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REPORTOF

The Lancet Special Sanitary CommissionON THE

POLISH COLONY OF JEW TAILORS.

THE foreign Jews, who for many years have been flockingto the East-end of London, are so numerous that their pre.sence seriously affects the social and sanitary condition ojthis part of the metropolis. Dr. Dorgel, in his work on the"German Colony in London," estimates the number of hisfellow-countrymen at the East-end at 130,000, the majorityof whom are Jews. But the recent persecutions in Russiahave necessitated a further exodus, and now there are closeupon 30,000 Russo-Polish Jews huddled together in districtsthat were already overcrowded. Not only are the Jewsfrom Russia all of Polish origin, but a very large proportionof the German Jews are also from the Pjlish provinces.Hence we have to deal with a large population of Jews inblood and creed, but to a great extent Poles in their in-

stincts, customs, and predilections. Even in its Jewish

aspect this colony is thoroughly foreign, for the eastern Jewis very different from the western, who indeed is lookeddown upon as almost a heretic. In one respect, however,this is fortunate, as the orthodox Jews are more likely toobserve those regulations affecting diet which have greatlycontributed to maintain the health and vigour of the race.On the other hand, the rigorous observance of the Sabbathmakes it difficult for these men to obtain work in otherthan Jewish workshops, and this obstacle tends to lowerthe wages, which at best are not high enough for the main.tenance of health. It is needless to say that, with but fewexceptions, the members of this Jewish colony are all ex-

tremely poor, and it is so difficult for them to obtain thebarest subsistence that the Jewish Board of Guardians, andall the eminent and philanthropic Jews who contribute solargely to the charities instituted to relieve their poorerbrethren, use every possible influence to prevent any moreemigrants from coming to England. It is well known thatno assistance is given to any Jew by Poor-law guardiansunless he has resided at least six months in England. TheJews themselves recognise that they are overcrowding thelabour market, and therefore it is time that the question at Iissue should be taken into serious consideration by othersthan the local authorities.Under these circumstances we have instituted an inquiry

among the Jews in the East-end of London, and visited alarge number of their homes and workshops. In these ex-plorations we found that all the difficulties attached to thequestion of the housing of the poor are aggravated by thespecial habits of this peculiar people.In Southern Russia the artisan class is composed almost

exclusively of Polish Jews; and, unlike their English co-religionists, their first idea is not to trade, but to work.Hence they have created an industrial colony, where themajority are producers, the victims of middlemen rather thanmiddlemen themselves. But those among them who havelived long enough in England to acquire some knowledge ofEnglish, and who possess a small capital, are able to profit,in an exceptional manner, by the forlorn condition of theirfellow-countrymen. The Polish Jew, refugee or exile, arrivesin London penniless, and unable to speak a word of English.He is rarely able to find employment in his own trade, andmust go to the Jew "sweater," who alone knows his lan-guage, and will not ask him to work on the Sabbath. Themarket where he can sell his labour is thus restricted to verynarrow limits. The employer is master of the situation andcan impose any condition. The unfortunate worker greedilyaccepts starvation wages, and even assists his employer todefy the Factory Act, the Sanitary Act, and other laws insti-tuted to protect him, fearing that, by availing himself of our

legislature, he may lose the little he is able to earn. Suchare the economic circumstances which have brought about astate of affairs that urgently require reform.The principal grievance to be brought against these Jew

tailors of the East-end is that they work in unwholesome,overcrowded houses, where girls and women are kept toilinglong after the hours prescribed by the Factory and Work-shops Act. These facts are undoubted and undenied byall who live in the neighbourhood ; and though in someworkshops the stipulations of the Factory Act are observed,their avoidance is very general. After considerable difficultywe obtained the addresses of several "sweating" tailorswhere women worked beyond the time prescribed by law.The first of these workshops was kept by a RussianPolish Jew. The tailoring was done in a small irrega-larly-shaped room with a very low ceiling, where, wewere assured, no more than six persons worked together,but on counting those present we found no less than tenmen and women bent over their tasks at the very momentof our unexpected visit. The whole house was in a ruinousstate ; a wretched and rickety staircase led past the roomsoccupied by lodgers to the workshop in the attic. Therewas but one closet for all the inhabitants and the work.people, and, as a natural consequence, it was in a foulcondition.In Hanbury-street we found eighteen workers crowded in

a small room measuring eight yards by four yards and ahalf, and not quite eight feet high. The first two floors ofthis house were let out to lodgers, who were also Jews.Their rooms were clean but damp, as the water was comingthrough the rotting wall. The doors fitted badly, and thelocks would not act. In one room the window-frame wasalmost falling into the street ; in another the floor wasbroken, and the fireplace giving way. The boards of thestairs were so worn that in some places they were only aquarter of an inch thick, and broke under extra pressure.The sink was not trapped, the kitchen range was falling to.

pieces, while the closet was a permanent source of trouble.A flushing apparatus had been provided, but this dischargedthe water outside the pan ; the water consequently cameout under the seat and flowed across the yard to the wall oppo-site, which was eaten away at its base. There is a drainunder the water tap, but the yard naturally inclines towardsthe wall, where the slops accumulate and emit foul odours.Yet the tailor who hired this miserable abode showed us areceipt for £ 17 in payment of only one quarter’s rent. Itseems preposterous that 968 should be charged for ahouse literally falling to pieces, and containing only sixrooms. When, further, we consider that the top room,though the largest, had at times to hold eighteen persons,working in the heat of the gas and the stoves for warmingthe pressing irons, surrounded by mounds of dust and chipsfrom the cut cloth, breathing an atmosphere full of woollenparticles containing more or less injurious dyes, it is notsurprising that so large a proportion of working tailors breakdown from diseases of ti2e respiratory organs. In Wilks-street we went over some workshops recently opened in newhouses. The ceilings were more elevated, the surroundingsclean, and the printed forms on the wall showed that theyhad been duly visited by the factory inspector. But, in spiteof this, it is impossible to convert one or two rooms of aprivate house into a good workshop. The ventilation wasdefective even in the best of these private workrooms. Thesame may be said of the houses we inspected in Heanage-street. Here great professions were made of respect for theFactory Act; but, on the other hand, even the mastersthemselves acknowledged that where the Factory Act isapplied the women are on]y paid for three quarters of a day.If a woman wishes to earn a full day’s wage, she must workfrom eight in the morning till eleven or twelve at night.This is freely done even in the workshops visited by thefactory inspector ; nor do we see any regulation in the lawcalculated to defeat the practice. The workshops are

but rarely inspected either early in the morning or

late at night, and our appearance after nine causedquite a panic ; the master tailors freely expostulatingtbat visits at such hours were illegal. But at each callwe found women still at work. On the appearance of anystranger the women are often distributed throughout theprivate parts of the house-in the bedrooms, kitchens, andso forth. If any question is asked, there is always a readyreply-the one is a niece, the other is a daughter ; and ifthey are working, it is only for the family, and not in thepursuit of their trade. These explanations are often absolute

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falsehoods, but the foreign Jew workwomen are, for thereasons we have described, in so dependent a position thatthey dare not rise and contradict their employer. They willeven answer questions falsely, so as to avoid the applicationof the Factory Act. It is absolutely useless to question theworkwomen in the presence of their employers ; they cannotsay how long they work, how little time is allowed for theirmeals, unless they feel ceitain that such revelations will notbe brought home to them, entailing the loss of their meansof livelihood. The evil cannot be uprooted by official visitspaid in the broad daylight; it must be dealt with by thesame methods as those employed in the detection of ordinarycrime.

Tailoring of the poorest description will be seen moreespecially in Pelham-street, Spitalfields. This is a peculiarand miserable thoroughfare. Nearly every one of thesmall low-class houses, on either side of the street, con-tains one or two workrooms. At all hours of the day andnight the street resounds with the rattle and whirr of theinnumerable sewing machines, the windows shine with theflare of gas, but the street is comparatively deserted. Thereare but one or two Christians in the whole of the street,and these are at least as poor and miserable as their Jewneighbours. Here also we entered a large number of thehouses, and found none of the closets provided with water.The staircases were extremely small, very dirty, and coveredwith the dust from the cloth, which apparently no one everthought of removing. In some cases there was only onecloset for two houses, and no one in particular seemedanxious to maintain it in any degree of cleanliness. Oneroom was tenanted by a woman, her husband, and threechildren. By the window and close to the bed two cripples,who were called assistants, sat huddled together on a tailor’stable hard at work, helping this family to manufactureclothes in what was at once the sleeping-room, the nursery,the kitchen, the workshop, and the living-room; and, to makematters worse, the rain had been coming through the roof for thelast two winters. Close by, in Hanbury-street, we had occa-sion to notice that the dustbins of the houses where Jewishtailors work are very often specially offensive. Even theconstant and rapid removal of the dust does not suffice toobliterate the evil. The rubbish often becomes so foul thatsteam is seen rising from the heap. The large quantityof refuse from the fish, which forms a staple of the Jewishdiet, mixing with the cloth dust coming from the workroomsmay, perhaps, contribute to create this unpleasantness, andunder these circumstances we would strongly urge theextensive use of disinfectants.On questioning the police in this neighbourhood, they testi-

fied to the fact that they have often seen women returningfrom work at 1 o’clock in the morning. One policeman toldus he frequently heard the machines as late as 2 o’clock inthe morning, and that they began again at 7 o’clock. Inone street there was a house where women worked from7 o’clock in the morning till 1.30 at night; and in another iwe surprised some young girls working at about 10 atnight, though they hid in a back room on our approach.As a natural result the stamina of both the men andwomen is greatly reduced. When compared with themore prosperous English Jews and the English working-classes, these foreign Jews seem weak in muscle, emaciatedin frame, and stunted in growth. Their pale unwholesomecomplexions and dejected attitudes clearly indicate that thelaw has failed to protect them from the deteriorating effectsof overwork and overcrowding.

Whitechapel has never thoroughly recovered from theovercrowding that arose when, night after night, waggonloads of poor Jews were brought up from the docks, wherethey had just arrived still panic-stricken from Russia.Starving and penniless, glad to have escaped with theirlives, they thronged the poor dwellings of Fashion-streetand neighbourhood. The population of the WhitechapelUnion has, it is true, decreased to the extent of 6000 personswithin the last ten years, but in the parish of Christ Church,Spitalfields, where the Jews mostly congregate, there hasbeen an increase of 1000 inhabitants. About 22,000 personslive in the parish, and the augmentation in their number is avery serious matter, for not only are there no houses vacantto accommodate the new arrivals, but an entire street of oldhouses was recently pulled down. Thus, though the generalpopulation may not be so numerous, the specific overcrowd-ing in a particular class of dwellings is greatly aggravated.One of the poorest of the Jewish quarters is known as Tenter-ground. There is no tailoring done here, but many of the

poorer workers live on this spot. In Emely-place, a part ofthe district, we found five persons living in one room, whilein another house we came upon a Jewish potato dealer whokept his wife, live children, and his stock of potatoeB allin one room measuring five by six yards. There was butone bed in the room, and probably some of the family slepton the floor. The potato dealer was utterly unaware thatsuch overcrowding was illegal. He seemed very prond ofhis family, and complained only of a strong smell of drain.age which came from a cupboard in the corner of theroom, where the damp wall suggested the proximity.of a broken pipe. Many of these overcrowded tenementswere so dilapidated that there were neither locks norkeys, and it was impossible to shut up the houses. InButler-street, close at hand, the drains of two or threehouses, though trapped, emitted such foul odours that wecould but conjecture the pipes to be broken. In the choleraoutbreak of 1866, this district suffered severely, though themore prosperous Jews, living in other quarters, have shownremarkable immunity from epidemic disease. Describingthis locality, in his report for 1867, Dr. John Little states:"As the result of an inspection of the sanitary conditionof the houses of the Jewish poor made some time ago, it wasreported that of 311 houses visited promiscuously, 245 exhi-bited sanitary defects of some kind or another. The defectsprincipally complained of were defective drainage, deficientwater-supply, untrapped gullies, accumulation of dust,overcrowding, filthy ceilings and walls, decayed floors, anddeficient means of ventilation." Some eighteen years haveelapsed since this was written, but it still applies in almostevery detail. The water-supply is improved, but there areno means of flushing the drains. Most of the gullies havebeen trapped, though in many instances only bell traps areused, that soon get out of order, and the ordinary gully-trapsare often broken.While the old districts have scarcely improved, the con.

dition of the newer houses is hardly better. We visited,for instance, Shepherd’s-buildings, a large block of dwell.ings erected some three years ago overlooking Tenter.ground,and consisting of thirty-nine separate tenements, inhabitedby about 150 persons. Some of the rooms are so dark thatcandles have to be lit in the middle of the day, and out of thefifteen waterclosets four were broken and only one clean.Though provided with a waste-preventer and a flush of ninegallons, the whole system was so foreign to the inhabitantsthat they had not yet learnt to pull the chain so as to flushand clear the pan. In Booth-street there are similar blockscontaining 230 rooms with some 700 inhabitants. Here theclosets were neglected, soiled and damaged to such an extentthat they were ultimately removed to the yard so as to avoidinfecting the house. Now, however, the inhabitants, manyof them foreign Jews, objecting to descend the stairs, simplythrow the soil out of the windows, according to the practiceof the Middle Ages.All things considered, it will be seen that the presence

in our midst of this numerous colony of foreign Jews givesrise to a sanitary problem of a most complicated nature.Their uncleanly habits and ignorance of English ways ofliving render it difficult to maintain in a wholesome con.dition even those more modern dwellings where the system ofdrainage is well organised. On the other hand, the povertyof the emigrants who reach our shores, and the miserablenature of the "sweater’s" trade, naturally produce overworkand overcrowding. These conditions lead to the open defianceof the Factory Act and the Sanitary Act, which, we wouldurge, should in all cases, and in the face of all obstacles, bevigorously enforced. The very application of these lawswould divert the current of low-class labour from the" sweater’s " den ; and, by the force of circumstances, directit towards a more wholesome and profitable market.

HOSPITAL SATURDAY FUND.-At a council meetingof the board of delegates of this fund, held on the 26th ult.,it was announced that a conference had been arranged totake place on May 20th, to consider the best means ofworking the fund more efficiently, at which Mr. SamuelMorley, M.P., will preside. After a long discussion thefollowing motion was carried by a large majority: "Thatin the opinion of this board it is desirable to take fit andproper steps, according to the rule, to withdraw the words’non-political,’ as applied to working men’s clubs, fromthe regulations of the constitution of the Hospital SaturdayFund." The proceedings then terminated.