on fire," remarks my mate. "I shall get through to-day after all " "Ob, don't do that," says an astute looking wiry old man, who has just handed in his paper. "Why not!" demands the enumerator. "It's contract work."

" Oh, ah ! Then that alters it. I thought it was day work," and the old iran plunges into reminiscent of the good old times when he went electioneering, and had so much a day for six weeks. I am afrtaid my chum found before the day was out occasion to alter his opinion about his rate of progress, unless his oontinued experience was very different from that of another enumerator with whom I took temporary engagement in a neighboring locality. " It's worth a guinea an hoar !" exclaimed this gentleman as he and the minister of one of the synagogues plodded perseveringly from house to house, all inhabited by Polish Jews. This street Beemed to have escaped my previous attention, and the work could never have been done at all withont tbe assistance of the gentleman who, at tbe urgent solicitation of Dr Adler and at great personal iaeonvenience, had oome out with a severe cold upon bim to do this arduous public service, Every room seemed to be teeming with foreigners, who all trooped out into the passages to see what was going to happen now that these mysterious blue papers were demanded. In large numbers of cases the papers were presented blank, ! not apparently from any unwillingness to

give information, bat • from the total inability of the dark-eyed foreigners to make heads or talis of them. Sometimes when they were filled np they were rather worse than the absolutely blank. The dreadful pozzies of Polish-Russian names were in many cases entered in the most topsy-turvey fashion. One rosy-cheeked, good-tempered-looking woman, whose eyes would have done for a Madonna, handed over her paper with evident pride. Hers was filled in, not like those that the rest had been scolded for, and it was something like this : " Esther, Just go out work in Wi>ere there is river—Tour British subject 1864. birth 26 Mar. Rushen Polen 1860, 22 May," Amendment was helpless, and another schedule had to be substituted.

And now away into another locality, where surely the people must be English. This row of houses is in the heart of Spit&lfields, and used to be the centre of the silkweaving brought over here by the Huguenots ; bnt the silk-weavers have almost entirely died out, and here, as in the other neighborhood, are Jewish refugees. What queer medleys of humanity they make on these old Btairoases and landings as they come oat of their rooms in response to our oalls for oensns papers. The most perplexing complications arise from the queer way in which the people do their best to comply with tbe law, many of them giving quite as. much difficulty by their works of supereroga. tion as by their omissions. A man io filling up the column "age last birthday " takes the trouble to give tbe precise date of birth all down a long list, for instance, leaving the enumerator to calculate exactly how old he must be. Another creates hopeless confusion by putting the right entries in wrong lines, thus making all the male names stand for females, and putting all the elders at school, while the juveniles are the employers of labor or tbe heads of families, That employment column has been a sore perplexity for ail concerned, and the information got together at infinite pains must be wholly untrustworthy if I may judg* by what I saw of the filling np of the scheau!**. " Why, look here at these ages," saya auyoomrade. They were all patriarch* • f a. truly Biblical type, Head of family, Albert Jenkins, age last birthday, 407; Mary Ann. Jenkins, 401; Thomas Jenkins, 201. " How's this!" we want to know. Why do people live go long in that insalubrious - looking house ? :

" Albert Jenkins 401 !" exclaims a cida veroos youth in tbe dark steep staircase " Why, that's the ole man !"

"Yes, I should rather think it is," and there is a roar of laughter from up above. "How old's th'ole man?" np Thomas,

" Forty-seven," says the missis, ebobing with mirth at the idea of the head of a family four good centuries old. " Ah, that's it, then—4o and 7in the" ole man's" edition of Cocker make 47, and sc. with all the rest.