After the baked potato season is over, the generality of the hucksters take to selling strawberries, raspberries, or anything in season. Some go to labouring work. One of my informants, who had been a bricklayer’s labourer, said that after the season he always looked out for work among the bricklayers, and this kept him employed until the baked potato season came round again.
“When I first took to it,” he said, “I was very badly off. My master had no employment for me, and my brother was ill, and so was my wife’s sister, and I had no way of keeping ’em, or myself either. The labouring men are mostly out of work in the winter time, so I spoke to a friend of mine, and he told me how he managed every winter, and advised me to do the same. I took to it, and have stuck to it ever since. The trade was much better then. I could buy a hundred-weight of potatoes for 1s. 9d. to 2s. 3d., and there were fewer to sell them. We generally use to a cwt. of potatoes three-quarters of a pound of butter—tenpenny salt butter is what we buy—a pennyworth of salt, a pennyworth of pepper, and five pennyworth of charcoal. This, with the baking, 9d., brings the expenses to just upon 7s. 6d. per cwt., and for this our receipts will be 12s. 6d., thus leaving about 5s. per cwt. profit.” Hence the average profits of the trade are about 30s. a week—“and more to some,” said my informant. A man in Smithfield-market, I am credibly informed, clears at the least 3l. a week. On the Friday he has a fresh basket of hot potatoes brought to him from the baker’s every quarter of an hour. Such is his custom that he has not even time to take money, and his wife stands by his side to do so.
Another potato-vender who shifted his can, he said, “from a public-house where the tap dined at twelve,” to another half-a-mile off, where it “dined at one, and so did the parlour,” and afterwards to any place he deemed best, gave me the following account of his customers:—
“Such a day as this, sir [Jan. 24], when the fog’s like a cloud come down, people looks very shy at my taties, very; they’ve been more suspicious ever since the taty rot. I thought I should never have rekivered it; never, not the rot. I sell most to mechanics—I was a grocer’s porter myself before I was a baked taty—for their dinners, and they’re on for good shops where I serves the taps and parlours, and pays me without grumbling, like gentlemen. Gentlemen does grumble though, for I’ve sold to them at private houses when they’ve held the door half open as they’ve called me—aye, and ladies too—and they’ve said, ‘Is that all for 2d.?’ If it’d been a peck they’d have said the same, I know. Some customers is very pleasant with me, and says I’m a blessing. One always says he’ll give me a ton of taties when his ship comes home, ’cause he can always have a hot murphy to his cold saveloy, when tin’s short. He’s a harness-maker, and the railways has injured him. There’s Union-street and there’s Pearl-row, and there’s Market-street, now,—they’re all off the Borough-road—if I go there at ten at night or so, I can sell 3s. worth, perhaps, ’cause they know me, and I have another baked taty to help there sometimes. They’re women that’s not reckoned the best in the world that buys there, but they pay me. I know why I got my name up. I had luck to have good fruit when the rot was about, and they got to know me. I only go twice or thrice a week, for it’s two miles from my regular places. I’ve trusted them sometimes. They’ve said to me, as modest as could be, ‘Do give me credit, and ’pon my word you shall be paid; there’s a dear!’ I am paid mostly. Little shopkeepers is fair customers, but I do best for the taps and the parlours. Perhaps I make 12s. or 15s. a week—I hardly know, for I’ve only myself and keep no ’count—for the season; money goes one can’t tell how, and ’specially if you drinks a drop, as I do sometimes. Foggy weather drives me to it, I’m so worritted; that is, now and then, you’ll mind, sir.”
There are, at present, 300 vendors of hot baked potatoes getting their living in the streets of London, each of whom sell, upon an average, ¾ cwt. of potatoes daily. The average takings of each vendor is 6s. a day; and the receipts of the whole number throughout the season (which lasts from the latter end of September till March inclusive), a period of 6 months, is 14,000l.
A capital is required to start in this trade, as follows:—can, 2l.; knife, 3d.; stock-money, 8s.; charge for baking 100 potatoes, 1s.; charcoal, 4d.; butter, 2d.; salt, 1d., and pepper, 1d.; altogether, 2l. 9s. 11d. The can and knife is the only property described as fixed, stock-money, &c., being daily occurring, amounts to 75l. during the season.
Of “Trotting,” or “Hawking” Butchers.
These two appellations are, or have been, used somewhat confusedly in the meat trade. Thirty, or forty, or fifty years ago—for each term was mentioned to me—the butcher in question was a man who went “trotting” on his small horse to the more distant suburbs to sell meat. This was when the suburbs, in any direction, were “not built up to” as they are now, and the appearance of the trotting butcher might be hailed as saving a walk of a mile, or a mile and a half, to a butcher’s shop, for only tradesmen of a smaller capital then opened butcher’s shops in the remoter suburbs. For a suburban butcher to send round “for orders” at that period would have occupied too much time, for a distance must be traversed; and to have gone, or sent, on horseback, would have entailed the keeping or hiring of a horse which was in those days an expensive matter. One butcher who told me that he had known the trade, man and boy, for nearly fifty years, said: “As to ‘trotting,’ a small man couldn’t so well do it, for if 20l. was offered for a tidy horse in the war time it would most likely be said, ‘I’ll get more for it in the cavaldry—for it was often called cavaldry then—there’s better plunder there.’ (Plunder, I may explain, is a common word in the horse trade to express profit.) So it wasn’t so easy to get a horse.” The trotting butchers were then men sent or going out from the more frequented parts to supply the suburbs, but in many cases only when a tradesman was “hung up” with meat. They carried from 20 to 100 lb. of meat generally in one basket, resting on the pommel of the saddle, and attached by a long leathern strap to the person of the “trotter.” The trade, however, was irregular and, considering the expenses, little remunerative; neither was it extensive, but what might be the extent I could not ascertain. There then sprung up the class of butchers—or rather the class became greatly multiplied—who sent their boys or men on fast trotting horses to take orders from the dwellers in the suburbs, and even in the streets, not suburbs, which were away from the shop thoroughfares, and afterwards to deliver the orders—still travelling on horseback—at the customer’s door. This system still continues, but to nothing like its former extent, and as it does not pertain especially to the street-trade I need not dwell upon it at present, nor on the competition that sprung up as to “trotting butcher’s ponies,”—in the “matching” of which “against time” sporting men have taken great interest.
Of “trotting” butchers, keeping their own horses, there are now none, but there are still, I am told, about six of the class who contrive, by hiring, or more frequently borrowing, horses of some friendly butcher, to live by trotting. These men are all known, and all call upon known customers—often those whom they have served in their prosperity, for the trotting butcher is a “reduced” man—and are not likely to be succeeded by any in the same line, or—as I heard it called—“ride” of business. These traders not subsisting exactly upon street traffic, or on any adventure depending upon door by door, or street by street, commerce, but upon a connection remaining from their having been in business on their own accounts, need no further mention.
The present class of street-traders in raw meat are known to the trade as “hawking” butchers, and they are as thoroughly street-sellers as are the game and poultry “hawkers.” Their number, I am assured, is never less than 150, and sometimes 200 or even 250. They have all been butchers, or journeymen butchers, and are broken down in the one case, or unable to obtain work in the other. They then “watch the turn of the markets,” as small meat “jobbers,” and—as on the Stock Exchange—“invest,” when they account the market at the lowest. The meat so purchased is hawked in a large basket carried on the shoulders, if of a weight too great to be sustained in a basket on the arm. The sale is confined almost entirely to public-houses, and those at no great distance from the great meat marts of Newgate, Leadenhall, and Whitechapel. The hawkers do not go to the suburbs. Their principal trade is in pork and veal,—for those joints weigh lighter, and present a larger surface in comparison with the weight, than do beef or mutton. The same may be said of lamb; but of that they do not buy one quarter so much as of pork or veal.