The bosom of the community
‘Scattered’ homes immersed children in working-class life with considerable – sometimes too much – success
At the end of the 19th century, received thinking on the best places to foster Britain’s most deprived children began to change again. The consensus was now that cottage homes were too detached from working-class communities – isolating children from the communities in which they would eventually have to make their way in life. The time had come for a new approach.
The solution was the scattered homes system, in which children would reside in groups of up to around 20 in houses ‘scattered’ about the union. There they would live in a family unit overseen by a house-mother. Crucially, they would attend local schools.
Early reports on the scattered system – which was pioneered in the Sheffield union in 1893 – were glowing. Inspectors declared that it had succeeded beyond “their most sanguine expectations”, as the children were “mixing more with non-pauper life”. They also remarked upon the children’s “happiness and contentment”.
In Camberwell, we’re told, children could “run about the streets and form friendships with other boys and girls, run all the risks and enjoy all the privileges of ordinary young humanity”.
In fact, if the scattered homes system had a drawback, it was that it integrated the children into their local communities too well. Inspectors noted makeshift and make-do regimes typical of working-class neighbourhoods that saw meat running out by Saturday, a lack of toothbrushes, and infestations of head lice.
Despite these drawbacks, the authorities hoped that immersing young paupers in working-class communities would spare them the feelings of worthlessness experienced by their predecessors in separate schools. “When I was 14, it was when scoring for the Hanwell team one Saturday afternoon at an away game, that I first became conscious of my lowly status in society,” remembered one such resident, Edward Balne. “The realisation that I was considered to be a member of the lowest form of human creation was an experience from which I have never fully recovered.”
Meat ran out early, head lice infestations abounded and there was a lack of toothbrushes