How the Poor Live; and, Horrible London / 1889

by George R. Sims

The baronet can work, in spite of his pedigree, as well as any of his mates, and the fivepence an hour is a godsend to him. Strange are the stories of vicissitude which many of these men can tell. I have said it is the last haven of the outcast, and by that I do not mean to imply that all Dock-labourers are destitute; but that among the huge crowd of outsiders who come daily to take their chance are many of those who form the absolutely most helpless and most hopeless of the London poor, No character is required for the work, no questions are asked; a man can call himself any name he likes; so long as he has two hands and is willing to use them, that is all the Dock Company require. Among these men are hundreds of those whose cases are so difficult to deal with in respect of house accommodation. They are the men who have to pay exorbitant rents for the filthy single rooms of the slums, and whose fight with starvation is daily and hourly. They are the men earning precarious livelihoods who are objected to by the managers of all the new Industrial dwellings, which have swept away acres of accommodation of an inferior class. A man who is a dock-labourer may earn a pound a week—he may earn only five shillings. Sometimes they get taken on every day in a week, and then for a fortnight they may have to go empty-handed from the gates day after day.

Once fix on your mind the wear and tear, the anxiety and doubt, the strain and harass, the ups and downs of a life like this, count the smallness of the gain and the uncertainty of employment, and you will understand why it is that the common body of men who are classed as 'Dock-labourers' are reckoned as among the poorest of the London poor who make an honest effort to keep out of the workhouse. Watch the crowd—there must be over two thousand present in the great outer circle. The gangers are getting into the rostrums—two tea ships have come in, and a large number of men will be required. Hope is on many faces now; the men who have been lying in hundreds sleeping on the bank opposite—so usual a bed that the grass is worn away—leap to their feet. The crowd surges close together, and every eye is fixed in the direction of the ganger, who, up in his pulpit, his big book, with the list of the names of regular men, or 'Royals,' open before him, surveys the scene, and prepares for business. He calls out name after name—the men go up and take a pass, present it to the police at the gate, and file in to be told off to the different vessels. It is when the 'Royals' are exhausted that the real excitement begins. The men who are left are over a thousand strong—they have come on the chance. The ganger eyes them with a quick, searching glance, then points his finger to them, 'You—and you—and you—and you.' The extra men go through the usual formality, and pass in. There is still hope for hundreds of them. The ganger keeps on engaging men; but presently he stops.

You can almost hear a sigh run through the ragged crowd. There comes into some of the pale, pinched faces a look of unutterable woe—the hope that welled up in the heart has sunk back again. There is no chance now. All the men wanted are engaged.

As you turn and look at these men and study them—these, the unfortunate ones—you picture to yourself what the situation means to some of them. What are their thoughts as they turn away? Some of them, perhaps, have grown callous to suffering, hardened in despair. To-day's story is but the story of yesterday, and will be the story of tomorrow. There is on many of their faces that look of vacant unconcern to everything that comes of long familiarity with adversity. They have the look of the man who came into the French Court of Justice to take his trial for murdering his colleague at the galleys, and who had branded on his arm his name—'Never a chance!' Never a chance when a man gets that branded, not on his arm but on his heart; he takes bad luck very quietly. It is the good luck which would astonish and upset him.

Some of the men, new-comers most of these, and not used to the game yet, show a certain rough emotion. It is fair to say it generally takes the form of an expletive. Others, men who look as though they had sunk by degrees from better positions, go away with a quivering lip and a flush of disappointment. If we could follow the thoughts of some of them, we should see far away, and perhaps where in some wretched room a wife and children sit cowering and shivering, waiting for the evening to come, when father will bring back the price of the day's work he has gone to seek. It must be with a heavy heart that his wife towards mid-day hears the sound of her husband's footsteps on the creaking stairs. This advent means no joy to her. That footstep tells its sad, cruel tale in one single creak. He has not been taken on at the Docks; another weary day of despair has to be sat through, another night she and the little ones must go hungry to bed.

It must not be imagined that the men clear away directly who have not been engaged. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, and dozens of men still wait on in hope. It sometimes happens that a ship comes in late, or something happens, and more men are required. Then the ganger comes out and picks them from among the remaining crowd.

Dozens of them hang about on the off-chance until two; after that it rarely happens any men are engaged, so the last brave few who have stood with wistful eyes for six or eight hours at the gate, turn slowly on their heels and go—God knows where!

Some of them, I believe, are absolutely homeless and friendless, and hang about street corners, getting perhaps a bit of tobacco from one or another more fortunate in this world's goods than themselves, and with it stave off the gnawing pangs of hunger. They hang about up side streets and round corners till night comes, then fling themselves down and sleep where they can, and go back once more at dawn to the gates of their paradise, to wait and hope, and be disappointed perhaps again.

This is the dark side of the Dock-labourer's story. It has a brighter and better one inside, where on miles and miles of wharf hundreds of men, package- and bale-laden, are hurrying to and fro, stowing the produce of the world in shed after shed. Thousands of barrels of sugar are lying in one, and the air is perfectly sweet with it. The ground is treacly with it, and one's boots are saturated with it as one walks through a thick slime of what looks like toffee gone wrong in a sweetstuff window on a hot summer day. Thousands of boxes of tea, just in from China, are in another shed, and their next-door neighbours are myriads of bags of wheat. The steam cranes are going as far as the eye can see, whirling and dragging, and swinging huge bale after bale greedily from the good ships' holds; lighters laden to the top are being piled higher still; whole regiments of men bent with precious burthens are filing from wharf to warehouse; the iron wheels of the trolley, as it is pushed rapidly over the asphalted floor, make a music of their own; and the whole scene is shut in with a background of shipping—argosies freighted with the wealth of the Indies, the produce of many a land beyond the seas; all this goes to make up a picture of industry and enterprise and wealth, which gives just a little pardonable pride to the Englishman who contemplates it for the first time.

The system in the Docks is admirable. The strange men who are taken on are not taken entirely on trust. There is a uniform scale of pay for old hands and new, but there is an overlooker to see that all work well. If a man shirks or makes himself in any way objectionable, the process is short and summary: 'Go to the office and take your money.' The man is discharged—he is paid for the time he has worked, but no more; and he can leave the Docks out of the question as a field for his talents, if he has shown himself a duffer. A mark is put against his name in the ganger's book.