Part 10
Every year there are thousands of boys who leave the London Board-schools, their “education” completed, with no chance of an apprenticeship to any trade, their hands absolutely untrained, just a hanging pair of hands, prehensile, like the monkey’s tail. It is indeed lucky that they are prehensile, otherwise what would be the lot of their owners?
They leave school; they have to face the necessity of making a livelihood for themselves, of earning their daily bread, perhaps for sixty long years to come, without knowing any single one of the many arts and crafts by which men live and provide for their families and themselves. At the outset it appears to be a hopeless task. Of course, it is the greatest possible misfortune for a lad to learn no trade. If we consider the waste of intellectual power alone, where there is no training to skilled labor, it must be acknowledged to be the greatest misfortune that can befall a boy at the outset. Still, all is not lost. For a steady lad, willing to work, this misfortune may be partly overcome. There are many openings for such a boy. Let us consider, for instance, what lines of work he may attempt, keeping only to those which require no previous training and no skill.
He hears of these openings from other boys; he has heard of such openings all his life. For instance, he would very much like to enter the service of the City of London, as one of the boys whose business it is to keep the streets clean. You may see these boys, in a red uniform, running about among the horses and omnibuses in Cheapside; they are always under the horses’ feet, but they never get run over; they are active and smart lads; they seem to take a pride in doing their humble work rapidly and thoroughly. They receive very good pay, which helps to keep up their spirits—6_s._ 6_d._ a week, rising to 9_s._ or 10_s._ Even better than this is the railway service, where a smart lad may very soon get 9_s._ a week. He may then rise to the position of a railway porter. Now, at the great London stations, in which the trains are coming in and going out all day long, and every passenger with luggage is good for a tip of threepence or sixpence, no one knows what the weekly earnings of a railway porter may be. Things are whispered; nothing is known for certain; the position, however, is recognized as one of the prizes in the profession of the unskilled hand.
Then there are the factories—matches, jam, all kinds of factories—into which, if a boy is fortunate enough to be taken, he may make at the outset 5_s._ or 6_s._ a week. It is, however, generally felt that there is a lack of interest about factory work. A much more enviable occupation is that of a van boy, whose very simple duty is to sit behind among the boxes and parcels, in order to take care that none of them are stolen and that none drop off into the street. One is expected to assist in loading and unloading, which means somewhat heavy work, but the greater part of the day is spent in being pleasantly carried up and down the streets of London and enjoying a moving panorama of the town in all its quarters. There are great possibilities for the van boy; if he is ambitious he may hope to become, in course of time, even driver of the van, a post of real distinction and responsibility, with “good money,” although the hours may be long.
Some boys, without taking thought for the future, jump at the post of beer boy to a barge. It is attractive, it is light work, it is well paid, but it leads to nothing. One would not recommend any young friend to accept this post. Generally a barge is loaded and unloaded by one or two gangs of men, seven in a gang. Each of these men pays the beer boy twopence a day, so that if there are two gangs to the barge he will make 2_s._ 4_d._ a day, or 14_s._ a week, his simple duty being to carry beer to the men at work from the nearest public house. The work seems easy, but it requires activity; the gangs are thirsty, tempers are quick, and cuffs are frequent.
This kind of errand situation is very easy to get; in every trade an errand boy is wanted. I am surprised that no one has magnified the post and preached upon the necessity, for the conduct of the internal trade of the country, of the errand boy. As yet he has not found his prophet. Thus a green-grocer is lost without his errand boys; a suburban green-grocer in a flourishing way of business will have twenty boys in his employ; every small draper, every shopkeeper, in fact, small or great, must have his errand boy—but this is a post reserved for older lads. Some one must carry round the things; it is the boy who has learned no trade; the carriage of the basket is the first use to which he puts his unskilled hands. I believe that five shillings a week is the recognized pay for the situation. In one way or another, however, the boy finds some kind of place and begins to earn a living.
As a rule, these boys live well. For breakfast they have bread and butter and tea, with a “relish,” such as an egg or a piece of bacon; at twelve they take their dinner at one of the humbler coffee-houses which abound in the streets of East London; it consists of more bread and butter and tea, with half a steak and potatoes. For tea they go to another coffee-house; they can get two thick slices of bread for a halfpenny each; butter or jam costs another halfpenny; a cup of coffee costs a halfpenny, or a whole pint may be had for a penny. In the evening their favorite supper is the dish familiarly known as “ha’porth and ha’porth”—that is, fish and potatoes at a halfpenny each. So far their life is healthy, with plenty of work and plenty of food, and, in most cases, strong drink is neither desired nor taken. The craving for drink comes later. The dangerous time of life is the age when the boy passes into manhood. Then the simple meals at the coffee-house no longer suffice. Then it becomes necessary to have beer, and beer in ever-increasing quantities. Then the boy grows out of his work; he becomes too big to carry beer for the bargees or to go round with the newspapers, or to sit at the back of the van, or to carry about cabbages in a basket.
What is he to do next?
There are, even for a grown man, many situations which demand no training and no apprenticeship. In all the warehouses, in the great shops, in offices of every kind, there are wanted men to fetch and carry, to load and unload, to pack and unpack. In the docks there are wanted troops of men to load and to unload. In the markets and on the railways there are wanted men to carry and to set out the goods. In every kind of business servants must be had to do that part of the work which requires no skill. Unfortunately the supply is greater than the demand. There are many lads who get into the service of companies, railways, or factories, and remain in steady work all their working lives in the same employment. There are, on the other hand, a great number who have to hang about on the outskirts of regular work, who are taken on in times of pressure and find it difficult to get work when times are slack; these are the men who become the casual hands; these are the men who hang about the dock-gates and loaf round street corners.
The process of degeneration by which the promising lad sinks into the casual hand is easy to follow.
The work, whatever it may be, is finished at half-past six or seven. The lads have, therefore, like the factory girl already considered, four or five solid hours every evening to get through. The other day I was looking through some statistics of work in the eighteenth century. It then began at six, sometimes at half-past five; it left off at eight in the evening, with the exception of those trades which could not be carried on by the light of tallow candles. The people went to bed before ten. The time for supper, rest, and recreation was therefore reduced to two hours. There was no Saturday afternoon holiday. All through the pre-Reformation time there had been a Saturday half-holiday, because Saturday was reckoned as the eve of a saint’s day, and every eve of an important saint’s day was a half-holiday. The Reformation swept away this grateful respite from work. Therefore, except for Sunday, the craftsman’s working-day was practically the whole day long.
We have changed these long for shorter hours; the people have now a long evening to themselves and the Saturday half-holiday, as well as Sunday.
Consider what this means to a lad of sixteen, one of the riverside lads. He has, we have seen, no books and no desire for reading; a free library offers no attractions to him; he has no study or pursuit of any kind; he does not wish to learn anything; and he has four hours, perhaps five, to get through every evening, except Saturday, when he has nine hours, and Sunday, when he has the whole day—say sixteen hours. In every week he has actually forty-five long hours in which to amuse himself as best he can. What is that boy to do? He must do something which brings with it excitement and activity; his blood is restless; he knows not what he wants; it is an age which has its ideals, and his are of the heroic kind, but too often of a perverted heroism.
A few of them, but in proportion very few indeed, belong to the boys’ clubs which are scattered about East London. They are the fortunate boys; they contract friendships with the young men—gentlemen always—who run the club; they can learn all kinds of things if they like; they work off their restlessness and get rid of the devil in the gymnasium with the boxing-gloves and with the single stick; they contract habits of order and discipline; they become infected with some of the upper-class ideals, especially as regards honor and honesty, purity and temperance; the fruits of the time spent in the club are seen in their after life; these are the lads who lead the steady lives and become the supporters of order and authority. A few again, but very few, get the chance of polytechnic classes and continuation schools, but these things are mostly above the riverside folk. Here and there a class is formed and taught by ladies in one or other of the minor arts, such as wood-carving, in which the lads quickly take great delight.
Setting aside these, what becomes of all the rest?
They have the music-hall; there are half a dozen music-halls in which the gallery is cheap; they go to one of these places two or three times a week in winter; they have the public house, but these lads are not, as a rule, slaves to drink so early in life; their own lodgings are not inviting either for comfort or for rest or for society. They have, however, the street.
It is the street which provides the casual hand; it is also the street which produces the drunkard, the loafer, the man who cannot work, the man who will not work, the street rough, the street sneak, and the street thief. The long evening spent in the street nourishes and encourages these and such as these of both sexes.
It is of course the old story—the abuse of liberty. We shorten the hours of work, and we offer nothing in the place of work, except the street; we leave the lads, whom we thought to benefit, to their own devices, and to discover, if they can, the way to turn the hours thus rescued from drudgery into a means of climbing to a higher life. We leave them, even, in complete ignorance as to any higher life at all. Their own idea of employing their idle time is to do nothing, to amuse themselves, and, as the street is the only place where they can find amusement for nothing, they go into the street.
They begin by walking about in little companies of two and three; by way of asserting their early manhood the boys smoke cheap cigarettes, called, I believe, “fags”; also, by way of asserting their own importance—no one knows the conceit and vanity of lads of fifteen and sixteen, the age between the boy and the man—they occupy a great deal of the pavement, they hustle each other, regardless of other people; they get up impromptu fights and sham fights; they wrestle; they make rushes among the crowd; they push about the girls of their own age, who are by no means backward in appreciating and returning these delicate attentions; they whistle and sing, and practise the calls of the day and the locality. A very favorite amusement, in which they are joined and assisted by the girls, is to get up a little acting in dumb show; some of them are excellent mimics. I have, for instance, read more than once in the columns of temperance organs or the letters of philanthropists, tearful or indignant, most melancholy accounts of precocious drunkenness among the boys and girls of East London—that poor East London! “I have seen,” writes the visitor to Ratcliffe and Shadwell, “with my own eyes, boys and girls, quite young boys and girls, reeling about drunk,—actually drunk, hopelessly drunk,—the girls, poor creatures, worse than the boys. I spoke to one. She was no more than thirteen or so—a pretty child, but helplessly intoxicated. When I spoke to her she tried to reply, but became inarticulate; she gasped, she laughed—the awful laugh of a drunkard! She made a gesture of helplessness, she fell sideways on the pavement, and would not rise. Her companions, as far gone as herself, only laughed. A sad sight, truly, in a civilized country!”
A very sad sight, indeed! This observer, however, did not understand that the personation of drunken people is one of the favorite amusements of the boys and girls in the evening streets. They have every day opportunities of studying their subject. A life school exists in every street, and is thrown open every night, and the fidelity with which every stage of drunkenness is represented by these young actors would be remarkable even on the boards of Drury Lane. Had the indignant writer of that letter known so simple a fact his pity and his wrath would have been reserved for a more worthy object.
Acting and running and shouting are amusing as far as they go, but they are not enough. The blood is very restless at seventeen; it wants exercise in reality. This restlessness is the cause of the certain street companies of which the London papers have recently spoken with indignation. They are organized originally for local fights. The boys of Cable Street constitute themselves, without asking the permission of the War Office, into a small regiment; they arm themselves with clubs, with iron bars, with leather belts to which buckles belong, with knotted handkerchiefs containing stones—a lethal weapon—with sling and stones, with knives even, with revolvers of the “toy” kind, and they go forth to fight the lads of Brook Street. It is a real fight; the field is presently strewn with the wounded; the police have trouble in putting a stop to the combat; with broken heads, black eyes, and bandaged arms, the leaders appear next day before the magistrate.
The local regiment cannot always be meeting its army on the field of glory; the next step, therefore, to hustling the people in the street is natural. The boys gather together and hold the street; if any one ventures to pass through it they rush upon him, knock him down, and kick him savagely about the head; they rob him as well. In the autumn of last year (1899) an inoffensive elderly gentleman was knocked down by such a gang, robbed, kicked about the head, and taken up insensible; he was carried home, and died the next day. These gangs are the modern Mohocks; South London is more frequently favored with their achievements than the quarter with which we are here concerned; they are difficult to deal with because they meet, fight, and disperse with such rapidity that it is next to impossible to get hold of them. It is an ugly feature of the time; it is mainly due to the causes I have pointed out, and it will probably disappear before long. Meantime, the boys regard the holding of the street with pride; their captain is a hero, as much as the captain of the Eleven at a public school.
Sometimes they devise other modes of achieving greatness. A year or two ago half a dozen of them thought that it would be a good thing if they were to attend Epsom races on the Derby Day, the great race of the year. One can go to Epsom by road or rail; the latter is the cheaper and the easier way, but the more glorious way is to go by road, as the swells go. They hire a carriage and pair, and get a luncheon hamper from Fortnum and Mason’s, and pay for a stand on the hill—the thing can be done for about £25. These boys thought to emulate the swells; they would drive to Epsom. They therefore helped themselves to a baker’s horse and light cart, and, all in the gray of the morning, drove the whole way in the greatest glory to the race-course. Arrived there they sold the horse and cart to a Gipsy for three pounds, and spent the day in watching the races, in betting on the events, and in feasting. When the glorious day was over and their money all gone they found an outhouse near the common, and there lay down to sleep, intending to walk home in the morning. Now, the baker, on discovering his loss, had gone to the police, and the police, remembering the day and suspecting the truth, for the lads’ thirst for sport was well known, telegraphed to Epsom; the horse and cart were recovered, and in the middle of the night the boys themselves were found. They did return to town in the morning, but not as they left. It was in the roomy vehicle commonly called “Black Maria” that they were taken to the police court, and from the court to the Reformatory, where they still languish.
The boys are great gamblers. As gambling and betting are strictly forbidden in the streets, they have to find places where they can play undisturbed. Sunday is the day devoted to gambling. The boys get on board a barge, where they sit in the hold and play cards—locally called “darbs”—all day long; sometimes they find an empty house, sometimes a room in a condemned row of crazy tenements. The favorite game, the name of which I do not know, is one in which the dealer holds the bank; he deals a card to every player and one to himself. Each player covers his card with a stake, generally a penny: the cards are turned up; the players pay the dealer for cards below, and are paid for cards above the dealer’s card. It is quite a simple game, and one in which a boy may lose his Saturday wages in a very short time. They also play “heads and tails,” and they are said to bet freely among each other.
At this period of their career some of them begin to read a good deal. Not the newspapers, not any books; their reading is confined to the penny novelette; for them Jack Harkaway performs incredible feats of valor; it is not for them that the maiden of low degree is wedded by the belted earl—that is for the girls; for these lads, to whom a fight is the finest thing in the world, the renowned Jack Harkaway knocks down the wicked captain on the quarter-deck, rescues a whole ship’s company from pirates, performs prodigies at Omdurman. His feats are described in the amazing sheets which he calls “ha’penny bloods” or “penny dreadfuls.” If the boys buy a paper it is one of like mind, such as are written and printed especially and exclusively for him.
They go often, I have said, to the music-hall; there are three or four in their own quarter—the Paragon, Mile End Road; the Foresters, Cambridge Road; and the Queen’s, Poplar. But they go farther afield, and may be found in the galleries of even West-End music-halls to see a popular “turn.” As for concerts and lectures and entertainments given at the Town Hall or other places, they will not go to them. There is too much “class.”
At this time, namely, at sixteen or seventeen, the boys commonly take a sweetheart; they “keep company” with a girl; night after night they walk the streets together; what they talk about no one knows, what vows of constancy they exchange no man hath ever heard or can divine; they take each other, the boy paying when he can, to the music-hall or to the theater; they stand drinks—it is at this period that the fatal yearning for drink begins to fasten itself upon the lad. The “keeping company” is perhaps a worse evil than the growing thirst for drink; it ends, invariably, in the early marriage, which is one of the most deplorable features in the lower life; the young girl of sixteen or seventeen, ignorant of everything, enters upon the married life, and for the rest of her days endures all the wretchedness of grinding poverty, children half-nourished and in rags, a drunken husband and a drunken self. The boys’ clubs, the girls’ clubs, the settlements, of which I shall speak again presently, do all in their power to occupy the young people’s minds with other things; but the club closes at ten, and the street remains open all night.
None of these street boys and girls—or very few, as I have said already—are country-born; the country lads come up to London Town, to the city paved with gold, in thousands, but they are older than these children of the street; they have not learned the fascination which the street exercises upon those who have always lived in it and always played in it.
Their martial tastes should make them enlist, but the discipline forbids enlistment. Many of them, however, belong to the Tower Hamlets Militia, a regiment called out for drill for six weeks every year. They enjoy sporting the uniform ; they like marching; they like the band and the mess in barracks, but they cannot endure the discipline for more than six weeks, even in return for the grandeur and the glory of the thing.
What, then, is the connection between the casual hand and the lads of the street? This: the life of the street is an ordeal through which these lads must pass, since we give them no other choice; some of them emerge without harm; for them the craving for drink has not become a demoniac possession; they have never been haled before the police court; they know not the interior of prison or reformatory; they have not married at seventeen; these are the young fellows who get, and keep, permanent places with “good money,” they are hewers of wood and drawers of water like the children of Gideon, yet they live not in the slums; their homes are in the Monotonies; theirs is a four-or six-roomed house, one of a row, one of a street, a flat in a barrack; their houses and dwelling-places stand side by side miles around. But the life that is led in these streets is not monotonous, because every man has his own life and his own experience, his birth and childhood, his manhood and his age, and these can never be monotonous.
There remain, alas! those with whom we began, the company of two or three who hang around the corner outside the public house or lean against the walls of the docks. They are the men whom the ordeal of the street, more than any other cause, has broken down. They have emerged from that ordeal with a confirmed habit of taking the Easy Way, that of no self-restraint, that which temptation indicates with beckoning finger and false smiles; at nineteen they have lost any possible joy of work, pride in work, desire for work—they know not any work which can afford the workman joy or pride; to them the necessity for work is an ever-present curse which corrupts and poisons life. Were it not for this cruel necessity they might pass through the allotted span with no more effort and no more ambition than the common slug of the hedge.