I learned later that this elongated solemn coffin of a man was the champion eater of the district I am not inclined to be nice in my remembrance of recorded weights and measures; but they had him registered to an ounce at the “Lewisham Arms,” which was only a yard or two beyond the police barracks, on the road to Handsworth, where he figured as having consumed a shoulder of mutton, a loaf of bread, a pan of potatoes, and a dish of cabbage, each of such and such a weight, in such and such a time. I cannot be sure whether it were at this house of entertainment, or at another in the neighbourhood, where there was a glass case on view in which was displayed the ashy remnant of a pound of tobacco smoked, and the desiccated remnant of a pound of tobacco chewed, within so many given minutes by the local champion in these inviting arts. I am pretty certain now that the local glutton was not identical with the local champion consumer of tobacco; but at that time I heaped all these honours on his head, and my belief in his original responsibility for the launching of the universe was not, so far as I remember, in any way disturbed by the contemplation of these smaller attributes of power.
It is something, even in the flights of baby fancy, to have known and conversed with the origin of all created things. It is perhaps something of a throwback to be forced to the recognition of that prodigious figure as it really was. But, after all, it is not quite impossible that a similar awaking may await the grown man who imagines himself to have mastered something of the real philosophies of life. The cadaverous peeler with the abnormal appetite fades out of recollection, and my next hero is a blacksmith, who, in a countryside once rich in amateur pugilists, had earned a local distinction for himself before he made a settlement for life at the “Farriers' Arms,” in Queen Street. His name was Robert Pearce, and he dawns on me as second hero because of a physical strength which must have been remarkable even when all allowance for the childish ideal is made.
Sir Ernest Spencer, who was for many years the Parliamentary representative of my native parish, was an infant schoolfellow of mine, and on a birthday, or some other such occasion for celebration, his father made him a present of a small donkey; and we two took the beast to Bob Pearce's to be shod. I can see the great, broad-shouldered, hairy farrier at this minute, as if I saw him in a picture, with his smoky shirt thrown wide open at the collar, and his breast as bearded as his chin. When the small beast was trotted in to the farriery, the grimy giant laughed aloud. He stooped, and, placing his great palm under the donkey's belly, he raised the animal in one hand, and poised him at the ceiling, swaying him here and there as if he had been a weathervane in a high and varying wind. I suppose that the donkey was a little donkey; but I am sure that he was only an averagely little donkey, and that not one man in a British regiment could have performed Bob Pearce's feat with any approach to the air of ease and dexterity he gave it. There was no effort at all about the action, and no apparent idea that any exhibition of strength was being offered. There was a conquering comic spontaneity in that exhibition of great muscular power which irresistibly appealed to the imagination, and made the Queen Street farrier a god for years to come.
When I was sent to a regular day-school, many years afterwards, there were legends amongst us of this man's super-normal strength. There was a great lath of a fellow who kept the “Star and Garter” public-house. After all this lapse of time one hopes that one may not hit on any surviving prejudice against the use of names and places. His name was Tom Woolley, and I saw Pearce set his big hand underneath the chair on which he sat, and place him on an ordinary table in a smoke-room for some slight wager of a pint of beer or so. This was one of the ameliorations of the rigours of a committee meeting, of which my father was chairman, called to decide on the form of the public reception of a returning Chartist, who had spent six months in Stafford Gaol for the expression of such extreme opinions as are now daily enunciated in the columns of The Times.
There are no such liars as schoolboys, and no set of men could possibly be found who could as religiously believe each other's lies as they do.
We used to invent for each other's delight stories about this particular hero which went beyond grown-up credence altogether. But there are some few narratives that survive the application of the laws of evidence. For instance, it is recorded that, taking advantage of the temporary absence of a rival smith, he carried away an anvil under his cloak without exciting suspicion that he was bearing any weight at all.
There was a pork butcher in the High Street who sprang to the most dazzling height of fame amongst the schoolboys and other well-practised, self-believing liars of the parish. On the Wednesday the man was as mere and simple a salesman of dead pig as might be found within the limits of the land. On the Thursday he had obliterated the memory of the achievements of Nelson and Six-teen-String Jack. Surveying the circumstances from a considerable distance, I am inclined to think that there was some authenticity in the story which sent the whole parish into a gaping admiration. The tale was that the pork butcher had gone money-hunting on the afternoon of that eventful day which made a hero of him. He had gathered, so the local story ran, something like two hundred pounds, and he made an incautious brag of this fact in the bar-room of the old “Blue Posts,” at Smethwick. Midway up Roebuck Lane, which was then without a house from end to end, three men sprang out upon him from the shadows of the bridge then just newly-erected across the Great Western line of railway, over which, if I remember rightly, no train at that time had ever travelled.
Then that pork butcher proved himself a paladin. He thrust one of his assailants to the rails at the bottom of the cutting with his foot; he laid out another upon the pathway with one prodigious buffet; and, seizing the third by the coat collar, he kicked him half a mile to the police station. Even now, I believe this story to be true, or near the truth; and the sympathetic reader may fancy what we boys made of the hero of it. I have worshipped many people in my time, and I have thrilled at the thought of many splendid deeds; but I have never since reached that high-water mark of hero-worship at which I sailed when I followed that pork butcher down the West Bromwich High Street, and persuaded myself beyond the evidence of my senses that he was ten feet high.