[Illustration: JACK BLACK, HER MAJESTY’S RATCATCHER.
[_From a Photograph._]]
As I wished to obtain the best information about rat and vermin
destroying, I thought I could not do better now than apply to that
eminent authority “the Queen’s ratcatcher,” and accordingly I sought an
interview with Mr. “Jack” Black, whose hand-bills are headed--“V.R. Rat
and mole destroyer to Her Majesty.”
I had already had a statement from the royal bug-destroyer relative to
the habits and means of exterminating those offensive vermin, and I was
desirous of pairing it with an account of the personal experience of
the Queen of England’s ratcatcher.
In the sporting world, and among his regular customers, the Queen’s
ratcatcher is better known by the name of Jack Black. He enjoys the
reputation of being the most fearless handler of rats of any man
living, playing with them--as one man expressed it to me--“as if they
were so many blind kittens.”
The first time I ever saw Mr. Black was in the streets of London, at
the corner of Hart-street, where he was exhibiting the rapid effects
of his rat poison, by placing some of it in the mouth of a living
animal. He had a cart then with rats painted on the panels, and at the
tailboard, where he stood lecturing, he had a kind of stage rigged up,
on which were cages filled with rats, and pills, and poison packages.
Here I saw him dip his hand into this cage of rats and take out as many
as he could hold, a feat which generally caused an “oh!” of wonder to
escape from the crowd, especially when they observed that his hands
were unbitten. Women more particularly shuddered when they beheld him
place some half-dozen of the dusty-looking brutes within his shirt next
his skin; and men swore the animals had been tamed, as he let them run
up his arms like squirrels, and the people gathered round beheld them
sitting on his shoulders cleaning their faces with their front-paws, or
rising up on their hind legs like little kangaroos, and sniffing about
his ears and cheeks.
But those who knew Mr. Black better, were well aware that the animals
he took up in his hand were as wild as any of the rats in the sewers of
London, and that the only mystery in the exhibition was that of a man
having courage enough to undertake the work.
I afterwards visited Jack Black at his house in Battersea. I had some
difficulty in discovering his country residence, and was indebted to
a group of children gathered round and staring at the bird-cage in the
window of his cottage for his address. Their exclamations of delight at
a grey parrot climbing with his beak and claws about the zinc wires of
his cage, and the hopping of the little linnets there, in the square
boxes scarcely bigger than a brick, made me glance up at the door to
discover who the bird-fancier was; when painted on a bit of zinc--just
large enough to fit the shaft of a tax cart--I saw the words, “J.
Black, Rat Destroyer to Her Majesty,” surmounted by the royal initials,
V.R., together with the painting of a white rat.
Mr. Black was out “sparrer ketching,” as his wife informed me, for he
had an order for three dozen, “which was to be shot in a match” at some
tea-gardens close by.
When I called again Mr. Black had returned, and I found him kneeling
before a big, rusty iron-wire cage, as large as a sea-chest, and
transferring the sparrows from his bird-catching apparatus to the more
roomy prison.
He transacted a little business before I spoke to him, for the boys
about the door were asking, “Can I have one for a penny, master?”
There is evidently a great art in handling birds; for when Mr. Black
held one, he took hold of it by the wings and tail, so that the little
creature seemed to be sitting upright and had not a feather rumpled,
while it stretched out its neck and looked around it; the boys, on the
contrary, first made them flutter their feathers as rough as a hair
ball, and then half smothered them between their two hands, by holding
them as if they wished to keep them hot.
I was soon at home with Mr. Black. He was a very different man from
what I had expected to meet, for there was an expression of kindliness
in his countenance, a quality which does not exactly agree with one’s
preconceived notions of ratcatchers. His face had a strange appearance,
from his rough, uncombed hair, being nearly grey, and his eyebrows and
whiskers black, so that he looked as if he wore powder.
Mr. Black informed me that the big iron-wire cage, in which the
sparrows were fluttering about, had been constructed by him for rats,
and that it held over a thousand when full--for rats are packed like
cups, he said, one over the other. “But,” he added, “business is bad
for rats, and it makes a splendid havery; besides, sparrers is the rats
of birds, sir, for if you look at ’em in a cage they always huddles up
in a corner like rats in a pit, and they are a’most vermin in colour
and habits, and eats anything.”
The ratcatcher’s parlour was more like a shop than a family apartment.
In a box, with iron bars before it, like a rabbit-hutch, was a white
ferret, twisting its long thin body with a snake-like motion up and
down the length of its prison, as restlessly as if it were a miniature
polar bear.
When Mr. Black called “Polly” to the ferret, it came to the bars and
fixed its pink eyes on him. A child lying on the floor poked its
fingers into the cage, but Polly only smelt at them, and, finding them
not good to eat, went away.
Mr. Black stuffs animals and birds, and also catches fish for vivaria.
Against the walls were the furred and feathered remains of departed
favourites, each in its glazed box and appropriate attitude. There was
a famous polecat--“a first-rater at rats” we were informed. Here a
ferret “that never was equalled.” This canary “had earned pounds.” That
linnet “was the wonder of its day.” The enormous pot-bellied carp, with
the miniature rushes painted at the back of its case, was caught in the
Regent’s Park waters.
In another part of the room hung fishing-lines, and a badger’s skin,
and lead-bobs and curious eel-hooks--the latter as big as the curls on
the temples of a Spanish dancer, and from here Mr. Black took down a
transparent-looking fish, like a slip of parchment, and told me that
it was a fresh-water smelt, and that he caught it in the Thames--“the
first he ever heard of.” Then he showed me a beetle suspended to a
piece of thread, like a big spider to its web, and this he informed me
was the Thames beetle, “which either live by land or water.”
“You ketch ’em,” continued Mr. Black, “when they are swimming on their
backs, which is their nature, and when they turns over you finds ’em
beautifully crossed and marked.”
Round the room were hung paper bags, like those in which housewives
keep their sweet herbs. “All of them there, sir, contain cured fish for
eating,” Mr. Black explained to me.
“I’m called down here the Battersea otter,” he went on, “for I can go
out at four in the morning, and come home by eight with a barrowful of
freshwater fish. Nobody knows how I do it, because I never takes no
nets or lines with me. I assure them I ketch ’em with my hands, which I
do, but they only laughs increderlous like. I knows the fishes’ harnts,
and watches the tides. I sells fresh fish--perch, roach, dace, gudgeon,
and such-like, and even small jack, at threepence a pound, or what
they’ll fetch; and I’ve caught near the Wandsworth ‘Black Sea,’ as we
calls it, half a hundred weight sometimes, and I never took less than
my handkerchey full.”
I was inclined--like the inhabitants of Battersea--to be incredulous of
the ratcatcher’s hand-fishing, until, under a promise of secrecy, he
confided his process to me, and then not only was I perfectly convinced
of its truth, but startled that so simple a method had never before
been taken advantage of.
Later in the day Mr. Black became very communicative. We sat chatting
together in his sanded bird shop, and he told me all his misfortunes,
and how bad luck had pressed upon him, and driven him out of London.
“I was fool enough to take a public-house in Regent-street, sir,” he
said. “My daughter used to dress as the ‘Ratketcher’s Daughter,’ and
serve behind the bar, and that did pretty well for a time; but it was a
brewer’s house, and they ruined me.”
The costume of the “ratketcher’s daughter” was shown to me by her
mother. It was a red velvet bodice, embroidered with silver lace.
“With a muslin skirt, and her hair down her back, she looked wery
genteel,” added the parent.
Mr. Black’s chief complaint was that he could not “make an appearance,”
for his “uniform”--a beautiful green coat and red waistcoat--“were
pledged.”
Whilst giving me his statement, Mr. Black, in proof of his assertions
of the biting powers of rats, drew my attention to the leathern
breeches he wore, “as were given him twelve years ago by Captain B----.”
These were pierced in some places with the teeth of the animals, and
in others were scratched and fringed like the washleather of a street
knife-seller.
His hands, too, and even his face, had scars upon them from bites.
Mr. Black informed me that he had given up tobacco “since a haccident
he met with from a pipe. I was smoking a pipe,” he said, “and a friend
of mine by chance jobbed it into my mouth, and it went right through to
the back of my palate, and I nearly died.”
Here his wife added, “There’s a hole there to this day you could put
your thumb into; you never saw such a mouth.”
Mr. Black informed me in secret that he had often, “unbeknown to his
wife,” tasted what cooked rats were like, and he asserted that they
were as moist as rabbits, and quite as nice.
“If they are shewer-rats,” he continued, “just chase them for two or
three days before you kill them, and they are as good as barn-rats, I
give you my word, sir.”