THE CADGERS OF LONDON BRIDGE.
AFTER leaving the Old Jewry Lane and passing up Cheapside, we came into
the Poultry just as the rain had ceased, and as great rifts in the
masses of fog were breaking through the opaque atmosphere. The Poultry
is a short street which runs up to the Mansion House, and during the
noon of the day is nearly impassable from the amount of traffic done
there. Now the shops were all closed, and the bell of St. Paul's rang
out for midnight, the echoes stealing over the city and the river in
a ghostly way that thrilled through the hearts of the pedestrians who
were darkness-bound in the streets. We passed through the Poultry into
King William street, and on past Cannon street, with its warehouses and
retail stores, by East Cheap, until we could see London Bridge, in all
its vastness, looming up like a sleeping giant, the dark arches girding
the river in seemingly everlasting bands.
The detective said: "Let's go down the stairs of the bridge and see
some of the characters that find board and lodging down the steps.
They're a hawful set, some on 'em."
The Thames lay at our feet, spread out like a map. The sky was
clearing, and the river was very quiet. Now and then the sullen waters,
driven in an eddy against the huge piers, could be heard plashing in
a secret, stealthy manner, and anon they would recede and come back
again, plash! plash! plash! All about us was so still; not a sound to
be heard as we leaned over one of the alcoves in the bridge. Below us,
to the left, the Catharine Docks, full of shipping; the London Docks,
full of shipping; Shadwell lined with lighter craft--all so still, and
the million of masts looking ghostly in the holy light of the midnight.
Over on the right, Bermondsey-way, more shipping--countless spars
pointing up to the midnight skies; the Pool choked with shipping--coal
barges, eel-boats, East India vessels, brigs and schooners, barks and
black-hulled packets, lying high in the water; flat-bottomed barges
for carrying sand and for dredging; the gray coping stones of the
Tower hanging over the water, and the stillness of death on noisy
Rotherhithe, and a pall over the immense West India docks.
This great river, this river of all the nations of the world, with
their tributes laid at her docks and their gifts on her broad
bosom--how quiet it is just now. A matchless stream for its congregated
wealth. Miles of warehouses, miles of stone docks, miles of shipping,
and thousands of seamen. And yet a dirty and turbid and ungrateful
river at times, when it overflows the fish-stalls, when it overflows
the high street in Wapping and drowns myriads of rats in Upper and
Lower Thames street.
[Sidenote: VAGRANCY AND PAUPERISM.]
We went down the "London Stairs." Every bridge that spans the Thames
has four stairs or flights of stone-steps running down to the water's
edge. These stone stairs are generally twenty or twenty-five feet
wide, and they run down, for a hundred broad, massive and capacious
steps, to where the tide comes in. There are turns in the stairs, and
stone platforms--where the magnificent stone embankment has not been
completed, as it is at Westminster Bridge down the river--under whose
vast arches hundreds of human beings find shelter from the inclemency
of the weather. I may say here that there is not such a city in the
world as London for vagrancy and vagabondism of the worst kind despite
the fact that there are 7,000 police in the metropolitan district;
and besides this force for prevention, the work-houses in the West
District, composing Kensington, Fulham, Paddington, Chelsea, St.
George's, Hanover Square, St. Margaret, and St. John, and Westminster,
furnish in and out door relief to 18,000 persons. Marylebone,
Hampstead, St. Pancras, Islington, and Hackney, in the North District,
provide for 24,820 persons. St. Giles, St. George, Bloomsbury, the
Strand, Holborn, and City of London, in the Central District, provide
for 19,127 persons. Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St. George
in the East, Stepney, Mile End Town, and Poplar, provide for 28,713
persons, in the East District. In the Southern District, St. Saviour,
Southwark, Rotherhithe, and Bermondsey; in St. Olave's, Lambeth,
Wandsworth, and Clapham, Camberwell, Greenwich, Woolwich, and Lewisham,
there is provision for 38,487 persons. Here we have a total of 128,880
men, women, and children, occupants of the union work-houses of the
metropolis of London, with a population of less than three and a half
millions. Besides this number, there are thousands of casuals who
receive lodgings in the work-houses; and outside this fearful aggregate
there are roaming in and about London at least 15,000 vagrants--or, as
they would be called in America, "bummers"--who do not frequent the
work-houses from various reasons, and consequently have to "bunk out,"
as we would call it in New York.
At the bottom of some of the bridges there are heaps of rubbish and old
rotting planking, some of which rubbish is carried off when the tide
leaves the stones of the bridges. Then there are old boat-houses, and
rows of long, stout-built boats for hire; but at night there are no
persons to watch these boats, and they are used as berths to sleep in
by the vagrant vagabonds who haunt the recesses of the bridges. When
the tide recedes in the Thames, it generally leaves a space of twenty
to two hundred feet of the inshore bottom of the river bare on the
Surrey side, and this is generally a soft, drab-looking mud, with a
treacherous look, where man or beast might be swallowed up without any
warning. When the detective and I went down into the dark recesses of
London Bridge, that night, the river was at the flood, and the rubbish
was being carried away by the incoming tide. This was on the Surrey
side of the river. There were about a dozen persons beneath the first
archway, making, in fact, a perfect gypsy encampment. Eight of these
persons were of the male sex, and beside these there were two old
haggard-looking women and a grown girl of twenty years or thereabouts,
and a child of ten years, in all the glory of rags and destitution.
The oldest man in the party might have been fifty years of age, and
the others were younger, one of them being a stout, able-bodied young
fellow of eighteen or nineteen. Some of the party were asleep, and were
snoring most comfortably, as the rain did not penetrate to their place
of sleeping; but every few minutes a gust of wind came howling down the
river and burst through the arches with a mad fury, making the sleepers
turn uneasily on the stone steps.
[Illustration: THE CADGER'S MEAL.]
The old fellow, who seemed to be a confirmed vagrant, from his slouchy
look and greasy, unpatched clothes, had built a small fire of the
refuse which abounded in the arches, and he was drying pieces of
driftwood that had floated from the scaffolding on the new Blackfriar's
Bridge down the river. He was warming his hands and slapping them, and
the little girl of ten years was stooped over the fire, toasting an
enormous potato on the end of a splinter of wood.
[Sidenote: THE LOST GIRL.]
"What are you herding here for, Prindle," said the detective to the old
fellow, who looked up in a morose way and muttered something under his
teeth which sounded like "D----n the bobbies."
"I'm a trying to get somethink to heat. Vy vill yer foller a cove
everywheres as wants to get a mouthful to heat. I haint done nothink as
should bring you here arter me. I'm not hon the pad now hany more."
"I don't want yer pertikler, I don't; but stop yer jaw and keep a civil
tongue in yer head, will ye," said the sergeant. "Whose gal is that ere
a toasting the taty with the skiver?"
"I'm blessed hif I knows whose gal it his. Ye don't suppose that I'm
the man as makes the Post-hoffice Di-rek-te-ree. She haint mine, I
know, cos I'm not a fool, nor never vos, to have any children. I must
say she is werry 'andy at the taties when a feller wants to get some
winks. But, I say, you got nothink aginst me from the Beak, 'ave you?"
"No, I have nothing against you just at this partickler moment, but
I dunno how soon I'll have," said the sergeant. "But I have brought
a gentleman here who wants to get some information about this 'ere
precious family of yours, and how you contrive to live, and I want you
to answer him civilly, or I may find something against you that would
hurt your tender feelings, you know."
"He wants some hinformation habout me and my family, does he? That's
a precious lark, that is. Why doesn't he stay in his bleeding bed and
cover his nose hup in the sheets. I never asked 'im about his familee,
as I knows on. Wot a werry pecoolier taste he has, to be sure. Maybe
he's one of them rummaging Paper chaps as is halways a torkin about
the rights and dooties of the vorkin' classes, and is a-ruinin' of the
country's blessed prosperity?"
"Father, answer the man civilly, will ye. Yer halways a-making trouble
for yourself by yer bad tongue, and it does other people harm as well
as yourself. Tell him wot you have got to tell, and he'll go away."
This was said by the young girl, who now came forward and stood looking
at the old man eagerly. She was robed in an old calico gown, rather
tattered at the bottom, and quite besmirched with the washings of the
Thames mud which had clung to the stone stairs of the bridge. The girl
was well formed and tall, and her dress hung from a good figure. Her
eyes were black and glittering, and her bold, coarse, handsome face
was seared with the traces of evil passions, hardship, and reckless
despair. The girl's face told her story before she had spoken.
Childhood and girlhood reeking with the foulness of the gutters, and
then the matured woman a castaway in the deadly miasma of the London
slums.
"There, aint that a precious daughter for a loving father like me. Oh,
she's a comfort to me in me hold hage, so she is. And she talks of
wirtue and gets on the 'igh 'orse with her poor old father sometimes,
and makes him veep. Oh, vot an ungrateful family I've got, to be sure.
She's no better than she ought to be, anyhow."
"Oh, stop that bloody talk, old man," said the stout, able-bodied
young fellow, who seemed to be a person of influence in the out-door
establishment. "W'ats the use of throwin' sich things in the gal's
face. Molly's a gal jest like any one else's gal when she can't get
anything to eat. I don't blame her a bit."
[Sidenote: THE YOUNG CADGER'S STORY.]
"If I am bad, Jem," burst out the girl, raging with passion, and her
eyes filled with tears, "who made me so? Who kept chiming into my ears
that I had a pretty face and that I ought to sell it? Who, I say? Who
was it," continued the girl, clenching her hands, and her face blazing
with excitement, "that struck me last Christmas night, come two years,
and pitched me out of the hole that we lived in on Saffron Hill? And
then I had to seek a livin' in the streets, and when I was hungry I
took money and sold myself to perdition; and then I had a father who
used to steal it from me when I'd come home to sleep, and he'd take the
few shillings that I earned by my shame, to go and drink it, and none
of ye were ashamed to live on the money that lost my poor soul. Not one
of ye." Here the girl, utterly exhausted, sat down on the stones and
wept as if her heart was going to break, while the ragged child, who
had by this time succeeded in burning her fingers a number of times,
looked on in wonder at the sudden turmoil of vagabondism. The son, a
powerfully built fellow, looked up and said:
"Molly, I wish your devilish trap ud shut. Wot good does this do any
of ye, I'd like to know. Here I've been hon the aggrawatin' tramp for
two weeks, and I hexpected to see yes all comfortable like, when I kum
home, in Saffron Hill, down St. Giles way, and here I finds yes hall
a-living hunder London Bridge by night, and a-beggin, or doin' wuss, in
the day time. Hits enuff to make a saint swear at his blessed liver."
"Wuss luck, Jem; wuss luck, Jem; I halways knew as how it would come
to this, a-sooner or a-later," said an old crone in the corner of the
archway, who was smoking a pipe and whom I believed to be fast asleep.
"Well, sir, if ye'v got no hobjection," said the stout young man, "I'll
tell you our story. It isn't much of a story to tell, after all. The
old man there went to be a navvy and got two shillings a day until he
took to drink; when he had work on the Great Western. They used to
swindle him in the Tommy shops. Them's the shops, you see, where a
contractor who 'as the job to bulk it, keeps the groceries and grub for
the navvies. They skin the navvies so terribly, do these Tommy shops,
and when his week is up, a man has nothing left out of his vages, cos',
you see, they halways manages to run up the bill as high as the week's
vages. Oh! they are precious scoundrels!"
"Don't call them scoundrels, Jem. Hit's too good a name for them
haltogether," said the old man, who was beginning to doze.
"Will you shut up?" savagely said the hopeful son; and then he
continued, when he had taken a whiff at the pipe: "Well, by and by the
old man got to drinking so much beer that the whole of the wages was
drawn for lush, and he had nothing to eat during the week excepting
what the other men gave him for charity."
"Hevery word of that's a lie, Jem. Wot a precious talent you have, to
be sure, for habusin of your poor old fayther."
"Will you shut up, d----n you?" said the dutiful son, who was fast losing
his temper at being interrupted so often by his fond parent. "I wos
away at sea down on a Cardiff coaster, when the old man came home, and
the gal, there, Molly, was a lace-maker, and wos making eight shillings
a week, and the old woman used to make penny baskets to carry fish home
from the markets, and she got, I suppose, as much as--how much did you
make on them ere baskets, mother?"
"Two and sevenpence ha'penny a week, Jem, and some of the stuff wos
rotten has an egg, Jem, and I halways had bad hies, Jem--you know I
had--a-crying for you when you wos a blessed baby."
"There, stop that bell-clapper of yours, will ye? Yez are all crazy, I
think. Well, the short and the long of it wos, that the old man came
home and began to drink everything that he could put his hands on, and
Molly lost her place because the old un _would_ come haround her place
of business, in Tottenham Court road, and her hemployer as was said as
'ow he's blessed if he'd stand hit hany longer, 'aving such a drunken
old bloke a-comin around his shop; and then the gal took to the street,
and she got two months in the Bridewell for wagrancy, and when she came
hout she was wuss nor ever, and then the family got put hout cos' they
could not pay the rent in Saffron Hill, four bob and a tanner a week;
and it all comes of that hold man a-drinking like a swine that we are
here to-night hunder London Bridge."
"How _can_ you tell sich voppers, Jem, about yer poor old fayther? Ven
you was about two hinches 'igh I used to dandle ye hon me knee, and now
look at yer hingratitude to the hauthor of your beink."
[Sidenote: TWENTY-FIVE HUNDRED CADGERS.]
"Guv us a taty, Jenny," said the son to the little girl, who was now
engaged in pulling three or four from the dying embers of the fire;
and he snatched one and tore a piece out of it eagerly, hot ashes
and all. Just then a low steamer went past, with her red signal light
shining like a huge glow-worm out upon the surface of the dark river,
and as she went under the bridge her whistle shrieked out on the night
air like a demon, and at the same moment the bell of St. Saviour's in
Southwark, on the Surrey side of the river, tolled in a brazen tone the
hour of one o'clock, and Sergeant Scott suggested to me that we might
as well go about our business and leave the Cadgers to themselves.
"Cadger" is a Cockney term for people who will not work and have no
habitation, but go from one place to another, roaming loosely, picking
up anything they can get, honestly if they can get it that way, and
if not they will not hesitate to steal for a living, or beg when they
find people charitable enough and willing to commiserate their supposed
sufferings.
There are about 2,500 of this class in and around London, continually
changing their places of residence, and to this class the hopeful
family under London Bridge belonged.
[Illustration]