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EAST LONDON
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[Illustration: A Street Row in the East End.]
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EAST LONDON
BY
WALTER BESANT
AUTHOR OF
“LONDON,” “SOUTH LONDON,” “WESTMINSTER,” ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
PHIL MAY, JOSEPH PENNELL, AND
L. RAVEN-HILL
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1901
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Copyright, 1899, 1900, 1901, by
THE CENTURY CO.
THE DEVINNE PRESS.
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CONTENTS
PAGE
I WHAT EAST LONDON IS 1
II THE CITY OF MANY CRAFTS 19
III THE POOL AND THE RIVERSIDE 39
IV THE WALL 101
V THE FACTORY GIRL 114
VI THE KEY OF THE STREET 153
VII THE ALIEN 185
VIII THE HOUSELESS 209
IX THE SUBMERGED 227
X THE MEMORIES OF THE PAST 253
XI ON SPORTS AND PASTIMES 285
XII THE HELPING HAND 317
INDEX 359
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ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
A STREET ROW IN THE EAST END _Frontispiece_
MAP OF EAST LONDON 5
LONDON STREET, LIMEHOUSE 11
A TYPICAL STREET IN BETHNAL GREEN 15
AN EAST END WHARF 25
AN EAST END FACTORY 31
BARGE-BUILDERS 36
THE WATER-GATE OF LONDON: TOWER BRIDGE 43
LOOKING TOWARD ST. PAUL’S
THE BANK OF “THE POOL.” LOOKING TOWARD 49
TOWER BRIDGE
IN THE DOCKS 53
THE TOWER OF LONDON 57
THE WATER-GATE OF LONDON: TOWER BRIDGE 63
FROM THE EAST SIDE OF THE TOWER
THE TURN OF THE TIDE ON THE LOWER THAMES 69
COMING UP THE LOWER THAMES WITH THE TIDE 75
OFF SHADWELL 80
RATCLIFFE-CROSS STAIRS 83
LIMEHOUSE BASIN AND CHURCH 89
THE THAMES SIDE AT LIMEHOUSE 93
GREENWICH HOSPITAL 97
WADE STREET, LIMEHOUSE 117
IN AN EAST END GIN-SHOP 125
THE BRITISH WORKMAN IN EPPING FOREST 131
BROOK STREET, LIMEHOUSE 139
AN AUGUST BANK-HOLIDAY IN THE EAST END 145
A MUSIC-HALL 150
THE WEST INDIA DOCK GATES 157
THE BARGES THAT LIE DOWN THE THAMES 163
EAST LONDON LOAFERS 169
THE “HOOLIGANS” 175
SUNDAY GAMBLING 179
WHITECHAPEL SHOPS 190
A CORNER IN PETTICOAT LANE 197
A “SCHNORRER” (BEGGAR) OF THE GHETTO 200
EAST AND WEST HAM 215
EAST AND WEST HAM, FROM THE MARSHES 215
SALVATION ARMY SHELTER 232
SANDWICH-MEN 245
“A QUIET DULLNESS” 259
THE STREET AND OLD CHURCH TOWER, HACKNEY 262
AN EAST LONDON SUBURB, OVERLOOKING 265
HACKNEY MARSHES
CLAPTON 269
THE OLD CHURCH, STOKE NEWINGTON 272
A STREET IN STOKE NEWINGTON 274
HOUSE IN STOKE NEWINGTON IN WHICH EDGAR 277
ALLAN POE LIVED
HAMPSTEAD HEATH, LOOKING “HENDON WAY” 293
THE SHOOTING-GALLERY 299
ON MARGATE SANDS 305
TOYNBEE HALL AND ST. JUDE’S CHURCH 312
THE NEW WHITECHAPEL ART GALLERY 322
THE EAST LONDON MISSION 329
THE NEW MODEL DWELLINGS 336
DR. BARNARDO’S HOME, STEPNEY CAUSEWAY 340
MILE END ALMSHOUSES 347
“THE BRIDGE OF HOPE,” A WELL-KNOWN EAST 355
END NIGHT REFUGE
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I
WHAT EAST LONDON IS
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EAST LONDON
I
WHAT EAST LONDON IS
IN my previous books on London I have found it necessary to begin with
some consideration of the history and antiquities of the district
concerned. For instance, my book on Westminster demanded this historical
treatment, because Westminster is essentially an old historical city
with its roots far down in the centuries of the past: once a Roman
station; once the market-place of the island; once a port; always a
place of religion and unction; for six hundred years the site of the
King’s House; for five hundred years the seat of Parliament; for as many
the home of our illustrious dead. But with East London there is no
necessity to speak of history. This modern city, the growth of a single
century,—nay, of half a century,—has no concern and no interest in the
past; its present is not affected by its past; there are no monuments to
recall the past; its history is mostly a blank—that blank which is the
history of woods and meadows, arable and pasture land, over which the
centuries pass, making no more mark than the breezes of yesterday have
made on the waves and waters of the ocean.
It is, however, necessary that the reader should understand exactly what
I mean by East London. For this purpose I have prepared a small map
showing the part of Greater London, which in these pages stands for East
London. I include all that area which lies east of Bishopsgate Street
Without and north of the river Thames; I include that area newly covered
with houses, now a densely populated suburb, lying east of the river
Lea; and I include that aggregation of crowded towns, each large enough
to form an important city by itself, formed of the once rural suburban
villages called Hackney, Clapton, Stoke Newington, Old Ford, Stepney,
Bow and Stratford.
In order to save the trouble of a long description, and because the
reader ought to know something of the natural features of the ground on
which East London stands, I have presented on the map certain
indications by which the reader, with a little study, may make out for
himself as much of these natural features as are necessary. He will see,
for instance, that the parts now lying along the bank of the river were
formerly either foreshore or marshland, overflowed at every high tide,
and lying below a low, natural cliff, which receded inland till it met
the rising ground of the bank of the river Lea. The figures on the map
mark the sites of villages successively reclaimed from the river by a
dyke or sea-wall; if the reader were to visit these riverside parishes
he would find in many places the streets actually lower than the high
tide of the river, but protected by this sea-wall, now invisible and
built over. North of the cliff was a level expanse of cultivated farms,
woods and orchards, common ground and pasture land.
[Illustration: Map of East London.]
This level ground was a manor belonging to the Bishop of London; the
farmers, huntsmen, fowlers, and fishermen occupying it were his tenants;
he was jealous over encroachments, and would not permit the City to
stretch out its arms over his domain. The history of the manor belongs
to the antiquary: to the East Londoner himself it has no interest; and
indeed, there is very little to tell. That Captain Courageous, Wat
Tyler, marched his men across this manor. They came by the road marked
“To Bow.” One of our kings held a Parliament in the Bishop’s Palace;
heretics were occasionally burned here; there were one or two monastic
houses; a bishop’s palace there was; and there was one parish church,
for the large parish called Stebenhithe, now Stepney. Farmhouses were
scattered about; there were orchards and gardens, lovely woods, broad
pastures, acres of waving corn. The citizens of London, though this
place belonged to the bishop, had the right of hunting and fishing in
its woods and over its low-lying levels; it was a right of the most
valuable kind, for the marshes were full of wild birds and the woods
were full of creatures fit for man’s food. In the year 1504, Sir Thomas
More, writing to his friend Dean Colet, then Vicar of Stepney, says:
“Wheresoever you look, the earth yieldeth you a pleasant prospect; the
temperature of the air fresheth you, and the very bounds of the heavens
do delight you. Here you find nothing but bounteous gifts of nature and
saint-like tokens of innocency.”
The whole of the area between the northern road, which is our western
boundary, and the river Lea is now covered with houses and people; the
peninsula, marked on the map by the number “VII,” consisting of low and
malarial ground, long stood out against occupation, but is now almost
entirely covered over and absorbed by factories and workmen’s
residences; what is more, the people of the original East London have
now overflowed and crossed the Lea, and spread themselves over the
marshes and meadows beyond. This population—not to speak of the suburban
villas, which now cover many square miles—represents a movement and a
migration of the last twenty years. It has created new towns which were
formerly rural villages. West Ham, with a population of nearly 300,000;
East Ham, with 90,000; Stratford, with its “daughters,” 150,000; and
other “hamlets” similarly overgrown. Including, therefore, as we must
include, these new populations, we have an aggregate of nearly two
millions of people, living all together in what ought to be a single
city under one rule. This should be a very remarkable city for its
numbers alone; the population is greater than that of Berlin or Vienna,
or St. Petersburg, or Philadelphia. As a crowded mass of humanity alone
it should demand serious consideration. In other respects, however, it
is more remarkable still. You will acknowledge with me that in these
respects and from these points of view, no other city in the world is
like East London.
To begin with, it is not a city by organization; it is a collocation of
overgrown villages lying side by side. It had, until this year (1900),
no center, no heart, no representative body, no mayor, no aldermen, no
council, no wards; it has not inherited Folk’s Mote, Hustings, or Ward
Mote; it has therefore no public buildings of its own. There are vestry
halls and town halls, but they are those of the separate hamlets—Hackney
or Stratford—not East London. It has no police of its own; the general
order is maintained by the London County Council. It is a city full of
churches and places of worship, yet there are no cathedrals, either
Anglican or Roman; it has a sufficient supply of elementary schools, but
it has no public or high school, and it has no colleges for the higher
education and no university; the people all read newspapers, yet there
is no East London paper except of the smaller and local kind; the
newspapers are imported from Fleet Street; it has no monthly magazines
nor any weekly popular journals, not even penny comic papers—these also
are imported; it has no courts of law except the police courts; out of
the one hundred and eighty free libraries, great and small, of London,
only nine or ten belong to this city—two of these are doubtful, one at
least is actually falling to pieces by neglect and is in a rapid state
of decay. In the streets there are never seen any private carriages;
there is no fashionable quarter; the wealthy people who live on the
northeast side near Epping Forest do their shopping in the City or the
West End; its places of amusement are of the humbler kind, as we shall
learn in due course; one meets no ladies in the principal thoroughfares;
there is not visible, anywhere, the outward indication of wealth.
People, shops, houses, conveyances—all together are stamped with the
unmistakable seal of the working-class.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all is this: in a city of two millions of
people there are no hotels! Actually, no hotels! There may be, perhaps,
sprung up of late, one or two by the docks, but I think not; I know of
none. No hotels. That means, of course, that there are no visitors. Is
there anywhere else in the world a great city which has no visitors? It
is related of a New Zealander that he once came over intending to make a
short stay in London. He put up at a hotel in the City of London itself,
on the eastern side; his wandering feet took him every day into
Whitechapel and Wapping, which, he imagined, constituted the veritable
London of which he had read. After three or four weeks of disappointed
monotony in search of London’s splendors he sought a returning steamer
at the docks. “London,” he said, “is a big place; but for public
buildings and magnificence and rich people, give me Canterbury, New
Zealand.”
There are no visitors to demand hotels; there are also none to ask for
restaurants. Consequently there are none. Dining-rooms, coffee-rooms,
and places providing for the working-men, places of the humbler kind
where things to eat may be had, there are in plenty. Most of the working
folk take their dinners in these places; but the restaurant of the
better kind, with its glittering bars and counters, its white tables,
its copious catering, and its civil waiters, does not exist in East
London. Is there any other city of the world, with even a tenth part of
this population, of which these things would be said? This crowded area,
this multitude of small houses, this aggregation of mean streets—these
things are the expression and the consequence of an expansion of
industries during the last seventy years on a very large and unexpected
scale; East London suddenly sprang into existence because it was
unexpectedly wanted. A map of London of the year 1830 shows a riverside
fringe of hamlets—a cluster of houses outside the City of London and
along the two principal roads marked on my map. For the whole of the
district outside and around there are lanes and paths through fields and
orchards and market gardens, with occasional churches and clusters of
houses and detached country residences.
I have said that there is no municipality, that there are no mayor,
aldermen, or wards; one reason is that it is a manufacturing, not a
trading, city; the wharves and docks are for the use and convenience of
the merchants of the great trading city, their neighbor; manufacturers
are not a gregarious folk; they do not require a bourse or exchange;
they can get along without a mercantile center; they do not feel the
want of a guildhall; they do not understand that they have any bond of
common interest except the necessity of keeping order. The city sprang
up so rapidly, it has spread itself in all directions so unexpectedly,
it has become, while men, unsuspecting, went about their daily business,
suddenly so vast that there has been no opportunity for the simultaneous
birth or creation of any feeling of civic patriotism, civic brotherhood,
or civic pride.
[Illustration: London Street, Limehouse.]
The present condition of East London suggests to the antiquary, in
certain respects, the ancient condition of the City of London before the
people obtained their commune and their mayor. For as the City was
divided into wards, which were manors owned and ruled by aldermen, with
no central organization, no chief or leader of the citizens, so East
London, until the changes in last year’s Act of Parliament, consisted of
parishes, vestries, boards of guardians, and other boards, with no
cohesion, no central government, and, in important matters, such as
fire, water, sanitation, police, education, law, subject to external
authority.
There are no newspapers, but then their newspapers are published in
Fleet Street, only two or three miles away. But their books—where do
they get their books? There are no book-shops. Here is a city of two
millions of people, and not a single bookseller’s shop. True, there are
one or two second-hand book-shops; there are also a few shops which
display, among other goods, a shelf or two of books, mostly of the goody
kind—the girls’ Sunday-school prize and the like. But not a single place
in which the new books of the day, the better literature, the books of
which the world is talking, are displayed and offered for sale. I do not
think that publishers’ travelers ever think it necessary to visit East
London at all. Considering the population, I submit that this is a very
remarkable omission, and one that can be observed in no other city in
the world a tenth part so thickly populated.
Some twelve years ago I was the editor of a weekly sheet called the
“People’s Palace Journal.” In that capacity I endeavored to encourage
literary effort, in the hope of lighting upon some unknown and latent
genius. The readers of the “Journal” were the members of the various
classes connected with the educational side of the place. They were
young clerks chiefly—some of them very good fellows. They had a debating
society, which I attended from time to time. Alas! They carried on their
debates in an ignorance the most profound, the most unconscious, and the
most self-satisfied. I endeavored to persuade them that it was desirable
at least to master the facts of the case before they spoke. In vain.
Then I proposed subjects for essays, and offered prizes for verses. I
discovered, to my amazement, that, among all the thousands of these
young people, lads and girls, there was not discoverable the least
rudimentary indication of any literary power whatever. In all other
towns there are young people who nourish literary ambitions, with some
measure of literary ability. How should there be any in this town, where
there were no books, no papers, no journals, and, at that time, no free
libraries?
Another point may be noted. Ours is a country which has to maintain, at
great cost, a standing army of three hundred thousand men, or
thereabouts, for the defense of the many dependencies of the Empire.
These soldiers are all volunteers; it is difficult, especially in times
of peace, to get recruits in sufficient numbers; it is very important,
most important, that the martial spirit of our youth should be
maintained, and that the advantages which a few years’ discipline with
the colors, with the subsequent chances of employment, possess over the
dreary life of casual labor, should be kept constantly before the eyes
of the people. Such is the wisdom of our War Office that the people of
East London, representing a twentieth part of the population of the
whole country, have no soldiers quartered on them; that they never see
the pomp of war; that they never have their blood fired with the martial
music and the sight of men marching in order; and that in their schools
they are never taught the plain duties of patriotism and the honor of
fighting for the country. In the same spirit of wisdom their country’s
flag, the Union Jack, is never seen in East London except on the river;
it does not float over the schools; the children are not taught to
reverence the flag of the country as the symbol of their liberties and
their responsibilities; alone among the cities of the world, East London
never teaches her children the meaning of patriotism, the history of
their liberties, the pride and the privilege of citizenship in a mighty
empire.
[Illustration: A Typical Street in Bethnal Green.]
What appearance does it present to the visitor? There is, again, in this
respect as well, no other city in the world in the least like East
London for the unparalleled magnitude of its meanness and its monotony.
It contains about five hundred miles of streets, perhaps more—a hundred
or two may be thrown in; they would make little difference. In his
haste, the traveler who walks about these streets for the first time
declares that they are all exactly alike. They contain line upon line,
row upon row, never-ending lines, rows always beginning, of houses all
alike—that is to say, there are differences, but they are slight; there
are workmen’s houses of four or five rooms each, all turned out of the
same pattern, as if built by machinery; there are rows of houses a
little better and larger, but on the same pattern, designed for foremen
of works and the better sort of employees; a little farther off the main
street there are the same houses, but each with a basement and a tiny
front garden—they are for city clerks; and there are dingy houses up
squalid courts, all of the same pattern, but smaller, dirty, and
disreputable. The traveler, on his first visit, wanders through street
after street, through miles of streets. He finds no break in the
monotony; one street is like the next; he looks down another, and finds
it like the first two. In the City and in the west of London there are
old houses, old churches, porches that speak of age, courts and lanes
that have a past stamped upon them, though the houses themselves may be
modern. Here there seems to be no past; he finds no old buildings; one
or two venerable churches there are; there is one venerable tower—but
these the traveler does not discover on his first visit, nor perhaps on
his second or his third.
As are its streets, so, the hasty traveler thinks, must be the lives of
the people—obscure, monotonous, without ambition, without aims, without
literature, art or science. They help to produce the wealth of which
they seem to have so little share, though perhaps they have their full
share; they make possible splendors which they never see; they work to
glorify the other London, into which their footsteps never stray. This,
says the traveler, is the Unlovely City, alike unlovely in its buildings
and in its people—a collocation of houses for the shelter of a herd; a
great fold in which the silly sheep are all alike, where one life is the
counterpart of another, where one face is the same as another, where one
mind is a copy of its neighbor.
The Unlovely City, he calls it, the City of Dreadful Monotony! Well, in
one sense it is all that the casual traveler understands, yet that is
only the shallow, hasty view. Let me try to show that it is a city full
of human passions and emotions, human hopes and fears, love and the joys
of love, bereavement and the sorrows of bereavement; as full of life as
the stately City, the sister City, on the west. Monotonous lines of
houses do not really make or indicate monotonous lives; neither tragedy
nor comedy requires the palace or the castle; one can be human without a
coronet, or even a carriage; one may be a clerk on eighty pounds a year
only, and yet may present, to one who reads thought and interprets
action, as interesting a study as any artist or æsthete, poet or
painter.
Again, this city is not, as our casual observer in his haste affirms,
made up entirely of monotonous lives and mean houses; there are bits and
corners where strange effects of beauty can be seen; there is a park
more lovely than that of St. James’s; there are roads of noble breadth;
there is the ample river; there are the crowded docks; there are
factories and industries; there are men and women in East London who
give up their lives for their brothers and their sisters; and beyond the
city, within easy reach of the city, there are woods and woodlands,
villages and rural haunts, lovelier than any within reach of western
London.
It will be my task in the following pages to lay before my readers some
of the aspects of this city which may redeem it from the charges of
monotony and unloveliness. Do not expect a history of all the villages
which have been swallowed up. That belongs to another place. We have
here to do with the people; humanity may be always picturesque; to the
philosopher every girl is beautiful because she is a girl; every young
man is an object of profound interest because he is a man, and of
admiration because he is young. You have no idea how many girls,
beautiful in their youth; how many women, beautiful in their lives; how
many young men of interest, because they have their lives before them;
how many old men of interest, because their lives are behind them, are
living in this city so monotonous and so mean.
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II
THE CITY OF MANY CRAFTS
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II
THE CITY OF MANY CRAFTS
SOME time ago I compiled a list of the various crafts carried on in
London during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, simply using for
the purpose the more accessible books. It was a time when everything
wanted for the daily use of the people was made or prepared by the
craftsmen of the City, always excepting the things of luxury in demand
only by the richer sort, such as foreign wines, silks, velvets, fine
weapons, inlaid armor, swords of tempered steel, spices and oil and
carpets. The London weaver sat at his loom, the London housewife sat at
her spinning-wheel, the London cutler made knives for the Londoner, the
“heaumer” made helmets, the “loriner” made bits and spurs, and so on.
Yet the number of the crafts was only between two and three hundred, so
simple was the life of the time. Then I made another compilation, this
time for the eighteenth century. In the interval of four hundred years
many new inventions had been made, many new arts had come into
existence, many new wants had been created—life had become much more
complex in character. My list of crafts and trades had actually doubled,
though many things were made out of London. At the present moment even,
when dependence is largely necessary on outside industrial centers and
when no great city is sufficient to herself in manufactures, when whole
classes of manufactures have been localized in other parts, when one
might fairly expect a large reduction in the number of trades, we find,
on the other hand, a vast increase. Especially is this increase
remarkable in East London, which, as a home of industries, hardly
existed seventy years ago. It is now especially a city of the newer
wants, the modern crafts, the recent inventions and applications.
East London is, to repeat, essentially and above all things a city of
the working-man. The vast majority of the people work at weekly wages,
for employers great or small. But the larger employers do not live near
their factories, or among their people; you may find at Mile End and
elsewhere a few houses where wealthy employers have once lived, but they
have long since gone away. The chief difference between the present
“City,” properly so called, and East London is that in the City
everybody—principals, clerks, servants, workmen, all go away as soon as
the offices are closed, and no one is left; in East London the employers
go away when the factories are closed, but the employees remain. There
is therefore no sensible diminution in the population on Saturdays and
Sundays; the streets are never deserted as in the City. The
manufacturers and employers of East End labor live in the country or at
the West End, but for the most part in the suburbs beyond the river Lea,
on the outskirts of Epping Forest, where there are very many stately
houses, standing in their gardens and grounds, occupied by a wealthy
class whose factories and offices are somewhere about East London.
The distribution of the trades curiously follows the old mediæval
method, where the men of each trade inhabited their own district for
purposes of work and had their own place recognized and assigned to them
in the great daily fair or market of Chepe. In Whitechapel, for
instance, we may find gathered together a very large percentage of
those, men and women—Polish Jews and others—who are engaged in making
clothes. In Bethnal Green and in Shoreditch are found the followers of
the furniture and woodwork trade; the riverside gives lodging to those
who live by work in the docks; bootmakers are numerous in Mile End, Old
Town, and Old Ford; the silk trade still belongs especially to
Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. The large factories which turn out such
a boundless collection of useful, if unlovely, things line the riverside
of the Isle of Dogs, and the factory hands have their houses in newly
built streets near their work; in Hoxton there is carried on an entirely
different class of industries, chiefly of the smaller kind, such as fur
and feather dressing; their number and the number of their branches and
subdivisions are simply bewildering when one begins to investigate the
way in which the people live. In watchmaking, which belongs to
Clerkenwell, a man will go through life in comfort knowing but one
infinitesimal piece of work—how to make one small bit of a watch; so in
these East End trades a man or a woman generally knows how to do one
thing and one thing only, and if that one piece of work cannot be
obtained the man is lost, for he can do nothing else. In cigar-making,
for instance, there are many women who do nothing all their lives but
take out of the tobacco-leaf the mid rib; this must be done so that the
stalk will be pulled out readily without disturbing or abrading the
surface of the leaf. It is work, too, which is well paid, a “stripper”
getting from twenty-three to twenty-five shillings a week.
The division of labor among the population can be arrived at from a
study of certain tables prepared by Mr. Charles Booth for his great
work on the “Life and Labor of the People of London.” For his purpose
he takes a population of nearly a million—to be accurate,
908,958—inhabiting the area which he defines as East London and
Hackney. My own definition of East London, however, includes a much
larger area, and when we add West Ham, with its large population of
270,000, nearly all sprung up in the last quarter of a century; that
of East Ham, with 90,000, where, twenty years ago, there was but a
hamlet and a church in the fields; and Stratford, with Bow, Bromley,
and Forest Gate, with about 200,000 more, and Walthamstow, with Leyton
and the suburbs south of Epping Forest, we have a population nearly
amounting to two millions. Nor does he include the Isle of Dogs, now
very thickly populated. Let us, however, take Mr. Booth’s figures as
applicable to his district, which is that with which we are most
nearly concerned. He has ascertained, partly from the last census and
partly from independent research and investigation, the main divisions
of the various industries and the number of people dependent upon
each. Thus, out of his solid million he could find only 443 heads of
families, representing 1841 souls, and 574 women, representing 1536
souls, who were independent of work—that is to say, only one person in
600 lived on accumulated savings either of himself or his father
before him. This percentage in an industrial town is extremely small.
The whole of the rest live by their own work, the greater part by
industries, but a few by professions. Thus, of the latter there are
4485 persons—a very small proportion—supported by the professions,
meaning the clergy, the medical men, the lawyers, the architects, etc.
Of clerks and subordinates in the professions there are 79,000 persons
maintained, there are 34,600 persons supported by shops of all kinds,
there are 9200 persons supported by taverns and coffee-houses; this
accounts for less than 140,000. The whole of the remaining 726,000
live on the wages earned by the breadwinner.
[Illustration: An East End Wharf.]
It is, in fact, altogether an industrial population. If, again, we take
Mr. Charles Booth’s figures in greater detail there are seventy-three
thousand who depend upon casual employment; there are the railway
servants, the police, the road service, the sailors, and the officials.
There are, next, those employed in the main divisions of trade—dress,
furniture, building, and machinery—and there are the significant items
of “sundry artisans,” “home industries,” “small trades,” and “other
wage-earners,” amounting in all to the support of about eighty-five
thousand persons. It is among these “sundries” that we are to look for
the astonishing variety of industries, the strange trades that our
complex life has called into existence, and the minute subdivisions of
every trade into branches—say, sprigs and twigs—in which one man may
spend his whole life. We are now very far from the days when a shoemaker
sat down with the leather and his awl and worked away until he had
completed the whole shoe, perfect in all its parts, a shoe of which he
was proud as every honest workman should be, with no scamping of work,
no brown paper instead of leather for the heel. The modern system leaves
no room for pride in work at all; every man is part of a machine; the
shoe grows without the worker’s knowledge; when it emerges, not singly
but by fifties and hundreds, there is no one who can point to it and
say, “Lo! I made it. I—with my right hand. It is the outcome of my
skill.” The curse of labor, surely, has never been fully realized until
the solace of labor, the completion of good work, was taken away from
the craftsman. Look at the list, an imperfect one, of the subdivisions
now prevailing in two or three trades. Formerly, when a man set himself
to make a garment of any kind he did the whole of it himself, and was
responsible for it and received credit for it, and earned wages
according to his skill. There is now a contractor; he turns out the same
thing by the score in half the time formerly required for one; he
divides the work, you see; he employs his “baster, presser, machinist,
buttonholer, feller, fixer, general hand,” all working at the same time
to produce the cheap clothing for which there is so great a demand. In
bootmaking the subdivision is even more bewildering. There are here the
manufacturers, factors, dealers, warehouse men, packers, translators,
makers of lasts, boot-trees, laces, tips and pegs—all these before we
come to the bootmaker proper, who appears in various departments as the
clicker, the closer, the fitter, the machinist, the buttonholer, the
table hand, the sole maker, the finisher, the eyeletter, the rough-stuff
cutter, the laster, the cleaner, the trimmer, the room girl, and the
general utility hand. Again, in the furniture and woodwork trade there
are turners, sawyers, carvers, frame makers, cabinet-makers, chair
makers, polishers, upholsterers, couch makers, office, bedroom, library,
school, drawing-room, furniture makers; upholsterers, improvers,
fancy-box makers, gilders, gluers, and women employed in whichever of
these branches their work can be made profitable.
If we turn to women’s work as distinct from men’s, we find even in small
things this subdivision. For instance, a necktie seems a simple matter;
surely one woman might be intrusted with the making of a single tie. Yet
the work is divided into four. There is the woman who makes the fronts,
she who makes the bands, she who makes the knots, and she who makes the
“fittings.” And in the match-making business, which employs many
hundreds of women and girls, there are the splint makers, the dippers,
the machinists, the wax-vesta makers, the coil fillers, the cutters
down, the tape cutters, the box fillers, the packers, and so on.
It is not my intention in this book to enter into detail concerning the
work and wages of East London. To do so, indeed, with any approach to
truth would involve the copying of Mr. Charles Booth’s book, since no
independent single investigator could hope to arrive at the mass of
evidence and the means of estimating and classifying that evidence with
anything like the accuracy and the extent of information embodied in
those volumes. I desire, however, to insist very strongly upon the fact
that the keynote of East London is its industrial character; that it is
a city of the working-classes; and that one with another, all except a
very small percentage, are earners of the weekly and the daily wage. I
would also point out that not only are the crafts multiplied by the
subdivisions of contractors, but that every new invention, every new
fashion, every new custom, starts a new trade and demands a new set of
working folks; that every new industrial enterprise also calls for its
new workmen and its skilled hands—how many thousands during the last
twenty years have been maintained by the bicycle? As for wages, they
speedily right themselves as the employer discovers the cost of
production, the possible margin of profit, and the level of supply and
demand, tempered by the necessity of keeping the work-people contented
and in health.
Another point to observe is the continual demand for skilled labor in
new directions. A walk round the Isle of Dogs, whose shores are lined
with factories producing things new and old, but especially new, enables
one to understand the demand, but not to understand the supply. Early in
this century the general application of gas for lighting purposes called
for an army of gas engineers, stokers, and fitters and makers of the
plant required. The development of steam has created another army of
skilled labor; the new appliances of electricity have called into
existence a third army of working-men whose new craft demands far more
skill than any of the older trades. Consider, again, the chemical
developments and discoveries; consider the machinery that is required
for almost every kind of industry; the wonderful and lifelike engine of
a cotton mill, which deals as delicately as a woman’s fingers with the
most dainty and fragile fiber, yet exercises power which is felt in
every department of the huge mill; consider the simple lathe driven by
steam; consider the new materials used for the new industries; consider
the machinery wanted to create other machinery; and consider, further,
that these developments have all appeared during the nineteenth century,
that East London is the place where most of them, in our country, were
first put into practice. If, I say, we consider all these things we
shall understand something of the present population of East London.
Again referring to Mr. Charles Booth’s book, there you may learn for
yourself what is paid to men, women, and children for every kind of
work; there you may learn the hours employed and all the
conditions—sanitary, insanitary, dangerous, poisonous—of all the
industries. It must be enough here to note that there are, as might be
expected, great variations in the wages of the work-people. High skill,
whatever may be the effect, in certain quarters, of sweating, still
commands high wages; those trades which make the smallest demand for
skill and training are, as might be expected, poorly paid. For instance,
there is no work which calls for more skill than that of the electrical
or mechanical engineer, or the engineer of steam or of gas. Therefore we
observe without astonishment that such a man may receive £3 or £4 a
week, while the wage of the ordinary craftsman ranges, according to the
skill required, from 18_s._ to 35_s._ a week. In the work of women it is
well to remember that the lower kinds of work are worth from 7_s._ to
12_s._ in ordinary seasons, and that there are some kinds of work in
which a woman may make from 15_s._ to 25_s._ a week. In thinking of East
London remember that the whole of the people (with certain exceptions)
have to live on wages such as these, while the clerks, who belong to a
higher social level and have higher standards of comfort, are not in
reality much better off with their salaries ranging from £80 a year to
£150.
[Illustration: An East End Factory.]
It might be expected that in speaking of trade and industry we should
also speak of the sweating, which is so largely carried on in this city
of industry. There is, however, nothing on which so much half-informed
invective has been written—and wasted—as on the subject of sweating. For
my own part, I have nothing to say except what has been already said by
Mr. Charles Booth, who has investigated the subject and for the first
time has explained exactly what sweating means. The sweater is either
the small master or the middleman; the employer practically resigns the
responsibility of his workmen and makes a contract with a middleman, who
relieves him of trouble and makes his profit out of the workmen’s pay.
Or the employer finds a middleman who distributes the work and collects
it, does part of it himself, and sweats others, being himself sweated.
Or sometimes it is a “chamber master” who employs “greeners”—new
hands—for long hours on wages which admit of bare subsistence—sweating,
in fact, is the outcome in all its shapes of remorseless competition.
Many experiments have been tried to conduct business on terms which will
not allow the sweater’s interference. These experiments have always
ended in failure, often because the work-people themselves cannot
believe in the success of any system except that with which they are
familiar. Some twelve or fifteen years ago my friend Mrs. H—— started a
workshop at St. George’s-in-the-East on coöperative principles. She made
shirts and other things of the kind. At first she seemed to be getting
on very well; she employed about a dozen workwomen, including a
forewoman in whom she placed implicit confidence. Her successful start,
she said, was due entirely to the enthusiasm, the zeal, the devotion, of
that forewoman. Then a dreadful blow fell, for the devoted forewoman
deserted, taking with her the best of the workwomen, and started a
sweating shop herself—in which, I dare say, she has done well. My friend
got over the blow, and presently extended her work and enlarged her
premises. The enlargement ruined her enterprise; she had to close. Her
experience was to the effect that it is only by the sweated farthing
that in these days of cut-throat competition shops which sell things
made by hand or by the sewing-machine can pay their expenses, that the
sweater is himself sweated, and that the workwoman, starving under the
sweating system, mistrusts any other and is an element of danger in the
very workroom which is founded for her emancipation.
She also discovered that the workgirl requires constant supervision and
sharp—very sharp—admonition; she found that the system of fines adopted
by many workshops saves a great deal of trouble both in supervision and
in admonition; that a gentle manner is too often taken for weakness and
for ignorance. And she impressed upon me the really great truth that the
working girl is never employed out of sentimental kindness, but as a
machine, by the right and judicious use of which an employer may make a
livelihood or even perhaps a competence. In other words, when we talk
about miserable wages we must remember all the circumstances and all the
conditions, and, she insisted, we must set aside mere sentiment as a
useless, or even a mischievous, factor. For my own part, I do not
altogether agree with my friend. I believe in the power and uses of
sentiment. Let us by all means ascertain all the facts of the case, but
let us continue our sentiment—our sympathy—with the victim of hard
conditions and cruel competition.
A remarkable characteristic of East London is the way in which the
industrial population is constantly recruited from the country. I shall
speak of the aliens later on. I mean, in this place, the influx from the
country districts and from small country towns of lads or young men and
young women who are always pouring into East London, attracted by one
knows not what reports of prosperity, of high wages, and greater
comforts. If they only knew—most of them—what awaits them in the
labyrinthine city!
Long ago it was discovered that London devours her own children. This
means that city families have a tendency to die out or to disappear. All
the city families of importance—a very long list can be drawn up—of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the Bukerels, Basings, Orgars, Battes,
Faringdons, Anquetils—have disappeared in the fifteenth. All the great
names of the fifteenth—Whittington, Philpot, Chichele, and the rest—are
gone in the sixteenth; all the great names of the sixteenth century have
disappeared in the eighteenth, and we may ask in vain, “Where are those
families which were leaders of the City in the beginning of the
nineteenth?”
The same thing seems true of the lower levels. I cannot here inquire
into the reasons; the fact remains that London demands the continual
influx of new blood, whether for the higher or the lower work. At the
same time, there is also the continual efflux. I should like if it were
possible, but it would entail an enormous amount of work and research,
to ascertain how far the descendants of the old London families, the
rich merchants of the last three or four hundred years, are still to be
found among our county families. There are descendants of Henry Fitz
Ailwyn, first mayor of London, and there are also descendants of the
Thedmars, the Brembres, the Philpots, the Walworths. Are there
descendants of the Boleyns and the Greshams? Are there descendants among
the county families and the nobility of those city merchants who made
their “plum” in the last century, and were so much despised by the
fashion of the day? Further, I should like to ascertain, if possible,
how far the old London families are represented by descendants in
America. It would, again, be interesting to learn how many firms of
merchants still remain of those which flourished in London a hundred
years ago. And it would also be interesting if we could learn, in a
long-settled parish of working folk, such as Bethnal Green or
Spitalfields, how many names still survive of the families who were
baptized, married, and buried at the parish church in the year 1800. The
last would be an investigation of great and special interest, because no
one, so far, has attempted to ascertain the changes which take place in
the rank and file of a London parish, and because the people themselves
keep no record of their origin, and the grandchildren, as a rule,
neither ask nor seek to know where their grandfathers were born; they
care nothing for the rock from which they were digged.
Again I venture to borrow two or three simple figures from Mr. Booth. He
tested a small colony called an “Irish” neighborhood; it consisted of
160 persons. I presume that he means 160 heads of families; of these 57
were Londoners by birth; out of London, but in the United Kingdom, 88
were born; the remaining 15 were foreigners by birth. And out of 693
applicants for relief to the Charity Organization Society in Mile End,
Old Town, and St. George’s-in-the-East, 486, or seventy per cent., were
Londoners by birth; 207, or thirty per cent., were born out of London.
[Illustration: Barge-Builders.]
It may be added that if we take the whole of London it is roughly
estimated that 630 in the thousand of the population are natives of
London, that 307 come from other parts of England and Wales, that 13 are
Scotch, 21 Irish, 8 colonists, and 21 of foreign birth. This estimate
may have been slightly altered by the recent influx of Russian Jews, but
the difference made by a hundred thousand or so cannot be very great.
The settlements of the alien, especially in East London, will be
considered in another chapter. Meantime, to one who lives in the suburbs
of London—to one who considers the men of light and leading in London:
its artists, men of letters, architects, physicians, lawyers, surgeons,
clergy, etc.—it seems at first sight as if no one was born in London.
The City merchants, however, can, I believe, point to a majority of
their leaders as natives of London. It would be easy to overstate the
case in this respect.