"HOMES LITTLE BETTER THAN PIGSTYES."

Otago Daily Times, Issue 17635, 27 May 1919, Page 6

"HOMES LITTLE BETTER THAN PIGSTYES."

.MINERS'- AWFUL HOUKESTG CONDITIONS. — A Disgrace to Civilisation.— When Mr Robert Smiilie declared in what has been described as "a dramatic outburst" that the men who risk their lives in the dark depths of the mines were "housed like swine," he only gave utterance to a literal truth, says Mr George R Sims, in an article on the homes of the miners. Of the housing conditions prevailing In the Lancashire and Yorkshire mining districts, Mr Sims continued, I know only what I have heard, but of the conditions prevailing in the South Wales area I can speak with personal knowledge, because some little time before the war I studied the housing question on the spot. The conditions in which the miners were then living were scandalous, and many of these still prevail. This is not due to the lack of municipal effort, but to the difficulty of obtaining land. The old insanitary dwellings in ' which the miners and their families are herded have not been swept away because a site for new ones which would be suitable and capable of being let at a moderate rental cannot be secured. — Wretched Hovels.— Some of the largest employers of labour were then, and probably are still, the owners of the worst property. Mr Sims refers to a district where the homes are " little better than pigstyes," and says: In some of these houses I found a bed —in a damp, ill-ventilated room, with a low ceiling, and scarcely any breathingspace—would be occupied for the greater part of the 24 hours. A day-worker slept in the bed at night sometimes with members of his family, and a night worker had it in the day time. The night worker was generally a lodger taken in to help to pay the rent. In a wretched agglomeration of hovels —dirty, dilapidated, and evil-smelling— the conditons were indescribable, and it was to these terrible homes that men came from their terrible toil to live terrible lives, and too often to meet with a terrible death. In order to reach the door of one of these residences you have to climb over ridges of refuse and wade through quagmires of decaying odours. When I reached the door at last I turned my face towards the scenery and looked out on an inferno filled with the hellish vapour that hisses up from the great works in the hollow below. On the black coal tips that hem in the habitations and on mounds of rotting refuse the child played, and these decaying refuse heaps were heaUjhier than the wretched one and two-roomed houses for which there was rent to be paid. — Awful Living Conditions;— The interior conditions of these homes was awful. In one I found a little girl sitting on v a broken and filthy floor nursing a baby. It was a two-roomed house, and a family of seven occupied it. Father and mother and the two children slept in a room that the bed filled up. Off this room there was a , small cupboard so contrived that no- light could enter it. I peered into the black hole, and I discovered that there was a bed in it. This -was occupied at night by the little girl who was nursing the baby, and two sisters, one 15 and one 17. In another house I found a family of 10 occupying two rooms. There were 12, but two children had died within a few weeks. The "wonder was tha.t the others had survived.

The worst of these terrible hanses have since been removed and new ones erected in their place, but overcrowding is rampant in the whole district, and there are still some appallingly insanitary spots. In many places the back-to-back houses are a disgrace to civilisation. It is the neglect of the employers t<? deal sympathetically with these evils that made it possible for Mr Smillie to taunt them with the fact that the men who risk life and limb to get them their wealth were " housed like swine." ' The members of the public who attended the sitting of the Coal Commission were deeply moved by the evidence of the housing conditions in the mining villages, as narrated by Mr John Robertson, chairman of the Scottish Union of Mineowners. In the middle ward of Lanarkshire 35,000 miners and their families lived in 17,000 houses. At Hamilton, where the population totalled 38,000, no fewer than 27,000 lived in one or two-roomed houses; whilst in Wishaw 28.5 of the population lived in houses of one room. In that town, he said, there are living— Six in a, room ..;.. 2,768 Seven in a room 1,237 Bight in a room „. „.. 510 Nine in a room 190 There are numerous houses where a husband, wife, and seven children live in one room, and several houses where three men, one woman, and two children live in one room. In reply to further Questions by Mr Smillie, witness said there were 2500 acres of ground belonging to the Duke of Hamilton upon which he had never seen a cow grazing. They wanted to purchase the land for the purpose of building houses, but the Duke of Hamilton would not give it up under £500 an acre. " I happen to Hve," added witness, "in one of 12 houses built about 30 years ago. Some of them are practically uninhabitable because of the coal being taken from underground after our monev has been spent in building the houses." " Mr Smillio: Under the lease, if "the town or individual takes a piece of ground from the Duke of Hamilton, and ■nays him an annual rent for the ground, he claims the right to take coal out from underneath the ground and pull the house down without any compensation. Do yon think the people are going to allow that to continue?— l hope not.