Annie Hope BLAKE
1842-1938
East
End and Norfolk families
links to Tynemouth and the emigrants to New Zealand
Annie
Hope BLAKE's notes & family
Back
to East Anglia
Annie's
first husband Henry COLE: death of a shoemaker
Annie’s second husband Robert
HAMILTON: drowned off Greymouth
Their
grandson Winston
Francis MONK New Zealand Rhodes scholar
Annie's
stepfather George Bruce ADAM of Banff
Annie’s
uncle Thomas Hase BLAKE
Banff on the Moray Firth whence the Bruce Adams came
Annie Hope Blake
–Mrs Hamilton- at Kaikoura in 1905 and 1935
The
following are notes made by Annie Hope Blake's grandson Winston Monk while
listening to her recollections in 1935, three years before she died aged 97:
[her] Father drowned when Gran
a baby & mother opened a Tobacconist Shop in London.
Contact with Bruce Adams, in E.
India Trade . m.brother of great man in
business.
Geo.B. Adams
Wm.B.Adams
[her] Mother married twice.
Family: William Nicholson Blake // Thos.Adams // Geo.Adams. All Middx.
London.
>cooper
one of the largest shops in London learnt his trade . > Charlotte & Jane
Adams.
Sep 5th 1842 a little younger than gran
Gran born at sea & Xened
at Newcastle- on- Tyne
Middlesex, Victoria Park, Fenchurch Street, East.India
Rd. Commercial Rd, / gran at home in E End of London
Nr. Miss Burdett Coutts Buildings.
Coles. George Cole @ Oxford and was a schoolmaster in London
Tom Adams came out to see gran when out on a trip to Figi.
Painted Hall at Greenwich
Pensioners of early days.
Gran dined on board East Indiaman & best fruits
of the East
Women used to smuggle off whisky & gin off E Indiamen inside their
crinolines.
1866 came out with young husband
Chandler cousins were at Waikaemarina diggings and
made a lot of money after Coolgardie.
Returned home said NZ wd. be a good place £1000 a yr. opening there - bootmaker by trade - clever young man well done(?) in London. at 27 drowned at Kaikoura. Harry Cole a baby
of 12 months
Landed at Lyttleton - taken to Barracks. Plenty to
eat there, washed clothes - into ChCh. G.C.(?) took a house in ChCH and made
£1 a day as a journeyman bootmaker - recommend. go to Kaikoura as a good opening, so it would have been. - ChCh. to Cobb's Coach- road on horseback, with Maori Dick
the guide - stayed at Caverhills / at Maori Pah - never slept - waves coming in - maoris
sitting round, noise and laughter - didn't stay at Monks at Conway, but dined
with them - William the Native led the Pah."
Grans
mother buried in Tower
Hamlets Cemetery in London.
Henry Wm. Cole (gran's husband) - married A.H.Blake at Old Bow Church in Middlesex, London about
1863/5 [hard to read] - bootmaker by trade, came out
to N.Z. in the "John Templer" in 1866,
landed at Lyttleton - later set up shop in Kaikoura
and drowned in 1867
Gran's mother. born on June 17, 1821.
KINSHIP ROOTS
KOSMOID
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www.victorianlondon.org/publications/sala-10.htm
Twice Round the Clock, or The Hours of the Day and Night in London, by
George Augustus Sala, 1859
ONE P.M. -DOCK
LONDON AND
DINING LONDON.
This modest series of papers brought me, at the time of their composition, into
great trouble, which was very nearly resulting in my complete discomfiture.
Perhaps the severest of my trials was having to write the book at all,
possessing, as is my misfortune, of course, a constitutional disinclination for
the avocation to which I have devoted myself (as a gagne
pain, or bread-winning mean). I didn't so much mind the ladies and gentlemen,
who, since the commencement of the periodical in which these articles were
originally published - ladies and gentlemen personally quite unknown to me -
who overwhelmed me with correspondence; some denouncing, others upbraiding,
many ridiculing, and a few - a very few - eulogising yours to command. I didn't
so much object to the attentions of those professional begging-letter writers,
who are good enough to include authors in their list of possible contributaries, and who were profuse lately in passionate
appeals (in bold, clerkly hands) for pecuniary assistance; for though, like Bardolph, I have nothing, and cannot even coin my nose for
guineas, or my blood for drachmas, it is not the less flattering to a man's
minor vanities to receive a begging letter. I can imagine an old pauper out for
a holiday, coming home to the workhouse, quite elated at having been accosted
in the street by a mendicant, and asked for a halfpenny. I could bear with
equanimity - nay, could afford to smile at - the people who went about saying
things (who are the people who go about saying things, I wonder!) who
ingeniously circulated reports that I was dead; that I wrote these papers under
a pseudonym; that they were plagiarisms from some others written twenty years
ago; and that I never wrote them at all. I disregarded such insinuations
serenely; for who among us is exempt from such bald chat The very stupidest
have their Boswells - the very meanest have those to envy them, as well as the
Great and Learned! There are people at this very moment, who are going about
saying that Jones has pawned his plate, that the bailiffs are in Thompson's
country house, that Robinson has written himself out, that Brown has run away
with Jenkins's wife, that Muggins has taken to
brandy-and-water, that Simpkins murdered Eliza Grim wood, that Larkins cut Thistlewood's head
off; and that Podgers was tried at the Old Bailey, in
the year thirty-five, for an attempt to set the Thames on fire. But I was
infinitely harassed while the clock was ticking periodically - the efforts I
had to make to keep it from running down altogether !
- by the great plague of "Suggesters'.
From the metropolitan and suburban postal districts, from all parts of the United
Kingdom - the United
Kingdom, pshaw! from the Continent generally, and from across the broad Atlantic
(fortunately, the return mail from Australia was
not yet due) - suggestions poured in as thickly as letters of congratulation on
one who has just inherited a vast fortune. If there had been five hundred in
lieu of four-and-twenty hours in "Twice Round the Clock,' the Great
Suggestions I received had stomach for them all. The Suggesters
would take no denial I was bound under terrific penalties to adopt, endorse,
carry out, their hints,- else would they play the
dickens with me. I must have a sing-song meeting for nine p.m. ; the
committee of a burial club at ten ; the dissecting-room of an hospital at
eleven; a postal receiving-house, a lawyer's office, a rag, bones, and bottle
shop, the tollgate of Waterloo Bridge, and
the interior of a Hammersmith bus, at some hour or other of the day or night.
The Suggestions were oral as well as written. Strange men darted up on me from
by-streets, caught at my button with trembling fingers, told me in husky tones
of their vast metropolitan experience, and impressed on me the necessity of a
graphic tableau of Joe Perks, the sporting barber's, at one o'clock in the
morning. Lowbrowed merchants popped from shady
shell-fish shops, and, pointing to huge lobsters, asked where they could send
the crustaceous delicacies with their compliments, and how excellent a thing it
would be to give a view of the aristocracy supping at Whelks's
celebrated oyster and kippered salmon warehouse after the play. And, finally, a
shy acquaintance of mine, with a face like an over-ripe Stilton cheese, and
remotely connected with the Corporation of London - he may be, for aught I
know, a ticket-porter in Doctors' Commons, or a hanger-on to the water bailiff
- favoured me with an occult inuendo that a
word-picture of the Court of Common Council will be the very thing for four
p.m., fluttering before my dazzled eyes a phantom ticket for the Guildhall
banquet. In vain I endeavoured to convince these respectable Suggesters, that the papers in question were not commenced
without a definite plan of action; that such plan, sketched forth years since,
duly weighed, adjusted, and settled, after mature study and deliberation,
not only so far as I am concerned, but by "parties" deeply learned in
the mysteries of London Life, and versed in the recondite secret of pleasing
the public taste, had at length been put into operation, and was no more
capable of alteration than were the laws of the Medes and Persians. But all to
no purpose did I make these representations. The Suggesters
wouldn't be convinced; their letters continued to flow in. They found out my
address at last (they have lost it now, ha, ha !), and
knocked my door down bringing me peremptory letters of introduction from people
I didn't know, or didn't care five farthings about, or else introducing
themselves boldly, in the "Bottle Imp" manner, with an implied "
You must learn to love me ;" they nosed me in the lobby, and saw me
dancing in the hall, and my only refuge at last was to go away. Yes; the
pulsations of time had to beat behind the dial of a clock in the rural
districts; and these lines were written among the hay and the ripening corn,
laughing a bitter laugh to think that the postman was toiling up the quiet
street in London with piles of additional suggestions, and that the Suggesters themselves were waiting for me in my usual
haunts, in the fond expectation of a button to hold, or an ear to gloze
suggestions within.
I tried the sea-shore; but found London-super-Mare sweltering,
stewing, broiling, frying, fizzing, panting, in the sun-like Marseilles,
minus the evil odours-to such an extent, and so utterly destitute of shade, that I was compelled to leave it. The paint was
blistering on the bright green doors; the shingly pavement
seemed to cry out "Come and grill steaks on me!" the pitch oozed from
the seams of the fishing-boats; the surf hissed as it came to kiss the pebbles
on the beach; the dial on the pier-head blazed with concentric rays; the chains
of the suspension bridge were red hot ; the camera obscura
glared white in the sunshine; the turf on the Steyne
was brown and parched, like a forgotten oasis in a desert ; the leaves on the
trees in the pavilion gardens glittered and chinked in the summer breeze, like
new bright guineas; the fly-horses hung their heads, their poor tongues
protruding, their limbs flaccid, and their scanty tails almost powerless to
flap away the swarms of flies, which alone were riotous and active of living
creation, inebriating themselves with saccharine suction in the grocers' shops,
and noisily buzzing their scanmag in private
parlours; the flymen dozed on their boxes ; the
pushers of invalid perambulators slumbered peacefully beneath the hoods of
their own Bath chairs ; the ladies in the round hats found it too hot to
promenade the cliff, and lolled instead at verandahed
windows, arrayed in the most ravishing of muslin morning wrappers, and
conversed languidly with exquisites, whose moustaches were dank with moisture,
and who had scarcely energy enough to yawn. The captivating amazons abandoned
for the day their plumed hats, their coquettish gauntlets, their wash-leather
sub-fusk garments with the straps and patent-leather
boots, and deferred their cavalcades on the skittish mares till the cool of the
evening; the showy dragoon officers confined themselves, of their own free
will, to the mess-room of their barracks on the Lewes road, where they sipped sangaree, smoked fragrancias,
read "Bell's Life," and made bets on every imaginable topic. The hair
of the little Skye terriers no longer curled, but hung supine in wiry banks;
the little children made piteous appeals to their parents and guardians to be
permitted to run about without anything on; the two clerks at the branch bank,
who are sleepy enough in the coldest weather, nodded at each other over the
ledgers which had no entries in them. The only sound that disturbed the drowsy
stillness of the streets was the popping of ginger-beer corks; and the very
fleas in the lodging-houses lost all their agility and vivacity. No longer did
they playfully leap-no longer archly gyrate ; they crawled and crept, like
their low relatives the bugs, and were caught and crushed without affording the
slightest opportunity for sport. It was mortally hot at London-super-Mare, and
I left it. Then I tried that English paradise of the west, Clifton ; but
woe is me! the Downs were so delightful ; the prospect so exquisitely lovely;
the Avon winding hundreds of feet beneath me, like a silver skein, yet bearing
big three-masted ships on its bosom; the rocks and underwood so full of matter for pleasant, lazy cogitation,
that I felt the only exertion of which I was capable, to be writing sonnets on
the Avon and its sedgy banks, or making lame attempts
at pre-Raphaelite sketches in water-colours; or thinking about doing either,
which amounts to pretty nearly the same thing. So I came away from Clifton too,
and hung out my sign HERE. (It is THERE now: swallows have come and gone, snows
have gathered and melted, babies prattle now who were
unborn and unthought of then.) Ye shall not know
where Here was situated, oh, ye incorrigible Suggesters.
No more particular indices of its whereabouts will I give, even to the general
public, than that close to my study was a dry skittle-ground, where every day -
the hotter the better - I exercised myself with the wooden "cheese"
against the seven and a-half pins which were all that the dry skittle-ground
could furnish forth towards the ordinary nine; that over-against this gymnastic
course was an étable, a "shippon,
as they call it in the north, where seven cows gravely ruminated; and that, at
the end of a yard crowded with agricultural implements which old Pyne alone could draw, there was a Stye,
from which, looking over its palings,
"All start, like boys who, unaware,
Ranging the woods to find a hare,
Come to the mouth of some dark lair:
Where, growling low, a fierce old hear
Lies amid bones and blood.
Not that any fierce or ancient member of the ursine tribe resided therein; but
that it was the residence of a horrific-looking old sow, a dreadful creature,
that farrowed unheard-of families of pigs, that lay on her broadside starboard
the live-long day, winking her cruel eye, and grunting with a persistent
sullenness. The chief swineherd proudly declared her to be "the viciousest beast as ever was," and hinted darkly that
she had killed a Man. The
chief swineherd and I were friends. He was my "putter-up" at
skittles, and did me the honour to report among the neighbouring peasantry,
that "barrin' the gent as cum here last autumn,
and was off his head" (insane, I presume); I was "the very wust hand at knock-'em.downs he
ever see." It is something to be popular in the rural districts; and yet I
was not three miles distant from the Regent Circus.
My eyes are once again turned to the clock face. It is One o'Clock in
the Afternoon, and I must think of London. Come
back, ye memories open Sesame, ye secret chambers of the brain, and let me
transport myself away from the dry skittle-ground, the seven grave cows and the
vicious sow, to plunge once more into the toil and trouble of the seething,
eddying Mistress City of the world.
There are so many things going on at one o'clock in the day;
the steam of life is by that time so thoroughly "up," that I am
embarrassed somewhat to know which scenes would be the best to select from the
plethora of tableaux I find among my stereoscopic slides. One o'clock is the great
time for making business appointments. You meet your lawyer at one; you walk
down to the office of the newspaper you may happen to write for, and settle the
subject of your leading article, at one. One
o'clock is a capital hour to step round to your
stockbroker, in Pope's Head Alley, Cornhill, and
do a little business in stocks or shares. At one o'clock the Prime Minister, or
his colleagues, have resignation enough to listen (with tolerable patience) to
some half dozen deputations who come to harangue them about nothing in
particular; at one o'clock obliging noblemen take the chair at public meetings
at the Freemasons', or the London Tavern. At one o'clock- from one to two rather-the aristocracy indulge in
the sumptuous meal known as "lunch. At one o'clock that vast, yet to
thousands unknown and unrecked of city, which I may call
Dock London, is in full activity after some twenty minutes' suspension while
the workmen take their lunch.
The ingenious and persevering artist who constructed that
grand model of Liverpool, which we all remember in the Exhibition of 1851, and
which is now in the Derby Museum of the city of the Liver, did very wisely in
making the Docks the most prominent feature in his model, and treating the
thoroughfares of the town merely as secondary adjuncts. For the Docks are in
reality Liverpool, even as the poet has said that love is of man's life a part,
but woman's whole existence. Our interest in the Queen of the Mersey
commences at Birkenhead, and ends at Bramley Moore Dock, on the other side. I say Bramley Moore Dock, because that was the last constructed
when I was in Liverpool. Some dozens
more may have been built since I was there. Docks are like jealousy, and grow
continually by what they feed on. We can ill afford to surrender so noble a
public building as St. George's Hall, so thronged and interesting a
thoroughfare as Dale Street ; yet
it must be confessed that the attention of the visitor to Liverpool is
concentrated and absorbed by the unrivalled and magnificent docks. So he who
visits Venice, ardent lover of art and architecture as he may be, gives on his
first sojourn but a cursory glance at the churches and palaces; lie is
fascinated and engrossed by the canals and the gondolas. So the stranger in Petersburg and Moscow has
at first but scant attention to bestow on the superb monuments, the picturesque
costumes; his Senses are riveted upon the golden domes of Tzaaks
and the Kremlin. Liverpool is one huge
dock; and from the landing-stage to West Derby
island, everything is of the docks and docky. The
only wonder seems to be that the ships do not sail up the streets, and
discharge their cargoes at the doors of the merchants' counting-houses. But in London, in
the suburbs, in the West-end, in the heart of the city ofttimes,
what do we know or care about the docks? There are scores of members of
the Stock Exchange, I will be bound, who never entered the dock gates, and
those few who have paid a visit to Dock London, may merely have gone there with
a tasting-order for wine. When we consider that in certain aristocratic circles
it is reckoned to be rather a breach of etiquette than otherwise to know
anything about the manners and customs of the dwellers on the other side of
Temple Bar, even as the by-gone snob-cynic of fashion and literature professed
entire ignorance as to the locality of Russell Square, and wanted to know
"where you changed horses" in a journey to Bloomsbury - unless,
indeed, my Lord Duke or my Lady Marchioness happen to be a partner in a great
brewing and banking firm, under which circumstances he or she may roll down in
her chariot to the city to glance over the quarterly balance sheet of profit ;
when we consider that this world of a town has cities upon cities within its
bosom, that in the course of a long life may never be visited; when we think of
Bermondsey, Bethnal Green, Somers Town, Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Hackney, Stepney, Bow, Rotherhithe, Horsleydown-places of which the great and titled may read
every day in a newspaper, and ask, languidly, where they are,-we need no longer
be surprised if the Docks are ignored by thousands, and if old men die every
day who have never beheld their marvels.
Coming home from abroad often, with an intelligent
foreigner, I persuade him to renounce the Calais route
and the South-Eastern Railway, and even to abjure the expeditious run from
Newhaven. I decoy him on board one of the General Steam Navigation vessels at Boulogne, and when his agonies of sea-sickness have, in the
course of half a dozen hours or so, subsided - when we have passed Margate,
Gravesend, Erith, Woolwich, Greenwich even - when I have got him past the Isle
of Dogs, and we are bearing swiftly on our way towards the Pool - I clap my
intelligent foreigner on the back, and cry, " Now look around (Eugene or
Alphonse, as the case may be) ; now look around, and see the glory of England.
Not in huge armies, bristling with bayonets, and followed by monstrous guns;
not in granite forts, grinning from the waters like ghoules
from graves; not in lines of circumvallation, miles and miles in extent; not in
earthworks, counterscarps, bastions, ravelins, mamelons, casemates, and gunpowder magazines - shall be
found our pride and our strength. Behold them, O intelligent person of foreign
extraction! in yonder forest of masts, in the flags of every nation that fly
from those tapering spars on the ships, in the great argosies
of commerce that from every port in the world have congregated to do
honour to the monarch of marts, London, and pour out the riches of the universe
at her proud feet. After this flourishing exordium-the sense of which you may
have heard on a former occasion, for it forms part of my peroration on the
grandeur of England, and, if my friends and acquaintances are to be believed, I
bore them terribly with it sometimes-I enter into some rapid details concerning
the tonnage and import dues of the port of London; and then permit the
intelligent foreigner to dive down below again to his berth. Sometimes the
foreign fellow turns out to be a cynic, and (leclares
that he cannot see the forest of masts for the fog, if it be winter-for the smoke,
if it be summer.
But the docks of London - by which, let me be perfectly
understood, (I do not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the London
Docks) I speak of Dock London in its entirety of the London and St.
Katherine's, of the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks - what huge
reservoirs are they of wealth, and energy, and industry! See those bonding
warehouses, apoplectic with the produce of three worlds, congested with bales
of tobacco and barrels of spices ; with serons of
cochineal, and dusky, vapid-smelling chests of opium from Turkey or India; with
casks of palm-oil, and packages of vile chemicals, ill-smelling oxides and
alkalis, dug from the bowels of mountains thousands of miles away, and which,
ere long, will be transformed into glowing pigments and exquisite perfumes;
with shapeless masses of india rubber, looking
inconceivable dirty and nasty, yet from which shall come delicate little cubes
with which ladies shall eraze faulty pencil marks
from their landscape copies after Rout and Harding-india
rubber that shall be spread over our coats and moulded into shoes, yea, and
drawn out in elastic ductility, to form little filaments in pink silk ligatures
- I dare not mention their English appellation, but in Italian they are called
"legaccie "-which shall encircle the bases
of the femurs of the fairest creatures in creation; with bags of rice and
pepper, with ingots of chocolate and nuggets and nibs of cocoa, and sacks of
roasted chicory. The great hide warehouses, where are packed the skins of South
American cattle, of which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything
but pleasant odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the
tan-pit. See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with
sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes.* (* Free-grown sugar in the first two:
slave-grown sugar in boxes.) How many million cups of tea will be
sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! how
many tomesful of gossiping scandal will be talked to
the relish of those saccharine dainties ! what stores
of barley-sugar temples and Chantilly
baskets for the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the poor, will come from those coarse canvas
bags, those stained and sticky casks! And the huge tea warehouses, where the
other element of scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the family Souchong,
slumbers in tinfoiled chests. And the coffee
warehouses, redolent of bags of Mocha and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian
berries. And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable,
mass of other produce shellac, sulphur, gumbenzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt, yokes of copper from
Asia Minor; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin from
Smyrna; flour from the United States; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and especially
tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces mountains of
timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, tinder, raw cotton (though
the vast majority of that staple goes to Liverpool), indigo, saffron, magnesia,
leeches, basket-work, and wash- leather! The ships vomit these on the dock
quays, and the warehouses swallow them up again like ogres. But there is in one
dock, the London, an
underground store, that is the Aaron's rod of dock
warehouses, and devours all the rest. For there, in a vast succession of
vaults, roofed with cobwebs many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads
the wines that thirsty London -
thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland -
must needs drink. What throats they have, these consumers! what
oceans of good liquor their Garagantuan appetites
demand! Strange stories have been told about these docks, and the thirsty souls
who visit them with tasting-orders; how the brawny coopers stride about with
candles in cleft sticks, and, piercing casks with gimlets, pour out the rich
contents, upon the sawdust that covers the floor, like water ; how cases of
champagne are treated as of as little account as though they were cases of
small beer; how plates of cheese- crumbs are handed round to amateurs that they
may chasten their palates and keep them in good tone of taste ; how the coopers
are well nigh infallible in detecting who are the tasters that visit these
"wine vaults" with a genuine intention of buying, and who the
epicureans, whose only object in visiting the London Docks is to drink, gratuitously
on the premises, as much good wine as they can conveniently carry. Strange,
very strange stories, too, are told of the occasional inconvenience into which
the "convenient carriage" degenerates; of respectable fathers of
families appearing in the open street, after they have run the tether of the
tasting-order, staggering and dishevelled, and with bloodshot eyes, their
cravats twisted round to the backs of their necks like bagwigs, and
incoherently declaring that cheese always disagreed with them. I am candidly of
opinion, however, that the majority of these legends are apocryphal, or, in the
rare cases when they have a foundation in fact, belong to the history of the
past, and that commercial sobriety, in the highest order, is
the rule in the wine vaults of the London Docks.
But the Ships ! Who shall describe
those white-sailed camels? who shall tell in graphic
words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts and rigging, of the pitchy
burliness of their bulging sides ; of the hives of human ants who in barges and
lighters surround them, or swarm about their cargo-cumbered decks? Strange
sight to see, these mariners from every quarter of the globe
; of every variety of stature and complexion, from the swarthy Malay to
the almost albino Finn in every various phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the fruitship, in his camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his red
shirt, tarry trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyards to his
girdle. But not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds who throng the
docks. There are lightermen, stevedores, bargees, and lumpers; there are
passengers flocking to their narrow berths on board emigrant ships ; there are
entering and wharfingers' clerks traveling
about in ambulatory counting-houses mounted on wheels; there are land rats and
water rats, ay, and some that may be called pirates of the long-shore, and over
whom it behoves the dock policemen and the dock watchmen to exercise a somewhat
rigid supervision-for they will pick and steal, these piratical ne'er-do-weels, any trifle, unconsidered or not, that comes handy to
their knavish digits; and as they emerge from the dock-gates, it is considered
by no means a breach of etiquette for an official to satisfy himse1f~ by a
personal inspection of their garments, that they don't happen to have concealed
about them, of course by accident, such waifs and strays as a bottle of Jamaica
rum, a lump of gutta percha,
a roll of sheet copper, or a bundle of Havannah
cigars.
But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock-
labourers, from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to
their toil. Goodness and their own deplenished
pockets only know how they have been lunching, or on what coarse viands they
have fed since noon. Many
have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds,
especially in the London
Docks-where no recommendation save strength is needed, and they are taken on
their good behaviour from day to day-are of the Irish way of thinking; and, wonderfully
economical, provident, self-denying are those much maligned Hibernians when
they are earning money. They are only spendthrifts and indolent when they have
nothing. They will content themselves with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and
the bibulous solace of the nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to the
unsavoury den - be it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off Kensington,
for they prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible distance from their
place of daily toil - where their ragged little robins of children dwell like
so many little pigs under a bed. And there they will partake of a mess of
potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed up therein, to "give it a
relish." They will half starve themselves, and go as naked as the police
will permit them to go ; but they will be very liberal
to the priest, and will scrape money together to bring their aged and infirm
parents over from the "ould country." That
is folly and superstition, people will say. Of course, what people say must be
right.
Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little
bread; for they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who
still pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but to the
defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious trade, now well
nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining districts, known as the "tommy-shop" system. I think I need scarcely explain
what this system is, for, under its twin denomination of "truck," it
has already formed a subject for Parliamentary inquiry. Let it suffice to say,
that the chief feature in the amiable system consists in giving the labourer a
fallacious amid delusive credit to the amount of his weekly wages, and
supplying him with victuals and drink (chiefly the latter) at an enormous rate
of profit. The labourer is paid by his foreman in tickets instead of cash, and
invariably finds himself at the end of the week victimised, or, to use a more
expressive, though not so genteel a term, diddled, to a heart-rending extent.
Dock-labourers who are in regular gangs and regularly employed, are the
greatest sufferers by this unjust mode of payment. As to the casual toilers who
crowd about the gates at early morning in the hope of being engaged for a working
day, they are paid half a crown, and are free to squander or to hoard the
thirty pence as they list. That industrious and peaceable body of men, the
coalwhippers, groaned for a long period under the
iniquities of the truck system; they are now protected by a special Act of
Parliament, renewed from time to time; but the dock-labourers yet eat their
bread leavened by a sense of injustice. There are none to help them; for they
have no organisation, and very few friends. It is perfectly true that the dock-companies
have nothing whatsoever to do with the social servitude under which their
labourers groan; and that it is private speculators who work the system for
their own aggrandisement; but the result to the labourer is the same. I don't
think it matters to Quashie, the negro
slave, when he is beaten, whether the cowhide be wielded by Mr. Simon Legree, the planter, or by Quimbo,
the black driver.
Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for
astonishment to know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men,
coarse, dirty, and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have been
tenderly bred and nurtured; who have been, save the mark, gentlemen! who have received University educations and borne the
Queen's commission. And here also are the draff and
husks of foreign immigration; Polish, German, and Italian exiles. They have
come to this - down to this - up to this, if you choose ;
come to the old, old level, as old as Gardener Adam's time, of earning the
daily bread by the sweat of the brow. It were better so than to starve ; better so than to steal.
What time the dock-labourers have finished lunch, another
very meritorious class of human ants begin their prandial
repasts. With I just one thought at the vast number of merchants', brokers',
shipping-agents', warehousemen's, wholesale dealers' counting-houses that exist
in London city, you will be able to form an idea of the legions of clerks, -
juniors and seniors, who, invariably early-breakfasting men, must get seriously
hungry at one p.m. Some I know are too proud to dine at this patriarchal hour.
They dine, after office hours, at Simpson's, at the Albion, at
the London, or,
save us, at the Wellington. They
go even further west, and patronise Feetum's, or the
Scotch Stores in Regent Street,
merely skating out, as it were, for a few minutes at noon, for a snack at that Bay Tree to which I have already
alluded. Many, and I they are the married clerks, bring neat parcels with them,
containing sandwiches or bread-and-cheese, consuming those refreshments in the
counting-house. In the very great houses, it is not considered etiquette to
dine during office-hours, save on foreign-post nights. As to the extremely
junior clerks, or office-boys, as they are irreverently termed, they eat
whatever they can get, and whenever they can get it, very frequently getting
nothing at all. But there are yet hundreds upon
hundreds of clerks who consume an orthodox dinner of meat, vegetables, and
cheese - and on high days and holidays pudding-at one p.m. Their numbers are sufficient to cram almost to
suffocation the eating-houses of Cheapside, the
Poultry, Mark Lane, Cornhill, and especially Bucklersbury.
Of late years there has been an attempt to change the eating-houses of Cheapside into pseudo
"restaurants." Seductive announcements, brilliantly emblazoned, and
showily framed and glazed, have been hung up, relating to "turtle"
and "venison ;" salmon, with wide waddling mouths, have gasped in the
windows; and insinuating mural inscriptions have hinted at the existence of
"Private dining- rooms for ladies." Now, whatever can ladies - though
I have the authority of Mr. Charles Dibdin and my own
lips for declaring that there are fine ones in the city - want to come and dine
in Cheapside for?
At these restaurants they give you things with French names, charge you a
stated sum for attendance, provide the pale ale in silver tankards, and take
care of your hat and coat; but I like them not - neither, I believe, do my
friends, the one-o'clock dining clerks. Either let me go to Birch's or the
Anti-Gallican, or let me take my modest cut of roast
and boiled, my "one o' taters," my " cheese and sallary," at an eating- house in Bucklersbury
- such a one as my alter ego, Mr. M'Connell, has here
presented for your edification. And his pictured morals must eke out my written
apophthegms - for this sheet is full.
www.victorianlondon.org/publications/sala-10.htm
The Victorian Dictionary compiled by Lee Jackson www.victorianlondon.org
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