Housing-accommodation was provided for only about one-tenth of the force. The Head Police Office at Crawford Market, which Colonel Wilson had so often asked for, was completed and occupied in 1899, and lines for 120 men had been built on the western boundary of the parade-ground adjacent to the Gokuldas Tejpal hospital. Stabling for twenty horses of the mounted police was also built, the main body of the mounted police being accommodated in the old Government House Bodyguard lines at Byculla. With the exception of the 200 men or so, who occupied the old police-lines in Byculla and the newly-erected quarters in the compound of the Head Police Office, the whole force was living in hired rooms of an undesirable and insanitary type in various parts of the city. The monthly house-allowance paid to constables barely sufficed to pay the rents of their squalid rooms, while in the case of the European officers it was quite insufficient to secure proper accommodation. The difficulty was acute in the A. division (Fort and Colaba), where suitable residential accommodation was extremely limited and fetched a high rent. To anyone, like the author of this book, who has seen the very unsuitable quarters in which most of the European and Indian police were obliged to reside at the beginning of the present century, it will always be a matter of surprise that the force accomplished as much as it did and that the death-roll among both Europeans and Indians was not far heavier. Even the comparatively modern buildings at Bazar Gate and Paidhoni left much to be desired in the way of reasonable space and ordinary comfort. The occupants of the Paidhoni station, which mounts guard over a crowded lower-class neighbourhood, possessed the additional disadvantage of an atmosphere heavy with the smells and miasmata of an Eastern city. It says much for the _dura ilia_ of the British soldiers recruited for the Bombay police force that so many of them were able to live and carry on their work in these conditions without a permanent loss of health.