Tiger Yard Camberwell 1933

This photo has intrigued me since I first found it a year ago. 1933 and the Daily Herald –the Labour Party paper – was reporting on campaigns about the dire state of so much working class housing in London. Even by the standards of the 1930’s sole access to water from a public tap was something of a scandal. Although the picture is dated September 6^th 1933, it turns out that it wasn’t published in the edition of that day, or, as far as I can see, anytime in that month. It has probably remained in the Herald’s archive all this time.

Tiger Yard. 6th September1933. Daily Herald Archive / National Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library http://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk

I’m struck by the idea that the two people in the photo were living in much the same sort of accommodation as their parents, and possibly even as their grand-parents. It’s likely that by 1933 gas was laid on, and possible – but not at all certain – that they had electricity. It’s hard to visualise what life was like in these two room apartments. Yes, two rooms. I’m not sure how many people were crowded into them in 1933, but I know that twenty years earlier about 100 people lived in the 18 flats which made up Tiger Yard, including more than 40 children.

The point the Herald was making was that not a lot, or not enough, had changed since before the First World War and the subsequent political promise to build ‘homes fit for heroes’.

Nevertheless, there they were in Tiger Yard Camberwell on an early autumn morning in 1933 getting ready for work, out in the yard, at the only running water source available. Is she holding a toothbrush? Are they together or just neighbours?

Tiger Arms Yard

On the 1871 OS map you can find Tiger Yard, along with Joiners Yard and a few other similar places, discreetly tucked away behind the pubs which gave them their name. The Tiger is still on the corner of Church Street, opposite Camberwell Green – it never went away, it was just rebranded for a while as the Silver Buckle, but it’s there now in 2015 with something like its earlier identity. The caption on the photo is ‘Tiger Arms Yard’ but the 1871 map indicates just ‘Tiger Yard’. The Joiners Arms, just up Denmark Hill keeps its name to this day. But The Cock, with Cock Yard has long gone, as has Lion Yard.
These houses I’m writing about are quite difficult to date. With slight differences in numbering they were certainly there in 1881. In 1884 the land was sold along with the housing and it doesn’t seem that anything was pulled down or rebuilt then. By 1911 there were clearly eighteen two room dwellings and the photo gives you a sense of how they might have looked at that time.

Although Camberwell was seen as a moderately comfortable inner London suburb –it was famous for its Victorian clerks –it also housed a large and expanding working class population generally living in crowded conditions. In the last decades of the 19th century many Camberwell people lived in crowded yards and narrow streets like Tiger Yard.
The Camberwell population had exploded from 111,000 in 1871, to 187,000 ten years later. By 1911 it reached 261,000. Today, I doubt that on that same area, which is effectively all of the current London Borough of Southwark south of Albany Rd, the population is even half what it was 1911.

Where Tiger Yard housed 100 people at the turn of the Twentieth Century what’s left is a rather barren car park behind Butterfly Walk Shopping Centre, next to Morrison’s. Yards for bins, not for people.

Tiger Yard in 1911- a community of labourers

Who lived there and what did they do? I know more about the second question than the first because the census returns are detailed about occupations. Well they are for men but more on that later. What is first clear from the 1911 census is that Tiger Yard was a community of labourers and unskilled workers. The men’s jobs were builders’ and bricklayers’ labourers, decorators and painters, handymen and carmen (delivery drivers – horse and cart mostly still), shop boys and teenage van boys .

Half the adult men in Tiger Yard worked in the building trade but it’s doubtful if any would have counted as a ‘tradesman’. Painters and decorators, while they had plenty of skills were a down trodden lot with precarious employment, as anyone who knows the contemporary novel the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist would agree.

Women’s Work

Only one of the 18 households had a female head of household at that time, Sarah Walsh a widow aged 39. The only female occupations listed were for two charwomen and eighteen year old Annie Attwood, a domestic cook. There was also twenty year old Fanny Florence Wyld who was a ‘laundress’; but this description might obscure what she actually did. Laundresses obviously worked in laundries of which many were sizable factory-like places as depicted in the recent film Suffragette. On the other hand the word sometimes signified a difference with the work of a ‘washerwoman’. Both might take in washing but a laundress might starch and iron as well. She might or might not do the mangling. The point is that much of the physical work done by women was missed by the census, and often by history.

There were 42 children in Tiger Yard; seven of the families had more than four children. Several teenage girls who did not have a listed occupation were, I think, kept busy looking after younger children. A census can only tell us what the census taker recorded. So much is hidden. In a period of sweated labour and ‘putting out’ it is very likely that many women in Tiger Yard were supplementing the family earnings with home working. This really common under -reporting of women’s work reflected the general devaluing of women’s lives at the time. Cooking, cleaning, daily shopping, washing and mangling, caring for several young children all in a two room flat on a low income was arduous to say the least. While the census focuses on the jobs of the men, the ‘bread-winners’, and also records those of the teenagers, both boys and girls, it is nearly silent about the economic activity of adult women, the mothers.

A Young and Changing Population

It is striking how young was this population. The oldest resident was 60 year old Amus Dickens, a Carman like his 23 year old son. Ruby, his 16 year old daughter, had no ‘occupation’ but it would be a good guess that she was cook, laundress, cleaner and shopper for the two men- no other adult woman recorded in this household.
Only three people were over 50 years old; nearly two-thirds were between 21 and 40. 11 teenagers either had jobs or were girls most likely looking after younger children. And remember there were 42 children. Life in Tiger Yard would have been hard and it also must have been noisy!

Looking, in ten year jumps, as far back as the 1881 census it is striking that the social profile of the yard didn’t really change. We know that poorer working class Londoners moved home frequently and between 1881 and 1911 no family in the Yard recorded on one census was recorded on the next except the Kingsburys, father and son, who were chimney sweeps. Joseph aged 53 was still not far away in Allendale Rd in 1911. Working class London lived in rented rooms and moved regularly according to circumstances- if you could afford three rooms you moved out of Tiger Yard. You might move in because work was scarce and a lower rent helped keep heads above water.

This partly explains why so few (men) had a vote. The 1913 register lists only seven men in Tiger Yard with a vote –by then there was a common voting roll both for Parliament and council elections. So a majority of men here didn’t have a vote, a lower proportion than average at the time, estimated at about 60% of adult men. The qualification for a vote was at least one year’s residency in any one place and then there were other difficulties for ‘lodgers’. Not until the 1918 electoral reform could we say that there was universal franchise for men. The same Act gave a limited franchise to women at 30.

So how did social investigators of the time perceive a community like Tiger Yard? From the 1880s London’s middle and upper classes had become increasingly anxious about the widening gulf between themselves and poorer London. Lurid, impressionistic journalism painted not just the East End, but the world of these yards and back-streets with multi-occupied houses across London as dangerous places.

Charles Booth’s street maps, produced at the end of the century, show Tiger Yard coloured dark blue with some black edging which signified, in his colour coding system, that not only were the inhabitants poor they were also dubious people.

The Ghost of Charles Booth

There is no escaping Booth’s ghost when studying working class London at the turn of the century.

LSE. Booth Archive.
Booth map 1898-1900. Tiger Yard- the two dark blue rectangles close to the Post Office, east of Denmark Hill .

According to the Booth surveys a street like Tiger Yard, coloured dark blue, housed mostly people from his Class B, “casual earnings-very poor”. This classification also labelled them as labouring people who were pathologically inadequate in many ways.

…from whatever section class B is drawn, except the sections of poor women, there will be found many of them who from shiftlessness, helplessness, idleness, or drink, are inevitably poor…
“…The wives in this class mostly do some work, and those who are sober, perhaps, work more steadily than the men…
“ …Class B, and especially the ‘labour’ part of it, is not one in which men are born and live and die, so much as a deposit of those who from mental, moral and physical reasons are incapable of better work…

I could go on and on with similar extracts but you get the point!

It doesn’t square with the limited information available from the Census. The denizens of Tiger Yard at the end of the 19th Century were undoubtedly poor. Their work was most likely casual and seasonal. But, “incapable of better work”? This equivalence of poverty with sin was, however, too typical of those who observed, albeit with sympathy and anxiety, the lives of those they struggled to understand.

There’s an obvious point to make here about Booth. His first survey studied the East End of London and drew in detail on docklands and the impoverished, overcrowded world of casual work and sweated labour. This was the Poverty series- the classification scheme and then the mapping of streets arose out of it. In fairness, the criticism that it relied only on the observations of those who had authority over the poor is not right. There was intensive field work with personal observation and interviews. The recording of these sometimes showed signs of sensitivity about the conditions and lives of people they investigated. However, the subsequent surveys, which extended to parts of London such as Camberwell, were more impressionistic and did rely much more on the observations of officials such as school board attendance officers, poor law officials, police and church workers.
There is a problem about matching up the classification above with the census account of occupations. More than a problem, it’s a fundamental difficulty.

What the 19o1 or 1911 censuses’ accounts of occupations can’t tell us about is the insecurity of work, especially for workers who lived in places like Tiger Yard. For example building work was seasonal; cold winter periods meant no work and no pay. While Booth had insight into this, placing it at the centre of his analysis, he also thought their plight was a consequence of an ‘overstocked’ labour market on one hand and of a Social Darwinian process on the other. Those who ended up in the casual, unskilled pool of labour did so as a result of being less fit than others. So back to the above comments about Class B; back to the ‘undeserving’ poor, the feckless who didn’t ( or couldn’t) try hard enough.

All this might have appealed to middle class observers but by 1911 a developing Labour and socialist critique was questioning this analysis vigorously.

Camberwell Council did finally pull down Tiger Yard in 1935 but only after the Labour Party had won a majority on the council the previous year. The day before the date on this photo the Herald had reported how the 12 Labour councillors (out of 70) were publically exposing inaction and complacency at the Council whose leading group – so called Moderates, Tories by any other name – knew as long before as 1922 that the houses had been designated unfit for human habitation.