Read Online Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell - Free Book Online

no one who read
At the Works
could possibly make such a statement again. Florence’s mission was one that could be properly promulgated even as the wife of the ironmaster whose fortune rested on the workers. Having established the facts, she analysed them. She succeeded in producing an impressive piece of social investigation and left the conclusions to the industrial sociologists and reformers who would follow. Equally, she left the emotional music to the family friend Charles Dickens, who had the God-given ability to put an unforgettable face and soul to the poorest of the poor.
    Readers of
At the Works
learnt about the poorest of the workers and “how terribly near the margin of disaster the man . . . walks, who has, in ordinary normal conditions, but just enough to keep himself on.” * Wages ranged from 18 to 80 shillings a week; readers learnt what proportionwent to the absolute necessities—rent, coal and wood, clothes and locomotion, “in a place where for many of the men the river lies between them and their work, and has to be crossed at a halfpenny a passage on a steam ferry-boat.” They learnt that the quantity of food expected to last a family of three for seven days would be consumed by a better-off family in only two. Working-class women were frequently reviled by the rich for their filthy skirts that dragged in the mud. Florence revealed the truth, which was that they did not choose to display the miserable state of their decaying footwear. She explained how teenage girls went into marriage full of hope and excitement, and how the arrival of one baby after another left them broken in health, depressed, and unable to make the physical effort demanded by cleaning, mending, and cooking: “it is not so very surprising that she should leave the clothes un-mended, that she should leave the floor unswept.” Florence describes the breakdown of marriages as the weary worker begins to look “for comfort and enjoyment out of his own home”; his life is turned in the wrong direction by his wife “not because she is ill-intentioned, but simply from her incapacity to deal with existence, however she may struggle, and above all from her failing health.” She drew the obvious comparison—with the middle-class woman who can rely on someone else to see to the cleaning and tidying. “We shall understand better if we admit this and do not try to deceive ourselves; if we frankly recognize that . . . there is regrettably one code of conduct for the rich and another for the poor.”
    As civic leaders and local benefactors, the Bells built assembly rooms, libraries, schools, and offices. Florence recognized that a place of recreation was needed in Middlesbrough, where exhausted workers could go in the evening to escape their crying babies. She wanted to provide an alternative to the pub, where men were led into spending too much of their wage packet and where fights often broke out. In 1907 she would open the Winter Garden, a large, well-warmed modern hall that was “light and bright and cheerful . . . open to anyone and everyone who chose to pay one penny.” A cup of tea and a biscuit could be had for another penny, but alcohol was
not
served. At the opening, Hugh made his usual graceful speech: there was no position he would rather hold, he declared, than that of “a fellow-worker, a captain of industry of such an army that I command”; he hoped the Winter Garden would make thelives of that army brighter and better. Women were welcome, although Florence acknowledged that most mothers had to stay at home in the evening to feed and look after their children; but, she noted joyfully on the first day, there were “Lots of women!”
    Hugh had borne the expense of clearing the site and erecting the building, and a further sum of £2,070 was raised locally. The finished hall was decorated with hanging flower baskets and supplied with billiard tables, rows of