round about a pound a week

I’ve been pulling together lots of stuff recently on the work of the social reformers of the early 20th century. Lesser known than Charles Booth’s study of London, or Seebohm Rowntree’s investigation of York, is Maud Pember Reeves’ Round About A Pound A Week with the Fabian Women’s Group in Lambeth, my very own borough, almost exactly one hundred years ago.

Like Booth and Rowntree, Pember Reeves and her fellow women investigators conducted a version of ethnographic research to understand life for families living on between 18s and 30s a week – not the poorest, but those families where the men had some kind of work (not entirely dissimilar, perhaps, to the ‘just coping’ families we worked with in Kent). They documented daily routines in minute detail, capturing menus, children’s moods, the isolation of many of the mothers, and who went without what to keep going. They found many of their assumptions to be wrong when confronted with such family life. For example, Pember Reeves notes that they thought that drink would be the source of many of the problems. In fact, the men were unable to drink on this kind of income.

Her report had a powerful impact. Her work shocked people by revealing the depth of poverty that kids were growing up in. Her final chapter, on the state’s role in tackling such poverty, begins with an extract from The Times, which is worth quoting:

Because they are the children of the nation, the nation owes them all the care that a mother owes to her own child. Because they are the future nation, the nation can only neglect them to its own hurt and undoing. That is a law of life which is proved up to the hilt by the bitter and humiliating experience of a large proportion of the disease and mortality and crime in our homes and hospitals and asylums and prisons. But it is a law of life which also carries with it this further truth – that the nation’s children are the nation’s opportunity.

Pember Reeves made a clear moral, social and political case for tackling poverty that brought together stories with cold hard facts and policy analysis. Time for some more of that. And time to find a way of making connecting it to the Children’s Party idea I’ve blogged about before…