Then, again, dustwork, as with the weaving of silk, is a kind of family work. The husband, wife, and children (unfortunately) all work at it. The consequence is, that the earnings of the whole have to be added together in order to arrive at a notion of the aggregate gains.
The following may therefore be taken as a fair average of the earnings of a dustman and his family when in full employment. The elder boys when able to earn 1s. a day set up for themselves, and do not allow their wages to go into the common purse.
| £. | s. | d. | £. | s. | d. | |
| Man, 5 loads per day, or 30 loads per week, at 4d. per load | 0 | 10 | 0 | |||
| Perquisites, or beer money | 0 | 2 | 9½ | |||
| Night-work for 2 nights a week | 0 | 5 | 0 | |||
| 0 | 17 | 9½ | ||||
| Woman, or sifter, per week, at 1s. per day | 0 | 6 | 0 | |||
| Perquisites, say 3d. a day | 0 | 1 | 6 | |||
| 0 | 7 | 6 | ||||
| Child, 3d. per day, carrying rags, bones, &c. | —— | 0 | 1 | 6 | ||
| Total | 1 | 6 | 9½ | |||
These are the earnings, it should be borne in mind, of a family in full employment. Perhaps it may be fairly said that the earnings of the single men are, on an average, 15s. a week, and 1l. for the family men all the year round.
Now, when we remember that the wages of many agricultural labourers are but 8s. a week, and the earnings of many needlewomen not 6d. a day, it must be confessed that the remuneration of the dustmen, and even of the dustwomen, is comparatively high. This certainly is not due to what Adam Smith, in his chapter on the Difference of Wages, terms the “disagreeableness of the employment.” “The wages of labour,” he says, “vary with the ease or hardship, the cleanliness or dirtiness, the honourableness or dishonourableness, of the employment.” It will be seen—when we come to treat of the nightmen—that the most offensive, and perhaps the least honourable, of all trades, is far from ranking among the best paid, as it should, if the above principle held good. That the disagreeableness of the occupation may in a measure tend to decrease the competition among the labourers, there cannot be the least doubt, but that it will consequently induce, as political economy would have us believe, a larger amount of wages to accrue to each of the labourers, is certainly another of the many assertions of that science which must be pronounced “not proven.” For the dustmen are paid, if anything, less, and certainly not more, than the usual rate of payment to the London labourers; and if the earnings rank high, as times go, it is because all the members of the family, from the very earliest age, are able to work at the business, and so add to the general gains.
The dustmen are, generally speaking, an hereditary race; when children they are reared in the dust-yard, and are habituated to the work gradually as they grow up, after which, almost as a natural consequence, they follow the business for the remainder of their lives. These may be said to be born-and-bred dustmen. The numbers of the regular men are, however, from time to time recruited from the ranks of the many ill-paid labourers with which London abounds. When hands are wanted for any special occasion an employer has only to go to any of the dock-gates, to find at all times hundreds of starving wretches anxiously watching for the chance of getting something to do, even at the rate of 4d. per hour. As the operation of emptying a dust-bin requires only the ability to handle a shovel, which every labouring man can manage, all workmen, however unskilled, can at once engage in the occupation; and it often happens that the men thus casually employed remain at the calling for the remainder of their lives. There are no houses of call whence the men are taken on when wanting work. There are certainly public-houses, which are denominated houses of call, in the neighbourhood of every dust-yard, but these are merely the drinking shops of the men, whither they resort of an evening after the labour of the day is accomplished, and whence they are furnished in the course of the afternoon with beer; but such houses cannot be said to constitute the dustman’s “labour-market,” as in the tailoring and other trades, they being never resorted to as hiring-places, but rather used by the men only when hired. If a master have not enough “hands” he usually inquires among his men, who mostly know some who—owing, perhaps, to the failure of their previous master in getting his usual contract—are only casually employed at other places. Such men are immediately engaged in preference to others; but if these cannot be found, the contractors at once have recourse to the system already stated.
The manner in which the dust is collected is very simple. The “filler” and the “carrier” perambulate the streets with a heavily-built high box cart, which is mostly coated with a thick crust of filth, and drawn by a clumsy-looking horse. These men used, before the passing of the late Street Act, to ring a dull-sounding bell so as to give notice to housekeepers of their approach, but now they merely cry, in a hoarse unmusical voice, “Dust oy-eh!” Two men accompany the cart, which is furnished with a short ladder and two shovels and baskets. These baskets one of the men fills from the dust-bin, and then helps them alternately, as fast as they are filled, upon the shoulder of the other man, who carries them one by one to the cart, which is placed immediately alongside the pavement in front of the house where they are at work. The carrier mounts up the side of the cart by means of the ladder, discharges into it the contents of the basket on his shoulder, and then returns below for the other basket which his mate has filled for him in the interim. This process is pursued till all is cleared away, and repeated at different houses till the cart is fully loaded; then the men make the best of their way to the dust-yard, where they shoot the contents of the cart on to the heap, and again proceed on their regular rounds.
The dustmen, in their appearance, very much resemble the waggoners of the coal-merchants. They generally wear knee-breeches, with ancle boots or gaiters, short dirty smockfrocks or coarse gray jackets, and fantail hats. In one particular, however, they are at first sight distinguishable from the coal-merchants’ men, for the latter are invariably black from coal dust, while the dustmen, on the contrary, are gray with ashes.
In their personal appearance the dustmen are mostly tall stalwart fellows; there is nothing sickly-looking about them, and yet a considerable part of their time is passed in the yards and in the midst of effluvia most offensive, and, if we believe “zymotic theorists,” as unhealthy to those unaccustomed to them; nevertheless, the children, who may be said to be reared in the yard and to have inhaled the stench of the dust-heap with their first breath, are healthy and strong. It is said, moreover, that during the plague in London the dustmen were the persons who carted away the dead, and it remains a tradition among the class to the present day, that not one of them died of the plague, even during its greatest ravages. In Paris, too, it is well known, that, during the cholera of 1849, the quarter of Belleville, where the night-soil and refuse of the city is deposited, escaped the freest from the pestilence; and in London the dustmen boast that, during both the recent visitations of the cholera, they were altogether exempt from the disease. “Look at that fellow, sir!” said one of the dust-contractors to me, pointing to his son, who was a stout red-cheeked young man of about twenty. “Do you see anything ailing about him? Well, he has been in the yard since he was born. There stands my house just at the gate, so you see he hadn’t far to travel, and when quite a child he used to play and root away here among the dust all his time. I don’t think he ever had a day’s illness in his life. The people about the yard are all used to the smell and don’t complain about it. It’s all stuff and nonsense, all this talk about dust-yards being unhealthy. I’ve never done anything else all my days and I don’t think I look very ill. I shouldn’t wonder now but what I’d be set down as being fresh from the sea-side by those very fellows that write all this trash about a matter that they don’t know just that about;” and he snapped his fingers contemptuously in the air, and, thrusting both hands into his breeches pockets, strutted about, apparently satisfied that he had the best of the argument. He was, in fact, a stout, jolly, red-faced man. Indeed, the dustmen, as a class, appear to be healthy, strong men, and extraordinary instances of longevity are common among them. I heard of one dustman who lived to be 115 years; another, named Wood, died at 100; and the well-known Richard Tyrrell died only a short time back at the advanced age of 97. The misfortune is, that we have no large series of facts on this subject, so that the longevity and health of the dustmen might be compared with those of other classes.