The Salvation Army officers gathered a great deal of information about the poor and about the causes of poverty. This showed that some of the causes of poverty were beyond the control of ordinary people. It was not their fault they were poor. William Booth understood this. He described poverty and the poor in terms of three circles: The starving and homeless, but honest poor. Those who lived by vice. And those who lived by crime.
Charles Booth (1840-1916)
Charles Booth lived in London in the Mid 1970s’. He refused to accept the official statistics that said that about 25 per cent of the working population was living in poverty. He decided to find out for himself and set up his own team of paid investigators. Over a period of around 17 years (1886-1903) he and his team investigated the living conditions, income and spending of over 4000 people and reported their findings on a regular basis. These were published between 1889 and 1903 in 17 volumes, called Life and Labour of the People in London.
Charles Booth found that nearly 31 per cent of Londoners were living below what he called the 'poverty line'. By this, he meant that they did not have the money to buy enough food, shelter and clothing. By this, he meant that they did not have the money to buy enough food, shelter and clothing. He divided the poor into four groups:
- Class A: The lowest Class: Street sellers, criminals, loafers. Their life is the life of savages with extreme hardship. 11,000 or 1.25% of the poor.
- Class B: Casual earnings: widows and deserted women; part-time labourers; many shiftless and helpless. 110,000 or 11.25% of the poor.
- Class C: Occasional earnings: hit by trade depressions. 75,000 or 8% of the poor.
- Class D: Low wages: less than 21 shillings a week; wages barely enough to stay alive. Includes dock labourers and gas workers. 129,000 or 14.5% of the poor.
Perhaps more importantly, Booth worked out that 85 per cent of people living in poverty were poor because of problems relating to unemployment and low wages. In other words, poverty wasn't their own fault, as so many Victorians had believed.
Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954)
Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree belonged to the family of York-based chocolate manufacturers. The family were Quakers and their principles led them to treat their workers well, by the standards of the time. Rowntree was particularly interested in Charles Booth's findings about the London poor and wanted to see whether what he had discovered was also true of poor people in York.
He calculated that a family of five (two parents and three children) could live on 21 shillings and 8 pence a week. Using this as his baseline he found that around 28 per cent of the population of York were living in poverty. He divided this poverty into two kinds:
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Primary poverty: No matter how hard a family worked, they would never earn enough to provide themselves with adequate good, shelter and clothing. These families didn’t stand a chance.
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Secondary poverty: These families could just about feed, clothe and shelter themselves, providing there were no additional calls on their income. These families were living on the edge.
About 10% of the people of York were living in primary poverty and around 18 percent in secondary poverty. Rowntree then drew on Booth’s idea of a poverty line and worked out when individuals might find themselves above or below the line.
Why did poverty become a political issue?
- Seebohm Rowntree's book, ‘Poverty: a Study of Town Life’ was read by thousands of people and Charles Booth's books on the labouring poor in London were consulted by hundreds more. Some of these people, like the young MP Winston Churchill, would soon be in a position to do something about the grinding poverty in which millions lived.
- In 1899, the British army began fighting the Boer settlers in South Africa. Young men volunteered to fight and in their thousands they were rejected as unfit. In some industrial areas of Britain, as many as two out of three volunteers were turned down because they failed the army medical examination. This was worrying enough in itself, but there were wider implications. The economies of countries such as Germany and the USA were highly successful because of the skills and hard work of their workforces. It looked as if the British workforce hadn't got the strength or the stamina to compete.
- In 1900, all the socialist groups in Britain came together and formed the Labour Party. This new political party pledged to get better living and working conditions for working people as well as a fairer distribution of the country's wealth. The Liberal Party was afraid that the Labour Party would take members and votes from them.
