We… climb one more rickety staircase, grimy, dirt-mantled, and dark, in a court off Pinnell street, where room after room is occupied by families. No ray of light finds its way there, and as you touch the greasy, clammy walls to keep your footing on the crazy steps the coating of filth sticks to your fingers. 

Apart from a few archaic-sounding terms, this paragraph could have come straight from one of the many recent hard-hitting reports into the state of the UK’s housing. In fact, it’s from 1883, when a series of articles in a local paper brought home to unsuspecting Bristolians the extent of the misery in some of the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

Homes of the Bristol Poor told of how sickness and unemployment left families pawning or selling clothes, furniture and everything they had just to buy food, where women took in washing, pasted labels on matchboxes or sold firewood to feed their starving children. 

It was also the first instance of what we would now call investigative reporting by any local paper. 

At a time before national newspapers had made any inroads, Victorian Bristol had three morning dailies: the Bristol Mercury (Liberal), the Bristol Times & Mirror (Tory) and the Western Daily Press (Liberal-ish). They are valuable resources for historians, but to the casual reader they’re a possible cure for insomnia: pages of dense type in even denser language, no pictures, and coverage of long-forgotten political disputes.

It would be hard to overstate what a radical journalistic initiative Homes of the Bristol Poor was – reporters in the 1880s simply didn’t look into the lives of the working classes. 

The author toured the worst neighbourhoods of the city over several weeks, and as Victorian newspapers hardly ever carried bylines, most readers would not have known who he was. 

In fact, he was James Crosby, the Mercury’s chief reporter, working under editor John Latimer – who would soon retire to research and write his great local histories, the Annals of Bristol.

Central Bristol’s slums

Homes of the Bristol Poor opens with a long account of how housing in Bristol had improved in recent decades, with Bristol now one of the healthiest cities in Britain, despite its explosive population growth. The rate of premature deaths had shown a steady decline since the mid-1800s thanks to clean drinking water and various public health initiatives. 

His reports took in what’s now Broadmead/Cabot Circus, then a dense warren of narrow streets and lanes mingled with warehousing and factories. We also visit St Jude’s and St Agnes parishes, St Philip’s (‘The Marsh’), Redcliffe, Bedminster and Hotwells. 

Some of these neighbourhoods boasted relatively new housing, though often of poor quality. But in much of central Bristol, Hotwells and Redcliffe, older buildings had turned into slums. 

It would be hard to overstate what a radical journalistic initiative Homes of the Bristol Poor was

Crosby explored some of these ‘courts’ – around a small open space the houses were rented out, room by room, through ancient and complex patterns of landlordism. Bristol had about 600 of these – often just alleyways, and often ‘blind’ in that they only had an entrance at one end and a dead end at the other. Most, apart from the smallest, were in multiple occupation, the very poorest families occupying a single room. 

Many who didn’t live in the courts regarded them as a quaint and distinctive feature of the city. You can see why if you seek out Albion Chambers off Small Street, or Tailors Court off Broad Street. They’ll give you some idea of the hundreds of little courts that once honeycombed the city. But life here could be very hard.

In one: The poor woman, looking round her desolate home, says, “We have been getting rid of something every day for food. We had three little beds, but we parted with the bed-clothes last week, and yesterday I was obliged to sell the children’s clothes, leaving one of them with only one thin garment, and the others scarcely got anything now. It seems to get worse and worse every day, instead of better.”

Keeping it together

Nearly all the courts are gone now. Many were demolished before the First World War, others went in the slum clearance drives of the 1920s and 30s, and the rest were lost to wartime bombing and postwar redevelopment. 

Of the homes in other neighbourhoods he visited, some houses are still standing – for instance in Dowry Square, Hotwells, where the big houses were in multiple occupation – but many more have long since been built over. 

Even in the most desperate areas, Crosby found families keeping it together, where they had furniture and the children were adequately clothed and fed. There was no secret to their success, said Crosby. It was just about being lucky enough to have regular work, and keeping off the drink. 

This wasn’t just middle-class moralising. Alcoholism was a massive social problem in Victorian Britain. Men were often the sole breadwinners, and if they spent much or all of their wages on drink, the consequences for wives and children were catastrophic. The labour movement was just as keen on temperance as any Christian evangelist. 

Crosby observed several surreal and eccentric moments, too. In Redcliffe: … we stumble upon a curious and interesting little art gallery of a ship carpenter, who … was so devoted to the art of painting that in his leisure hours he completely covered the walls, doors, skirting boards, lintels, and shutters of his house with oil paintings. Figures of Neptunes and mermaids, satyrs and sylphs, and mythological heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses, which his creative fancy has depicted in glowing colours. 

In St Jude’s he found numerous lodging houses inhabited by men “on the tramp” – itinerant workers – often living quite comfortably, and coming from all manner of backgrounds: Men of education, who have graduated at Oxford, ministers [i.e. churchmen] … schoolmasters, town councillors from distant places … and in one case a naval officer ruled the common kitchen with something of the smartness with which he once gave his orders from the quarter-deck of a British man-of-war.

Making an impact

The broader picture, though, was of families living in desperate want. Crosby barely even hinted at things that would offend Victorian sensibilities, such as sex work or sexual abuse, but otherwise he pulled no punches. For a heartbreaking account of one tiny tragedy – and it’s not for the faint-hearted – look up the paragraphs headed “Poor Morrissey, the Street Boy”. 

The articles evidently had an impact, and were published in book form in early 1884. They prompted Bristol Corporation (now the council) to appoint an additional sanitary inspector with legal powers to order improvements to the worst dwellings. The Mercury also claimed, probably without exaggeration, that the articles were widely quoted by vicars and ministers of religion throughout the city, drawing the attention of congregations to their fellow citizens’ suffering. 

The churches were then at the forefront of attempts to relieve the worst excesses of poverty, and Crosby mentioned several times in his articles that he was being taken around Bristol by various “companions”. Some, probably all, of his guides would have been connected to local churches. 

The articles prompted Bristol clergymen to write to the local bishop, Charles Ellicott, who set up a committee to look into the state of the poor in Bristol. It produced a lengthy report making numerous recommendations.

These included the closure of unregulated slaughterhouses and the diversion of Bristol’s wealthy legacy of charitable funds towards the ‘deserving’ poor – defined by the National Archives as including “elderly, widows, orphans, the sick and disabled”. The ‘undeserving’, meanwhile – those judged unwilling to work – were left to parish poor relief or the workhouse, the last resort of the desperate. 

Nothing much changed. The lives of the poor in Bristol, as elsewhere, only got better through slowly improving prosperity and, later, the huge demand for labour caused by the First World War. What made the biggest difference was the rise of the trade union movement and the Labour Party, not the kindness of rich men or the charity of church ladies. 

James Crosby returned to his work at the Mercury and the middle-class comfort of the home he shared with his wife Marianne and eight children on Belvoir Road, St Andrews. He died in 1901, aged 63, visiting a health spa in Devon, just as the Lord Mayor was sending him a telegram wishing him a speedy recovery from his illness. 

The obituaries were effusive in their praise for his considerate, courteous and affable character. Many called Homes of the Bristol Poor his greatest achievement. 

Nothing ‘Gentleman James’ wrote for the Mercury carried his name while he was alive, but he left us a priceless and vivid snapshot of Bristol’s least fortunate citizens, frozen in time one autumn long ago.