the fairy lights; “Do you remember,” I asked him, “when those things
came in?” “It was about ten years ago,” he said, without hesitation.
Then the present moment reasserted itself. He became again one of the
submerged. “Lend me half a crown,” he said. “On Monday morning I will
meet you here, and I’ll return it.” On the following Monday morning I
repaired to the china and glass shop. My friend, however, had forgotten
his appointment. Faith in my own expectations would have been shaken had
he kept it. I have only to add that he took the half crown as one
gentleman accepts, say, a cigar, from another. “Thanks, thanks,” he
said, airily, and he moved away with the bearing of one who is on his
way to his club. It was pleasant to observe the momentary return to the
old manner, though the contrast between the rags and the manner
presented an incongruity that could not pass unobserved, and I regret to
this day that I did not invite him to a chop-house and to a statement
from his own point of view as to the turning of fortune’s wheel.
I have said that the submerged do not, as a rule, give much trouble to
the police. They may have had their lapses from virtue, their
indiscretions, but they are not habitual criminals. The way of the
latter, so long as he keeps out of prison, is much more comfortable; for
transgressors the prison in which they pass most of their time is hard,
but the intervals of freedom are often times of plenty and revelry. The
submerged have no such intervals. The common rogue is generally a brazen
braggart, while the submerged is timid and ashamed. Of course, too, it
is by no means a common thing that he has been a gentleman; in East
London there are over ten thousand of the homeless and the wanderers,
loafers, and the casuals, with some criminals. I have before me twelve
cases investigated by an officer of the Salvation Army. The men belonged
to the following trades: confectioner, feather-bed dresser, tailor,
riverside laborer, sawyer, distiller, accountant in a bank, builder’s
laborer, plumber’s laborer, carman, match-seller, slater. Out of the
twelve, one, you see, had been a gentleman. The cause of destitution was
variously stated: age—it is very difficult in some trades to resist the
pressure of the young; cataract in one eye; inability to find work,
though young and strong; cut out by machinery; last place lost, by his
own fault—an admission reluctantly made and not explained; arm withered;
brought up to no trade, and so on.
As for their attempts to get work, the odd job appears to be the most
common, if the most hopeless. It will be seen from the cases given above
that the men can no longer get work at their own trades; now, they know
no other; what, then, are they to try? One cannot expect much resource
in an elderly man who has been making confectionery all his life, when
he has lost his place and his work; nor in a feather-bed dresser, when
feather-beds are no longer made. The former can do nothing in the world
except make sugar plums according to certain rules of the mystery; the
latter can do nothing but “dress” feather-beds. The ignorance and
helplessness of our craftsmen outside their own branch of work are
astonishing. So that the run after the odd job is explained. There is
nothing else for them to try. A great many working hands are dock
laborers, and fight every day for the chance of being taken on; but a
man advanced in years, with the sight of one eye gone or with a withered
arm—what chance has he of getting employment?
Sometimes they try to sell things—boot-laces and useful odds and ends.
But capital is wanted, a few shillings that can be locked up, and the
returns are deplorable. Sometimes they try matches; the man with the
“box o’ lights” is busy on Sundays and holidays outside the railway
station or at the stopping places of omnibus or tram; I believe that
threepence or so represents the average daily profit to be made in this
branch of commerce. A few try to sell newspapers, but they are cut out
by the boys who run and bawl and force their “specials” on the public.
Newspaper selling in the streets is only good when one has a popular
“pitch.” For instance, at Piccadilly Circus, where the stream of life
runs full and strong, a news-vender must do very well, but such
“pitches” are rare. Sometimes they offer the latest novelty out for one
penny. The trade in “novelties” depends on the attractiveness of the
wares; they must be really novel to catch the eye, and they must seem
desirable. The principal markets for the penny novelties are the kerb of
Broad Street and that on the north side of Cheapside. There is generally
a new “novelty” every week, and the ingenuity, the resource, the
invention of the unknown genius who provides it are beyond all praise.
When he hits the popular taste you may see the dealers selling their
pennyworths as fast as they can lay them out on their trays. Sometimes
there is a “frost”; the novelty does not “catch on.” Then the poor
dealer loses his little capital, and what happens to the inventor no one
knows.
It is recorded of a certain collector, who spent his whole life in
making a collection of the penny novelties, that at his death his
museum, his life’s work, was sold for the enormous sum of £12. I suppose
he might have found comfort in the reflection that there are a great
many men whose whole life’s work would not fetch as many pence. But his
soul must have felt a certain amount of dejection after so busy a
pursuit—and one covering so many years—to find it valued at no more than
£12. How many poets, novelists, preachers, journalists, could get as
much as £12 for their contributions to literature? After all, he was
above the average, this collector.
One would think that journalism would offer chances to the submerged.
Here, at least, is a door always wide open. I know of one case in which
a man just let out of prison met with a singular piece of good luck; he
was a man whose character was hopelessly gone, and could never be
retrieved, who had committed frauds and cheats innumerable upon all his
old companions, whose friends had long since plainly told him that
nothing, nothing more would be done for him, and that no mercy would be
shown him in case of further frauds. The day came when he was released
from prison; he stood outside and looked up and down and across the
road; he saw a stony-hearted world; amid this multitude of people there
was not one single person to whom he could turn for help; it was a cold,
gray morning; he had concocted several little schemes of villainy in his
cell; now, in the open air, he realized that they were hopeless; prison
had somewhat reduced his strength of mind; he felt that just then he
could not sit down and work out any one of his schemes; he saw no
prospect before him but that of a casual loafer in the streets,
submerged for life.
He turned to the east; he wandered away, he knew not where; he had a
small sum of money in his pocket, enough for a short time. After that,
the slouch along the streets.
Suddenly he came upon a street scene, a short, quick, dramatic scene
enacted in a few minutes. It fired his imagination; he saw a chance; he
bought paper and pen at a stationer’s shop; he went into a coffee-house,
called for a cup of coffee and the ink, and wrote a descriptive paper on
that scene; when it was done he took it to the office of a great daily
paper, and asked to see one of the subeditors. His paper was read and
accepted; he was told that he might bring more; he did bring more; he
became one of the staff; he was presently sent abroad on the business of
that paper. I do not know whether he thought fit to tell the editor
anything about his own record. Well, the man ought to have become one of
the submerged; but, you see, he was a scholar and a man of imagination;
he had been engaged, it is true, in frauds, and was morally hopeless and
corrupt through and through, but he had not lost his power of will; he
had had no experience of the disappointments and the step-by-step
descent which rob the submerged of his energy and his resource. The
example only proves that journalism opens its doors in vain for the
ordinary submerged who has lost his grasp of realities.
For those who are strong enough to walk about the streets at an even
pace for a great many hours a day the sandwich offers a tolerably safe
means of living. Remember, however, that your truly submerged very
often, by reason of age and infirmities,—some physical weakness
generally appears after a time to aggravate the misery,—cannot undergo
the fatigue of carrying the boards all day. If, however, the strength is
there the work can generally be found at a shilling or one shilling and
twopence a day. It is work which entirely suits any man who has left off
trying. At the same time, it is a help to the young man who for the
moment may be down on his luck. For the former it means simply the
fatigue of walking about for so many hours on end. It is interesting to
walk slowly along the pavement while the single file of sandwich men
pass along, one after the other. They never talk, there is no exchange
of jokes, they never chaff the workmen or the girls or the lads or the
drivers who threaten to run over them; on the other hand, no one chaffs
them; they are by common consent held sacred, as men in the world but
not of the world. Some of them carry a pipe between their lips, but
merely as a habit; it is an empty pipe; there is no speculation in their
faces; they manifest no interest in anything; there may be a police row
and a fight, there may be a horse down, the sandwich man pays no
attention; he looks neither to the right nor to the left; the show that
he advertises is not for himself; the wares exposed in the shop-windows
are not for him to buy; the moving panorama, the procession of active
and eager life along which he marches is nothing to him; he takes no
longer any interest in anything; he is like the hermit, the anchorite,
the recluse—he is dead to the world; he is without friends, without
money, without work, without hope; his mind has nothing to occupy it; he
thinks of vacant space; he walks in his sleep; he is comatose; if he
lifts his eyes and looks upon the world it must be in wonder that his
own figure is not in its proper place, its old place—it ought to be
there. Why is it not? How did he get into the gutter, one of a line in
single file, with a board in front of him and a board behind him?
Newsboys shout their latest; the shops light up till every street is a
fairyland of brightness; the carriages go up and down. To all the sights
around him, to the meaning of the show and to the dance of life, which
is so often the dance of death, the sandwich man remains indifferent. He
has nothing left of all the joys and toys and dreams and vanities of the
world; the past is a blurred memory on which he will not dwell if he can
help it; there is no future for him, only the day’s tramp; the shilling
at the end of it; fivepence will give him warmth, light, a bed, and a
modicum of food; eightpence, or, if he is lucky, tenpence, must find him
food, drink, and tobacco for the following day, with some means of
keeping the mud and water out of his boots.
[Illustration: Sandwich-men.]
A small contingent of the submerged is formed by the men who, not being
habitual and hardened criminals, have been in prison and have not only
found employment difficult and even impossible in consequence of a
misfortune which many worse than themselves escape, but have returned to
the world broken down by the terrible discipline of an English prison.
The prison receives a man; it turns out a machine, an obedient machine,
as obedient as the dog which follows at heel: it obeys cowering; the
machine has no self-respect left, and no power of initiative; the prison
bird can only henceforth live in a cage where he is not called upon to
earn his livelihood or to carry on a trade. I know little about prisons
in other countries, but I doubt whether any system has ever been
invented more effective in destroying the manhood of the poor wretches
who are subjected to its laws than the prison system of Great Britain.
There is no sadder sight imaginable than the reception of a released
prisoner by the Salvation Army Refuge for these unfortunate men. Every
day their officer attends at the prison doors at the hour of discharge,
and invites the men, as they come out, to the refuge. They come in dazed
and pale; the light, the air, the freedom, the absence of the man of
authority with the keys—all together make them giddy; they are received
with a welcome and a handshake which make them suspicious; they are
invited to sit down and take food; they obey with a shrinking readiness
which brings a flush of shame to the spectator’s face. See; after a
little they push the plate away; it is solid food—they cannot take it;
they have been so long accustomed to gruel that a plate of meat is too
much for them; they can neither eat nor talk; they cannot respond even
to kindliness; they cannot understand it; the man—the lost manhood—has
to be built up again. The Salvation Army’s Helping Hand rescues some; it
fails with some; even where it fails, some good effect must be left in
their minds by the show of friendliness and kindness.
The best place to find the submerged is at one of the shelters of the
Salvation Army. Here they give for fourpence a large pot of coffee, tea,
or cocoa, with a hunch of bread; it is probably the best meal that the
men have had that day; the fourpence also entitles them to a warm and
well-lighted room with benches and tables, the means of getting a good
wash and a bed. For a smaller sum the accommodation is not so good.
Every evening the shelters are quite full; every evening there is held
that kind of service, with addresses, prayers, and the singing of hymns,
which is called a Salvation Meeting. Well, the men feel, at last, that
they are with friends; the lasses with the banjos and the tambourines,
the men in the jerseys who speak to them—these are not making any money
out of them, they are working for them, they are taking an immense
amount of pains entirely on their behalf; I cannot but believe—indeed, I
know—that among this poor wreckage of society their efforts meet with
the kind of response that is most desired.
Or, if you can get so far out, there is Medland Hall by the riverside at
Ratcliffe. It was formerly a Dissenting chapel; it is now a free
lodging-house. No one pays anything; there are bunks ranged in lines
over the floor—they are rather like coffins, it is true; these bunks are
provided with mattresses, and for sheet and blanket with American cloth,
which can be easily kept clean. I believe that bread is also provided.
An effort is made to find out a way of helping the men to work; the
likely young fellows are sent to the recruiting sergeants; some
connection has been formed with the railway companies for men young and
strong.
The casual ward is a place to which no one will go if he can possibly
avoid it. This refuge will only receive the actual destitute, those who
have no money at all; their rations of food are light, to say the least.
The allowance for young and old, strong and weak, is the same—for
breakfast, half a pound of gruel and eight ounces of bread; the same for
supper; for dinner, eight ounces of bread and an ounce and a half of
cheese; for drink, cold water. The casual is put into a cell by himself
and there locked up; in the morning, when he ought to be out and looking
for work, he is detained to do stone-breaking or oakum-picking—half a
ton of stone-breaking or four pounds of oakum, a task so heavy that it
takes him the best part of the day, and he is lucky if he is not
detained as a punishment for another night and day, with a corresponding
increase in the task imposed upon him.
One would like to take some of the permanent officials of the Local
Government Board and set them to the same work _on the same food_. What
is the man’s crime? Poverty. There may be other crimes which have
reduced him to this condition of destitution, but no questions are
asked. It is poverty, poverty, nothing but poverty, for which this
treatment is the punishment. I once visited a casual ward; it was, I
believe, Saturday afternoon. I was shown one cell occupied by a
woe-begone young country lad; he was sitting alone; I think he had done
his task; he was to be a prisoner till Monday morning—such was the
infamy of his poverty. Lucky for him if he was not kept over Monday, to
pick more oakum and to reduce his strength and impair his constitution
by more starvation on gruel and bread weighed out by ounces. With
refuges for the destitute where they are starved and made to work hard
on insufficient food, with prisons for the criminal where manhood is
crushed and strength is destroyed by feeding men on gruel, we support
bravely the character of a country obedient to the laws of God and
marching in the footsteps of Christ.
Such are the submerged—an army of brokendown gentlemen, ruined
professional men, penniless clerks, bankrupt traders, working-men who
are out of work through age or infirmity, victims of drink, ex-prisoners
and convicts, but not habitual criminals. It is a helpless and a
hopeless army; I have said already that this is the note of the
submerged. We shall see presently what is done for this great body of
misery. One thing must be remembered. There are lower levels than those
reached by this army; physicians, clergymen, missionaries, journalists,
whisper things far worse than can be alleged against the submerged. And
we have not included among them the tramp, that class whose blood is
charged with restlessness hereditary, who cannot remain long in any
place, who cannot enter upon steady work, who are driven by their
restlessness, as by a whip of scorpions, along the roads. Not the tramp,
nor the sturdy rogue, nor the professional criminal, nor the vile
wretches who live by the vilest trades, may be numbered among the
submerged. They fall noiselessly from their place of honor, they live
noiselessly in their place of dishonor; they might perhaps be brought
back to work, but the cases of recovery must be very few in proportion,
because the causes which dragged them down are those which prevent them
from being dragged up. If any physician can give back to the submerged
patience, resolution, will, courage, hope, he may reclaim them. If that
cannot be done they must remain as they are.
My illustration of the submerged seems to have little to do with East
London. As a fact, there is no respect paid to places. When a man has
belonged to the West End his wandering feet, over which, as over his
other actions, the patient has no control, carry him about the scenes of
his former prosperity without his taking any steps to prevent it. Old
acquaintances recognize him, and pass him by with a cold eye which
denies the recognition and conceals the pity. He himself sees nobody and
remembers nobody. In the same way a man who belongs by birth and habits
to East London will remain there after he has come to grief. Or, if the
former gentleman, for some reason, gets into East London and finds out
its ways, with the cheap lodgings, the shelters, the “ha’penny” cups of
cocoa, and the many helping hands from which he may get some kind of
relief he will stay in East London. We need not hesitate about awarding
the palm of nourishing or starving more or fewer of the submerged to
East or West London. It is enough to know that they exist in both
quarters, and that, according to statistics, there are over ten thousand
of them in East London alone. If any help can be found for this mass of
wreckage let us find that help and give it with full hands and in
measure overflowing, for indeed of all those who are poor and distressed
and unhappy the company of the submerged are the most wretched. Even if,
as is almost always the case, they have brought their punishment upon
themselves by the folly of the prodigal, the weakness of those who take
the Easy Way, and the wickedness of those who indulge the natural
inclination to vice, let us not inquire too closely into the record; let
us still stretch out our hand of help; if we can restore some of
them—even a few, even one here and there—to the life of honesty among
folk of good repute, we must still leave them the shameful memory of the
past. That punishment we cannot avert; we cannot remove it from them.
The world will forgive them, but how shall we find that Lethe whose
waters will enable them to forgive themselves? “Arise”—it is easy for
the world to say—“thy sins shall no longer be imputed to thee for a
reproach and a hissing.” Alas! When the better self returns, how shall
that poor wretch cease to reproach himself?
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X
THE MEMORIES OF THE PAST
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X
THE MEMORIES OF THE PAST
I HAVE so often insisted that East London must be regarded as a city of
many crafts—the working-man’s city—that it may seem contradictory to
call attention to another aspect. That part of East London with which we
have been most concerned is the densely populated part lying north of
the river and including all that part west of the river Lea as far north
as Dalston, Clapton, and Hackney, and east of that river, including Bow,
Stratford, Walthamstow, Wanstead, Forest Gate, Bromley West, and East
Ham and Barking. It includes, in a word, very nearly all the ancient
villages and hamlets whose names may be found upon the map. But there is
a fringe, and there are extensions. When one emerges at last from
streets which seem to have no end, when the nightmare of a world which
is all streets, with never a field or an orchard or a hillside left,
begins to break, when it is cleared away, as an ugly dream by the
daylight, by the reappearance of trees and large gardens and wide roads,
then we discover the fringe. Part of Stoke Newington, part of Stamford
Hill, a small part of Tottenham, part of Snaresbrook, belong to the
fringe. Here we get roads lined with trees, villas with trees in front
gardens, modern churches built all after the same half-dozen patterns,
in true proportions, correct and without inspiration; here we get
windows filled with flowers, and here presently we get houses well apart
and a wealth of creepers and of flowering shrubs; which means that the
breath of the crowded City is left behind.
But there are further extensions; the suburbs of East London are not
confined within the limits of the map of London; they stretch out far
afield, they include Chigwell and Chingford and Theydon Bois, and all
the villages round Epping Forest. Dotted about everywhere in this
extension are stately houses with large gardens and grounds, the
residences of the manufacturers and the employers, not those of the
small trades of East London, where the master is often but one degree
better off than the employee, but those of the factories and the works;
theirs is the capital invested; theirs is the enterprise; theirs the wit
and courage which have made them succeed; theirs is the wealth. This
extension is a delightful place in early summer; it is full of trees;
there are old churches, and there is “the” forest—the people of East
London always speak of “the” forest, for to them there is no other. It
is, also, a part of London very little visited; it is, to begin with,
somewhat inaccessible; one who would visit it from the West End has to
get first into the City. In the next chapter we will discourse on what
may be seen by the curious who would explore the forest and its
surroundings. Let us return to my group of villages.
To the American, and to most of my own people, the names of Stoke
Newington, Hackney, Stepney, Mile End, and the rest are names and
nothing else; they awaken no more memories than a list of Australian or
American townships. Let me try to endow these names with associations; I
would make them, if possible, venerable by means of their association
with those who have gone before. The suburban life of London belongs
essentially to the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In the
former only the wealthy had their country, as well as their town,
houses; in the latter there have been no town houses left in the City at
all, and the whole of the people who every day carry on their business
in the City have now their suburban residences.