Ten years in a Portsmouth slum

IN

A PORTSMOUTH SLUM

I.
My Appointment.

I fear the title of this little book is almost a libel; but, as the parent often looks upon the grown-up son as if he were still a child, so do my thoughts ever go back to the infancy of our work, and S. Agatha’s is a slum district in my mind. Though we have largely lost the outward visible signs of slumdom, poverty, of course, remains—it always will—but utter hopelessness and callous depravity have, in a large measure, passed away, not merely from our people, but from our very streets.

We are a curious little island in this great town of Portsmouth. The Unicorn Road, leading to the Dockyard, the Edinburgh Road, leading to Portsea, and the Commercial Road—the main artery of all the traffic of the town—form a kind of irregular square, with the Dockyard wall as a base; and if it were not that Charlotte Street, which in happier days used to be called “Bloody Row,” from the number of butchers’ shops in it, and slaughter-houses behind it, is the thoroughfare which the Dockyard men mostly use in reaching their homes, we should be almost an unknown spot. This kind of isolation is one of the difficulties which the municipal authorities have had to face in making Portsmouth the great city they desire to see it.

Portsmouth is composed of four separate towns. When Portsmouth and Portsea—the former thronged with soldiers, the latter with sailors—High Street, Portsmouth, being a kind of parade ground; the Hard, Portsea, a kind of inland quarter-deck—burst their bonds, and the moats were removed, they developed, on the one hand, into Southsea, inhabited mostly by half-pay officers, with many hotels and lodging-houses, and, in the other direction, into Landport and Kingston, inhabited mostly by artisans in the Dockyard. This quadruple town, with its different, and often conflicting, interests, with an extraordinarily rapid increase of population, with its absence of wealthy people, and with hardly any manufactories, has been a very difficult mass out of which to create a really united city; and yet the progress which has been made even in my ten years has been very wonderful. Southsea has become a beautiful and fashionable watering-place; we have a splendid Town Hall and People’s Park; the electric light has been most efficiently installed; the School Board has created through the town many magnificent schools; and when an attempt, which has been begun, is completed, of removing some of the slums which disgraced Portsmouth and Portsea, the town will become in some true sense worthy of its great historic interest.

All these changes have hardly affected our little district. The streets are, most of them, very narrow and quaint, named after great admirals and sea-battles, with old-world, red-tiled roofs, and interiors almost like the cabins of ships—many times I have stuck in a staircase, and could not go up or down till pulled from below—with the far-off scent of the sea coming over the mud of the harbour, and every now and then the boom of a cannon, or the shrill shriek of the siren; sailors everywhere, sometimes fighting, sometimes courting, nearly always laughing and good-humoured, except when afraid that they have broken their leave—our chief joy, alas! oftentimes our greatest danger. I remember well how, the first night I made acquaintance with it, their uniforms and rolling gait redeemed from its squalor and commonplace this poor little district, with its eleven hundred little houses and its fifty-two public-houses. Charlotte Street was, from end to end, an open fair; cheap-jacks screaming; laughing crowds round them, never seeming to buy; women, straggling under the weight of a baby, trying to get the Sunday dinner a little cheaper because things had begun to get stale; great louts of lads standing at the corners—you can guess from their faces the kind of stories they are telling; then some piece of horse-play, necessitating a sudden rush through the crowd, many a cuff and many a blow, but hardly any ill-nature; slatternly women creeping out of some little public-house. But why try and describe it to you? You have seen many such spots in any of our large towns. In my mind was but one single thought—“God has sent me to teach these people that they are His children, and that, therefore, they are priceless in His eyes.”

I think if I had paid this visit before I accepted the Mission, I never should have accepted it. The shrill gaiety was a revelation to me of utter hopelessness, such as I had never imagined before. I was very seedy, too, at the time. I had left London soon after Bishop Jackson’s death—the death of a bishop seems ever to be my note of warning. Dr. Fearon had heard very kind things about me from Bishop Walsham How, and I think some old Wykehamists at New College and Magdalen must have told him about me too. But I certainly was never more surprised in my life than when I got his letter asking me to go and see him. An interview with a Headmaster, the very idea of his study, filled me with alarm. Memories of Dr. Butler’s study at Harrow came back with no pleasant suggestions. Yet I date from that interview with Dr. Fearon ten years of the happiest life that I can imagine possible for anyone. How large a part of that happiness Winchester has contributed, this little book will tell. I felt from that moment that, if the Mission was to be worthy of its name, it must achieve amongst Missions a place second to none. Even in that first visit, three facts about Winchester struck me—its simplicity, its unity, its solidity. These three notes we have tried to translate into Landport. It was three months after this visit that I first saw Winchester men at home. Yet looking back I seem to have stepped at once from Dr. Fearon’s study into the great Hall of College, so entirely in my mind was Dr. Fearon’s offer of the Mission finally ratified by the men. Dr. Linklater, with great kindness, came to introduce me to them. One of the dons said to me, as we went into the Hall, “Linklater has taken all our hearts by storm,” and that was no more than the truth—I saw it in their faces, I heard it in their cheers. Is there any discordant note so full of harmony and music as the cheers of schoolboys? And in some true sense those cheers are still ringing in my ears; they have been my incentive in the hour of sloth, my rest in the hour of weariness, ever since.

I do not think I dreaded the interview with the Bishop at Farnham nearly so much as that with Dr. Fearon. I had known many Bishops, but no Headmaster before. And, curiously, Dr. Harold Browne revealed to me the very three notes I had discovered at Winchester—most simple, most balanced, most solid. I felt he had heard strange stories about me. Indeed, I think at first he was more nervous than I was. But when I saw the overwhelming weight which Portsmouth seemed to be to him, when he told me how it was always in his prayers and in his heart, and when, though he hoped I would not do anything foolish, he left me full liberty of operation, saying that his one hope, as far as we were concerned, was that the splendid work, which Dr. Linklater had begun, might be consolidated and perfected, I left Farnham Castle with a great increase of courage and hopefulness, though I had to pawn my watch to pay for a bed, as I could not get home that night. If for a moment during the interview I had wondered why a heart so occupied with his enormous diocese had such a large part of it sacred to Portsmouth, the work and energy of Sister Emma, the head of the Deaconesses, subsequently explained to me this interest. She has had more than any other single person to do with the bettering of Portsmouth. Its sins and sorrows had burned so deeply into her heart, that she could not fail to create in anyone, who saw her constantly, a reflection of her own feelings. The Bishop having placed her and her community there, was in constant communication with her. A Commission, too, had just reported to his Lordship on the state of the town. Its most prominent members were Mr. John Pares and Admiral Hornby, the former still a most earnest defender of all that makes for righteousness in Portsmouth; the latter, alas! called from the midst of his many labours, but who, as a sailor knowing every inch of Portsea, had influenced not only the Admiralty, but all thinking men with the thought that something needed doing in Portsmouth.

These two ordeals past, a worse one remained. I had to hear from Dr. Linklater’s own lips the ideals he had created for the Landport Mission. He had sent me some of his reports; they were enough to frighten anyone from trying to follow in his footsteps. He had had efficient helpers; these I had yet to discover. He was a persona grata with the Naval and Military authorities; this, I was sure, I never would be. He had a tact in dealing with people almost unique, and a personal influence which remains in the hearts of many S. Agatha’s people still, though he has hardly been in Landport for ten years, and a buoyancy and hopefulness which disappointment seemed to increase, and even illness could not abate. When I tried to square my memory of the Saturday night which I had seen in Charlotte Street with his ideals, no problem in mathematics ever seemed so impossible.

I had never had the pleasure of seeing him, but directly I arrived at the railway station I knew him. “I cannot talk to you here,” he said; “let us get back into the train again, and go to Rowland’s Castle. I don’t want you to see Landport as it is; I want you to see it as I desire it to be.”

There is an avenue of trees—you can see it from the train, just before you get into Rowland’s Castle. I suppose that once it led up to some great mansion, but now it seems to stand alone, and it dominates the whole country.

“I want you to promise,” he said, “that you will come here once a week; better still, take a walk over these downs for four or five miles; better still, sleep in the pure country air, if possible, once a week.”

I believe if I had made time to keep this as a rule of my life, our work at Landport would have been far more successfully fulfilled. The plan of campaign—the best manner of working it out in detail—is not possible in the strife of the battle and the tumult of the conflict; this is what he wanted me to learn. One by one, as he talked them over, his ideals already seemed to have taken form—a great church with a staff of clergy, dignified services, efficient preaching, a centre of Catholic devotion, making its way through all the different strata of Portsmouth society; a free school for the children of the parish, a high school for those of a better class; social work of all kinds and descriptions, with one single intention, the drawing together into one Christian family all kinds and classes; real homes for soldiers and sailors, in which they might be equipped with that armour which alone could make them victorious in their hours of temptation; above all, to make Winchester rejoice, share, and understand every part of the work. And then, as we hurried back to Portsmouth, he said, “Now you will see what we have already achieved.”

And so, from the ideal to the real, to S. Agatha’s with its chancel screened off, its walls covered with religious pictures, all fresh and new, loving hands having painted Christian emblems all over it, good-nature and fun beaming from every face—for Dr. Linklater had gathered those connected with the church to meet me—with a joke for one, and a clout for another, we passed along, until we reached the centre of the room, and then—“Here is your new clergyman. What do you think of him?”

One of my chief causes of thankfulness to-day is that many of those in S. Agatha’s that night are still Sunday School teachers, on the altar, and earnest communicants.

As I celebrated the Holy Communion the next morning, with the debris of the party still round me, though some attempt had been made to clear it away, I was lost in amazement at my own presumption in daring to undertake a work which seemed at that moment so impossible.