SLUM LIFE TRAGEDIES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2915, 26 January 1910, Page 25

SLUM LIFE TRAGEDIES.

Harrowing 1 , dramatic, with an occasional gleam of street Arab wit to accentuate the pathos, Mrs Commissioner Hay's address on the tragedies of slum life in London was of ,a nature to appeal, to the large audience-,which assembled at the Salvation Army Fortress on Sunday afternoon. Having touched upon the many-sided-ness of the work, and the pity of the necessity for such, Mrs Hay said that, in spite of its singular unattrac-tiveness, women were found to do_.it. " The squalor and the filth. It is all shocking—shocking. The dirt, the 5 darkness, and the despair. Bodies that have not been touched with water for years." She pictured the slum officer sitting up with the dying in some awful attic, 'and in the morning going, not to bed, but straight out to people in the evil-smelling alleys, who must be attended to. The slum officer stood on no ceremony. There was no knocking at the door. Lonely folk died in these dens; so lonely that the dead bodies might not be discovered for days or weeks. Here were old women so neglected and diseased that they were more like animals than human beings. And how they clung to their old poverty-stricken haunts rather than go to the poor.house. There were places shrouded in darkness, wherein it was impossible to enter without the aid of the most powerful disinfectants. Here ware found old feeble bodies rotted a.way with disease, and invalids who had to be "put in soak" before the dirt would come off. Mrs Hay mentioned the case of a man left alone orr the top floor of one of these mournful, dilapidated tenements because- he had gone mad. No owe, not even his wife, had been near him for three weeks. The condition of the unfortunate when found by the officer had better be left to the imagination. The Commissioner pictured the man out of work, the despondent, pallid wife, and the little wistful-eyed hungry children cowering in the cold, mean litle room ; the knock at the door; not bailiffs, but the slum officer; dinner, beef tea, work; or if no work can be procured, the family is "ticked off" as a. special case for relief. One. instance civ n was the ca«e of a woman with a rrsw-born babe. Not oven a glass of water had passed the woman's lips since the child had been horn ; no one had been near her; and a scrap of the mother's tattered dress was all the child's aoparel. The Corn-miss ion pi- asked if New Zealanders, with their comfortable homes, good meals, and health, could realise this. She spoke of families in dark cellars; of old "grannies" of 85. who were allowed 1 to live in some corner free of rent because they acted as bullies for the landladies and saw, amon-o- other thing's, that none of the lodgers did "a. moonlight flit." Then there was the fiGfhtine: —women with women, husband with wife; men killed, women torn to pieces ; the screams of little children from the dark emptiness o f foul windows, "He's killing her, he's killing her this time!" Sometimes the whisper would come round, "there will be a lively time to-night," and there would be. The slum officer would stumble over a woman lying- at the bottom of a staircase in a pool of bleed: or in the street; there would be a snlinter!ng of glass, and clown would come the bodv of a. woman out of the third-storey window; down, and down with a rush on to the sharp-pointed iron palirrss. Then the slum officer would have to lift the body off the spikes and send for. : the ambulance. The Commissioner went on to apeak of strong- men who used their huge navvy's boots to kick in the heads of women because they brought in no money for drink. She electrified' her hearers bv mention of the born dnink.irds ; little babies whose finsf. lisped wo v '" was "Gin'; gin, mother, me want gin." At. some of the coooa suppers the cbildnan

were supposed to bring their own mugM. Some brought cracked cups, cut-down bottles, condensed milk tins; and oraa little boy brought along an old felt hat* saying, in a shame-faced way, " Sister, that's all I have got, and I do want some ooeoa." The slum officer's method of clothing the naked was to give them, if possible, raiment of all colours of the rainbow. The reason being that they could not pawn them. " Uncle "in the slums did not like suits of this description. She had been particularly anxious to get hold of one litle boy, but, the Captain said, he could not go out because he really had no clothes. Mrs Commissioner Hay was determined to have the boy. clothes or no clothes, and said so. "Then," said the Captain, "if he does, he'll have to wear his father's trousers." "Let hirA," said Mrs Hay. " his father can do without for a day"; and he did. The speaker took her hearers in imagination from the city to the back of Southwark on a hot evening in July; up ona of the worst alleys in London, where the heat and stench overwhelm one. There in a bare, wretched room, a family of gaunt and haggard wretches stood round a makeshift table, on which lay the dead body of a litle child. And there was rco money fca buy a coffin.