The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

Ten years ago this woman and her husband came from the country to try their luck in London. The man failed to get work, fell in with evil companions, and they drifted to the Avemus. The husband is a loafer—the wife does a little work at a laundry when she can get it. They live in a vile street, where oaths and foul language and brutal deeds are all they hear and see. The house they live in is filled with bad characters. The eldest boy—he came a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked child from the country with his parents—is in prison; the girl, who was bom after they came to the Avemus, is in an idiot asylum; the boy at the school is developing criminal tendencies. The mother sees with despair the min of her family, but she is helpless to avert it. Her husband is a drunkard. She herself has fallen into the slough at last.

Her case is typical of hundreds in the neighbourhood. So terrible is the effect of the environment on the children that day and night the Industrial School officers are searching for girls and boys, whose only hope of salvation is to be separated from their parents.

If you were to spend one night in the Avemus your face would be crimson with righteous indignation that little children should live open-eared and open-eyed in constant contact with such horrors.

Do you see a broad-shouldered, burly, kindly-looking man walking quietly along the street? As he comes into sight a group of lads and lasses disperse as if by magic. There is a sudden bolt up a narrow passage that through a back street leads into the open thoroughfare.

The big man smiles good-humouredly. He has seen the group, and the girl he wants was in it. He will find her before the night is over, because he will enter every house she is likely to have taken refuge in. He is the Industrial School's officer. Three years ago he rescued a girl from evil surroundings and she was sent to Canada. She has managed in some mysterious way to get back again across the sea, and has headed straight for the Avemus, where she has a bad mother, and a father who is worse.

There is nothing brings the shame and degradation of one phase of London life so acutely home to you as a day and a night with the officers whose duty it is to remove the young from the homes and haunts of vice. In one street in the Avemus there are two hundred children growing up. There is not one house in the whole of that street that does not harbour women of the most degraded type.

Many of these children are already busy as money-makers. Some of them are sent out into the streets to beg; to play their carefully planned tricks and dodges on the humanity of the passers-by. There are women who wash their faces, smooth their hair, and dress in seedy black as widows, and take little children out with them to beg. These "poor widows" starve the children and spend the money in drink. Sometimes they don't take their own children; they hire a deformed child or a cripple of a mother who is willing to let it out. There are hundreds of little children now in industrial homes who were forced into the streets to ply the trade of mendicity and mendacity, and who were treated with the most brutal violence by their parents if they came home empty-handed. Many a child, failing to get money by begging, would steal rather than go home to be received with foul words and brutal blows.

This Avernus of the West is an area of vice. The most typical area of crime lies nearer to the City's heart. It has been said, "Wall off Hoxton, and nine-tenths of the criminals of London would be walled off." That is, perhaps, a too sweeping statement, but that there are whole areas in Hoxton inhabited entirely by criminals is a fact beyond dispute. Those criminals are principally thieves and burglars. The majority are of the lowest order, but there are among them several superior "artists"—men who plan and carry out big jobs. The "fences," or receivers of stolen goods, have made quite a little colony here, and the modern trainer of thieves, the Fagin of the twentieth century, has his daily and nightly classes in the neighbourhood.

Look at this row of neat-looking houses. There are blinds and well-arranged curtains at the windows, the handle of the bell is polished, the steps are clean. The signs without bespeak comfort within. These houses are largely occupied by the superior craftsmen in crime. One or two receivers also reside here, and the cleverest trainer of young thieves in London occupies the upper portion of the house that has the best show of flowers in the home-made window-boxes.

It has been my privilege to converse with some of these trainers and to get an insight into their methods. I am not betraying any confidence in publishing what I have learnt of their system, because it is perfectly well known to the police and to the Christian workers who labour among the pupils of the modern Fagin. The boy who is "trained" is, as a rule, taught one branch of the art of robbery only. For instance, a thief who wants to be an expert abstracter of ladies' watches never steals watches from men. If he "mixes his pockets" he loses his delicacy of touch. The fingers must be employed in one way in taking a watch from a man's pocket, and in quite another way in taking a watch from a lady. To steal from the person adroitly and with little fear of detection the fingers must be in constant practice in one particular way. Many a thief who has stolen from women for years with impunity has come to instant grief when, tempted by the apparent carelessness of the owner in a crowd, he has tried to take a watch from a man.