Of the Street-sellers of Bread.
The street-trade in bread is not so extensive as might be expected, from the universality of the consumption. It is confined to Petticoat-lane and the poorer districts in that neighbourhood. A person who has known the East-end of town for nearly fifty years, told me that as long as he could recollect, bread was sold in the streets, but not to the present extent. In 1812 and 1813, when bread was the dearest, there was very little sold in the streets. At that time, and until 1815, the Assize Acts, regulating the bread-trade, were in force, and had been in force in London since 1266. Previously to 1815 bakers were restricted, by these Acts, to the baking of three kinds of bread—wheaten, standard wheaten, and household. The wheaten was made of the best flour, the standard wheaten of the different kinds of flour mixed together, and the household of the coarser and commoner flour. In 1823, however, it was enacted that within the City of London and ten miles round, “it shall be lawful for the bakers to make and sell bread made of wheat, barley, rye, oats, buck-wheat, Indian-corn, peas, beans, rice, or potatoes, or any of them, along with common salt, pure-water, eggs, milk, barm-leaven, potato, or other yeast, and mixed in such proportions as they shall think fit.” I mention this because my informant, as well as an old master baker with whom I conversed on the subject, remembered that every now and then, after 1823, but only for two or three years, some speculative trader, both in shops and in the streets, would endeavour to introduce an inferior, but still a wholesome, bread, to his customers, such as an admixture of barley with wheat-flour, but no one—as far as I could learn—persevered in the speculation for more than a week or so. Their attempts were not only unsuccessful but they met with abuse, from street-buyers especially, for endeavouring to palm off “brown” bread as “good enough for poor people.” One of my elder informants remembered his father telling him that in 1800 and 1801, George III. had set the example of eating brown bread at his one o’clock dinner, but he was sometimes assailed as he passed in his carriage, with the reproachful epithet of “Brown George.” This feeling continues, for the poor people, and even the more intelligent working-men, if cockneys, have still a notion that only “white” bread is fit for consumption. Into the question of the relative nutrition of breads, I shall enter when I treat of the bakers.
During a period of about four months in the summer, there are from twenty to thirty men daily selling stale bread. Of these only twelve sell it regularly every day of the year, and they trade chiefly on their own account. Of the others, some are sent out by their masters, receiving from 1s. to 2s. for their labour. Those who sell on their own account, go round to the bakers’ shops about Stepney, Mile-end, and Whitechapel, and purchase the stale-bread on hand. It is sold to them at ½d., 1d. and 1½d. per quartern less than the retail shop price; but when the weather is very hot, and the bakers have a large quantity of stale-bread on hand, the street-sellers sometimes get the bread at 2d. a quartern less than the retail price. All the street-sellers of bread have been brought up as bakers. Some have resorted to the street-trade, I am told, when unable to procure work; others because it is a less toilsome, and sometimes a more profitable means of subsistence, than the labour of an operative baker. It is very rarely that any of the street-traders leave their calling to resume working as journeymen. Some of these traders have baskets containing the bread offered for street-sale; others have barrows, and one has a barrow resembling a costermonger’s, with a long basket made to fit upon it. The dress of these vendors is a light coat of cloth or fustian; corduroy, fustian, or cloth trousers, and a cloth cap or a hat, the whole attire being, what is best understood as “dusty,” ingrained as it is with flour.
From one bread-seller, a middle-aged man, with the pale look and habitual stoop of a journeyman baker, I had the following account:
“I’ve known the street-trade a few years; I can’t say exactly how many. I was a journeyman baker before that, and can’t say but what I had pretty regular employment; but then, sir, what an employment it is! So much night-work, and the heat of the oven, with the close air, and sleeping on sacks at nights (for you can’t leave the place), so that altogether it’s a slave’s life. A journeyman baker hasn’t what can be called a home, for he’s so much away at the oven; he’d better not be a married man, for if his wife isn’t very careful there’s talk, and there’s unhappiness about nothing perhaps. I can’t be thought to speak feelingly that way though, for I’ve been fortunate in a wife. But a journeyman baker’s life drives him to drink, almost whether he will or not. A street life’s not quite so bad. I was out of work two or three weeks, and I certainly lushed too much, and can’t say as I tried very hard to get work, but I had a pound or two in hand, and then I began to think I’d try and sell stale bread in the streets, for it’s a healthfuller trade than the other; so I started, and have been at it ever since, excepting when I work a few days, or weeks, for a master baker; but he’s a relation, and I assist him when he’s ill. My customers are all poor persons,—some in rags, and some as decent as their bad earnings’ll let them. No doubt about it, sir, there’s poor women buy of me that’s wives of mechanics working slop, and that’s forced to live on stale bread. Where there’s a family of children, stale bread goes so very much further. I think I sell to few but what has families, for a quartern’s too much at a time for a single woman. I often hear my customers talk about their children, and say they must make haste, as the poor things are hungry, and they couldn’t get them any bread sooner. O, it’s a hard fight to live, all Spitalfields and Bethnal-green way, for I know it all. There are first the journeyman bakers over-worked and fretted into drinking, a-making the bread, and there are the poor fellows in all sorts of trade over-worked to get money to buy it. I’ve had women that looked as if they was ‘reduced,’ come to me of an evening as soon as it was dusk, and buy stale bread, as if they was ashamed to be seen. Yes, I give credit. Some has a week’s credit regular, and pays every Saturday night. I lose very little in trusting. I sometimes have bread over and sell it—rather than hold it over to next day—for half what it cost me. I have given it away to begging people, sooner than keep it to be too stale, and they would get something for it at a lodging-house. The lodging-house keepers never buy of me that I know of. They can buy far cheaper than I can—you understand, sir. Perhaps, altogether, I make about a guinea every week; wet weather and short days are against me. I don’t sell more, I think, on a Saturday than on other nights. The nights are much of a muchness that way.”
The average quantity sold by each vendor during the summer months is 150 quarterns daily, usually at 4d., but occasionally at 3d. the quartern. One man informed me that he had sold in one day 350 quarterns, receiving 5l. 16s. 8d. for them.
The number of men (for if there be women they are the men’s wives) engaged daily throughout the year in the street-sale of bread is 12. These sell upon an average 100 quarterns each per day: taking every day in the year 1l. 12s. each (a few being sold at 3d.)
Calculating then the four months’ trade in summer at 150 quarterns per day per man, and reckoning 15 men so selling, and each receiving 45s. (thus allowing for the threepenny sale); and taking the receipts of the 12 regular traders at 1l. 12s. per day, we find nearly 9,000l. annually expended in the street purchase of 700,000 quartern loaves of bread. The profits of the sellers vary from 1l. to 2l. a week, according to the extent of their business.
To start in this branch of the street-trade a capital is required according to the following rate:—Stock-money for bread, average 1l.; (largest amount required, 5l.; smallest, 10s.); a basket, 4s. 6d. Of those who are employed in the summer, one-half have baskets, and the other half bakers’ barrows; while of those who attend the year through, 8 have baskets at 4s. 6d. each, 3 have barrows at 40s. each, and one a barrow and the long basket, before mentioned. The barrow costs 30s., and the basket 2l.