Chapter II: Appendix: 241 (1)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[1]PORTRAIT OF THE REV. R. R. DOLLING _Frontispiece_

[1]OLD S. AGATHA’S _to face page_ 16

[1]SOME OF OUR WORKERS „ „ 22

[1]OUR GYMNASTS „ „ 30

[1]VISIT TO WINCHESTER, 1893 „ „ 36

[1]VISIT TO WINCHESTER, 1894 „ „ 36

[1]OUR BAND „ „ 54

[1]OUR ORPHANS „ „ 66

[1]LIPTON’S BOYS „ „ 78

[1]CHRISTMAS PARTY, 1893 „ „ 94

[1]SOME OF OUR VISITORS „ „ 98

[1]OUR SAILORS „ „ 112

[1]OUR TENANTS „ „ 128

[2]THE THIRD ALTAR „ „ 174

[2]NEW S. AGATHA’S „ „ 180

OUR CHOIR AND ACOLYTES „ „ 198

COMMUNICANTS’ LEAGUE „ „ 214

NEW S. AGATHA’S „ „ 230

[1] _Photograph by Mr. W. Austen Attree._

[2] _Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. W. & A. H. Fry,
Brighton._

TEN YEARS

IN

A PORTSMOUTH SLUM

I.

=My Appointment.=

I fear the title of this little book is almost a libel; but, as the parent often looks upon the grown-up son as if he were still a child, so do my thoughts ever go back to the infancy of our work, and S. Agatha’s is a slum district in my mind. Though we have largely lost the outward visible signs of slumdom, poverty, of course, remains--it always will--but utter hopelessness and callous depravity have, in a large measure, passed away, not merely from our people, but from our very streets.

We are a curious little island in this great town of Portsmouth. The Unicorn Road, leading to the Dockyard, the Edinburgh Road, leading to Portsea, and the Commercial Road--the main artery of all the traffic of the town--form a kind of irregular square, with the Dockyard wall as a base; and if it were not that Charlotte Street, which in happier days used to be called “Bloody Row,” from the number of butchers’ shops in it, and slaughter-houses behind it, is the thoroughfare which the Dockyard men mostly use in reaching their homes, we should be almost an unknown spot. This kind of isolation is one of the difficulties which the municipal authorities have had to face in making Portsmouth the great city they desire to see it.

Portsmouth is composed of four separate towns. When Portsmouth and Portsea--the former thronged with soldiers, the latter with sailors--High Street, Portsmouth, being a kind of parade ground; the Hard, Portsea, a kind of inland quarter-deck--burst their bonds, and the moats were removed, they developed, on the one hand, into Southsea, inhabited mostly by half-pay officers, with many hotels and lodging-houses, and, in the other direction, into Landport and Kingston, inhabited mostly by artisans in the Dockyard. This quadruple town, with its different, and often conflicting, interests, with an extraordinarily rapid increase of population, with its absence of wealthy people, and with hardly any manufactories, has been a very difficult mass out of which to create a really united city; and yet the progress which has been made even in my ten years has been very wonderful. Southsea has become a beautiful and fashionable watering-place; we have a splendid Town Hall and People’s Park; the electric light has been most efficiently installed; the School Board has created through the town many magnificent schools; and when an attempt, which has been begun, is completed, of removing some of the slums which disgraced Portsmouth and Portsea, the town will become in some true sense worthy of its great historic interest.

All these changes have hardly affected our little district. The streets are, most of them, very narrow and quaint, named after great admirals and sea-battles, with old-world, red-tiled roofs, and interiors almost like the cabins of ships--many times I have stuck in a staircase, and could not go up or down till pulled from below--with the far-off scent of the sea coming over the mud of the harbour, and every now and then the boom of a cannon, or the shrill shriek of the siren; sailors everywhere, sometimes fighting, sometimes courting, nearly always laughing and good-humoured, except when afraid that they have broken their leave--our chief joy, alas! oftentimes our greatest danger. I remember well how, the first night I made acquaintance with it, their uniforms and rolling gait redeemed from its squalor and commonplace this poor little district, with its eleven hundred little houses and its fifty-two public-houses. Charlotte Street was, from end to end, an open fair; cheap-jacks screaming; laughing crowds round them, never seeming to buy; women, straggling under the weight of a baby, trying to get the Sunday dinner a little cheaper because things had begun to get stale; great louts of lads standing at the corners--you can guess from their faces the kind of stories they are telling; then some piece of horse-play, necessitating a sudden rush through the crowd, many a cuff and many a blow, but hardly any ill-nature; slatternly women creeping out of some little public-house. But why try and describe it to you? You have seen many such spots in any of our large towns. In my mind was but one single thought--“God has sent me to teach these people that they are His children, and that, therefore, they are priceless in His eyes.”

I think if I had paid this visit before I accepted the Mission, I never should have accepted it. The shrill gaiety was a revelation to me of utter hopelessness, such as I had never imagined before. I was very seedy, too, at the time. I had left London soon after Bishop Jackson’s death--the death of a bishop seems ever to be my note of warning. Dr. Fearon had heard very kind things about me from Bishop Walsham How, and I think some old Wykehamists at New College and Magdalen must have told him about me too. But I certainly was never more surprised in my life than when I got his letter asking me to go and see him. An interview with a Headmaster, the very idea of his study, filled me with alarm. Memories of Dr. Butler’s study at Harrow came back with no pleasant suggestions. Yet I date from that interview with Dr. Fearon ten years of the happiest life that I can imagine possible for anyone. How large a part of that happiness Winchester has contributed, this little book will tell. I felt from that moment that, if the Mission was to be worthy of its name, it must achieve amongst Missions a place second to none. Even in that first visit, three facts about Winchester struck me--its simplicity, its unity, its solidity. These three notes we have tried to translate into Landport. It was three months after this visit that I first saw Winchester men at home. Yet looking back I seem to have stepped at once from Dr. Fearon’s study into the great Hall of College, so entirely in my mind was Dr. Fearon’s offer of the Mission finally ratified by the men. Dr. Linklater, with great kindness, came to introduce me to them. One of the dons said to me, as we went into the Hall, “Linklater has taken all our hearts by storm,” and that was no more than the truth--I saw it in their faces, I heard it in their cheers. Is there any discordant note so full of harmony and music as the cheers of schoolboys? And in some true sense those cheers are still ringing in my ears; they have been my incentive in the hour of sloth, my rest in the hour of weariness, ever since.

I do not think I dreaded the interview with the Bishop at Farnham nearly so much as that with Dr. Fearon. I had known many Bishops, but no Headmaster before. And, curiously, Dr. Harold Browne revealed to me the very three notes I had discovered at Winchester--most simple, most balanced, most solid. I felt he had heard strange stories about me. Indeed, I think at first he was more nervous than I was. But when I saw the overwhelming weight which Portsmouth seemed to be to him, when he told me how it was always in his prayers and in his heart, and when, though he hoped I would not do anything foolish, he left me full liberty of operation, saying that his one hope, as far as we were concerned, was that the splendid work, which Dr. Linklater had begun, might be consolidated and perfected, I left Farnham Castle with a great increase of courage and hopefulness, though I had to pawn my watch to pay for a bed, as I could not get home that night. If for a moment during the interview I had wondered why a heart so occupied with his enormous diocese had such a large part of it sacred to Portsmouth, the work and energy of Sister Emma, the head of the Deaconesses, subsequently explained to me this interest. She has had more than any other single person to do with the bettering of Portsmouth. Its sins and sorrows had burned so deeply into her heart, that she could not fail to create in anyone, who saw her constantly, a reflection of her own feelings. The Bishop having placed her and her community there, was in constant communication with her. A Commission, too, had just reported to his Lordship on the state of the town. Its most prominent members were Mr. John Pares and Admiral Hornby, the former still a most earnest defender of all that makes for righteousness in Portsmouth; the latter, alas! called from the midst of his many labours, but who, as a sailor knowing every inch of Portsea, had influenced not only the Admiralty, but all thinking men with the thought that something needed doing in Portsmouth.

These two ordeals past, a worse one remained. I had to hear from Dr. Linklater’s own lips the ideals he had created for the Landport Mission. He had sent me some of his reports; they were enough to frighten anyone from trying to follow in his footsteps. He had had efficient helpers; these I had yet to discover. He was a _persona grata_ with the Naval and Military authorities; this, I was sure, I never would be. He had a tact in dealing with people almost unique, and a personal influence which remains in the hearts of many S. Agatha’s people still, though he has hardly been in Landport for ten years, and a buoyancy and hopefulness which disappointment seemed to increase, and even illness could not abate. When I tried to square my memory of the Saturday night which I had seen in Charlotte Street with his ideals, no problem in mathematics ever seemed so impossible.

I had never had the pleasure of seeing him, but directly I arrived at the railway station I knew him. “I cannot talk to you here,” he said; “let us get back into the train again, and go to Rowland’s Castle. I don’t want you to see Landport as it is; I want you to see it as I desire it to be.”

There is an avenue of trees--you can see it from the train, just before you get into Rowland’s Castle. I suppose that once it led up to some great mansion, but now it seems to stand alone, and it dominates the whole country.

“I want you to promise,” he said, “that you will come here once a week; better still, take a walk over these downs for four or five miles; better still, sleep in the pure country air, if possible, once a week.”

I believe if I had made time to keep this as a rule of my life, our work at Landport would have been far more successfully fulfilled. The plan of campaign--the best manner of working it out in detail--is not possible in the strife of the battle and the tumult of the conflict; this is what he wanted me to learn. One by one, as he talked them over, his ideals already seemed to have taken form--a great church with a staff of clergy, dignified services, efficient preaching, a centre of Catholic devotion, making its way through all the different strata of Portsmouth society; a free school for the children of the parish, a high school for those of a better class; social work of all kinds and descriptions, with one single intention, the drawing together into one Christian family all kinds and classes; real homes for soldiers and sailors, in which they might be equipped with that armour which alone could make them victorious in their hours of temptation; above all, to make Winchester rejoice, share, and understand every part of the work. And then, as we hurried back to Portsmouth, he said, “Now you will see what we have already achieved.”

And so, from the ideal to the real, to S. Agatha’s with its chancel screened off, its walls covered with religious pictures, all fresh and new, loving hands having painted Christian emblems all over it, good-nature and fun beaming from every face--for Dr. Linklater had gathered those connected with the church to meet me--with a joke for one, and a clout for another, we passed along, until we reached the centre of the room, and then--“Here is your new clergyman. What do you think of him?”

One of my chief causes of thankfulness to-day is that many of those in S. Agatha’s that night are still Sunday School teachers, on the altar, and earnest communicants.

As I celebrated the Holy Communion the next morning, with the _debris_ of the party still round me, though some attempt had been made to clear it away, I was lost in amazement at my own presumption in daring to undertake a work which seemed at that moment so impossible.

II.

=My District.=

I did not really begin my work till September 29th, 1885, but as Dr. Linklater wanted to go away, I came down to help on Sundays, and, therefore, I had the opportunity of learning something about the district before my work really began. A very wise priest once said to me, “Don’t make plans for your parish, let your parish make plans for itself.” These six weeks were invaluable, letting me hear the parish voices, and try to discover its plans. Two notes were always making themselves heard; one was the poverty, the other was the sin. And surely they explained each other; they were sinful as a rule, because they were poor. A man who falls from a height is wounded to death, every limb is shattered, every feature disfigured. He who slips on the pavement by a casual chance, pulls himself up, and goes on unhurt. Oh, most blessed truth! our falls in Portsmouth entailed no complete destruction of character, hardly any disfigurement at all. Boys stole, because stealing seemed to them the only method of living; men were drunken because their stomachs were empty, and the public-house was the only cheerful place of entertainment, the only home of good fellowship and kindliness; girls sinned, because their mothers had sinned before them, oftentimes their grandmothers too, unconscious of any shame in it, regarding it as a necessary circumstance of life, if they were to live at all. The soul unquickened, the body alone is depraved, and, therefore, the highest part is still capable of the most beautiful development. I wish I had any words in which I could put this thought quite plainly before you. It lies at the keynote of all missionary work, and it is what makes missionary work so full of hope.

My first Sunday afternoon, as I was walking in Chance Street, I saw, for the first time, a Landport dance. Two girls, their only clothing a pair of sailors’ trousers each, and two sailor lads, their only clothing the girls’ petticoats, were dancing a kind of breakdown up and down the street, all the neighbours looking on amused but unastonished, until one couple, the worse for drink, toppled over. I stepped forward to help them up, but my endeavour was evidently looked upon from a hostile point of view, for the parish voice was translated into a shower of stones, until the unfallen sailor cried out, “Don’t touch the Holy Joe. He doesn’t look such a bad sort.” I could not stay to cement our friendship, for the bell was ringing for children’s service, and, to my horror, I found that some of the children in going to church had witnessed the whole of this scene. They evidently looked upon it as quite a legitimate Sunday afternoon’s entertainment. One little girl, of about eight, volunteered the name of the two dancing girls; she was a kind of little servant in the house, though she slept two or three doors off, and her only dread was that the return of a sailor, who had more rights in the house, might take place before the others had been got rid of.

You can imagine my feeling of hopelessness in conducting a service for children old in the knowledge, if not in the habits, of sin. Poor children, they had not been long accustomed to a church of their own; they had driven themselves away from the parish church by their behaviour. A neighbouring vicar, who kindly took them in for a little while, had left them in undivided enjoyment of his church, saying to Dr. Linklater, “I leave my church to you and your savage crew.” My first attempt reached a climax when two boys calmly lighted their pipes and began to smoke. One remedy alone seemed possible--to seize them by the back of the neck, and run them out of church, knocking their heads together as hard as I could. Amazed at first into silence, their tongues recovered themselves before they reached the door, and the rest of the children listened, delighted, to vocabulary which I have seldom heard excelled. We had no sooner restored order than the mothers of the two lads put in an appearance. As wine is to water, so was the conversation of the mothers to their sons’. I wish I could have closed the children’s ears as quickly as I closed the service. But they listened with extreme delight, even following me in a kind of procession, headed by the two ladies, to my lodgings. The contrast between this, my first procession, and the last, which took place when my church was opened, is a true measure of the difference which ten years have made.

These two little episodes, which stand out so plainly in my memory, forced upon me the knowledge of our shameless sinfulness, and of our utter lawlessness and disobedience. But was it any wonder that it should be so? The wages of the majority of the people in regular employment were so small that they lived in continuous poverty; the larger part had no settled wages at all, many of them being hawkers, greengrocers with a capital of five shillings, window cleaners in a district where no one wanted their windows cleaned, old pensioners past work with a shilling to eighteenpence a day, sailors’ wives with three or four children living upon £2 a month, and soldiers’ wives married off the strength with no pay at all. One week’s sickness of the bread-winners meant a fortnight’s living upon the pawning of clothes and furniture, with nothing before them but the workhouse, and death sooner than that. Of course, there were many exceptions to this generalisation, but I am speaking of the parish as a whole. Then, temptation at almost every door, places where you were always welcome, even if you had no money, for there is always somebody to treat you; places where there are always the outward visible signs of rollicking good-nature, of mirth and jest; places where the craving of the empty stomach can be satisfied, where the crying wife and the hungry children may be forgotten; places where, it is only just to add, extraordinary kindness is often shown, and help given in the hour of direst need, for there is a good and kindly side even to the public-house. Oh, that the bishops had the energy of the brewers! Oh, that the clergy had the persistency of the publicans! For what had the Church of England done for this district? Literally nothing. The enormous mother-parish of All Saints had its twenty-seven thousand parishioners, one church, one vicar, one curate. What even had Nonconformity done in its more recognised forms? One chapel, empty, minister and congregation having migrated to more favoured climes. But though the priest and Levite had passed by, the Good Samaritan had been represented by four little centres of earnest religious work, which have flourished during my whole ten years, and still are, thank God, working for Him in S. Agatha’s district.

In one of these, the most ecclesiastical, a man, who worked six days a week in the Dockyard, laboured every night amongst the poor, and preached all day Sunday. The influence of this good Mr. Grigg will never be forgotten; many souls bless him in Paradise to-day. I shall never forget his funeral; it was the most touching sight I ever saw in Portsmouth. His example of honest labour, and of a life which proved the depth of his religious convictions, was beyond all price in the Dockyard. When you hear people talk glibly of orthodoxy, of dissent, of the exclusive rights and privileges of the Church, I pray you realize how many places would be virtually heathen, if the Church of England was the only representative of God in England. It is quite true that Nonconformity, in its more dignified congregations, fails, I think, largely in the slums; but there is a vast body of unattached Christians, or of laymen with their hearts aflame with the love of souls, with some kind of quasi-authority from more respectable chapels, preaching the Gospel literally without money and without price. Do not scoff at it, because it does not square with your own ideas. It is possible that it may be very faulty in itself. But the poor, tired, ignorant soul has no time to enter into questions like this, and the name of Jesus, when spoken by a believer, always sounds sweet in the ears of those who hear it. We cannot hope to build churches in every new district, we cannot hope to endow parishes, we cannot hope to pay adequate incomes to University-educated men. But we are the Church of England: we are responsible for the souls of every single man, woman, and child. Why cannot we create an enthusiasm amongst working men, toiling six days in the week, to give the seventh for the conversion of souls? The instrument may not be polished, may not be fitted to speak soft words politely, to enunciate theological truths exactly. What does it matter? What does it matter? We have as good stuff in the Church of England as in any other religious body. We have as much love for souls, as much self-denial, amongst our people. What hinders it? What represses it? The freehold, and the jealousy of the clergy, the fearfulness of the bishops to make any venture for faith, to allow any work to be undertaken that is not safe, that is not respectable.

Amid, then, all the sin, poverty, and squalor of S. Agatha’s district--not a new district, remember, which increase of population had created, but a district of which every house had been built a hundred years ago--the only witness for God, until Dr. Linklater came, except an endeavour which Mr. Shute, the vicar of S. Michael’s, had made some few years before, had been the devotion and love of a few poor Nonconformists.

I think the lesson, which I chiefly learned from the parish voice, was that Jesus alone could change the characters of men, and that no reformation can take place without this change of character. I realized that our Lord, if He had been in my place, would have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, healed the sick, visited those in prison; above all, removed stumbling-blocks from the ways of little children. I knew that we must try and do the same. I knew that their poverty, their nakedness, their ignorance, their punishments, were their strongest appeal; that He Himself was practically suffering in every one of them; that He was lying at our door full of sores, that we might share the wonderful privilege of healing Him. But I learned something more than this, that even if I was able to ameliorate all these circumstances, to make them all healthy, educated, able to earn a good day’s wages, I might indeed have made it easier to do the one thing needful; but that one thing would still be undone until they had discovered that they, by His grace, must cure the ills of the soul, must clothe the nakedness of the spirit, that no one could set them free from sin save themselves, and that by His grace. In other words, strive as hard as ever you might to improve environment, to conquer even heredity, unless you have changed character, man is bound to remain helpless, though his helplessness may consist in a new weakness.

III.

=Our Gymnasium.=

I have said that we came without plans. And yet at every step, as we needed it, the Providence of God rendered possible the fulfilment of the plan, which the voice of the parish suggested. Bishop Harold Browne had evinced considerable nervousness, when I said I should bring my sisters down to Landport. He suggested that their dress might frighten the people. I said I hoped it would not. He intimated other difficulties. But his face brightened up considerably, when I told him that they were fleshly and not religious sisters, whom I hoped to bring with me. The first voice of the parish said, “We want Christian women.” God put it into the heart of three of my sisters, and of two dear friends, who lived with them, to say, “We want to go into every house in Landport, to know every woman, every girl, every child.”

Then another voice spoke, not always heard by the clergy, though it cries out louder to-day than it ever did before, the voice of the hard-headed artisan, the voice of the young man who is just beginning to face intellectual struggle, a voice for which the Free Library and the Press are largely responsible. That voice said, “We want an intellectual thinker, who can put deep profound truths into simple words, who can answer difficulties without suggesting others, who knows something of that agony of doubt without which no soul reaches the summit of faith, and has pity and compassion for it.” And God put it into the heart of Charles Osborne to say, “I want to consecrate all my intellect, all my knowledge, to the lessening of doubts, to the building up of the faith, amongst the working-men in Landport.”

And yet there was a need of a link between the past and the present, of someone to give me true advice about Sunday School Teachers, District Visitors, Communicants, Choir, all those things which my predecessor had created; and God put it into the heart of Gordon Wickham, who had worked two years with Dr. Linklater, to say, “Though it will be very difficult to stay on under a new _régime_, yet for the sake of the past, for love of the people, for hope of the future, I stay.”

God had given us the workers; would He also give us the places to live in? I was then in lodgings over a girls’ school in the Commercial Road. It was not at all a desirable plan. The woman who did for me was utterly inadequate. I remember discovering in one Saturday’s dinner the remains of Friday’s, for our vegetables were garnished with fish-bones. The lodging, too, was out of the district. Then I took a house in Spring Street, where there was a heavy rent to pay, a ginger-beer factory on one side, a public-house on the other. The difficulty of housing ourselves was not the only house difficulty we had to face. Dr. Linklater had started a Men’s Club, three Boys’ Clubs, and a Girls’ Club. The rent of premises to contain these cost over £120 a year, the buildings were very unsuited to the purpose, and there was a tremendous waste of energy in the management of them. I believed that no good daily example could be set until a clergy house could be provided, which would be our people’s house as well as our own, and no real disciplinary or recreative work could be done in clubs until we had proper accommodation. S. Agatha’s church, with the chancel screened off, had been used, as I knew from my own experience on my first introduction to the people, for entertainments of all kinds, teas, theatricals, even dances; but I made up my mind from the first that this should never happen again. Reverence is a very difficult virtue, and I am quite sure that the remembrance of the entertainments oftentimes marred the devotion at religious service. I remember once scolding a boy for laughing in church, and he said, “I could not help it, I was thinking of Mr. D---- singing ‘Johnny Sands.’” The only premises at my disposal besides the church were a row of houses, which had been purchased as a site for the new church. Two standing in Conway Street were less picturesque, but rather more commodious than the rest, slate roofs, no red tiles. I thought these could be turned into a Mission House. Pulling down the middle partitions, lowering the floors of the downstairs rooms, so as to make two good sitting-rooms below, and joining the houses by an outside balcony, we had our parsonage; not just, perhaps, your idea of a parsonage, but the door open all day, no mat to remind you that your boots were dirty, no carpets, and the plainest furniture, plenty of space in the dining-room to feed all comers, just room enough in the kitchen to cook the food; upstairs four bedrooms to begin our home.

I hope I have never been jealous of any Christian work done in my parish, but I must confess that there is something peculiarly irritating in the music of the Salvation Army drum, though I am not sure whether the shrill voice of the Salvation Army lass is not worse. I remember one night they out-voiced me altogether, though I was inside and they outside S. Agatha’s. By way of consolation someone said to me, “We shall have them always with us now, for they are just going to buy the Baptist Chapel in Clarence Street.” I registered a vow that they never would. Why could I not buy the chapel in Clarence Street? In many ways it was just suited for our purpose. It was a splendid property. The chapel itself had a gallery all round, square pews, three-decker pulpit, a font for immersions, and two dead ministers buried in the middle. Next door was the caretaker’s house, which would just do for Mr. Osborne, and in the street behind, Chance Street, an excellent Sunday School-room, and two cottages. It cost me in all over £3000. I had not a penny of money, but it was so obviously what the parish needed, that I knew we were bound to buy it. I collected something like £1200 in a very few months, and the bank kindly advanced me the balance to pay off the trustees. I was fairly intoxicated at the purchase; I even communicated my enthusiasm to others, so that at Winchester, where I was lecturing, they realised my idea of a great social centre. Alas, when with considerable pomp I ushered the four prefects, who were staying with me that week, into the building, they, who very likely had never seen a chapel before, said, “Now you have got it, what will you do with it?” I suppose that at the best of times the chapel of a hundred years ago never looked very picturesque, but this had been closed for nearly two years, the grotesque pews were worm-eaten, the ridiculous pulpit had an enormous Bible still upon the ledge, and, with the stagnant water still in the font, I think we even realised the bones of the ministers. I never felt so crestfallen. “At any rate, we can kick down some of the pews.” How delightful is the pleasure of destruction. One after another they were coming down, until prudence reminded me that they could be sold for something better than firewood.

Of course, there was the little difficulty at first of placing the old clubs in their new home. These little old clubs had many jealousies; one had driven out a member, after nearly breaking his head, because he would wear a collar, which they wanted to wrench off his neck, the collar being the outward visible sign of respectability; one was so ritualistic, that they would not allow anyone to join, who would not make the sign of the Cross; one so depraved, that losing all patience with the members who persisted in using the most disgusting language in the presence of the lady who managed them, I was compelled to chuck their leader downstairs, and almost broke his leg. Dear “Boss,” how well I remember him, for so we called him, as he had a cast in his eye, though none in his temper, for he forgave me that very night. Two virtues were common to them all--utter lawlessness, supreme exclusiveness.

We furnished the chapel with all things necessary for a rough gymnasium, the gallery being used for games and bagatelle. The rules were the simplest--no gambling, no bad language, no losing of temper, no annoying anybody else. All through the ten years of use, these four rules have remained as the foundation of our management. All sorts and kinds of men have tried to manage that gymnasium, with varying success, the clergy, the lay-readers, Oxford men, officers in the Army and Navy. They have suffered all sorts of contumely and wrong. I have seen them skilfully lassoed, arms and legs bound, and lashed to the gymnasium ladder, or a noose run under their armpits, and hauled up to the ceiling. I have seen them spread-eagled upon the vaulting-horse, with a dance of savage Indians whooping round them. I have seen all the mattresses ripped up and picked to pieces, then strewn over the floor. I have seen the bagatelle-tables used as points of vantage, from which opposing forces sprang at each other. I have seen men playing upon the piano with their feet, and I have known, when no other mischief was possible, the fierce joy of tearing away the front of the piano, and strewing the broken hammers artistically on the floor. And yet there rises before me the vision of a use in that gymnasium, the chief centre of reformation in the parish, of lads who amidst all this disorder, for the disorder arose merely from episodes of high spirits or weak management, gained their first lessons of self-restraint, and bodily and even mental development; weak, sickly lads coming to us, illness not always the cause of their weakness, now healthy and strong; bad-tempered sullen brutes licked into shape, boys learning the priceless benefit of wholesome play, mean unambitious people quivering with the passion of desiring to achieve success. How often the lad, just needing the inch to become a soldier, has won it by continuous use of our ladders, how often the lad, needing an inch in chest measurement, has won it by the use of our dumb-bells, many a regiment, many a gallant ship, could testify to-day. How many it has won from the awful fascination of the public-house, from the vulgarity and worse of the sing-song room, from the delirium of gambling, from hideous forms of sins, impossible for those who desire to achieve a wholesome mind in a wholesome body! From all parts of the world, strong, healthy self-respecting men, bless and praise God for the old gymnasium in Clarence Street. Some years ago, when I was at Vienna, I was watching a troupe of acrobats in one of the beer-gardens. They had reached their final feat by forming themselves into a living ladder, when suddenly, in a kind of ecstasy, I heard the topmost boy exclaim, “Don’t you see? there is the Father”; and before I knew where I was, three out of the five had precipitated themselves, and were clinging round me. There are scattered throughout the world to-day my brave army of gymnasium boys, but I believe they know that the Father’s eye is still on them, and I know their love still compensates my heart for many of its sorrows. You say, “Mr. Dolling, were you not very imprudent in spending so much money on an object which was not religious? What fruit did it bring forth in your church? Did it pay ecclesiastically?” I can reckon in that sense no fruit. I do not believe that in that sense it paid. So oftentimes, when we hear of the great waste of time and energy spent on games at school and college, we are inclined to think it wasteful, sometimes to condemn it as being of the Philistine character. But anything that is graceful, and done with true skill and just precision, in itself ministers to the highest beauty; anything that tends to the perfecting of the body, to the sweating out of the evil humours of discontent; anything that cures sloth and gives an incentive to activity, ministers not only to the purifying of the body, but to the strengthening and increase of the soul. I have heard a mother say, “When my boy comes home, he can talk of nothing but games.” Dear lady, if it is so, thank God; many boys talk of things evil and base and enervating.

The best effort that had been made under the old régime, and, I think, the manager who was most successful even in the gymnasium, was my old friend Charlie Claxon; and though stress of work and other reasons forced him to give up personal supervision, most of the old gymnasium members will remember him as a true and real friend.

One class of lad baffled all our allurements. Standing at the street corners all night, and most of the day, we got to know them by sight sooner than anybody else in the parish. In East London they had crowded into our club-rooms, and soon became amenable to order. I suppose one never learns that one’s own plans always fail, and yet that God always has His own plan. Late one night I was sent for to go to the hospital. An old woman was slowly dying of burns; drink and a paraffin lamp the cause. I only knew her by sight, and she did not seem to listen when I prayed; but, as I stooped down, to try and catch any word she might say, she whispered, “He didn’t do it,” and then nodded with her head to a boy in the corner of the room. In five minutes she was dead.

When I had got the son quieted down in my own house, I found that he had come suddenly home, found her under the influence of drink, and in some scuffle the lamp had been upset.

Dear Dan, there was not much difficulty afterwards in getting hold of him, but I soon found it was impossible to help him so long as he stayed at home. Not that Dan was to blame, for he would have worked if he could; but no one would employ him. He stands as the representative of many thousands, just like himself, full of good-nature and recklessness, with no habits of obedience, discipline, or order. He had never learned anything since he left school. It was some time before I could venture to emigrate him, and I thank God for that, for it gave us the opportunity of getting him confirmed; and, in the meantime, he brought--one by one--lots of his mates to know us, the most influential of whom, a lad we called “Nobby,” suggested that our own house was the only fitting club-room for his mates. And that really was the solution of the difficulty. Every Sunday night he brought, and kept in perfect order, whomsoever he would, and I trace to Dan and Nobby the breaking up of a gang, unkindly called “The Forty Thieves,” though very few of them had ever really stolen, yet a real terror to the neighbourhood. Dan is at this present moment a most prosperous person in Canada, with a wife and family. Nobby is a stoker. I hear from both of them from time to time.

The real difficulty of work like this is that it makes tremendous demands on one’s own personality, and that the larger part of the expenditure is in vain. And yet one has no right whatsoever to be astonished at this, when we try for a moment to measure all the chances that we have had in life, and then realise that these have never had any chance at all. God has two infallible methods of education--He hopes for everyone, He loves everyone; and yet many live in this world for whom no one hopes and whom no one loves. As the Mission work became heavier, I had to surrender much of this individual work, and then God sent us one who could do it infinitely better than we had ever done it; and, strangely, it was against all my own theories, for this time it was a woman who was to do it. Night after night I have seen her sitting in the midst of those whom decent society utterly refuse to help. On our missing a face, she would answer, quite simply, “Oh, he has gone to gaol for a little! Poor fellow, he cannot help fighting.” Or, “The temptation was too great for him, and he took something which did not belong to him.” She was the first to welcome him after his trouble, to show him that she had forgotten it; never preaching, never teaching, but with infinite tact dealing, in the truest sense, with their souls. I have prepared many of them for confirmation; I have heard the plain story of their whole lives simply and repentantly told; I have known them get up at six o’clock in the morning, to go and call each other for Communion; I have known them stand any amount of ridicule and temptation; I have seen one stand up for his mate when the rest thought he had brought disgrace on her whom they call “mother,” because he knew that that would be “mother’s” wish. I see them come home as soldiers and sailors, and from situations that we have got for them at a distance, in the truest sense refined. I have given them their Communions after days of earnest struggle against sin, or on the mornings of their departures; I read as much of their letters as any eye but hers may read. The world might call it almost miraculous, but it is a miracle that could be reproduced in any single place, even the worst, if we workers had but those methods of hope and love.

And God gave me later on another worker, with the same methods, perhaps in an even more difficult sphere. All boys from fourteen to sixteen are cruel and disagreeable. Passion, soon to find itself expressed in their manhood, troubles them, irritates them, brings forth mischief. Where there is the restraint of home or school, this is often mitigated, and outwardly the boy looks delightful. Where there is no restraint, “devilish” is the only adjective that represents him. Though the most important class for a clergyman to touch, fearing, as they do, neither God nor man, they remain as a rule untouched. You may cure them individually, when they reach the age of twenty, but I always knew that the only sound method of working would be to “_prevent_” them. All of us at different times tried our hand on them. All of us failed. I cannot speak of our last trial as successful, because it only lasted two years, but I believe in my heart that it would have been successful. It called itself a Brigade, but it was no more like a Brigade than the Tower Hamlets Militia is like the Guards. There was a semblance at first in the way of caps, and belts, and pouches, which I paid for, but Dowglass found that all of that was more or less, as he would call it, “tommy rot.” I remember bringing some ladies with great pomp to see the drill, when the leader on the left flank suddenly beat a hurried retreat, but not before we had seen that, in the exertion of stooping, the braces which kept together an otherwise disunited pair of trousers had given way. They were certainly the most ragged, noisy, and disobedient crew that ever a clergyman gathered together. The vision of one evening last August is vividly borne in upon my memory. Dowglass had had to go up to town for the day, and Charlie Davidson, our one-legged gymnast, who used to give them instruction, was also away. But the Brigade were not to be thus put off. Some of them effected an entrance into the gymnasium, and opened the doors for the rest, who swarmed in and proceeded to turn it upside down. Conibeere tried in vain to stem the torrent, and when I came in from church utterly tired, Looey, who was rushing out to summon aid, nearly fell into my arms, exclaiming, “Thank God, master, you are come. The house is being wrecked.” My sudden appearance in their midst produced no effect, except that the missiles, including a leg of the piano, were now directed at me. I hurled them all out into Clarence Street, and shut the doors, but three times did they burst them open.

And yet I am quite sure that, given two or three years’ more work, there would have been tremendous results. If the loafer class is ever to be exterminated, if that menace to society, the unemployed, is ever to disappear from the face of the earth, it will only be done by men with large enough hearts and sufficient faith _preventing_ the loafer.

In 1886 Mrs. Richardson--I had rather say Mrs. Dick, and I am sure she won’t mind--invited me to bring a party of mission men to Winchester to spend the day in College. About sixty went, I having to pay all their railway fares, in some cases even paying them their day’s work--false pride on my part, because I did not like College to think we had no men to go. They broke into the warden’s garden, and stole his fruit; they climbed over the wall of the bathing-place, and laughed at the men who were learning to swim; they tried to kiss the ladies who waited on them; they most of them got drunk before we went home. Mrs. Dick’s invitation is as elastic as her own heart. Year by year more and more men have wanted to go. This year we limited it to a hundred and sixty; we had to refuse an equal number. All of them paid their own journeys, except a few old men out of work, and some of the better-off men clubbed together, so that no expense should fall on the Mission. I don’t suppose men ever had a more delightful day. I am quite sure no lady ever entertained a more delightful company. We visited the cathedral, St. Cross, and all the places of interest. We had two splendid meals. One whole day’s perfect enjoyment, everyone sober, not a rude or rough word, and yet some of us were the identical people who had gone ten years before, and all of the same class, all the Mission’s children.

IV.

=Our Womankind.=

“I utterly disapprove of any club that takes girls systematically away from their own homes. It makes them for the present unmaidenly, and in the future bad wives and mothers,” so a very excellent clergyman’s wife said to me at the end of one of my lectures. I tried to suggest to her that this was not quite the standard to which she had brought up her own daughters; but she soon answered that by saying, “Oh, that’s quite different! my girls are ladies.” Thank God I was able to answer her, “My girls are ladies too.” For in the truest and most real sense that is what my sisters, and those who have worked with them, have achieved at Landport--ladies in appearance and manners, in mind and in heart. It has been, of course, a slow and tedious process, some disappointments, but surprisingly few as compared with the work among boys and men. “How have you done it?” people have often said to me, when sitting at one of our dances. My sister answers, “By having ideals for them; they soon live up to them.”

The good seed had been sown before we came, more efficiently amongst them, I think, than in any other parochial work. Dr. Linklater had started a club for girls called “The Social.” Almost all the original members, certainly all who are living in Portsmouth, belong to it still. They alarmed me very much the first time I saw them. I had half expected to be asked to give a short address, but I found them in the middle of a game of dumb-crambo. They very kindly soon put me at my ease by telling me that they did not think my sermons were as good as Dr. Linklater’s, but they did it in such a genuine kind way that I could not be offended. Most of them, I found out, worked at the Stay Factory; some of them were in service, and they all either lived in the parish, or had been prepared for confirmation by one of the clergy. My first great quarrel with them was because I thought them too exclusive; and herein is the chief difference between work amongst girls and amongst boys. At first you must be exclusive; you have almost reached a point of perfection when you can afford not to be so. Quite rightly their parents would have objected, and they themselves would have lost caste in the factory, besides running a real danger themselves. Ah! how often one wishes there was the same public opinion amongst men that there is amongst women, and that the shady man had as much difficulty in getting into good society as the shady woman. And yet I felt how utterly useless our woman’s work would be if it remained at the point of respectability. The very stay factories from which these girls came were, in those days, places of great temptation. Many of the workers were positively bad, and even amongst those who were not leading bad lives there was great vulgarity of speech and manner, a want of all true refinement. All that is changed to-day, and our Portsmouth factory girls are, as a rule, most respectable and well-conducted.

Then the Commercial Road and the Southsea Common were a perpetual menace. Those places, in which the girls delighted to walk, were full not only of rollicking, good-natured, thoughtless soldiers and sailors, but of those most hateful of all living creatures, the older profligate, the zest of whose pleasure is the innocence of his victim. Many of these girls, too, see sin continually in the streets in which they live. They see other girls who have no work to do--would to God they knew more plainly the awfulness of the work they do do!--able to dress well and go to places of amusement continually, while they themselves too often are unable to earn enough to keep themselves in the actual necessaries of life, with a hundred wretched old women ever on the look-out to tell them how easily money can be made. Take a walk any night you like down the Commercial Road, and, however prejudiced you might be against clubs that keep girls away from their own homes, you would be converted. And so our “Social” gradually added to its numbers, became courageous enough to take in one and then another who really wanted a helping hand, and thus led the way for opening two other clubs for younger girls, so that now, I suppose, there are more than a hundred girls attending every week. I can never tell what I owe to my elder girls, many of them Sunday School teachers and temperance workers, all of them communicants, every one helping a circle of younger girls, the truest, purest, most loving friends I have in the world.