On a Monday morning, especially on the Eastern Counties lines, the trains
running into town have an unusually large number of passengers. They
consist generally of the jolly-looking fellows who, at the time of the
cattle show, take the town by storm, and fill every omnibus and cab, and
dining room, and place of public amusement, and then as suddenly retire
as if they were a Tartar horde, dashing into some rich and luxurious
capital, then vanishing with their booty, none know whither. However,
penetrate into Mark-lane, you may see them every Monday and Friday,
smelling very strong of tobacco smoke--for, although smoking is absurdly
and strictly prohibited on railways, it is a known fact that people will
smoke nevertheless--and with the air of men who are not troubled about
trifles, and have their pockets well lined with cash. These are the
merchants and millers and maltsters of Mark-lane. All England waits for
their reports; their decisions affect the prices of grain at Chicago on
one side, and far in the ports of the Black Sea on the other. Bread is
the staff of life, and its traffic affects the weal or woe of empires.
Prices low in Mark-lane, and in the garrets of London, in the cellars of
Manchester, in the wynds of Edinburgh, there is joy. As we may suppose,
the trade in grain is one of the most ancient in the world. There were
corn merchants and millers long before Mark-lane was built. Originally
the corn merchants of the metropolis assembled at a place called Bark's
Quay, where now the Custom-house stands. Then they moved into
Whitechapel, somewhere near Aldgate Church, and then the Corn Exchange in
Mark-lane was built. Originally there was but one exchange, that erected
in 1749, which is private property, and the money for which was raised in
eighty hundred-pound shares; each share at this time being worth 1,300
pounds. This, I believe, is the only metropolitan market for corn,
grain, and seeds. The market days are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday;
hours, ten to three. Wheat is paid for in bills at one month, and other
corn and grain in bills at two months. The Kentish hoymen,
distinguishable by their sailors' jackets, have stands free of expense,
and pay less for metage and dues than others, and the Essex dealers enjoy
some privileges; in both cases said to be in consideration of the men of
Kent and Essex having continued to supply the city when it was ravaged by
the plague. Old Mark-lane consists of an open Doric colonnade, within
which the factors have their stands. It resembles the atrium, or place
of audience in the Pompeian house, with its impluvium, the place in the
centre in which the rain fell. In this market, managed by a committee
and secretary, there was no foreign competition. At this time there are
about seventy-two stands, and more than a hundred subscribers of five
guineas each. I believe the stands are from thirty to forty pounds a
year. Now at one time this place was quite a close borough. There were
more factors than the place could hold, and when a stand was vacant it
was given to some poor broken-down man, who would not be likely to
interfere with the jolly business which the rest were carrying on. The
excluded were very indignant. They planted themselves in Mark-lane.
They did business in the street outside the Exchange. They were men of
equal standing and respectability with any of the privileged; and after
an immense amount of grumbling and growling, they did as most Englishmen
would have done--went to Parliament, and got an Act to have a second
Exchange erected side by side with the old one. This second erection was
completed in 1826, and in the partition are now a couple of arches, which
were placed there in order that, if at any time the old Exchange were
amalgamated with the new--a consummation of which there seems no chance
at present--the whole may be formed into one capacious market. The new
Exchange has a central Grecian Doric portico, surmounted by imperial arms
and agricultural emblems, the ends having corresponding pilasters. Here
lightermen and granary-keepers have stands as well as corn merchants,
factors, and millers. At the further end of this building there is a
seed-market; nor is this all. Attached to the new Exchange is an hotel,
in the upper room of which is an auction room for the sale of damaged
cargoes; and on the other side--that is, above the old Exchange--is a
subscription refreshment room, known as Jack's, where most of the Norfolk
flour is sold, a great deal of it being paid for in ready money, and then
resold again downstairs, on the usual credit, the profit on such a
transaction being the odd threepence or sixpence, which becomes a
respectable sum if you buy or sell a thousand quarters. Up here are the
millers or their agents in large quantities. "We are not," said one to
the writer, "the rogues the world takes us for. If we don't sell good
flour, the bakers can't sell their bread." Let us hope this is true; but
in these days of universal rascaldom, when gold, no matter how
dishonestly acquired, makes its possessor an object of respect, and not
of scorn, what wonder is it that we believe that there are rogues in
grain as well as in other trades? In the middle of the old Exchange you
will see an immense number of foreigners; these are Greeks, living all
together in the neighbourhood of Finsbury-square, who are gradually
getting all the foreign trade--what are our English merchants about?--of
the country into their hands. It is the Greeks, not the English, who buy
up the corn shipped from the ports of the Black Sea, and pour it into the
English market. Besides these Greeks, you will see captains of vessels
in great numbers waiting to hear if their cargoes are sold, and where
they are to be taken. A busy scene is Mark-lane, especially on a Monday.
The malt tax in 1857 was 6,470,010 pounds, which represents an enormous
amount of malt, of which a great part is sold in Mark-lane. In the year
1857 there were imported into the United Kingdom 3,473,957 quarters of
wheat, 1,701,470 of barley, 1,710,299 of oats, 76,048 of rye, 159,899 of
peas, 305,775 of beans, 1,150,783 of Indian corn, 188 of buck-wheat, and
2,763 of bere or bigg; and in the same year there were imported 2,184,176
cwts. of flour and meal. Then we must not forget the home produce, which
is principally brought into London by ships, though a great deal of it
comes up by rail. In London alone the consumption of wheat in the shape
of flour and otherwise may be estimated at upwards of 1,600,000 quarters
a year. But Mark-lane is not, like Smithfield, a market for London
alone. On the contrary, it is attended by buyers from all parts of the
country. The cargoes in the river sold at Mark-lane may be landed at
Leith, or Glasgow, or Liverpool, or even in the distant ports of Cork, or
Belfast, or Dublin. Well may there be a bustle in Mark-lane. At eleven
the market commences, and at the various stands preparations are made for
the business of the day by untying and placing on the stands little bags
containing samples of every conceivable species of grain eatable by man
or beast. At the end of the day the floor is covered with the samples
which the buyer, after rubbing over in his hands and inspecting, has
thrown down. The sweepings are afterwards gathered up and sold, and
realise, I believe, a very handsome sum in the course of the year. At
half-past two a beadle rings a bell, and no more are permitted to enter
the Exchange. Those that are there hastily finish their business, tie up
their samples, swallow a chop, rush off to their respective termini, and
in two or three hours are perhaps more than a hundred miles away.
Mark-lane for the rest of the week is a dull, dirty lane, with but few
passengers, and very dark and dull indeed.
Yet Mark-lane has its romances. Look around you; not a man perhaps but
can tell you of enormous profits and enormous losses. The trade carried
on here is of so speculative a character that but few realise money by it
after all. Come to this stand. It was calculated the other day that the
firm carrying on business here were losing at the rate of a thousand
pounds per hour. Hear this factor: "I once bought some Windsor beans at
an early hour in the morning at 32s. a quarter, and sold them the same
day at 64s." Yet our informant has been compelled to settle with his
creditors. You may point to me a man who has not been reduced to this,
but he is a _rara avis_, and he can tell you how, perhaps, another day or
another hour would have made him a bankrupt. The rule is a crisis and a
crash; not a disgraceful one--for the unlucky ones, many of them, manage
to pay twenty shillings in the pound eventually--but a crisis and a
temporary suspension. In some cases where a man has been in trade many
years, and has accumulated a handsome fortune, one unlucky speculation
scatters it all, and compels him--old, and destitute of the energy of
youth--to begin business again. This is hard, but it cannot be helped.
Men who have been on the Exchange long can tell you funny stories of how
they came at seven in the morning and cleared handsome sums of money
before they went home to breakfast, and broke all the laws against
regrating and forestalling which the thoughtful stupidity of our
ancestors had devised--in order that bread, the staff of life, might not
be high in price--on a most royal scale. We do not hear of such things
now, nor do the mobs of London now break into the Quaker Chapels to see
if the flour is hidden there--an amiable weakness to which the mob was
much given towards the end of the last century, when wheat was at famine
prices, and the loaf was cheap at two and tenpence. We are fallen upon
better days, upon days of free trade, when the English artisan, in order
that bread may be cheap, has his emissaries and agents scouring all parts
of the old world and the new.