Sailors' Homes Return 1860

On 17 August 1860, the House of Commons ordered to be printed a Return of all the Sailors Homes in the course of erection in the United Kingdom (HC 1860).  About a year later, there was another return, this time to ascertain what the impact of the £1,600 allocated to the support of sailors’ homes had been (HC 1861).

 

Both returns were the result of requests by Sir Henry Josias Stracey (1802-1885), the Conservative MP for Great Yarmouth from 1859-1865. As the representative of a large maritime community, Stracey brought forward a Resolution in favour of Sailors' Homes, which was debated on Tuesday 9 April 1861 (Hansard 1861: 325). Stracey summarized the benefits of sailors’ homes to the House, observing that 'the founders of these sailors’ homes had every reason to be proud of the success which had attended their experiment'. They varied in their management, though they all served as ‘asylums for seamen', with services which might include refuges for shipwrecked mariners, infirmaries, schools for navigation, shipping offices, and savings banks.

There were a total of 31 homes for which a return had been received, and five or six had been allocated some of the grant of £1,600 annually made by the House. In the debate which followed, Stracey pressed for further support based on the traditional depiction of the sailor as a victim of the crimp and the prostitute: 'Although the sailor was gallant and enduring at sea he was soft and yielding on land, and the great object of homes was to save him from temptation ashore.' (Hansard 1861: 326)

While Admiral Walcott supported the move to continue support for homes, noting that the Admiralty supported those at Portsmouth and Devonport, but all others were maintained by voluntary contributions. Opposing the motion, Milner Gibson stated that 'sailors are as capable of taking care of their own interest as any other class of labourers', indeed more so since they were well paid. It was not appropriate therefore to turn them into objects of charity.

The motion failed, but support for sailors' homes continued. Stracey's initiative in securing the return on these institutions provides us with a snapshot of the distribution of sailors' homes across the ports of the United Kingdom at the height of the Victorian age.

So where were the 31 sailors' homes in the UK in the 1860? Many and possibly all of the homes on the Return of 1860 have been demolished or put to new uses. I have tried to identify their locations at the time of the Return. The map above shows approximate locations where it was not possible to find an exact location.

 

Return of all Sailors' Homes Erected, or in course of Erection, in the United Kingdom (so far as the Board of Trade have been able to find information)