Ten years in a Portsmouth slum

I did not really begin my work till September 29th, 1885, but as Dr. Linklater wanted to go away, I came down to help on Sundays, and, therefore, I had the opportunity of learning something about the district before my work really began. A very wise priest once said to me, “Don’t make plans for your parish, let your parish make plans for itself.” These six weeks were invaluable, letting me hear the parish voices, and try to discover its plans. Two notes were always making themselves heard; one was the poverty, the other was the sin. And surely they explained each other; they were sinful as a rule, because they were poor. A man who falls from a height is wounded to death, every limb is shattered, every feature disfigured. He who slips on the pavement by a casual chance, pulls himself up, and goes on unhurt. Oh, most blessed truth! our falls in Portsmouth entailed no complete destruction of character, hardly any disfigurement at all. Boys stole, because stealing seemed to them the only method of living; men were drunken because their stomachs were empty, and the public-house was the only cheerful place of entertainment, the only home of good fellowship and kindliness; girls sinned, because their mothers had sinned before them, oftentimes their grandmothers too, unconscious of any shame in it, regarding it as a necessary circumstance of life, if they were to live at all. The soul unquickened, the body alone is depraved, and, therefore, the highest part is still capable of the most beautiful development. I wish I had any words in which I could put this thought quite plainly before you. It lies at the keynote of all missionary work, and it is what makes missionary work so full of hope.

My first Sunday afternoon, as I was walking in Chance Street, I saw, for the first time, a Landport dance. Two girls, their only clothing a pair of sailors’ trousers each, and two sailor lads, their only clothing the girls’ petticoats, were dancing a kind of breakdown up and down the street, all the neighbours looking on amused but unastonished, until one couple, the worse for drink, toppled over. I stepped forward to help them up, but my endeavour was evidently looked upon from a hostile point of view, for the parish voice was translated into a shower of stones, until the unfallen sailor cried out, “Don’t touch the Holy Joe. He doesn’t look such a bad sort.” I could not stay to cement our friendship, for the bell was ringing for children’s service, and, to my horror, I found that some of the children in going to church had witnessed the whole of this scene. They evidently looked upon it as quite a legitimate Sunday afternoon’s entertainment. One little girl, of about eight, volunteered the name of the two dancing girls; she was a kind of little servant in the house, though she slept two or three doors off, and her only dread was that the return of a sailor, who had more rights in the house, might take place before the others had been got rid of.

You can imagine my feeling of hopelessness in conducting a service for children old in the knowledge, if not in the habits, of sin. Poor children, they had not been long accustomed to a church of their own; they had driven themselves away from the parish church by their behaviour. A neighbouring vicar, who kindly took them in for a little while, had left them in undivided enjoyment of his church, saying to Dr. Linklater, “I leave my church to you and your savage crew.” My first attempt reached a climax when two boys calmly lighted their pipes and began to smoke. One remedy alone seemed possible—to seize them by the back of the neck, and run them out of church, knocking their heads together as hard as I could. Amazed at first into silence, their tongues recovered themselves before they reached the door, and the rest of the children listened, delighted, to vocabulary which I have seldom heard excelled. We had no sooner restored order than the mothers of the two lads put in an appearance. As wine is to water, so was the conversation of the mothers to their sons’. I wish I could have closed the children’s ears as quickly as I closed the service. But they listened with extreme delight, even following me in a kind of procession, headed by the two ladies, to my lodgings. The contrast between this, my first procession, and the last, which took place when my church was opened, is a true measure of the difference which ten years have made.

These two little episodes, which stand out so plainly in my memory, forced upon me the knowledge of our shameless sinfulness, and of our utter lawlessness and disobedience. But was it any wonder that it should be so? The wages of the majority of the people in regular employment were so small that they lived in continuous poverty; the larger part had no settled wages at all, many of them being hawkers, greengrocers with a capital of five shillings, window cleaners in a district where no one wanted their windows cleaned, old pensioners past work with a shilling to eighteenpence a day, sailors’ wives with three or four children living upon £2 a month, and soldiers’ wives married off the strength with no pay at all. One week’s sickness of the bread-winners meant a fortnight’s living upon the pawning of clothes and furniture, with nothing before them but the workhouse, and death sooner than that. Of course, there were many exceptions to this generalisation, but I am speaking of the parish as a whole. Then, temptation at almost every door, places where you were always welcome, even if you had no money, for there is always somebody to treat you; places where there are always the outward visible signs of rollicking good-nature, of mirth and jest; places where the craving of the empty stomach can be satisfied, where the crying wife and the hungry children may be forgotten; places where, it is only just to add, extraordinary kindness is often shown, and help given in the hour of direst need, for there is a good and kindly side even to the public-house. Oh, that the bishops had the energy of the brewers! Oh, that the clergy had the persistency of the publicans! For what had the Church of England done for this district? Literally nothing. The enormous mother-parish of All Saints had its twenty-seven thousand parishioners, one church, one vicar, one curate. What even had Nonconformity done in its more recognised forms? One chapel, empty, minister and congregation having migrated to more favoured climes. But though the priest and Levite had passed by, the Good Samaritan had been represented by four little centres of earnest religious work, which have flourished during my whole ten years, and still are, thank God, working for Him in S. Agatha’s district.

In one of these, the most ecclesiastical, a man, who worked six days a week in the Dockyard, laboured every night amongst the poor, and preached all day Sunday. The influence of this good Mr. Grigg will never be forgotten; many souls bless him in Paradise to-day. I shall never forget his funeral; it was the most touching sight I ever saw in Portsmouth. His example of honest labour, and of a life which proved the depth of his religious convictions, was beyond all price in the Dockyard. When you hear people talk glibly of orthodoxy, of dissent, of the exclusive rights and privileges of the Church, I pray you realize how many places would be virtually heathen, if the Church of England was the only representative of God in England. It is quite true that Nonconformity, in its more dignified congregations, fails, I think, largely in the slums; but there is a vast body of unattached Christians, or of laymen with their hearts aflame with the love of souls, with some kind of quasi-authority from more respectable chapels, preaching the Gospel literally without money and without price. Do not scoff at it, because it does not square with your own ideas. It is possible that it may be very faulty in itself. But the poor, tired, ignorant soul has no time to enter into questions like this, and the name of Jesus, when spoken by a believer, always sounds sweet in the ears of those who hear it. We cannot hope to build churches in every new district, we cannot hope to endow parishes, we cannot hope to pay adequate incomes to University-educated men. But we are the Church of England: we are responsible for the souls of every single man, woman, and child. Why cannot we create an enthusiasm amongst working men, toiling six days in the week, to give the seventh for the conversion of souls? The instrument may not be polished, may not be fitted to speak soft words politely, to enunciate theological truths exactly. What does it matter? What does it matter? We have as good stuff in the Church of England as in any other religious body. We have as much love for souls, as much self-denial, amongst our people. What hinders it? What represses it? The freehold, and the jealousy of the clergy, the fearfulness of the bishops to make any venture for faith, to allow any work to be undertaken that is not safe, that is not respectable.

Amid, then, all the sin, poverty, and squalor of S. Agatha’s district—not a new district, remember, which increase of population had created, but a district of which every house had been built a hundred years ago—the only witness for God, until Dr. Linklater came, except an endeavour which Mr. Shute, the vicar of S. Michael’s, had made some few years before, had been the devotion and love of a few poor Nonconformists.

I think the lesson, which I chiefly learned from the parish voice, was that Jesus alone could change the characters of men, and that no reformation can take place without this change of character. I realized that our Lord, if He had been in my place, would have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, healed the sick, visited those in prison; above all, removed stumbling-blocks from the ways of little children. I knew that we must try and do the same. I knew that their poverty, their nakedness, their ignorance, their punishments, were their strongest appeal; that He Himself was practically suffering in every one of them; that He was lying at our door full of sores, that we might share the wonderful privilege of healing Him. But I learned something more than this, that even if I was able to ameliorate all these circumstances, to make them all healthy, educated, able to earn a good day’s wages, I might indeed have made it easier to do the one thing needful; but that one thing would still be undone until they had discovered that they, by His grace, must cure the ills of the soul, must clothe the nakedness of the spirit, that no one could set them free from sin save themselves, and that by His grace. In other words, strive as hard as ever you might to improve environment, to conquer even heredity, unless you have changed character, man is bound to remain helpless, though his helplessness may consist in a new weakness.