Experience of a Running Patterer.
From a running patterer, who has been familiar with the trade for many years, I received, upwards of a twelvemonth ago, the following statement. He is well known for his humour, and is a leading man in his fraternity. After some conversation about “cocks,” the most popular of which, my informant said, was the murder at Chigwell-row, he continued:
“That’s a trump, to the present day. Why, I’d go out now, sir, with a dozen of Chigwell-rows, and earn my supper in half an hour off of ’em. The murder of Sarah Holmes at Lincoln is good, too—that there has been worked for the last five year successively every winter. Poor Sarah Holmes! Bless her! she has saved me from walking the streets all night many a time. Some of the best of these have been in work twenty years—the Scarborough murder has full twenty years. It’s called ‘The Scarborough Tragedy.’ I’ve worked it myself. It’s about a noble and rich young naval officer seducing a poor clergyman’s daughter. She is confined in a ditch, and destroys the child. She is taken up for it, tried, and executed. This has had a great run. It sells all round the country places, and would sell now if they had it out. Mostly all our customers is females. They are the chief dependence we have. The Scarborough Tragedy is very attractive. It draws tears to the women’s eyes to think that a poor clergyman’s daughter, who is remarkably beautiful, should murder her own child; it’s very touching to every feeling heart. There’s a copy of verses with it, too. Then there’s the Liverpool Tragedy—that’s very attractive. It’s a mother murdering her own son, through gold. He had come from the East Indies, and married a rich planter’s daughter. He came back to England to see his parents after an absence of thirty years. They kept a lodging-house in Liverpool for sailors; the son went there to lodge, and meant to tell his parents who he was in the morning. His mother saw the gold he had got in his boxes, and cut his throat—severed his head from his body; the old man, upwards of seventy years of age, holding the candle. They had put a washing-tub under the bed to catch his blood. The morning after the murder, the old man’s daughter calls and inquires for a young man. The old man denies that they have had any such person in the house. She says he had a mole on his arm, in the shape of a strawberry. The old couple go up-stairs to examine the corpse, and find they have murdered their own son, and then they both put an end to their existence. This is a deeper tragedy than the Scarborough Murder. That suits young people better; they like to hear about the young woman being seduced by the naval officer; but the mothers take more to the Liverpool Tragedy—it suits them better. Some of the ‘cocks’ were in existence long before ever I was born or thought of. The ‘Great and important battle between the two young ladies of fortune,’ is what we calls ‘a ripper.’ I should like to have that there put down correct,” he added, “’cause I’ve taken a tidy lot of money out of it.”
My informant, who had been upwards of 20 years in the running patter line, told me that he commenced his career with the “Last Dying Speech and Full Confession of William Corder.” He was sixteen years of age, and had run away from his parents. “I worked that there,” he said, “down in the very town (at Bury) where he was executed. I got a whole hatful of halfpence at that. Why, I wouldn’t even give ’em seven for sixpence—no, that I wouldn’t. A gentleman’s servant come out and wanted half a dozen for his master and one for himself in, and I wouldn’t let him have no such thing. We often sells more than that at once. Why, I sold six at one go to the railway clerks at Norwich about the Manning affair, only a fortnight back. But Steinburgh’s little job—you know he murdered his wife and family, and committed suicide after—that sold as well as any ‘die.’ Pegsworth was an out-and-out lot. I did tremendous with him, because it happened in London, down Ratcliff-highway—that’s a splendid quarter for working—there’s plenty of feelings—but, bless you, some places you go to you can’t move no how, they’ve hearts like paving-stones. They wouldn’t have ‘the papers’ if you’d give them to ’em—especially when they knows you. Greenacre didn’t sell so well as might have been expected, for such a diabolical out-and-out crime as he committed; but you see he came close after Pegsworth, and that took the beauty off him. Two murderers together is never no good to nobody. Why there was Wilson Gleeson, as great a villain as ever lived—went and murdered a whole family at noon-day—but Rush coopered him—and likewise that girl at Bristol—made it no draw to any one. Daniel Good, though, was a first-rater; and would have been much better if it hadn’t been for that there Madam Toosow. You see, she went down to Roehampton, and guv 2l. for the werry clogs as he used to wash his master’s carriage in; so, in course, when the harristocracy could go and see the real things—the werry identical clogs—in the Chamber of ’Orrors, why the people wouldn’t look at our authentic portraits of the fiend in human form. Hocker wasn’t any particular great shakes. There was a deal expected from him, but he didn’t turn out well. Courvoisier was much better; he sold wery well, but nothing to Blakesley. Why I worked him for six weeks. The wife of the murdered man kept the King’s Head that he was landlord on open on the morning of the execution, and the place was like a fair. I even went and sold papers outside the door myself. I thought if she war’n’t ashamed, why should I be? After that we had a fine ‘fake’—that was the fire of the Tower of London—it sold rattling. Why we had about forty apprehended for that—first we said two soldiers was taken up that couldn’t obtain their discharge, and then we declared it was a well-known sporting nobleman who did it for a spree. The boy Jones in the Palace wasn’t much of an affair for the running patterers; the ballad singers—or street screamers, as we calls ’em—had the pull out of that. The patter wouldn’t take; they had read it all in the newspapers before. Oxford, and Francis, and Bean were a little better, but nothing to crack about. The people doesn’t care about such things as them. There’s nothing beats a stunning good murder, after all. Why there was Rush—I lived on him for a month or more. When I commenced with Rush, I was 14s. in debt for rent, and in less than fourteen days I astonished the wise men in the east by paying my landlord all I owed him. Since Dan’el Good there had been little or nothing doing in the murder line—no one could cap him—till Rush turned up a regular trump for us. Why I went down to Norwich expressly to work the execution. I worked my way down there with ‘a sorrowful lamentation’ of his own composing, which I’d got written by the blind man expressly for the occasion. On the morning of the execution we beat all the regular newspapers out of the field; for we had the full, true, and particular account down, you see, by our own express, and that can beat anything that ever they can publish; for we gets it printed several days afore it comes off, and goes and stands with it right under the drop; and many’s the penny I’ve turned away when I’ve been asked for an account of the whole business before it happened. So you see, for herly and correct hinformation, we can beat the Sun—aye, or the moon either, for the matter of that. Irish Jem, the Ambassador, never goes to bed but he blesses Rush the farmer; and many’s the time he’s told me we should never have such another windfall as that. But I told him not to despair; there’s a good time coming, boys, says I, and, sure enough, up comes the Bermondsey tragedy. We might have done very well, indeed, out of the Mannings, but there was too many examinations for it to be any great account to us. I’ve been away with the Mannings in the country ever since. I’ve been through Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Suffolk, along with George Frederick Manning and his wife—travelled from 800 to 1,000 miles with ’em, but I could have done much better if I had stopped in London. Every day I was anxiously looking for a confession from Mrs. Manning. All I wanted was for her to clear her conscience afore she left this here whale of tears (that’s what I always calls it in the patter), and when I read in the papers (mind they was none of my own) that her last words on the brink of heternity was, ‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Mr. Rowe, but to thank you for your kindness,’ I guv her up entirely—had completely done with her. In course the public looks to us for the last words of all monsters in human form, and as for Mrs. Manning’s, they were not worth the printing.”
Of the Recent Experience of a Running Patterer.
From the same man I had the following account of his vocation up to the present time:
“Well, sir,” he said, “I think, take them altogether, things hasn’t been so good this last year as the year before. But the Pope, God bless him! he’s been the best friend I’ve had since Rush, but Rush licked his Holiness. You see, the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman is a one-sided affair; of course the Catholics won’t buy anything against the Pope, but all religions could go for Rush. Our mob once thought of starting a cardinal’s dress, and I thought of wearing a red hat myself. I did wear a shovel hat when the Bishop of London was our racket; but I thought the hat began to feel too hot, so I shovelled it off. There was plenty of paper that would have suited to work with a cardinal’s hat. There was one,—‘Cardinal Wiseman’s Lament,’—and it was giving his own words like, and a red hat would have capped it. It used to make the people roar when it came to snivelling, and grumbling at little Jack Russell—by Wiseman, in course; and when it comes to this part—which alludes to that ’ere thundering letter to the Bishop of Durham—the people was stunned:
‘He called me a buffalo, bull, and a monkey,
And then with a soldier called Old Arthur conkey
Declared they would buy me a ninepenny donkey,