Throughout the 1880s, Trafalgar Square had become a haven for the homeless of London.
It was also the place where protest meeting were held, and several of those rallies had ended in riots; notable Black Monday, in February, 1886, and Bloody Sunday, on the 13th of November 1887.
The Express and Echo, in its edition of Friday the 26th of August, 1887, published the following article about conditions in the square at night:-
AT NIGHT IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE
“A Midnight Visitor,” in a special article contributed to a Metropolitan contemporary, says:-
The midnight hour had chimed and the streets were beginning to look very deserted when I concluded a hurried inspection of the paupers’ dormitory in Trafalgar Square.
Here, according to public rumour, were gathered nightly a most extraordinary assembly of the outcast poor, the vagabond, and the thief.
THE SQUARE AT MIDNIGHT
“You should really see the square at midnight,” said my latest informant, and I went and saw it.
It was indeed the spacious open-air dormitory of a wondrous crew – an aggregation of these miserable units and groups that are seen in the summer nights on the Embankments and the bridges, and that are the wonder, the compassion, and the despair of those who witness them, and know not what to do to mend a state of affairs that seems so terrible and so unnatural.
In the black shadows of the square they lie, homeless in the heart of a great city, without a refuge in the neighbourhood of palaces, without a hearing for their tales of distress, or redress for their grievances, within sight of the towers of St. Stephen’s.
WHY THEY ARE NOT NOTICED
There is some reason for their being so unobserved.
All the thousands of passers-by are not priests and Levites; but the good Samaritans do not see the misery so near them.
On three sides the obscurity of the square conceals it, on the fourth it is effectually screened by the parapet at the foot of which, on the inner side, it is wrapped up in its wretchedness and rags.
Put your foot between columns of the parapet, raise yourself up and look over, and there you can dimly see the sleepers, sitting, lying, sprawling, and crouching along the whole length of the wall-foot.
WHERE THEY REPOSE
Within the railed-off corners they are all lying, a grimy bad-looking lot.
There are benches two or three yards in front.
These offer accommodation for a second line of the loafers.
Many women in the tawdry bonnets and long black shawls common to the begging tribe are settled there for the night, while men who have come too late for the seats, or maybe have been chivalrous enough to abandon to the other sex, are coiled up on the ground behind.
NUMBERS NOT SO LARGE
On the steps leading up towards the National Gallery are some late comers, and all along the two sides of the enclosure, as you walk down towards Parliament-street, human beings are lying well in the deep shadow of the wall.
The numbers are, however, by no means so large this morning as the last report that reached me had led me to anticipate.
Some two or three hundred may be easily counted, but rumour had doubled, perhaps multiplied, that sum.
Rumour, one of the people told me, had not gone far wrong; for a multitude who had found a habitation in the square on the previous night had gone into Kent for the hopping; and, moreover, I was told that if I waited till two o’clock I should see there were more to come.
THE GIRL WITH THE BABY
In the centre of the tramp-like figures who were taking refuge under the wall was a brightly-dressed girl of about nineteen, a curious contrast to the wretched-looking men and women on each side.
She bad a baby in her arms, and young fellows protecting her on either side.
“Who is she?” I inquired.
“They call her “the Queen of the Square,” said a policeman laughing.
“She is always here. She prefers being among those people to being anywhere else. The baby is not her own. She is minding it for another woman, who herself has ten shillings a week for the maintenance of it, and yet is content to live in the square.”
“The Queen” herself, when spoken to, giggled a good deal, but was not readily drawn out.
Her companions were eloquent denunciators of the workhouse, which they said a man would be crazy to go into while there was a Trafalgar-square, the prison or the Thames in which to seek passing or everlasting refuge.
A DIRTY CROWD
Prolonged conversation was rendered impossible by the closing in around the visitor of a dirty crowd from which escape was in every respect desirable.
There was also in the square I was told a woman recognised by the name of “the Duchess of Devonshire.”
She for the moment was missing.
Underneath the side walls some old stagers had disposed themselves in a tolerably comfortable manner.
NEWSPAPER BLANKETS
One man or woman, it was impossible to tell which in the gloom, was snugly wrapped up in a canvass, from which a pair of not bad looking shoes peeped out.
This figure, however, was an exception.
The nearest approach to a blanket possessed by most of these London vagrants was a newspaper.
Many had a fancy for this kind of wrap who had not been able to obtain enough to cover them.
These poor fellows were content if they could but cover their knees with a scrap of paper. Having done that they thrust their hands into their pockets or their rags and went to sleep with their knees up to their chins.
A BEGGAR ON THE OUTSKIRTS
Hanging on the outskirts of the square was the only man who asked me for money.
“He had been five nights ‘on the square’,” he said, because he was not able to find work after coming from Manchester in search of it.
What did he do?
Well, he was a stable-man “by profession.” He could earn twenty-two shillings a week at that work when he could get employment, and he was daily searching for it; not like others, he self-complacently told me, who would never leave the Square, preferring its liberty at night and a beggar’s life through the day.
THE HORROR OF THE CASUAL WARD
Another man, more broken in spirit, volunteered the statement that it might not be altogether his misfortune, but a good deal his fault, that he was now in such straits, but he murmured, the life-long punishment for one offence bitterly repented of was hard.
He shared with others whose story had not inspired the same confidence or sympathy a cordial detestation of the casual ward.
The poorest and the meanest of human beings are sensitive to slights and harsh tones and contemptuous treatment.
The stories told in Trafalgar-square leave in the mind a strong suspicion that there must be a want of discretion, discrimination, and tenderness with poverty in many of these casual wards.
The complaints of the hard tasks are bitter, but the chief complaint is that the poor are not allowed to leave the wards at a time when there is a chance of their entering the daily competition for employment.
SOME LIKE THEIR FREEDOM
There are different views taken of the condition of the people in Trafalgar square.
Some of the strange groups on the square use it for a rendezvous.
Parents were waiting there this morning for a child whom they scolded for bringing home no more than fourteen pence.
Other children were confiding to each other that they had not enough to go home with.
As for those who remain there, some of the police evidently think that pity is thrown away upon them, that the majority are happy in their freedom, and are only desirous not to be molested.