"to give the poor lad a chance of becoming an honourable self respecting citizen" ..... helping the destitute children of Manchester

I don’t know the names of any of these young lads, nor the details of family or their futures.  And that is fine by me.  Everyone even those captured on a photograph over a hundred years ago deserves that much.

But I know where they were and why, and can share the story of one of them.
They are in the Strangeways Refuge for Boys on Francis Street, just off Great Ducie Street and the year is sometime around 1900.

What we do know is that some perhaps most of them were street children who had been living off their wits, not a stone’s throw from the Royal Exchange that huge expression of Manchester’s wealth and trading, in what many regarded as the second city of the country.

The Central Refuge and Workshops had been opened in 1871 by the Manchester & Salford Boys and Girls Refuge and Homes.  It was the central headquarters for their work , a home for those considered destitute and a place where the boys could be taught a trade.  The building was completed in three sections with the last in 1883 doubling the building capacity and allowing for the accommodation of 120 boys.  Here could be found a laundry, as well as the training areas, and gymnasium.

In its early years the charity just offered homeless boys a bed for the night and a meal but fairly quickly began to intervene in cases of child cruelty, campaigned against the use of young children as street hawkers, established similar refuges for girls, as well as setting up holiday camps and in 1872 started sending children to Canada.

Looking back in 1921 its historian concluded that
“Its one simple ultimate object has been throughout its career of half a century to give the poor lad a chance of becoming an honourable self respecting citizen.  Hundreds of old boys in all parts of the world refer to it in what is meant to be an affectionate appellation as ‘The Old Ref’  Its influence has gone through all the earth.”*

And there were success stories like “Joe” who came into the Refuge "wearing a pair of men’s old ragged trousers, held up by a piece of thick twine over an old striped shirt, ... while around his mud caked feet were the ends of the ragged trousers.”

Despite some early difficulties of adjusting to a new life and a period working in the Shoeblack Brigade, he joined the navy distinguished himself and settled back down with a wife and family, a “respected God-fearing citizen, living in his own house, in the employ of one of our town corporations; and what without much blame to him, he so easily might have been but for the help given, a prey and burden on Society with great loss to the State and infinite loss to himself.”**

The language strikes me as a little old fashioned and throughout the book there is little done to point a finger at the political and economic values that allowed children to end up on the streets.  But that is harsh.  There were opponents of the system at the time who spoke and campaigned for a better world and then there were those that accepted that it was happening but did their utmost to save what they could.

There is no easy answer and as I reflect on that debate I shall continue to dig deeper into the charity’s work.

Pictures; Strangeways Refuge courtesy of the Together Trust, details of the refuge buildings from Goad’s Fire Insurance Plans, courtesy of Digital Archives http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/
*Edmundson,William, Making Rough Places Plain, Manchester 1921
**Edmundon, page 53-54
Read the Together Trust's blog at  http://www.togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/