Twice round the clock; or, The hours of the day and night in London

by George Augustus Sala

The police have very speedily made a sanitary cordon round about the blazing premises, and let none pass save those who have special business near the place. The firemen are “welcome guests” within the magic cordon, as also the fussy, self-important sergeants and inspectors of police, who often do more harm than good with their orders and counter-orders. There are some other gentlemen, too, who slip in and out unquestioned and unchallenged. They don’t pump at the fire-engines, and they don’t volunteer to man the fire-escape. But they seem to have an undisputed though unrecognised right to be here, there, and everywhere, and are received on a footing of humorous equality by the police, the fire-escape men, the firemen, and the very firemen’s dogs. They are not official-looking persons by any means. They wear no uniforms, they carry no signs of authority, such as truncheons, armlets, or the like. They are rather given, on the contrary, to a plain and unpretending, not to say “seedy,” style of attire. Napless hats, surtouts tightly buttoned up to the throat and white at the seams, pantaloons of undecided length, unblackened bluchers, and umbrellas, seem to be the favourite wear among these gentlemen. They are, not to mince the matter, what are termed “occasional reporters” to the daily newspapers, and, in less courteous parlance, are denominated “penny-a-liners.” It is the vocation of these gentlemen (worthy souls for the most part—working very hard for very little money) to prowl continually about London town, in search of fires, fallings in and down of houses, runnings away of vicious horses, breakings down of cabs, carriages, and omnibuses; and, in fact, accidents and casualties of every description. But especially fires. Fatal accidents are not unnaturally preferred by the occasional reporters, because they lead to coroners’ inquests, which have of course also to be reported; and, in the case of a fire, a slight loss of life is not objected to. It entails “additional particulars,” and perhaps an inquiry before the coroner, with an examination of witnesses relative to the cause of the fire; nay, who knows but it may end in a trial for arson? There was—and may be now—a gentleman attached to the combustible department of the press, who was so well known and practised a hand at reporting conflagrations, that he was christened, and to some extent popularly known as, the “Fire King.” It was facetiously suggested that he was unconsumable, made of asbestos, not to be affected by heat, like Signor Buono Cuore at Cremorne Gardens. According to the legend current in London newspaper circles, the “Fire King” had his abode next door to a fire-engine station in the Waterloo Road, and further to guard against the possibility of missing one of these interesting, and, to him, remunerative events, he caused to be inscribed on the door-jamb, in lieu of the ordinary injunction to “ring the top bell,” this solitary announcement on a neat brass plate, “Fire Bell.” So, when a fire was signalled within the beat of that portion of the brigade stationed in the Waterloo Road—or, indeed, anywhere else if of sufficient magnitude, for the brigade are not by any means particular as to distances, and would as lief go down the river to Gravesend or up it to Henley if occasion required—a stalwart brigadier, his helmet and hatchet all donned, would pull lustily at the fire-bell, accompanying the tintinnabulation by stentorian shouts of “Wake up, Charley!” Charley, the “Fire King,” perhaps at that moment serenely dreaming of new Great Fires of London, Temples of Diana at Ephesus, and Minsters at York, ignited by Erostatratuses and Jonathan Martins yet unborn, would sing out of the window a sonorous “All right!” hastily dress, descend, jump on the ready-harnessed engine, and be conveyed jubilantly, as fast as ever the horses could carry him, to the scene of the fire. But two stains existed on the “Fire King’s” otherwise fair escutcheon. It was darkly rumoured that on one occasion—it was a very fat fire at a patent candle manufactory—he had offered to bribe the turncock, so tampering with the supply of water; and that on another, it being a remarkably cold winter’s night, he expressed a hope that the main might be frozen. And yet a more tender-hearted man—“additional particulars,” and the claim of a wife and large family being put out of the question—than the Fire King, does not exist.

Meanwhile the oil and pickle man’s house blazes tremendously. The houses on either side must go too; so think the firemen. Fears are entertained for the safety of the houses over the way, already scorched and blistering, and the adjoining tenements within a circle of a hundred yards are sure to be more or less injured by water, for the street is wretchedly narrow, and the houses lean-to frightfully. One extremity of the thoroughfare has been shored up for years by beams, now rotting. The oil and pickle man is heavily insured, so is the contractor for army clothing over the way, so is the wholesale boot and shoe manufacturer next door. It would be a mercy if the whole decayed stack of buildings were swept away by the devouring, yet purifying element. Yes, a mercy, surely a mercy. But the miserable inhabitants of the crumbling tenements that cling like barnacles to the skirts of the great shops and factories, are they insured? See them swarming from their hovels half naked, frenzied with terror and amazement, bearing their trembling children in their arms, or lugging their lamentable shreds and scraps of household goods and chattels into the open. Are they insured? The fire will send them to the workhouse, or, maybe, to the workhouse dead-wall—for they have no legal settlement there, or they are not casual paupers, or they haven’t seen the relieving-officer, or they are too early, or too late—there to crouch and die. To be sure, they ought never to have been born. They are not necessary for the prosperity of the wholesale trade in boots and shoes, oil, pickles, and army clothing. Why cumber they the earth?

And still the fire leaps up into the cold morning air. The house will be gutted out and out, the police now say authoritatively. Happily there is no danger to be apprehended now for human life within the blazing pile. The oil and pickle chandler does not dwell in his warehouse. He has a snug villa at Highgate, and is very probably now contemplating the motley sky from his parlour-window, and wondering wherever the fire can be. The only living person who had to be rescued was an old housekeeper, who persisted in saying that she had lived in the house “seven and thirty year,” and wouldn’t leave it while one stone remained on another; which was not so very difficult a task, seeing that the premises were built throughout of brick. She had to be hustled at last, and after much to do, into the fire-escape; but for hours afterwards she led the firemen a terrible life respecting the fate of a certain tom-cat, of extraordinary sagacity, called Ginger, which she averred to have left sitting on the lid of the water-butt, but which very soon afterwards appeared in the flesh, so scorched that it smelt like burnt feathers, and clawing convulsively at the collar of a police-constable of the F. division. It is, perhaps, scarcely worth while to state that in the course of the fire a poor woman is carried from one of the adjoining hovels dead. She was close upon her confinement, and the child and she are gone to a more peaceable and merciful city, where lives, at least, are assured for ever.

Towards two o’clock, the columns of flame begin to grow slenderer, less continuous, more fitful. The clanking of the fire-engines does not decrease, however, in the least, though the firemen joyfully declare that the fire is “got under.” The surrounding publicans—who, though they closed at midnight, have all taken down their shutters with marvellous alacrity—are doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed to the volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check being kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets. Where the tickets come from I have no means of judging, but this wonderful fire-brigade seem prepared for everything.

So, feeling very hot and dry, and dazed about the eyes with constant contemplation of the flames, I leave St. Giles’s and the oil and pickle vender’s warehouse, which, when daylight comes, will be but a heap of charred, steaming ruins, and wander westward, musing over the fires I have seen and the fires I have read of. I think of the great fire of London in Charles’s time—the fire that began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pye Corner, and in commemoration of which they built that strange monument, with the gilt shaving-brush at the top—

“... London’s column, pointing to the skies,

Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies.”

I think of the great fire at the Tower of London in 1841, of which I was an eye-witness, and which consumed the hideous armouries built by William III. and their priceless contents. I think upon the great scuffle and scramble to rescue the crown and regalia from the threatened Jewel House, such a scuffle and scramble as had not taken place since Colonel Blood’s impudent attempt to steal those precious things. Then my mind reverts to the monster conflagration by which the winter palace at St. Petersburg was destroyed in 1839; of the strange discovery then made, that dozens of families lived on the roof of the palace—lived, and roosted, and died, and kept fowls and goats there, of whose existence the court and the imperial household had not the remotest idea; of the sentinel who died at his post, notwithstanding the imperial command to leave it, because he had not been relieved by his corporal; and of the Czar himself watching with compressed lips the destruction of his magnificent palace, and vainly entreating his officers not to risk their lives in endeavouring to save the furniture. One zealous aide-de-camp could not be dissuaded from the attempt to reach a magnificent pier-glass, framed in gold and malachite, from a wall, whereupon his Imperial Majesty, seeing that injunction, entreaty, menace were all in vain, hurled, with the full force of his gigantic arm, his opera-glass at the sheet of crystal, which was shivered to atoms by the blow. Not an uncharacteristic trait of Nicholas Romanoff.