Of the Street-Sellers of Walking-Sticks.
The walking-sticks sold in the streets of London are principally purchased at wholesale houses in Mint-street and Union-street, Borough, and their neighbourhoods. “There’s no street-trade,” said an intelligent man, “and I’ve tried most that’s been, or promised to be, a living in the streets, that is so tiresome as the walking-stick trade. There is nothing in which people are so particular. The stick’s sure to be either too short or too long, or too thick or too thin, or too limp or too stiff. You would think it was a simple thing for a man to choose a stick out of a lot, but if you were with me a selling on a fine Sunday at Battersea Fields, you’d see it wasn’t. O, it’s a tiresome job.”
The trade is a summer and a Sunday trade. The best localities are the several parks, and the approaches to them, Greenwich-park included; Hampstead Heath, Kennington Common, and, indeed, wherever persons congregate for pedestrian purposes, Battersea Fields being, perhaps, the place where the greatest Sunday trade is carried on. Some of the greater thoroughfares too, such as Oxford-street and the City-road, are a good deal frequented by the stick-sellers.
This trade—like others where the article sold is not of general consumption or primary usefulness—affords, what I once heard a street-seller call, “a good range.” There is no generally recognised price or value, so that a smart trader in sticks can apportion his offers, or his charges, to what he may think to be the extent of endurance in a customer. What might be 2d. to a man who “looked knowing,” might be 6d. to a man who “looked green.” The common sticks, which are the “cripples,” I was told, of all the sorts of sticks (the spoiled or inferior sticks) mixed with “common pines,” are 15d. the dozen. From this price there is a gradual scale up to 8s. the dozen for “good polished;” beyond that price the street-seller rarely ventures, and seldom buys even at that (for street-trade) high rate, as fourpenny and sixpenny sticks go off the best; these saleable sticks are generally polished hazel or pine. “I’ve sold to all sorts of people, sir,” said a stick-seller. “I once had some very pretty sticks, very cheap, only 2d. a piece, and I sold a good many to boys. They bought them, I suppose, to look like men, and daren’t carry them home; for I once saw a boy I’d sold a stick to, break it and throw it away just before he knocked at the door of a respectable house one Sunday evening. I’ve sold shilling sticks to gentlemen, sometimes, that had lost or broken or forgot their own. Canes there’s nothing done in now in the streets; nor in ‘vines,’ which is the little switchy things that used to be a sort of a plaything. There’s only one stick-man in the streets, as far as I know, I think—that has what you may call a capital in sticks. Only the other day I saw him sell a registered stick near Charing-cross. It was a beauty. A Bath cane, with a splendid ivory head, and a compass let into the ivory. The head screwed off, and beneath was a map of London and a Guide to the Great Exhibition. O, but he has a beautiful stock, and aint he aristocratic! ‘Ash twigs,’ with the light-coloured bark on them, not polished, but just trimmed, was a very good sale, but they’re not now. Why, as to what I take, it’s such a uncertain trade that it’s hard to say. Some days I haven’t taken 6d., and the most money I ever took was one Derby day at Epsom—I wish there was more Derby days, for poor people’s sakes—and then I took 30s. The most money as ever I took in London was 14s.—one Sunday, in Battersea Fields, when I had a prime cheap stock of bamboos. When I keep entirely to the stick trade, and during the summer, I may take 35s. in a week, with a profit of 15s.”
The street stick-sellers are, I am assured, sometimes about 200 in number, on a fine Sunday in the summer. Of these, some are dock-labourers, who thus add to their daily earnings by a seventh day’s labour; others, and a smarter class, are the “supers” (supernumeraries) of theatres, who also eke out their pittance by Sunday toil; porters, irregularly employed, and consequently “hard pushed to live,” also sell walking-sticks on the Sundays; as do others who “cannot afford”—as a well-educated man, a patterer on paper, once said to me—“to lose a day if they were d——d for it.” The usual mode of this street-trade is to carry the bundle of sticks strapped together, under the arm, and deposit the ends on the ground when a sale is to be effected. A few, however, and principally Jews, have “stands,” with the walking-sticks inclosed in a sort of frame. On the Mondays there are not above a third of the number of stick-sellers there are on the Sundays; and on the other days of the week not above a seventh, or an eighth. Calculating that for 12 weeks of the year there are every day 35 stick-sellers, each taking, on an average, 30s. a week (with a profit, individually, of about 12s.), we find 630l. expended in walking-sticks in the streets.
On clear winter days a stick-seller occasionally plies his trade, but on frosty days they are occupied in letting out skates in the parks, or wherever ponds are frozen.