George
Sims, the son of a successful businessman, was born in London
in 1847. His mother was the daughter of the Chartist
leader, John Dinmore Stevenson. After he retired Stevenson lived with
his daughter and George later recalled that "it was my grandfather,
the old Chartist, who shaped my early political views".
After being educated at Eastbourne College, Sims went to work for
his father who owned a wholesale and export cabinet manufacturing
business. Sims had a strong desire to become a writer and in 1872
began writing theatre reviews for two journals, Dark
Blue and Woman. Three
years later he became a staff writer with Fun
and in 1877 moved to Referee.
Sims also wrote a weekly column for the Weekly
Dispatch.
Sims also wrote plays. He had a minor success with Crutch
and Toothpick in 1879 but it was with The
Lights of London that established Sims as a playwright.
Other plays written by Sims include Romany
Rye, The Member for Slocum
and The Harbour Lights.
In the 1880s Sims still retained the radical views of his youth and
often wrote poems on social issues for the Referee. These became known
as the Dagonet Ballads, the most
famous of these being In the Workhouse: Christmas
Day. Sims wrote in his memoirs that after it was first
published it was "vigorously denounced as a mischievous attempt
to set the paupers against their betters".
With his great friend, John Burns, Sims
gave lectures on need for social reform. After one of these meetings
in Southwark, Sims was approached by Arthur Moss, a local School Board
officer. Moss told Sims of the terrible poverty that large numbers
of working class people were experiencing in London.
Moss offered to take Sims of a tour of the district.
Sims was shocked by what he saw and decided he would try to find a
way of bringing this information to the notice of the general public.
Sims approached his friend, Gilbert Dalziel, the editor of a new illustrated
paper, The Pictorial World. Dalziel
agreed to publish a series of articles by Sims on the living conditions
of people in London. Illustrated by Frederick
Burnard, the articles were later published as a book entitled How
the Poor Live (1889). Articles originally published in
the Daily News appeared in another
volume called Horrible London (1889).
Although Sims was mainly a playwright he continued to write on social
issues. A series of articles on child poverty that appeared in the
Daily Telegraph in 1909 were eventually
published as books: London by Night
and Watches of the Night. Sims
also wrote for the Daily Mail and the
Evening News, newspapers owned by
his friend, Lord Northcliffe.
In the last few years of his life Sims worked on his memoirs. His
autobiography, My Life: Sixty Years' Recollections
of Bohemian London was published in 1917. George Sims died
in 1922.
Gustave
Dore, London (1872)
(1)
In his book How the Poor Live George Sims described a visit
to a family living in London (1889)
I was the other day in a room occupied by a widow women,
her daughters of seventeen and sixteen, her sons of fourteen and thirteen,
and two younger children. Her wretched apartment was on the street
level, and behind it was a common yard of the tenement. For this room,
the widow paid four and sixpence a week; the walls were mildewed and
steaming with damp; the boards as you trod upon them made the slushing
noise of a plant spread across a mud puddle in a brickfield.
Of all the evils arising from this one room system there is perhaps
none greater than the utter destruction of innocence in the young.
A moment's thought will enable the reader to appreciate the evils
of it. But if it is bad in the case of a respectable family, how much
more terrible is it when the children are familiarised with actually
immorality.
It is my shutting our eyes to evils that we allow them to continue
unreformed for so long. I maintain that such cases as these are fit
ones for legislative protection. The State should have the power of
rescuing its future citizens from such surroundings, and the law which
protects young children from practical hurt should also be so framed
as to protect them from moral destruction.
It is better that the ratepayers should bear a portion of the burden
of new homes for the respectable poor than that they should have to
pay twice as much in the long-run for prisons, lunatic asylums and
workhouses.
(2)
In How the Poor Live George Sims explained why
he was a supporter of the Temperance Society
(1889)
Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to
be wondered at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes
are made out of men and women who seldom know where tomorrow's meal
is coming from.
Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their
glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to those people; drink gives
them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their
senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to
live in such places.
The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell of their pestilent
homes. A copper or two, often obtained by pawning the last rag that
covers the shivering children on the bare floor at home, will buy
enough alcohol to send a woman so besotted that the wretchedness,
the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost their
grip. The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp edge from
sorrow, and leaves the drinker for awhile in a fools' paradise.
It is not only crime and vice and disorder flourish luxuriantly in
these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort bred of intemperance
of the inhabitants, but the effect upon the children is terrible.
The offspring of drunken fathers and mothers inherit not only a tendency
to vice, but they come into the world physically and mentally unfit
to conquer in life's battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen child-object
one comes upon in these localities is the most painful part of our
explorers' experience. The country asylums are crowded with pauper
idiots and lunatics, who owe their wretched condition of the sin of
the parents, and the rates are heavily burdened with the maintenance
of the idiot offspring of drunkenness.
(3)
George Sims,
Horrible London (1889)
More than one-fourth of the daily earnings of the citizens of the
slums goes over the bars of the public-houses and gin-places. On a
Saturday night, butchers, bakers, greengrocers, clothiers, furniture
dealers, all the caterers for the wants of the populace, are open
till a late hour; there are hundreds of them trading around and about,
but the whole lot do not take as much money as three publicans - that
is a fact ghastly enough in all conscience. Enter the public-houses,
and you will see them crammed. Here are artisans and labourers drinking
away the wages that ought to clothe their little ones. Here are the
women squandering the money that would purchase food, for the lack
of which the children are dying.
The time to see the result of a Saturday night's heavy drinking in
a low neighbourhood is after the houses are closed. Then you meet
dozens of poor wretches reeling home to their miserable dens; some
of them roll across the roadway and fall, cutting themselves till
the blood flows. Every penny in some instances has gone in drink.
All honour to the brave temperance workers who have already done so
much to diminish the evil. In this district such men are labouring
night and day. No one now disputes the good which temperance can accomplish.
It will strengthen the hands of those who are trying to wean the thriftless
poor from drink, if we give the people better homes and enforce sanitary
laws.
The temperance advocates have accomplished much - they will accomplish
more; but if they wish to check the evil in its hotbed, they must
be among the strongest advocates of the proper housing of the poor.
To say, because a certain proportion of the poor are drunkards, it
is useless to try and improve the social conditions of the masses,
is like refusing to send the lifeboat to a sinking ship because half
the crew are already known to be drowned.
(4)
George Sims, How the Poor Live (1889)
The man in his shirt-sleeves receives us
courteously. His wife apologizes for the wretched condition of the
room. both of them speak with that unmistakable timbre of voice which
betokens a smattering of education. In the corner of the room is a
heap of rags. That is the bed. there are two children, a boy and a
girl, sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the fast-dying embers
of a wretched fire. Furniture the room has absolutely none, but a
stool roughly constructed of three pieces of unplanned wood nailed
together.
Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the pie-shop;
the foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the basement, and
the utter neglect of all sanitary precautions. The man (who has only
one arm) is out of work this week, he tells us, but he is promised
a job next. To tide over till then is a work of some difficulty, but
the 'sticks' and the 'wardrobe' of the family have paid the rent up
to now. As to meals - well, they ain't got much appetite. The stench
in which they live effectively destroys that. In this instance every
bad drainage has its advantages, you see.
Before the man lost his arm he was a clerk; without a right hand he
is not much good as a penman in a competitive market. So he goes on
as a timekeeper in a builder's yard, as a messenger, or as anything
by which he can get a few shillings for a living.
The children have not been to school. "Why?" asks the officer
who accompanies us. "Because they've no boots, and they are both
ill now." The children's boots have gone with the father's coat,
and at present it does seem hard to say that the parents must be fined
unless the children come barefooted through the sloppy streets to
school.
(5)
George Sims, How the Poor Live (1889)
Compulsory education is a national benefit. I am one of its stoutest
defenders, but it is idle to deny that it is an Act which has gravely
increased the burdens of the poor earning precarious livelihoods;
and as self-preservation is the first law of nature, there is small
wonder that every dodge that craft and cunning can suggest it practised
to evade it.
In many cases the payment of the fees is a most serious difficulty.
Twopence or a penny a week for each of four children is not much,
you may say; but where the difference between the weekly income and
the rent is only a couple of shillings or so, I assure you the coppers
represent so many meals.
Many of the children who are of school age are of a wage-earning age
also, and their enforced 'idleness', as their parents call it, means
a very serious blow to the family exchequer. Often these children
are the sole bread-winners, and then the position is indeed a hard
nut for the kind-hearted official to crack.
(6)
George Sims,
How the Poor Live (1889)
Space after space has been cleared under the provisions of the Artisans'
Dwellings Act. Space after space has been cleared under the provisions
of this Act, thousands upon thousands of families have been rendered
homeless by the demolition of whole acres of the slums where they
hid their heads, and in scores of instances the work of improvement
has stopped with the pulling down. To this day the cleared spaces
stand empty - a cemetery for cats, a last resting-place for worn-out
boots and tea-kettles. The consequence of this is, that the hardships
of the displaced families have been increased a hundredfold. So limited
is now the accommodation for the class whose wage-earning power is
of the smallest, that in the few quarters left open to them rents
have gone up 100 per cent in five years.
(7)
George
Sims, How the Poor Live (1889)
M.P.'s do not drive through Whitechapel, nor do they take their
constitutional in the back slums of Westminster and Drury Lane.
What the eye does not see the heart does not grieve after, and the
conservative spirit born and bred in Englishmen makes them loath
to start a crusade against any system of wrong until its victims
have begun to start a crusade of their own - to demonstrate in Trafalgar
Square, and to hold meetings in Hyde Park. There is a disposition
in this country not to know that a dog is hungry till it growls,
and it is only when it goes from growling to snarling, and from
snarling to sniffing viciously in the vicinity of somebody's leg,
that the somebody thinks it time to send out a flag of truce in
the shape of a bone.
To leave the world a little better than he found it is the best
aim a man can have in life, and no labour earns so sweet and so
lasting a reward as that which has for its object the happiness
of others.
How long the scandal which disgraces the age shall continue depends
greatly, therefore, good reader, upon your individual exertions.
If I have enlisted your sympathy, pass from a recruit to a good
soldier of the cause, and help with all your will and all your strength
to make so sad a story as this impossible when in future years abler
pens than mine shall perhaps once again attempt to tell you.
(8)
George
Sims, My Life (1917)
My grandfather, John Dinmore Stevenson, was one of the leaders of
the Chartist movement. In 1848 the Chartists made the strategic
mistake of threatening to use force in order to obtain their demands.
My grandfather went off to join the Chartists in the great demonstration
on Kennington Common, and to act as one of the leaders in the threatened
advance upon Westminster, and my father was at the same time sworn
in as a special constable, and armed with his staff of office went
forth to protect London from my grandfather.
The Kennington Common affair was a terrible fiasco. The heavens,
I believe, wept over it so profusely that the ardour of the rebels
was damped in the deluge. My grandfather came back to our house
soaked to the skin, changed his clothes, and sat down to tea with
the special constable. And there was peace between them.
(9)
George
Sims, My Life (1917)
The journalistic campaigns of which I am proudest are those
I have been permitted to undertake on behalf of the children and
the youth of the vast and mighty city in which I was born. I have
always received the generous assistance of my friends the officers
and officials of the Metropolitan Police.
When I was writing The Cry of the Children I received the
greatest assistance from the police, who were as keenly interested
as I was in a campaign that had for its object the safeguarding
of infant life. It was in connection with this investigation that
for many weeks I walked about London in every direction through
the long night and often far into the dawn, and was able to publish
facts with regard to the infamous White Slave traffic that was carried
on by foreigners - principally Germans.
As a journalist I followed the Jack the Ripper crimes at close quarters.
I had a personal interest in the matter, for my portrait, which
appeared outside the cover of a sixpenny edition of my Social
Kaleidoscope, was taken to Scotland Yard by a coffee-stall keeper
(who had a conversation with Jack the Ripper on the night of the
double murder) as the likeness of the assassin. But it was quite
a pardonable mistake. The redoubtable Ripper was not unlike me as
I was at that time.
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