“HOMES LITTLE BETTER THAN! PIGSTIES.”

Otago Witness, Issue 3430, 9 December 1919, Page 49

“HOMES LITTLE BETTER THAN! PIGSTIES.”

MINERS' AWFUL HOUSING CONDITIONS.

A Disgrace to Civilisation.— When Mr Robert Srnillie 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 Mi 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 tneir families are herded Tiavei not been swept away because a site foi? new ones which would be suitable andj capable of being let at a moderate rental cannot bo secured. Wretched Hovels.—

Some of the largest employers of labour were then, and probably are still, tha owners of the worst property. Mr Sima 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 breathing- • space —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 hovela —dirty, dilapidated, and evil-smelling—tha' conditons were indescribable, and it waa 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 hern in the habitations and on mounds of rotting refuse the child played, and these decaying refuse heaps were healthier than the wretched one and two-roomed houses for which there was rent to be paid. Awful giving Conditions.—

The interior conditions of these homes was awful. In one I found a little girl sitting on 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 waa oocupied 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 that the others had survived. The worst of these terrible houses 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 spote. In many places the back-to-back houses axe a disgrace to civilisation. It is the neglect of the employers to 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 waredeeply 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, ho said, there are living —■ Six in a room 2,768 Seven in a. room 1,237 Eight in a room 510 Nine in a roam 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 Avanted to purchase the land for the purpose of building houses, but the Duke of Hamilton would not give it up under £SOO <in acre. " I happen to live," 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 money has been spent in building- the houses." Mr Smillie: 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