DAVID AND JONATHAN
[To face p. 90.
In 1880 Mr. Keith-Falconer took a First Class in the Semitic Languages Tripos. During the whole of his University career, not only was he one of the most brilliant students of his time, but also a well-known sportsman. There was no namby-pamby Christian about this young scion of a great house. Everything he undertook he did well, and he became a leading bicycle racer in England, scoring innumerable successes at Cambridge, in the Inter-University meeting with Oxford, and defeating the professional champion of England by five yards. All this time, and I cannot give more than a mere outline of Keith-Falconer's career, inasmuch as it is unconnected with the Tower Hamlets Mission and Mr. Charrington, he was sitting for innumerable examinations, and building up a record of scholarship which still survives. Yet he was most actively connected with Mr. Charrington's work, and was, now very shortly, to be more a part of it than ever. With his friend he penetrated into the most miserable homes, he conducted many services, and, as will be seen in further chapters, when the luridly exciting story of the Battle of the Music Halls is told, he was Mr. Charrington's right-hand man.
One story of the earlier period was told me recently.
At the close of one of the meetings a little boy was found sobbing. With some difficulty he was induced to tell his tale. It was simple. His widowed mother, his sisters and he, all lived in one room. Everything had been sold to buy bread except two white mice, the boy's pets. Through all their poverty they had kept those two white mice, but at last they, too, must go! With the proceeds he bought street songs, which he retailed on the "waste," and so obtained the means of getting more bread for his mother and sisters. Now they were completely destitute. The boy was accompanied home. Home! It was a wretched attic, in one of the most dilapidated houses. It was a miserably cold and dismal day. In the broken-down grate the dead embers of yesterday's fire remained. On the table, in a piece of newspaper, a few crumbs. The air was close and the smell insupportable. "My good woman," said Mr. Charrington, "why don't you open the window?" "Oh," she replied, "you would not say that if you had had nothing to eat, and had no fire to warm you." The family was relieved.
He was intimately connected with the first beginnings of that famous "feeding of the hungry," which has gone on under Mr. Charrington's auspices for so many years, and is still one of the great living facts of the East End of London.
A-propos of this, Keith-Falconer wrote—
"During the hard times of the winter of 1879 (due to the long frost and depression of trade), a work was forced on our Mission which we had never contemplated taking up. The difficulties and dangers of wholesale charity are very great, and our desire has been to avoid them, except in cases of extreme circumstances. But the distress of that winter was extreme, and for many weeks we opened our halls and fed the literally starving multitudes with dry bread and cocoa. The austere distress began in December. Hundreds of men were waiting daily at the Docks in the hope (nearly always a disappointed hope) of a job. Starving men were found in several instances eating muddy orange-peel picked off the road.
"Our feeding became a very public matter, as there was much correspondence about it in the Times, the Daily News, the Echo and other leading papers, and many people came from long distances to see for themselves. The public supported us liberally with funds, and we were enabled to give no less than twenty thousand meals from January 1st to February 14th, besides which we assisted over three hundred families every week in their homes. We look back to the time as one of very great blessing."
Of this feeding I propose to give as graphic a description as I can in its proper place, for I have attended at it myself, but I must pass on now to the time when the young Professor—for Keith-Falconer was shortly afterwards appointed examiner in the very Tripos where he had so distinguished himself—threw his whole heart and soul into the project for building the present Great Assembly Hall.
For a time had come when Mr. Charrington's success had become so enormous, the whole machine so gigantic, that it was necessary to erect a huge building commensurate with the needs of the mission. Keith-Falconer was an invaluable helper. It is true that the great mass of work devolving on Mr. Charrington required that there should be also a secretary living in the midst of affairs and devoting his whole attention to the work. Still, Mr. Keith-Falconer's post was far from being a nominal one. In writing a business letter he was exceedingly business-like; his facts were put in the clearest and most methodical way. A letter from him asking for a subscription was no effusive appeal; it was a quiet, sensible statement of facts, written by a scholar and a master of English, all the more telling because the writer had shown himself to take all possible pains to do justice to his case.