London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

“If a man be 25 years of age, he has no more than 2s. a week; he is not clothed, only fed and lodged in the same manner as the boys. The 2s. a week is not sufficient to find him clothes and other necessaries, certainly not; it is hardly enough to find him with shoe-leather, for they walk over a deal of ground in going about the streets. The journeyman is able to live upon those wages, for he gets halfpence given him: supposing he is 16 or 20 years of age, he gets the boys’ pence from them and keeps it; and if he happens to get a job for which he receives a 1s., he gets 6d. of that, and his master the other 6d. The boys’ pence are what the boys get after they have been doing their master’s work; they get a 1d. or so, and the journeyman takes it from them, and ‘licks’ them if they do not give it up.” [These “jobs,” after the master’s work had been done, were chance jobs, as when a journeyman on his round was called on by a stranger, and unexpectedly, to sweep a chimney. Sometimes, by arrangement of the journeyman and the lad, the proceeds never reached the master’s pocket. Sometimes, but rarely, such jobs were the journeyman’s rightful perquisite.] “Men,” proceeds Mr. Allen, “who are 22 and 23 years of age will play with the young boys and win their money. That is, they get half the money from them by force, and the rest by fraud. They are driven to this course from the low wages which the masters give them, because they have no other means to get anything for themselves, not even the few necessaries which they may want; for even what they want to wash with they must get themselves. As to what becomes of the money the boys get on May-day, when they are in want of clothes, the master will buy them, as check shirts or handkerchiefs. These masters get a share of the money which the boys collect on May-day. The boys have about 1s. or 1s. 6d.; the journeyman has also his share; then the master takes the remainder, which is to buy the boys’ clothes and other necessaries, as they say. I cannot exactly tell what the average amount is that a boy will get on the May-day; the most that my boy ever got was 5s. But I think that the boys get more than that; I should think they get as much as 9s. or 10s. apiece. The Christmas-boxes are generally, I believe, divided among themselves (among the boys); but I cannot say rightly. It is spent in buying silk handkerchiefs, or Sunday shoes, I believe; but I am not perfectly sure.”

Of the condition and lot of the operatives who were too big to go up chimneys, Mr. J. Fisher, a master-sweeper, gave the following account:—“They get into a roving way, and go about from one master to another, and they often come to no good end at last. They sometimes go into the country, and after staying there some time, they come back again; I took a boy of that sort very lately and kept him like my own, and let him go to school; he asked me one Sunday to let him go to school, and I was glad to let him go, and I gave him leave; he accordingly went, and I have seen nothing of him since; before he went he asked me if I would let him come home to see my child buried; I told him to ask his school-master, but he did not come back again. I cannot tell what has become of him; he was to have served me for twelve months. I did not take him from the parish; he came to me. He said his parents were dead. The effect of the roving habit of the large boys when they become too large to climb, is, that they get one with another and learn bad habits from one another; they never will stop long in any one place. They frequently go into the country and get various places; perhaps they stop a month at each; some try to get masters themselves, and some will get into bad company, which very often happens. Then they turn thieves, they get lazy, they won’t work, and people do not like to employ them lest they should take anything out of their houses. The generality of them never settle in any steady business. They generally turn loose characters, and people will not employ them lest they should take anything out of the house.”

The criminal annals of the kingdom bear out the foregoing account. Some of these boys, indeed, when they attained man’s estate, became, in a great measure, through their skill in climbing, expert and enterprising burglars, breaking into places where few men would have cared to venture. One of the most daring feats ever attempted and accomplished was the escape from Newgate by a sweeper about 15 years ago. He climbed by the aid of his knees and elbows a height of nearly 80 feet, though the walls, in the corner of the prison-yard, where this was done, were nearly of an even surface; the slightest slip could not have failed to have precipitated the sweeper to the bottom. He was then under sentence of death for highway robbery.

“His name was Whitehead, and he done a more wonderfuller thing nor that,” remarked an informant, who had been his master. “We was sweeping the bilers in a sugar-house, and he went from the biler up the flue of the chimney, it was nearly as high as the Monument, that chimney; I should say it was 30 or 40 feet higher nor the sugar-house. He got out at the top, and slid down the bare brickwork on the outside, on to the roof of the house, got through an attic window in the roof, and managed to get off without any one knowing what became of him. That was the most wonderfullest thing I ever knowed in my life. I don’t know how he escaped from being killed, but he was always an oudacious feller. It was nearly three months after afore we found him in the country. I don’t know where they sent him to after he was brought back to Newgate, but I hear they made him a turnkey in a prison somewhere, and that he’s doing very well now.” The feat at the sugar-house could be only to escape from his apprenticeship.

In the course of the whole Parliamentary evidence the sweepers, reared under the old climbing system, are spoken of as a “short-lived” race, but no statistics could be given. Some died old men in middle age, in the workhouses. Many were mere vagrants at the time of their death.

I took the statement of a man who had been what he called a “climbing” in his childhood, but as he is now a master-sweeper, and has indeed gone through all grades of the business, I shall give it in my account of the present condition of the sweepers.

Climbing is still occasionally resorted to, especially when repairs are required, “but the climbing boys,” I was told, “are now men.” These are slight dwarfish men, whose services are often in considerable request, and cannot at all times be commanded, as there are only about twenty of them in London, so effectually has climbing been suppressed. These little men, I was told, did pretty well, not unfrequently getting 2s. or 2s. 6d. for a single job.

As regards the labour question, during the existence of the climbing boys, we find in the Report the following results:—

The nominal wages to the journeymen were 2s. a week, with board and lodging. The apprentices received no wages, their masters being only required to feed, lodge, and clothe them.

The actual wages were the same as the nominal, with the addition of 1s. as perquisites in money. There were other perquisites in liquor or broken meat.