THE BOYS
How did the Founder find the boys who were admitted to his Homes? There are two answers to this question, not necessarily mutually exclusive. One is based on legend and the other on evidence.
The legends were recounted in newspaper articles that appeared at the time of C.E.B.Young’s death in 1928. For example, the “Daily Chronicle” published an article by their Special Correspondent which alleged:
From his beautiful Oxfordshire home he could journey to London for the sole purpose of finding unfortunate children on whom to shower kindness. His pockets lined with gold, he would seek the ragged urchins and clothe and feed them
The “Sunday News” gave an extended version of the same story:
He shunned publicity, and after driving to London in a magnificent car he would put it up in a garage and take a four-wheeled growler which matched his torn coat and frayed trousers. Thus attired he would walk about London with a thousand pounds in his pocket, on one side bank, and the other treasury notes.
He would go into a shop and fit out a boy from head to foot with new clothing, and send him to his sheltering home in London … . He stayed at the Grafton when in town, and would walk from his home there late at night. No-one ever molested him, but his friends feared for his safety, knowing that he had such a large sum of money on his person.
The “Children’s Newspaper” of 26th January 1929 gave an even more romantic version of this legend, including the surprising information, printed there in italics for emphasis, that ‘he took a party of slum boys with him on his honeymoon!`
Mr Young was shabby as he went about the streets, and for a very good reason: he went about looking for little boys in trouble. Many a poor little guttersnipe whom he found crying on a doorstep has matriculated and become an eminently prosperous citizen. He loved and helped every boy individually. He thought of them for fifty years, and gave up his life to them …
One who knew him declared that ‘he was the most lovable man I have ever known` and described how, though he had three or four cars at his country house, he would insist on the same old growler meeting him when he came to London. He wore an old hat … and promised his wife a thousand times to buy a new one.
It seems likely that the source of these stories was the Revd W Mitchell Carruthers, Chaplain of the Homes from 1920 to 1931, although he knew the Founder too well to be held responsible for the wilder flights of journalistic fancy in these articles. A reputation for ‘literally snatching boys out of the gutter` may have seemed commendable in the 1920s; today it would meet with serious disapproval, and might well lead to an appearance in court.
The evidence, however, tells a different story. In the 1960s there was a large cupboard, mounted on the wall, high up in the then staffroom. It took a good deal of re-arrangement of furniture to gain access. In the cupboard were many little folders containing the documents relating to the admission of the earliest boys on the Hill. Although all these appear now (2003) to have been lost or destroyed, I was able to examine a few of them at the time. In each case the candidate for admission was sponsored by a gentleman outlining the family circumstances, and this letter was accompanied by an application written by, or on behalf of, the boy’s (single) parent. The application was then usually endorsed by the local vicar, who gave his assurance that this was a worthy and genuine case.
For example, Austin Scarsbrook, the second boy to be admitted to the Home, on 7th October 1886, was recommended by Captain H. L. Wilkins, solicitor, of Chipping Norton, who wrote a letter to the Founder on 10th September 1886.
His father, formerly a painter of Chipping Norton, died 3 or 4 years since, a young man, leaving a widow and five children. Mother has respectably supported herself and family by glove making.
The next day, Colonel E.C.Lockwood of Kingham, the Rector’s brother, wrote a similar letter,
Father, William Scarsbrook, died aged 32 – left no benefit beyond what his ‘Benefit Society` secured.
Both Wilkins and Lockwood emphasized that the boy’s father had been a member of the Chipping Norton Volunteer Force, and had been an excellent Volunteer. In fact, William Scarsbrook was buried on 28th October 1884 aged 33. Three boys were eventually received in the Homes: James, born 5th July 1877; Austin born 16th October 1879; and George Steward, also (allegedly) entered in 1886, baptised in 1890, but no longer on the Hill in 1891.
Perhaps the truth lies somewhere between the legend and the evidence. The Founder will well have encountered needy boys ‘in the gutter`, but he probably took care that proper permission and the legal formalities were carefully followed. He was, after all, a barrister, and will have been well aware of the problems that Dr T. J. Barnardo had encountered in 1877, and later the serious dispute with Cardinal Manning in 1889 over the custody of orphans, and the consequent Custody of Children Act of 1891. Dr Barnardo emerged triumphant from these lawsuits, but with his reputation tarnished; no similar action was ever brought against Charles Baring Young.
His decision to focus on needy boys under the age of fourteen must have been the result of a conscious decision on his part. During his years with the ‘working boys` in London, he had realised that he was able to relate to them and to respond to them in ways that he had not found so easy with men of his own social class. He must also have seen that many of the boys in the Working Boys Homes in London were, in fact, homeless and jobless. If the problem were to be attacked at its roots by voluntary (and of course never by State) intervention, it would be essential to address it before the boys had reached the age of fourteen. He must have become aware of the desperate need of younger boys, orphaned or from dysfunctional families, who were not eligible for entry to the Working Boys Homes, but roamed the streets of London getting themselves into trouble. If such boys, from ages as young as four or five, could be brought within a secure, loving, family atmosphere, and above all within the context of sound Christian teaching and example, and if they were also taught a trade to enable them to earn their own living, then the problems of ‘working boys` would be far less likely to occur. Earlier social reformers in this field, notably Shaftesbury, had seen the solution to the problem in terms of state intervention: the regulation of working hours and conditions of employment by statute. But state intervention did not address the particular needs of the individual, and could inevitably become purely administrative and godless. This concept of social welfare had indeed been taken on board by the Conservative Party, and especially by Richard Cross in Disraeli’s ministry of 1874-1880, but state intervention smacked of Bismarckian ‘state socialism`, and was by definition unacceptable to C. E. B. Young whose attitude towards socialism was invariably hostile. So far as he was concerned, socialism was politically subversive: it threatened the social order, and was godless. There may have been a few self-styled ‘Christian Socialists` like F. D. Maurice or even C. E. B. Young’s distant relation, Baring Gould, but such isolated examples were anomalies, and even their Christian faith was suspected of contamination from ‘liberal` doctrines. It may have been that, in his rejection of Christian Socialism, C. E. B. Young was unable to escape from the implicit assumptions of the social class to which he belonged. It was the duty of the Christian gentleman to ‘remember the poor`, but not to attempt to eradicate poverty.
Society in the 1880s, and indeed later, also accepted such attitudes. The poor boys of the streets of Victorian London would respond with genuine respect and enthusiasm towards someone like C. E. B. Young who spoke to them like human beings, and offered them practical help and understanding. A class society, in which the ‘rich man in his castle` and ‘the poor man at his gate` were amongst all things bright and beautiful, was one in which C. E. B. Young could receive the respect and recognition that he deserved. But it is interesting to note that he did not himself subscribe to such attitudes. When he published (anonymously) his collection of hymns (‘Hymns of Prayer and Praise`, Humphrey Milford, London, 1921), he deliberately omitted that offending verse from the well-known hymn, and in doing so proved himself to be far ahead of his time. Probably no other collection of hymns omitted it at that time. It is hard for us to understand how it came to be written because the world is not like that today.
