ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the commercial lodging houses of the period roughly from the Golden Jubilee of 1887, to the late 1930s. A typical common lodging house would have a communal kitchen cum dining room cum day room in the basement; upstairs would be the dormitories. From the open fire, an amalgam of aromas from the sundry fish, meat and vegetables cooking away swirled about, trapped in the sealed room. The deputy might employ lower menials, night porters and kitchen men, recruited from the ranks of the dossers, who, for a few shillings a week and a bed, would serve as bed-makers, sweepers-up, fire-makers and boiler-fillers. Alexander Paterson, the youth club pioneer and prison reformer, wrote in 1912 of the London deputy that he had to walk a fine line between the underworld whose custom he depended on, and the police who expected co-operation.
