Arrow on browser to return back to
previous page
to bottom of pageInteresting Stories and Notes
Click
Arrow on browser to return back to
previous page
to bottom of page
The Bond family and Poverty in London.
The Charles Booth Poverty Maps of London were colour coded to show the type of person living in every street in London.
To see these maps go to
http://booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/4.html or or http://booth.lse.ac.uk/
The classifications of types of people are given below.
| Booth Classification | Description of class of person |
|---|---|
| A (Black) | The lowest class which consists of some occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals. Their life is the life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink |
| B (Dark Blue) | Casual earnings, very poor. The labourers do not get as much as three days work a week, but it is doubtful if many could or would work full time for long together if they had the opportunity. Class B is not one in which men are born and live and die so much as a deposit of those who from mental, moral and physical reasons are incapable of better work |
| C (Light Blue) | Intermittent earning. 18s to 21s per week for a moderate family. The victims of competition and on them falls with particular severity the weight of recurrent depressions of trade. Labourers, poorer artisans and street sellers. This irregularity of employment may show itself in the week or in the year: stevedores and waterside porters may secure only one of two days' work in a week, whereas labourers in the building trades may get only eight or nine months in a year. |
| D (Light Blue) | Small regular earnings. poor, regular earnings. Factory, dock, and warehouse labourers, carmen, messengers and porters. Of the whole section none can be said to rise above poverty, nor are many to be classed as very poor. As a general rule they have a hard struggle to make ends meet, but they are, as a body, decent steady men, paying their way and bringing up their children respectably. |
| E (Pink) | Regular standard earnings, 22s to 30s per week for regular work, fairly comfortable. As a rule the wives do not work, but the children do: the boys commonly following the father, the girls taking local trades or going out to service. |
| F (Pink) | Higher class labour and the best paid of the artisans. Earnings exceed 30s per week. Foremen are included, city warehousemen of the better class and first hand lightermen; they are usually paid for responsibility and are men of good character and much intelligence. |
| G (Red) | Lower middle class. Shopkeepers and small employers, clerks and subordinate professional men. A hardworking sober, energetic class. |
| H (yellow) | Upper middle class, servant keeping class. |
James Bond (1834-1909) was a railway labourer so would probably be rated as Class C. However, in the first decade of the 20th Century (when he was in his 60s) he was probably incapable of working. As a result he and his family descended to live in Orville Street, a Black Zone.
In the early 1900s his children male children became railway employees, starting as porters, and moved up to class D. They were still poor but respectable. The housing conditions were still not good. My grandparents, Joseph and Annie Bond lived in Latchmere Grove, classified as a Blue colour street. When they moved from there, in the early 1960s, the property still had no electricity, but all lighting and cooking was done by gas, supplemented by the range in the living room.