Waterbury evening Democrat., 1903-09-18
A LONDON WoRKHOusE.
Hard Work and Slim Diet for the h..
 mates

mates.
 London workhouses are under the jurisdiction of the local government board, and that body has seen fit in its wisdom to draw the linz which sepa- rates young men from old men at one's sixtieth birthday" writes an inmate of one of these houses to Chambers Jour- nal. T shall treat chiefly of the young men, quorum pars ful.
 There is no stone breaking done in the Princes Road workhouse, as in most other places of the kind, the only task works being grinding nine peck of corn on mill per day and picking four pounds of oakum. Not all of the men adjudged to the latter task can finish it, and, so far as my observation went, very few, indeed, were able to empty their mills before bedtime. l had one day on the mill myself: and, with my utmost efforts at the cruelty monVtonouus work, I succeeded in turning out only five pecks. It is an exercise that can confidently recon mended as a cure for obesity; only that is not common complaint
 
 Like every other contrivance of the sort, devised to measure up a mans | full strength. there is a knack in it which, if the operator is lucky enough 1 to hit upon it, will enable him to come off successfully; but even then 1t l is work which, as the men plth1ly ex- press it. wants doin' The secret Of oakum picking is, believe, much more easily compassed, it being not so much a matter of sheer strength and endurance as of patience and ingenu- ] ity. The taskmaster, the officer who has the power of making your life mis- erable or tolerable in the workhouse, can see a at glance whether a man is trying to do his level best on the corn mill and if he finds him really unable to finish the allotted task, be puts him next day on something else more with in his strength-that is, if the mill, on its part, fails in its chief function, which is to drive it's able bodied man. ipulator out of the gate. All the other work is of a general kind-sawing and chopping wood, scrubbing floors, clean ing stairs, passages and windows, and painting, all of which are carried on under the supervision of the lynx eyed labor master.
 ''The dietary scale for the young men is as follows On three days of the week there is a meat dinner of five ounces of boiled beef, with a thin, white gravy, potatoes and four ounces of bread On Monday dinner consists of a pint of pea soup and six ounces of bread; on Wednesday and Saturday, six ounces of bread, with piece of | aJ.o IT, heard Of species of soup, made of oat- meal and a few vegetables. In both ] kinds of soup there are always placed l a few small cubes of left over meat of l the toughness of gutta percha, and ab- solutely taste1ess, which make bold to hold responsible for the prevalence to nightmare in the young mems dor nitory on the nights following the soun dinners On Friday perhaps the best dinner of all is served, a round of suet pudding, which, in my own case, at least, eased the qualms of an ever be setting hunger better than ever did the meat (beef, never rnutton, which was almost always tough and cartila ginous and devoid of natural flavor.
 ''Breakfast consists of six ounces of bread, with a pat of butter and a libe- ral pint of tea, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when a basin of good oat- meal gruel takes the place of the tea, to the disgust of many, who will not touch the 'skilly,' as they contempt, uously call it. The supper or tea con sists of the same allowance of tea l bread and butter as at breakfast, on three nights of the week, cheese taking the place of butter on three other nights and Thursday night being re- served for the discussion of a thin beef or mutton broth (with six ounces of brea0, which the men scornfully designate as fly water and is the theme of endless testing. In this menu the bread and butter are invari ably good, so are the tea and the gruel the cheese, generally good, comes toe often Live times week.; the potatoes are often poor, and the meat at its best is un-nutritious and insipid to a degree not at all due to it's qualities as it comes from het hands of the butch CT,
 And now I will describe briefly the work I had to do on this diet, pre- missing that I could eat very little ot the meat, and durst not eat much o1 the cheese, from fear of indigestion Alter a week of paint scraping I was put into the boiler house as stoker's mate, or drudge. My first duty in the morning was to sweep down the tops of the two boilers, and then, descend ing from that torrid region to sweer and mop up the boiler house floor: and finally, to sweep the roadway as fal as the dust bins which I had to keeI tidy at all times. In the course of tht day. while incidentally shining brasses and carrying off and drenching ho1 ashes and clinkers whenever the fire man cleaned out his fires I had tc keep him constantly supplied with 6 large barrow~of coals, to the amount of from one and a half to two tons day. which I had to break up to the } requisite size in the coal hole before wheeling away. Twice day had tt clean the engine which runs the vari ous machinery of the washhouse: anC