During the twentieth century, voluntary social work organizations became accustomed to altering the emphases of their work in response to changing legislation or shifts in funding priorities, something that accelerated from the mid-1970s. The alternative – death from lack of funding – was a fate that threatened those that failed to conform.Footnote ¹ This article will consider the House of Charity in Soho, which faced the opposite dilemma – having been forced by circumstances to alter the nature of its work, how should it retain the support of funders who wished to support the original activity? Its solution was to allow its benefactors to believe that little had changed and that it was still catering to the needs of their imagined clientele. This process will be explored in the period from the foundation of the House to the outbreak of World War I, when those who might have been found amongst the ranks of the unemployed were absorbed into economic activity,Footnote ² and were no longer potential clients of the House or similar institutions. Although it continued to operate during the first years of the war, and re-opened afterwards, in the post-war period the House did not appear to have experienced so great a need to consider the ambitions and intentions of its original benefactors.

Origins and benefactors

The House of Charity for Distressed Persons in Soho was founded in 1846, both to offer temporary relief to suitably recommended persons and to provide an outlet for the charitable impulses of a group of Christian men.Footnote ³ Its first premises were in Rose Street,Footnote ⁴ but in 1860 it moved into neighbouring Greek Street, where it still functions as the House of St Barnabas.Footnote ⁵ The founders' ambitions for their charity, and the history of its first 70 years, suggest that the intention to serve a certain type of poor person soon was outweighed by the need to continue to provide supporters with an opportunity for Christian service, as the supply of inmates envisaged by the original Council dried up much more quickly than they had imagined would be the case. The survival of the House, therefore, in its function of providing a vehicle to ensure the spiritual well-being of its benefactors, became more important than the provision of particular services to a particular group of poor people. Its primary purpose was thereby subverted, and the energies of its workers diverted from raising funds to support ‘selected deserving persons’ and to help them to resume self-sufficient lives, to casting round for appropriate ways to continue to give the benefactors a role.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the group of men who met in the summer of 1846 to plan the establishment of a new charitable enterprise. They fell into the category of those whom Frank Prochaska has described as ‘imbued with a sense of social obligation at a time of political and social uncertainty’.Footnote ⁶ Its members were male, aristocratic – or at least upper middle class – and Anglican, not unlike those who, two decades later, would support the foundation of the Charity Organization Society (COS),Footnote ⁷ and distinct from those characterized by Alan Kidd as men ‘socially of the second rank’ whose charitable energies were more likely to have been directed towards non-conformist endeavour.Footnote ⁸

Historians of philanthropy have emphasized the importance of evangelical Christianity to the development of charitable enterpriseFootnote ⁹ but, although the term is often used loosely to describe any charitable activity inspired by Christian faith, in its doctrinal sense it is not easily applied to the House of Charity. By the early twentieth century the House became linked in its own publicity with the Oxford Movement, but it is probably more accurate to say that some of its original supporters happened to share a liking for a particular form of worship and that high Anglicanism was no more than a sort of social behaviour to which they all adhered to a greater or lesser extent. None was ardent in his Anglo-Catholicism, and one at least, the Reverend Dr F.D. Maurice, was viewed with suspicion by Tractarians and was soon to lose his post as Professor of English Literature and History at King's College, London, because of beliefs judged to be heretical.Footnote ¹⁰ Although the core group included members of ‘the Engagement’, a brotherhood that counted W.E. Gladstone amongst its members and was committed to liturgical observance and regular works of charity,Footnote ¹¹ few appear to have been particularly theologically literate,Footnote ¹² and none would have described himself as ‘evangelical’.

Nevertheless, Christian faith was integral to their justification for relief work – it provided motivation and gave them opportunity to promote religiously inspired values and observance among the recipients of their generosity. To this extent, their conduct was typical of many others in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³ However, historians have questioned the assumption that religion on its own necessarily provided motivation for philanthropy. Frederick Engels would almost certainly have questioned the purely religious motives of Gladstone and his friends and seen their activity as an economic transaction that aimed to ward off the worst effects of resentment on the streets,Footnote ¹⁴ an attitude which was to characterize the founding fathers of the COS 20 years later, according to Michael Roberts.Footnote ¹⁵ Prochaska is less inclined to play down the genuineness of religious motivation, arguing that our twenty-first-century secular lives render us unable fully to comprehend its importance,Footnote ¹⁶ but Jane Lewis, Martin Gorsky and Geoffrey Finlayson have all recently demonstrated that the motives of those who gave to charity were very varied and complex.Footnote ¹⁷

The founders of the House all had London homes and legal, medical, parliamentary or other professional interests in the metropolis, so it was not surprising that they should aim to alleviate the acute social problems evident there in the middle years of the century. It may be ungenerous to suggest that their choice of activity was informed in part by fear for their safety and that of their property, and the desirability of doing everything possible to avoid violence on the streets – this is certainly not explicit in their expressed intentions – but social unrest threatened 1840s London, and the founders of the House of Charity were among those who had most to lose materially if violence were to break out. Lewis' suggestion that in some cases the desire for status may have prompted active participation in charitable endeavourFootnote ¹⁸ is more likely to have influenced Kidd's ‘second rank’ menFootnote ¹⁹ than the socially confident founders of the House of Charity. Furthermore, the mood of the times was directed towards a more ‘scientific’ attitude towards the relief of poverty and the adoption of a harsher stance towards the poor, manifest in the provisions of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. Although the work of the COS from 1869 is indelibly linked with the aim of promoting a ‘sense of membership in society’ and the notion that any aid given to the poor had to be within a disciplinary framework whose ultimate aim was self-sufficiency and personal and familial responsibility,Footnote ²⁰ the founders of the House of Charity may be credited with a similar set of ambitions 20 years earlier. Even they may not be seen as pioneers if, as Kidd and others have argued, proponents of ‘scientific charity’ were active as early as the 1790s.Footnote ²¹

Beneficiaries and their treatment: errant children?

Benefits for those who received and those who gave were delineated in the Prospectus: help was to be provided for ‘specially selected or deserving persons’, while ‘persons whose time is much occupied by professions and other active duties, as well as those who have more leisure’ were to be enabled to co-operate in works of charity, under fixed regulations.Footnote ²² As will be shown, the help given included elements of religiously inspired parental discipline.

The plan to provide residential care fits the pattern of nineteenth-century urban philanthropy described in Gorsky's study of Bristol, where attention is drawn to its increasing population, which included a large transitory element.Footnote ²³ London, too, experienced massive growth, doubling in size between 1821 and 1851 without, as Stedman Jones has argued, a commensurate addition to the housing stock,Footnote ²⁴ so that an institution designed to provide short-term accommodation would help to meet an obvious and urgent need.

Although character, not class, was to determine the selection of beneficiaries, the ‘specially recommended or selected deserving persons’ who would be able to fend for themselves if helped over a difficult patch,Footnote ²⁵ were assumed to include in-patients discharged from hospital; out-patients still unfit to return to work; people temporarily unemployed because some calamity had befallen their employer; and people from outside the metropolis who had been drawn to London from rural or suburban areas to look for work.Footnote ²⁶ Applicants had either to convince the Council that they were worthy candidates or, preferably, to produce a character reference from ‘a clergyman, a medical man, or an officer of a public institution’.Footnote ²⁷ This neatly – and explicitly – excluded the ‘casual poor’, who were unlikely to be able to secure such a reference, and equally unlikely readily to adapt to the regime of regular Bible reading, participation in family prayers before supper and twice-daily church attendance.Footnote ²⁸ As poor risks, they were deemed to be better suited to the forms of relief afforded by the Poor Law,Footnote ²⁹ so that, as Kidd has shown in his study of the Manchester and Salford District Provident Society, the ‘less stigmatising and punitive practice of private charity’ was reserved for those who could be classified as ‘deserving’.Footnote ³⁰

Support was to take the form of admission to the House of Charity for no more than one month,Footnote ³¹ during which time habits of industry and religious observance would be encouraged and outdoor relief denied. By the end it was hoped that inmates would have found employment and become self-supporting, fulfilling, in Gorsky's words, ‘the familiar goals of investment in human capital and socialization through employment’.Footnote ³²

The founders' actions were informed by the biblical notion that the poor would be an ever-present element in society, and that to some extent they served a necessary function, allowing the rich to escape the spiritual consequences of wealth by providing a means for them to give some of it away – with safeguards.Footnote ³³ One such was that of ensuring that not only was poverty relieved and independence encouraged, but that inmates' future behaviour would be characterized by the virtues they had learned and practised while resident in the House. Constant surveillance was used to encourage satisfactory behaviour and that cardinal Victorian virtue, self-sufficiency. Success, guaranteed in part by the careful selection of inmates, was to be reinforced by the imposition of a regime designed, in Foucauldian terms, to produce ‘docile bodies’.Footnote ³⁴ The Principles, Constitution and Objects of the House state its purpose as offering ‘those who are sunk in the depths of temporal, and frequently spiritual, wretchedness the example of the discipline of a Christian family’.Footnote ³⁵ The family metaphor was carried through to the daily routines of the House. As nurturing parent, the House was to provide food and other temporal assistance together with spiritual counsel and comfort, advice and instruction. Inmates were required to submit themselves to a quasi-parental disciplinary regime designed to develop in them habits of religious observance, morality and industry.Footnote ³⁶

Religion, an integral part of the value system, was also a tool designed to impose its demands. Devotional exercises, together with useful activity, were the principal means of ensuring that idleness was avoided – although efforts to enforce their practice did not always produce the desired results, something that quickly became clear to the Visitors. These Council members were responsible for visiting the House at least once a day on a rota basis to ensure the welfare of the inmates and the conscientious observance of the rules. They were often dissatisfied with what they found. The Visitor on 19 January 1847 was concerned that some inmates disobeyed the requirement that they attend Divine Service every morning at the local church. Like children wanting to avoid the classroom, they pleaded illness, but their ruse failed.Footnote ³⁷ Although they might have managed to avoid a walk through cold London streets, a system was quickly instituted which ensured that they did not escape religious observance; the chaplain and the steward were instructed to prepare a homily ‘or a proper sermon’ for those not fit enough to walk to church and ‘singing or chanting’ were suggested as ‘a fitting recreation on Sundays’.Footnote ³⁸ Daily routines were to be punctuated by reference to God. A responsorial Grace was to be said before meals, so that inmates had actively to participate – a mumbled ‘Amen’ or the adoption of a respectful posture would not do. Those feigning sickness, misbehaving on the way to church or in prayers or disobeying orders were liable to instant dismissal.Footnote ³⁹

The reality of that element of quasi-parental discipline tended to be a little less harsh and was often mitigated by a reluctance to evict. For example, on 20 July 1847, Mrs Mackie was formally admonished at the Council meeting for not attending morning church services,Footnote ⁴⁰ and Mr Bauer, a German school master resident while his wife was a patient in the Lying-In Hospital, was warned that no exceptions to the House rules could be made in his case. If he did not attend church, then he must leave.Footnote ⁴¹ But neither Mrs Mackie nor Mr Bauer was turned out on to the street.

Redemptive work

Useful activity was an essential element in the rehabilitation process integral to the daily life of the House, and in addition all male inmates, women without husbands and some older children were expected to search for permanent employment.

Women were allocated housework or needlework by the matron,Footnote ⁴² but finding work for men posed more of a problem: the Visitor on 3 February 1847 complained that they seemed to have little to do except sit by the fire.Footnote ⁴³ A few weeks later the Visitor urged that inmates be told that they must make themselves useful around the House in any way that might be required of them – not as punishment, nor work for work's sake, but because the tasks they were asked to perform were necessary to the smooth running of the House.Footnote ⁴⁴ That suitable tasks were difficult to devise suggests that this was not the case, and that the requirement to perform prescribed tasks had more to do with implementing a system of rewards and sanctions designed to impress upon the inmates the fact that work and thrift were the only real means to escape poverty.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Rules for Inmates stressed that failure to comply with the requirement to work could result in instant dismissal. Such extreme measures appear only rarely to have been employed, however, although formal admonitions by the Council were meted out to those who refused to pull their weight.Footnote ⁴⁶

Notices placed in Anglican periodicals such as the Guardian and the English Churchman advertised the availability of ‘deserving and well-conducted persons’ as potential employees,Footnote ⁴⁷ and supporters of the charity were expected to help inmates to find employment when they left the House.Footnote ⁴⁸ They were often successful. For example, in March 1847, Mrs Howard was taken on as teacher in the workhouse at RomfordFootnote ⁴⁹ and Mrs Saxby found employment in St Anne's parochial school, in Soho, in April 1847.Footnote ⁵⁰ Others were less fortunate. Mrs Howe and her family were sent to ‘their proper parish’,Footnote ⁵¹ so were James Corner and his family,Footnote ⁵² while Margaret King was sent to the Strand Union workhouse on her discharge from Guy's Hospital.Footnote ⁵³

Little sympathy was wasted on those who failed to exert themselves, and less on those who nurtured unsuitable ambitions. Mary Thompson was sent to ‘a lady who wanted a servant . . . but [Mary] asked higher wages than her service was worth’. Furthermore, ‘her manner did not please’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Mary's manner continued to displease. Her persistent unsatisfactory behaviour was reported on 24 February 1847 and Mary promised that she ‘would try to be more docile’. The following day she complained to callers at the House that she was being ill-treated and the Visitor noted that ‘it seems to be impossible to preserve the discipline and order of the House while she is permitted to remain’. By 3 March, she had left.Footnote ⁵⁵ Mary Bachelor was another who estimated the value of her services too highly, and asked for such exorbitant wages that she was not offered employment. She, too, was asked to leave the House.Footnote ⁵⁶ Both Marys failed to conform to the expectation that they accept gratefully any offer of work which would enable them to stand on their own feet and revealed an attitude that may have been interpreted as an unwillingness to accept their station in life.

Appropriate behaviour

In addition to co-operating in the search for employment, the rehabilitative experience demanded that inmates adopt high standards of behaviour or risk disciplinary action.

The threat of dismissal hung over any who tended to misbehave, but again justice was frequently tempered. Mrs Paul and Mary Taylor were reported to the Council for rudeness, and asked to leave. However, when Mrs Paul apologized, she was immediately given permission to stay another week. Her fellow-sinner appears not to have had the sense to appear contrite, so was still required to go. She was, nevertheless, given ten shillings, ‘on account of her friendless condition’, something discouraged by the principles informing the Prospectus.Footnote ⁵⁷ Rules which aimed to limit any sort of insubordination were rehearsed again in 1856,Footnote ⁵⁸ but no doubt were applied with similar discretion.

Any temptation to sexual misbehaviour was severely curbed. Men and women lived in separate parts of the House. Men were forbidden to visit the women's apartments, and those who did ran the risk of being sent out on to the Soho streets.Footnote ⁵⁹ Other social contact was limited; for example, the matron was responsible for ensuring that all meals were taken in silence, and that once they were finished the inmates had immediately to go to their own quarters.Footnote ⁶⁰ An important exception to this sexual segregation was the provision made for families: husbands and wives, together with their children, were accommodated in family rooms, thus giving practical expression to the traditional Christian emphasis on the importance of the family and encouraging the practice of family hierarchies, even in the artificial situation of the House. That this, together with the higher quality of food provided, distinguished the care offered by the House from workhouse provision was something of which the charity's supporters were proud. It may also have reflected their expectation that their clients would be of a different order from those who found themselves forced to enter the workhouse.

A further quasi-parental control concerned access to information. Biblical texts and religious pictures were the only forms of decoration allowed on the walls. Manuals of private devotion were supplied.Footnote ⁶¹ Newspapers were not permitted in the House,Footnote ⁶² although the rigidity of this rule was challenged just a few months after the House had been opened, when the Council discussed the possibility of ordering the Guardian and the London Magazine, and an order was eventually placed for the latter.Footnote ⁶³ In 1872, the rule was relaxed further and the Daily Telegraph ordered for the men's room,Footnote ⁶⁴ though nothing was suggested for the women. Anything read aloud had first to be approved by the steward or a Visitor. Books ‘such . . . as may relieve the sick’ were included in the library, along with Bibles and prayer books,Footnote ⁶⁵ but material which did not meet those criteria or which did not conform to the sensibilities of the denominational foundation of the House were likely to be confiscated.Footnote ⁶⁶ Mrs Callaghan fell foul of this rule at the end of January 1847; she had some ‘Romish’ books in her possession – not surprisingly, as she was a Roman Catholic – and these were not permitted.Footnote ⁶⁷

A cluster of controls ensured the wise and profitable use of timeFootnote ⁶⁸ and the supervisory and disciplinary gaze necessary to enforce them functioned at several levels. The first was that of the paid staff – the steward, the chaplain and the matron. From 1860, these were joined by nuns of the Community of St John Baptist, whose mother house was at Clewer in Berkshire and who had taken over the building in Rose Street, originally occupied by the House of Charity, for their work with prostitutes. The two establishments, while organizationally separate, had close links. The nuns were responsible for much of the day-to-day housekeeping and management of the House and, although it has been argued that the Clewer sisters ‘ran’ the House of Charity,Footnote ⁶⁹ the records clearly demonstrate that their role was a housekeeping one and that they were answerable to the Council.Footnote ⁷⁰

The second layer of control fell to the Council, whose duties, in addition to receiving reports from the paid staff, were basic administration and management and admissions and discharges. It also issued admonitions and warnings and, when deemed necessary, dismissals. At a further level, the role of the Visitor was designed to underpin the work of the staff and the Council and to monitor the functioning of the House as well as the behaviour of the inmates. He was permitted to enter at any time in order to do spot checks and to write regular reports.Footnote ⁷¹ At first, Visitors took their duties very seriously and the inmates clearly felt the burden of an inquisitorial regime, complaining at one point that they were fed up with repeatedly having to answer the same questions.Footnote ⁷² W.E. Gladstone, when Visitor, went further than mere questioning and encouraged inmates to examine their consciences and amend their lives. A lengthy entry in the Visitors' Book in June 1847 records that he had spoken with an inmate called Turner, and had urged him to meditate on ‘the real meaning’ of his trials, insisting that any solution which by-passed that deep examination would be a great misfortune. What can have been his problem? Whatever it was, part of the solution Gladstone recommended was that Turner go to the Gladstone home every day to consult the situations vacant section of The Times.Footnote ⁷³ A couple of days later the Visitors' Book records that Turner does indeed call daily at the Gladstone house and, moreover, that he takes a copy of The Times back to the House of Charity with him. That was not part of the original deal. It signalled a departure from the rule forbidding newspapers in the House and held the threat of worse things to come: it was far too liberal for some Council members, who voiced their anxiety that it might even tempt inmates to bring home copies of the Weekly Dispatch.Footnote ⁷⁴ But Turner was a law unto himself, determined not to adopt the attitude of gratitude, docility and obedience expected of inmates. He appears to have been a man of some education and to have resented the restrictions placed on him. He complained about the behaviour of the steward and he complained about the food.Footnote ⁷⁵ For their part, Council members seem to have been reluctant to treat him as they treated other inmates and, as we have seen, Gladstone was ready to bend the rules for him. Although Turner had left the House by 24 June 1847, he re-appeared a couple of weeks later again asking for help and was given money from the alms box.Footnote ⁷⁶ He was readmitted on 13 July,Footnote ⁷⁷ but finally dismissed for failing to keep the rules on 16 July.Footnote ⁷⁸

Turner exemplified the sort of person that the House was ill-equipped to deal with, in spite of its original ambition to offer support to those of his sort who had fallen on hard times. He was independent, educated, reluctant to fall in with the demands of the House routine and lacking in gratitude. Poorer inmates, who did not excite such class-based anxieties about how to treat them, were given more summary justice if they showed themselves to be rude or uncooperative. Mr Allen, who had ‘behaved improperly to Mrs Peckham’, was instantly dismissed.Footnote ⁷⁹ So was Ellen Prior – because of her quarrelsome and unsatisfactory behaviour – and Mary Bowen, who was ‘insubordinate and unsatisfactory’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Changes and modifications

The period up to the end of the 1840s might be said to represent the ‘ideal’ or classical phase of the development of the House – the time in which rigid rules could be imposed and the founders' intentions had a chance of realization. But the slow improvement in the economic climate and resultant fall in the numbers of people in central London needing short-term shelter in the 1850sFootnote ⁸¹ forced changes in the pattern of provision.

With fewer suitable candidates for admission,Footnote ⁸² the need to publicize the work more widely and widen its scope became recurring and occasionally panic-laden themes for the rest of the century. A general meeting on St John the Baptist's day in 1852 noted the increase in the number of families admitted, including those in the process of emigrating, using the offices of HM Emigration Commissioners, the Church Emigration Society and the Female Emigration Fund. At one level this did not represent a major change; families had occasionally been given shelter in the House which, as has been noted, took pride in its ability to care for them. Émigrés fitted perfectly the category of those able to demonstrate their willingness and ability to stand on their own feet.Footnote ⁸³ Many had travelled from outside London, and needed temporary accommodation while waiting for their passage from Tilbury or Gravesend. For some, the wait was longer than they had anticipated. William and Emma Baker and their three children were unable to sail to South Africa in February 1879, because the government had requisitioned their ship in order to take troops to the Zulu war.Footnote ⁸⁴ They needed accommodation for more than the usual few nights while waiting for a favourable tide. Others needed help in order to purchase the outfit deemed necessary for emigrants; sometimes the House gave them money to buy it, and on other occasions provided clothes from a supply collected for the purpose.

It is impossible to assess the extent of the problem of under-use because accurate lists of bed-occupancy have not survived, if, indeed, they ever existed. But the pattern of admissions changed. Some inmates who did not fit the original description were unaccompanied children. Parishes, often well outside the metropolis, exploited links in the nation-wide network of Anglo-Catholic churches and priests in order to procure space for children whose parents were anxious to avail themselves of the facilities of specialist London hospitals, particularly those offering orthopaedic or ophthalmic treatment.Footnote ⁸⁵ Occasionally, local children were admitted to the House while their mothers were confined in one of the capital's maternity hospitals, most frequently at Queen Charlotte's. Many of these would have been recommended by supporters of the House who were also subscribers to London hospitals and could use their privilege of referring patients although, as Ellen Ross has argued, this was a time when, in the wake of their expansion, the London teaching hospitals provided ever more free hospital visits,Footnote ⁸⁶ and this new availability may well have accounted both for local patients and for some of those who travelled to London in the quest for medical or surgical treatment.

Emergency admissions and children

But even a more flexible admissions policy failed to fill all the empty space and the House found itself responding to requests for the sorts of emergency admissions that had not been anticipated by the founders.

In 1866, Gladstone's wife, Catherine, requested that the House admit 15 orphaned children, convalescent from cholera, while more permanent accommodation was found for them.Footnote ⁸⁷ The epidemic, which killed perhaps as many as 3,900 people in East London,Footnote ⁸⁸ left many children orphaned or without anyone to care for them while family members were ill or convalescent. Although the Council agreed to Catherine's request, her estimate of 15 children proved to be a conservative one and at least 150 were admitted during an eight-week period in the late summer.Footnote ⁸⁹ If an article by her daughter in the Cornhill Magazine is to be believed, Catherine herself carried many of the children from the London Hospital to Soho Square.Footnote ⁹⁰ The minutes are curiously silent about how these children – some only a few months old – were cared for before they were discharged, often to one of the orphanages in which Catherine had an interest, or to a family member, when that became possible. It must be assumed that the Clewer sisters played a major role; a letter from ‘Mrs Gladstone's committee’ in November 1866 asked for thanks to be passed to the Sister Superior.Footnote ⁹¹ And perhaps some of the female inmates would have given a hand. Sadly, the records provide little clue.

Catherine's intervention was in character. She was a regular and energetic supporter of relief work in Soho and its environs.Footnote ⁹² Women were not permitted to become members of the Council, but Catherine helped to raise funds for the House and was entitled to recommend suitable persons for admission; her concern for cholera victims may be seen as an extension of her normal use of the facilities. Moreover, having established during the epidemic that she could use it as a refuge for children, she frequently thereafter requested that orphans be admitted, often while they were moving from one of her London orphanages to the Gladstone family estate at Hawarden, in North Wales, where she had another. For example, it was agreed that five boys from Mrs Gladstone's orphanage in Clapton should be admitted in the summer of 1868, so long as it was understood that the House was not to be made responsible ‘for their future placing out in life’. Five more children stopped off during 1869.Footnote ⁹³

Other children, taken to the House at her instigation for a variety of reasons, were eventually found employment – 12-year-old Emily Brown was taken on as a kitchen maid at the Gladstone London homeFootnote ⁹⁴ and 13-year-old James Fletcher went to be a waiter boy at the Oxford and Cambridge University Club in Pall MallFootnote ⁹⁵ – or were sent to local industrial schools or to places like St Andrew's Home at Clewer, attached to the Mother House of the Community of St John Baptist.Footnote ⁹⁶ Newport Market Refuge, also in Soho, founded by the Gladstones and others in 1863 to provide shelter and training programmes for girls and boys,Footnote ⁹⁷ became the destination of many homeless children.Footnote ⁹⁸ With so many refuges and orphanages to choose from, it is not clear why poor Maria Gifford was sent to Mrs Burton's School for Training Rough Girls in CamdenFootnote ⁹⁹ – it does not sound the most welcoming of new homes. The presence of children in the House did not go down well with the neighbours in Greek Street, who wrote to complain in April 1869.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Sadly neither the neighbours' letter, nor the Council's reply, survives, but the policy of admitting unaccompanied children remained in place.

In 1870, events across the channel prompted another wave of emergency admissions, this time refugees fleeing the Franco-Prussian war.Footnote ¹⁰¹ An additional benefit gained for them was the agreement that Queen Charlotte's Lying-In Hospital, with which the House had already established a working relationship, would admit ‘French refugees’.Footnote ¹⁰² A steady stream of other admissions outwith the expectations of the original founders suggest a continuing need to widen the scope of the admissions policy while walking the tightrope of inculcating and maintaining standards of respectability.

Unsuitable admissions. The thin end of the wedge?

Although some inmates had always shown themselves to be unreceptive to the House's direction, and in spite of the fact that spare bed space had been filled as a result of emergency admissions and a more relaxed admissions policy, the last quarter of the century saw the Council anxious to find further ways to satisfy the expectations of its benefactors while, unsuccessfully, trying to avoid the pitfall of helping the undeserving.

In 1874 an agreement was made with the London COS to admit some of its clients. The House had always operated in ways acceptable to those concerned to create an intellectual framework for charitable activityFootnote ¹⁰³ and, although it meant relinquishing some control over admissions, the COS’ investigations would, in theory, have weeded out the undeserving, obviating the need for every applicant to be recommended by someone whose professional status the House would recognize.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

But even the inmates sent by the COS failed to keep the House full. Financial problems caused by the small number of admissions were reviewed in November and December 1876. One-off gifts had helped. For example, Lady Burrell agreed to give five shillings a week and to pay for the uniform of a porter in 1871;Footnote ¹⁰⁵ the Mercers' Company gave £25 in 1872 and the Fishmongers' Company donated ten guineas;Footnote ¹⁰⁶ the Merchant Taylors' Company gave a donation of ten guineas in 1874;Footnote ¹⁰⁷ and, in the same year, the curates of St Mary's Church, Crown Street, declined to accept the 20 guineas that had been offered for their services during the chaplain's illness.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Grocers' Company gave £25 in 1881, as did the Mercers' Company.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Parish churches also contributed. At a Council meeting on 8 March 1885, it was noted that St Paul's Knightsbridge had given £10 in 1885 and a ‘country vicar’ had sent £30.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But the shortage of inmates resulted in a shortage of cash for day-to-day expenses, because recommenders were expected to support financially those who were admitted. One way round this was to offer services to other institutions and it was decided to extend the number of hospitals to which it offered beds for convalescent patients by adding the Middlesex HospitalFootnote ¹¹¹ to University College Hospital and Westminster Hospital, which had been sending patients to the House since 1850.Footnote ¹¹²

Meanwhile, the maintenance of standards continued to be important. An attempt by the COS to subvert the founders' original principles by requesting that the House take cases while they were still under consideration was firmly rejected.Footnote ¹¹³ And even the COS’ often extensive and inquisitorial enquiries proved not to be entirely reliable. Eliza White and her child were admitted in response to a request from the COS in August 1879. A situation as a cook was found for Eliza, but the day before she was due to take it up her prospective employer discovered, though we are not told how, that Eliza had shown herself to be unsuitable in an earlier post, that her child was illegitimate and that she was bad tempered and disobliging and an inveterate drunkard.Footnote ¹¹⁴ And Eliza was not the only unsatisfactory case admitted at COS recommendation.Footnote ¹¹⁵

But if the COS’ methods were not foolproof, neither could the House claim infallible success in selection. On at least one occasion it failed to require the usual formal recommendation in the face of a hard luck story spun by someone who appeared to be respectable and well educated. John Cameron and his two children were admitted for six weeks in the spring of 1882, because he claimed that he had lost his job as a school master when the school needed to reduce the size of its staff. He was, he said, an excellent teacher of Latin, Spanish and Italian and had been appointed to a new post at Chalfont St Peter, in Buckinghamshire. On the face of it, he was exactly the sort of person for whom the House had been designed. A later laconic note in the case book records that none of this was true, and that he never went to Chalfont.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The mid-1890s minutes record an increase in the number of unsuitable applicants. On 4 January 1895, for example, it is noted that of the male applicants that week one had ‘suffered ten years penal servitude’, another ‘an unqualified surgeon’ was ‘given to drink morphia and was to be prosecuted by the Society for the Protection of Women and Children’, while a third had presented a forged letter of recommendation from an East End clergyman.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In 1899, the minutes note requests for admission from three clergymen – one ‘bibulous’, the second an ‘imposter convert from many religions’ and the third ‘amenable to the criminal law’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ On 13 May 1902, it was noted that all the male applicants during the week had been ‘characterless persons from Marylebone and Drury Lane doss houses, with the exception of those who were characterless from drink’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

By the early years of the twentieth century, not only was it becoming difficult to attract the suitably deserving, those who had availed themselves of the charity's assistance were finding that their association with it was beginning to cause some embarrassment. In 1909, the honorary secretary of the Church Emigration Society believed that even temporary residence in the House was detrimental to emigrants' chances of employment in their new country, and requested that all letters be headed simply 1 Greek Street.Footnote ¹²⁰ The discussion that this prompted, and the acknowledgment that the name could suggest that it was an off-shoot of the COS, was left unresolved, partly because the House had temporarily managed to solve its problems of under-use and was nearly always full, although as the minutes note ruefully, ‘not with the class of inmate for whom [it] was originally intended’.Footnote ¹²¹ Determination to distance itself from institutions which did not maintain its high standards led to a refusal to co-operate in a COS census of the inmates of casual wards, common lodging houses and Salvation Army hostels in London, on the grounds that the work of the House was quite different from those.Footnote ¹²² The COS’ mistake was an easy one to make – the difference that the House was anxious to claim might not have been obvious to outsiders.

Determination to project itself as different from – if not superior to – other charitable institutions, while admitting within the privacy of its own Council meetings that the standard of inmate was not quite what once might have been hoped, is indicative of a tension between the reality of the evidence of the case books and the charity's public profile. In 1910, the Reverend Prebendary F.L. Boyd extolled the valuable contribution made by the House to the alleviation of distress, particularly that which afflicted the middle class. ‘Long experience had taught him’, he said,

Extracts from Prebendary Boyd's speech were printed and circulated to supporters. Speaking at the Annual Meeting the following year, the mayor of Westminster stressed the numbers of clerks, salesmen, secretaries and others of ‘good character’ whose misfortune rather than fault was the cause of their distress. The minutes of the Council meetings and the case books suggest that the reality was rather different, though the Council might have taken comfort from a visitor who called in July 1912 and gave the warden £100 in gold as a thank offering for the benefits she had received when an inmate in the House in 1864.Footnote ¹²⁴

What was going on?

The House of Charity had changed considerably in the nearly 70 years of its existence, and much of that change had begun in the first two decades of its existence. In 1846, its aim was to serve ‘specially recommended or selected deserving persons’, but the supply of such persons seems quickly, and presumably unexpectedly, to have dried up, and for most of its history the House had provided care for the respectable – and not so respectable – poor, for would-be emigrants, for refugees from European warfare, for children.

The fortunes of urban charities can be seen as a measure of the economic and physical health of those towns and cities in which they operate. In the case of the House of Charity, its position in central London made it accessible both to those drawn there by hopes of employment or the services of its famous hospitals, as well as to Londoners fallen on hard times. When the economy improved, demand for its services declined. Although emergencies like the cholera epidemic helped to fill the gap, as did the need for space for hospital convalescents, by 1914 the need for short-term accommodation was very much less than in the 1840s. This did not go unremarked by contemporaries,Footnote ¹²⁵ including the Council of the House of Charity which noted that figures given to the Local Government Board indicated a marked decrease in unemployment and vagrancy.Footnote ¹²⁶

Although the needs for which the charity had first been established had declined, it had continued to function and to raise money to survive. As its clientele changed, so did the regime it imposed on them. The imposition of bourgeois values, traditionally associated with this sort of activity, and ambitions to instil habits of religious observance, had been modified. Anglican Christianity still underpinned its activities, but compulsory church-going gave way to encouragement to regular worship, to join confirmation classes and to have children baptized. Strict limits to the sort of literature allowed on the premises were replaced by a willingness to supply a variety of books, not now narrowly limited to religious texts. No more is heard of refusing wall space to any sort of decoration bar biblical texts or religious pictures.

One reason for struggling on, even after the initial need had evaporated, must lie in the impulse of charities to continue to survive, even if they have to keep re-inventing themselves. Another must reflect the nature of its principal supporters, well-to-do and largely Anglo-Catholic churchmen and women. Account books have not survived, and only a very incomplete list of supporters can be compiled from Council members and the chance inclusion of named men and women in the minutes,Footnote ¹²⁷ but it must be assumed that their need for an outlet for their charitable impulses was as lively as ever, and in its pursuit the House was prepared to modify its ambitions, while retaining a fairly constant public profile. In addition to personal benefactors, collections taken at services in fashionable London churches at which sermons were preached by eminent ecclesiastics augmented the income from time to time. Occasional donations from bodies such as livery companies and parish churches have already been noted.Footnote ¹²⁸ And hospitals and the COS would have been expected to pay for their use of the House facilities for their clients. Further small-scale funds were collected from a box fixed to the outside of the building, and as a result of the labours of fund-raisers, appointed intermittently though without notable success.Footnote ¹²⁹

The House of Charity was founded both to meet the needs of ‘specially recommended or selected deserving persons’ and to provide the opportunity for ‘persons whose time is much occupied by professions and other active duties, as well as those who have more leisure, to co-operate in works of charity’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Securing funding and ensuring its continued supply will always be a primary concern for charitable and philanthropic organizations. In the second half of the twentieth century voluntary organizations became accustomed to adapting their work in order to accommodate new legislation or to fit the requirements of grant-giving bodies. The House of Charity exhibited a similar pattern of behaviour and altered the profile of those whom it set out to help in order to survive, but unlike later examples it attempted to ensure its funding by allowing the impression to be created that it was continuing the work for which it was founded. For much of the second half of the nineteenth century it adapted the criteria for admission in order to keep its beds full while allowing supporters like Prebendary Boyd to believe that it was continuing to give succour to the deserving poor – even the middle-class deserving poor – whose plight had helped to fire the charitable impulses of its original founders. By so doing, its secondary aim of providing a vehicle for the generosity demanded of Christian benefactors continued to be met without the embarrassment of presenting them with evidence of unworthy beneficiaries.