It is hard for us to imagine the poverty of many in the Victorian period. Today’s Royal Mile in Edinburgh is the busiest street in Scotland. Multitudes come to see this old and iconic place. Running parallel to this famous street is the Grassmarket, with the Cowgate nearby. These days the Cowgate is the hub of nightclub life for the city. Take the clock back however, to the 19th century, and we would be shocked to see the plight of the poor. In the 18th century the New Town in Edinburgh was built, and the wealthy left their houses in the Old Town, and relocated there. Greedy landlords subdivided the houses in the Old Town to cram as many tenants in as possible for the greatest income. In time, these dwellings became slums. Adults turned to cheap gin and whisky, with large swathes of the local population becoming alcoholics. Their children were forced out onto the streets to beg for money; older girls became prostitutes, and boys became thieves. If they did not bring in enough income, their parents beat them. It was safer for these children to live on the streets. As far as the population of Edinburgh was concerned, these children were doomed to a life of crime. The Christians however, had a different opinion.
The Ragged School Union was an offshoot of the Sunday School Movement and “its purpose was to catch, befriend, and educate, “human eels in the mud””. In 1798 Thomas Cranfield of Southwark, London, saw the terrible plight of the children from the slums who were too ragged to attend Sunday Schools. Many of them lived on the streets and were beggars, pick-pockets and prostitutes. For some this was a safer existence than being at home to face the drunken brawling and abuse of their parents. Cranfield set up several schools for these urchins, waifs, and strays, under the supervision of Revd Rowland Hill. John Pounds of Portsmouth attempted the same vital work, but neither of these men saw a breakthrough which would see continuity. This would change with the visionary work of another Scottish man called Thomas Guthrie.
When Revd Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873) was appointed in 1837 as assistant minister at Greyfriars’ Kirk in Edinburgh, much of his work was focused among the poor of the district, for whom he poured out his life. It is hard for us to imagine what it was like in the Edinburgh slums of that time. What better person than Guthrie to tell us in his own expressive and emotive style:
“I wandered in those houses for whole days without ever seeing a Bible, or indeed any book at all. I often stood in rooms bare of any furniture; where father, mother, and half a dozen children had neither bed nor bedding, unless a heap of straw and dirty rags huddled in a corner could be called so. I have heard the wail of children crying for bread, and their mother had none to give them. I have seen a babe pulling breasts as dry as if the starved-looking mother had been dead. I have known a father turn his step-daughter to the street at night – bidding the sobbing girl who bloomed into womanhood, earn her bread there as others were doing. I have bent over the foul pallet of a dying lad to hear him whisper how his father and mother – who were sitting half drunk by the fireside had pulled blankets off his body to sell them for drink. I have seen children blanched like plants growing in a cellar – for weeks they never breathed a mouthful of fresh air for want of rags to cover their nakedness; and I used often to observe in these dingy dwellings, where the air is poison, and the food is scanty, and the cold is bitter, and short is the gleam of sunshine, and they live in continual terror of a drunken father or mother, and where when they cry they are not kissed but beaten, that the children have an air of sadness, and look as if they never smiled. I don’t recollect of ever seeing a mother in these wretched dwellings dandling her infant, or of hearing the little creature crow or laugh as he leapt with joy. There, infants have no toys; and mothers’ smiles are rare as sunshine. Nobody can know the misery I suffered amid those scenes of human wretchedness, woe, want, and sin.”
For Guthrie, healing the plight of the poor seemed like scaling a towering mountain with sheer rock faces, and many would have turned back at the knowledge of the real condition he knew so well, a condition that was hidden from most of the people in the city. And yet he steeled himself for the task of transformation, through God’s help. He could have fled to the security of the suburbs, but he held firm to his deep conviction that “if a man won’t live among the scum of the Cowgate, I would at once say to him ‘you can’t be its minister.’”
In 1841 Sheriff Watson had set up the first Ragged School in Scotland in Aberdeen, and Guthrie found that such a ministry needed to be set up in Edinburgh. The Ragged School Union had already been established in London in April 1844, with Lord Shaftesbury as its first president, but Guthrie was to play a prominent part in spreading this movement for the children in rags. When he and his congregation moved into Free St John’s (today’s St Columba’s Free Church), they decided to use the basement for the first Ragged School in Edinburgh, but the elders and deacons changed their mind when they realised the reality of what this would mean. Not being thrown into despondency, Guthrie picked himself up, and raised the funds for the first Ragged School in the city, built in 1847, which today stands next to the Camera Obscura on the way up to the castle. It is estimated that 300,000 poor children went through the Ragged Schools in London between 1844 and 1881, but Guthrie was the key mover in Scotland, with thousands of children been plucked out, like “human eels” from “the mud”of society’s degraded underbelly.
Guthrie’s Committee of Management consisted of members from the Episcopalian Church, Church of Scotland, Free Church, United Presbyterians, Baptists and Independents, so it was a non-denominational evangelical ministry. They did however hit trouble – this time from the Roman Catholics. Guthrie said that he had never seen a Roman Catholic priest working in the slums in twenty years, where “the girls were left to grow up as prostitutes, and the boys to become thieves”. But as soon as the children of Roman Catholic parents started to receive help to improve their lives and to learn to read the Bible, opposition broke out, as Guthrie put it: “Father Keenan of Dundee… boldly stated that he would prefer to see children perish in the streets rather than get food and education and God’s Word in the Dundee Ragged Schools.”This caused a rumpus, and the city of Edinburgh was “stirred to its depths”as a four-hour debate raged in the Music Hall. But when the vote was taken to continue the Ragged Schools as they were, a sea of hands was seen, with only five people standing against the motion.
The fruit of the Ragged Schools spoke for itself, as Guthrie pointed out in 1859:
“I. The results our Schools are to be found in many happy homes, the abodes of those that, once wretched, ragged outcasts, are now honest men and virtuous mothers, useful citizens and heads of families… We – and in these results I include the influence of other, though smaller schools, have cleared the streets of Edinburgh of juvenile beggars, – a feat that the Magistrates and Police, with cells and prison at their back, were far from ever being able to achieve, that when our School was set on foot, their name was Legion. They swarmed through all the town – it was creeping with them.
II. We are fast emptying the prisons…
III. The Original Ragged School [founded in 1847] alone has rescued from great misery and certain ruin not less than five hundred children. They are now blessings to society… And if we make the much more probable supposition, that but for our school – its useful, kind, and holy training – two-thirds of those five hundred children would have developed into full-blown criminals, we have saved the country not less than 72,000 [about £9.8 million in today’s money]!”
“… undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free… [do] not hide yourself from your own flesh…” (Isaiah 58:6-7, NKJV).
Image: Revd Dr Guthrie (1803-1873) in Princes Gardens, Edinburgh, by Paul James-Griffiths