Vagrancy around the World Wars

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century Government was having to accept the likelihood that without positive socio-economic action there would always be some hard core of itinerant poor. Their acceptance was coupled with the comforting, if mistaken, belief that the numbers involved would never be large and would comprise but a few entrenched eccentrics. A few reformist Edwardians considered that the treatment of casuals in workhouses remained shameful in its general lack of care. They suggested society should abandon its ‘undiscerning spirit of insensate persecution’ and accept responsibility for the ‘ruin’ of those human lives provided with only a ‘meagre and pernicious education … unemployment… the blight of slum environment … the insidious attractiveness of sparkling ale saloons’ which together bred ‘utter hopelessness’.² Any idea that vagrancy numbers would remain small quickly evaporated when, within a few years, workhouse casual wards reached unprecedented occupancy levels. It had been recognised that the war in South Africa and a period of good trade were ‘no doubt largely responsible for the low vagrancy figures reached in 1900’.³ When, in the early years of the century these contributory factors no longer applied, it did not stop Whitehall alleging, shortly after figures started to rise, that the reason for the phenomenon was that local Poor Law officials were not applying the rules regarding casual applicants with sufficient rigour.

Those who have work, how can they know

The bitter times you undergo.

Each mom you ‘wake, only to roam

In search of work to keep a home.^l