If we calculate then 42s. a week as the takings of six persons, for five months, so including the summer trade, we find that upwards of 200l. is expended in the street purchase of plum dough, nearly half of which is profit. The trade, however, is reckoned among those which will disappear altogether from the streets.
The capital required to start is: basket, 1s. 9d.; cloths, 6d.; pan for boiling, 2s.; knife, 2d.; stock-money, 2s.; in all about, 7s. 6d.
Of the Street-sellers of Cakes, Tarts, &c.
These men and boys—for there are very few women or girls in the trade—constitute a somewhat numerous class. They are computed (including Jews) at 150 at the least, all regular hands, with an addition, perhaps, of 15 or 20, who seek to earn a few pence on a Sunday, but have some other, though poorly remunerative, employment on the week-days. The cake and tart-sellers in the streets have been, for the most part, mechanics or servants; a fifth of the body, however, have been brought up to this or to some other street-calling.
The cake-men carry their goods on a tray slung round their shoulders when they are offering their delicacies for sale, and on their heads when not engaged in the effort to do business. They are to be found in the vicinity of all public places. Their goods are generally arranged in pairs on the trays; in bad weather they are covered with a green cloth.
None of the street-vendors make the articles they sell; indeed, the diversity of those articles renders that impossible. Among the regular articles of this street-sale are “Coventrys,” or three-cornered puffs with jam inside; raspberry biscuits; cinnamon biscuits; “chonkeys,” or a kind of mince-meat baked in crust; Dutch butter-cakes; Jews’ butter-cakes; “bowlas,” or round tarts made of sugar, apple, and bread; “jumbles,” or thin crisp cakes made of treacle, butter, and flour; and jams, or open tarts with a little preserve in the centre.
All these things are made for the street-sellers by about a dozen Jew pastry-cooks, the most of whom reside about Whitechapel. They confine themselves to the trade, and make every description. On a fine holiday morning their shops, or rather bake-houses, are filled with customers, as they supply the small shops as well as the street-sellers of London. Each article is made to be sold at a halfpenny, and the allowance by the wholesale pastry-cook is such as to enable his customers to realise a profit of 4d. in 1s.; thus he charges 4d. a dozen for the several articles. Within the last seven years there has been, I am assured, a great improvement in the composition of these cakes, &c. This is attributable to the Jews having introduced superior dainties, and, of course, rendered it necessary for the others to vie with them: the articles vended by these Jews (of whom there are from 20 to 40 in the streets) are still pronounced, by many connoisseurs in street-pastry, as the best. Some sell penny dainties also, but not to a twentieth part of the halfpenny trade. One of the wholesale pastry-cooks takes 40l. a week. These wholesale men, who sometimes credit the street-people, buy ten, fifteen, or twenty sacks of flour at a time whenever a cheap bargain offers. They purchase as largely in Irish butter, which they have bought at 3d. or 2½d. the pound. They buy also “scrapings,” or what remains in the butter-firkins when emptied by the butter-sellers in the shops. “Good scrapings” are used for the best cakes; the jam they make themselves. To commence the wholesale business requires a capital of 600l. To commence the street-selling requires a capital of only 10s.; and this includes the cost of a tray, about 1s. 9d.; a cloth 1s.; and a leathern strap, with buckle, to go round the neck, 6d.; while the rest is for stock, with a shilling, or two as a reserve. All the street-sellers insist upon the impossibility of any general baker making cakes as cheap as those they vend. “It’s impossible, sir,” said one man to me; “it’s a trade by itself; nobody else can touch it. They was miserable little things seven years ago.”
An acute-looking man, decently dressed, gave me the following account. He resided with his wife—who went out charing—in a decent little back-room at the East-end, for which he paid 1s. a week. He had no children:—
“I’m a ‘translator’ (a species of cobbler) by trade,” he said, “but I’ve been a cake and a tart-seller in the streets for seven or eight years. I couldn’t make 1s. 3d. a day of twelve hours’ work, and sometimes nothing, by translating. Besides, my health was failing; and, as I used to go out on a Sunday with cakes to sell for a cousin of mine, I went into the trade myself, because I’d got up to it. I did middling the first three or four years, and I’d do middling still, if it wasn’t for the bad weather and the police. I’ve been up three times for ‘obstructing.’ Why, sir, I never obstructed a quarter as much as the print-shops and newspaper-shops down there” (pointing to a narrow street in the City). “But the keepers of them shops can take a sight at the Lord Mayor from behind their tills. The first time I was up before the Lord Mayor—it’s a few years back—I thought he talked like an old wife. ‘You mustn’t stand that way,’ he says, ‘and you mustn’t do this, and you mustn’t do that.’ ‘Well, my lord,’ says I, ‘then I mustn’t live honestly. But if you’ll give me 9s. a week, I’ll promise not to stand here, and not to stand there; and neither to do this, nor that, nor anything at all, if that pleases you better.’ They was shocked, they said, at my impudence—so young a fellow, too! I got off each time, but a deal of my things was spoiled. I work the City on week-days, and Victoria Park on Sundays. In the City, my best customers is not children, but young gents; real gents, some of them with gold watches. They buys twopenn’orth, mostly—that’s four of any sort, or different sorts. They’re clerks in banks and counting-houses, I suppose, that must look respectable like on a little, and so feeds cheap, poor chaps! for they dine or lunch off it, never doubt. Or they may be keeping their money for other things. To sell eleven dozen is a first-rate days’ work; that’s 1s. 9d. or 1s. 10d. profit. But then comes the wet days, and I can’t trade at all in the rain; and so the things get stale, and I have to sell them in Petticoat-lane for two a halfpenny. Victoria Park—I’m not let inside with my tray—is good and bad as happens. It’s chiefly a tossing trade there. Oh, I dare say I toss 100 times some Sundays. I don’t like tossing the coster lads, they’re the wide-awakes that way. The thieves use ‘grays.’ They’re ha’pennies, either both sides heads or both tails. Grays sell at from 2d. to 6d. I’m not often had that way, though. Working-people buy very few of me on Sundays; it’s mostly boys; and next to the gents., why, perhaps, the boys is my best customers in the City. Only on Monday a lad, that had been lucky ‘fiddling’” (holding horses, or picking up money anyhow) “spent a whole shilling on me. I clear, I think—and I’m among the cakes that’s the top of the tree—about 10s. a week in summer, and hardly 7s. a week in winter. My old woman and me makes both ends meet, and that’s all.”
Reckoning 150 cake-sellers, each clearing 6s. a week, a sufficiently low average, the street outlay will be 2,340l., representing a street-consumption of 1,123,200 cakes, tarts, &c.