It is a thousand pities that people like you should bring children into the world’ – so said the NSPCC inspector when he reviewed the events around the shameful neglect of a baby by Kathleen and Francis Hales of Jameson Street, Brigg. Alderman Maxey, in charge of the hearing, agreed wholeheartedly. The couple had maltreated and neglected their two-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, on several occasions, and their lifestyle was indicative of a totally irresponsible attitude to the demands and responsibilities they should have had.
Their life story pinpoints the misery of that street-life that has always been with us in English history: they were virtually nomads despite their occasional life under a roof. The directive of the 1904 manual of the NSPCC, from the Inspector’s Directory, makes it clear that such cases were not uncommon then, and even by the middle years of the century, after the social security and national health measures were in place, there were poor copers around who could be anything from ‘feeble-minded’ to ‘dangerous to children in their custody.’ The directory refers to ‘the hopeless character of an offender’ whose child must be taken into safe custody. There was no doubt about this in the Hales case.
The pair appear to have drifted across the area, from village to village, living aimlessly and with no work. Begging was their only activity, and that was not successful. Worse still, this was not their first offence in this regard: they had been convicted of the same act in 1950.
A witness reported that he found them in Louth looking worn and ill, and Mr Hales said that they had been ‘sleeping rough’ out at Hubbard’s Hill. Another witness, a Mrs Melton, said that at one point she had taken them into her lodgings and had seen Mrs Hales hold the baby under a cold water tap to wash her. This was in Jubilee Crescent, Louth, at one of the rare periods in which the family had a roof over their heads.
The NSPCC inspector in the case said that when he had been called to them, he found the child in a ‘filthy and bedraggled state’. He had found them huddled on a bench in Louth and their condition was ‘despicably filthy’. He reported that the child had only some stale milk under a sheet in the pram. Mr Hales had no more than one penny on his person.
The amazing thing here is that even the young mother had no idea how to cope and had no knowledge of child care. Mrs Melton, when they were with her in the April, some months before they appeared in court, told the hearing that she had had to bath the child, but also she had to wash the mother as well. She described them on their arrival as ‘verminous and filthy’. The family only stayed with her until June, and then had to leave, with no destination in mind. They ended up in Brigg again, and it is not clear how they managed to afford any lodgings at all; we can only guess at how they earned money when desperate – probably when they were actually starving.
A significant point here is that both had served a six-month prison sentence after the previous prosecution; their story illustrates the tendency of deprived and socially excluded people to accept that a gaol term is their only viable option when all else fails. They must have welcomed the bed, the food and the cleanliness of Lincoln prison. After all, they all needed care; there was something in their world-view that excluded the norms of self-respect and the willingness to accept the work ethic that was so important at that time. They were heading there again, to a place where their child would be clean and well fed. If it had not been for Mrs Melton, they may well have been destined for extreme suffering on the streets, in the open, with none of the basics of life.