London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

The question has been raised as to the propriety of devoting some special locality to the purposes of dust-yards, and it is certainly a question deserving public attention.

The chief disposal of the street manure is from barges, sent by the Thames or along the canals, and sold to farmers and gardeners. In the larger wharfs, and in those considered removed from the imputation of “scurfdom,” six men, and often but four, are employed to load a barge which contains from 30 to 40 tons. In such cases the dust-yard and the wharf are one and the same place. The contents of these barges are mixed, about one-fourth being “mac,” the rest street-mud and dung. This admixture, on board the vessel, is called by the bargemen and the contractors’ servants at the wharfs Leicester (properly Læsta, a load). We have the same term at the end of our word bal-last.

I am assured by a wharfinger, who has every means of forming a correct judgment, it may be estimated that there are dispatched from the contractors’ wharfs twelve barges daily, freighted with street-manure. This is independent of the house-dust barged to the country brick-fields. The weight of the cargo of a barge of manure is about 40 tons; 36 tons being a low average. This gives 3744 barge-loads, or 132,784 tons, or loads, yearly; for it must be recollected that the dirt gathered by pauper labour is dispatched from the contractors’ yards or wharfs, as well as that collected by the immediate servants of the contractors. The price per barge-load at the canal, basin, or wharf, in the country parts where agriculture flourishes, is from 5l. to 6l., making a total of 20,594l. The difference of that sum, and the total given in the table (21,147l.) may be accounted for on the supposition that the remainder is sold in the yards and carted away thence. The slop and valueless dirt is not included in this calculation.

Of the Working Scavengers under the Contractors.

I have now to deal with what throughout the whole course of my inquiry into the state of London Labour and the London Poor I have considered the great object of investigation—the condition and characteristics of the working men; and what is more immediately the “labour question,” the relation of the labourer to his employer, as to rates of payment, modes of payment, hiring of labourers, constancy or inconstancy of work, supply of hands, the many points concerning wages, perquisites, family work, and parochial or club relief.

First, I shall give an account of the class employment, together with the labour season and earnings of the labourers, or “economical” part of the subject. I shall then pass to the social points, concerning their homes, general expenditure, &c., and then to the more moral and intellectual questions of education, literature, politics, religion, marriage, and concubinage of the men and of their families. All this will refer, it should be remembered, only to the working scavagers in the honourable or better-paid trade; the cheaper labourers I shall treat separately as a distinct class; the details in both cases I shall illustrate with the statement of men of the class described.

The first part of this multifarious subject appertains to the division of labour. This in the scavaging trade consists rather of that kind of “gang-work” which Mr. Wakefield styles “simple co-operation,” or the working together of a number of people at the same thing, as opposed to “complex co-operation,” or the working together of a number at different branches of the same thing. Simple co-operation is of course the ruder kind; but even this, rude as it appears, is far from being barbaric. “The savages of New Holland,” we are told, “never help each other even in the most simple operations; and their condition is hardly superior—in some respects it is inferior—to that of the wild animals which they now and then catch.”

As an instance of the advantages of “simple co-operation,” Mr. Wakefield tells us that “in a vast number of simple operations performed by human exertion, it is quite obvious that two men working together will do more than four, or four times four men, each of whom should work alone. In the lifting of heavy weights, for example, in the felling of trees, in the gathering of much hay and corn during a short period of fine weather, in draining a large extent of land during the short season when such a work may be properly conducted, in the pulling of ropes on board ship, in the rowing of large boats, in some mining operations, in the erection of a scaffolding for a building, and in the breaking of stones for the repair of a road, so that the whole road shall always be kept in good repair—in all these simple operations, and thousands more, it is absolutely necessary that many persons should work together at the same time, in the same place, and in the same way.”

To the above instances of simple co-operation, or gang-working, as it may be briefly styled in Saxon English, Mr. Wakefield might have added dock labour and scavaging.

The principle of complex co-operation, however, is not entirely unknown in the public cleansing trade. This business consists of as many branches as there are distinct kinds of refuse, and these appear to be four. There are (1) the wet and (2) the dry house-refuse (or dust and night-soil), and (3) the wet and (4) the dry street-refuse (or mud and rubbish); and in these four different branches of the one general trade the principle of complex co-operation is found commonly, though not invariably, to prevail.