Some of the sharpest of these men, I am told, have been reared up as sweepers; but it appears, although it is a matter difficult to ascertain with precision, the majority have been brought up to some generally unskilled calling, as scavagers, costermongers, tinkers, bricklayers’ labourers, soldiers, &c. The knullers or queriers are almost all to be found among the lower class chimney-sweepers. There are, from the best information to be obtained, from 150 to 200 of them. Not only do they scheme for employment in the way I have described, but some of them call at the houses of both rich and poor, boldly stating that they had been sent by Mr. —— to sweep the flues. I was informed by several of the master sweepers, that many of the fires which happen in the metropolis are owing to persons employing these “knullers,” “for,” say the high masters, “they scamp the work, and leave a quantity of soot lodged in the chimney, which, in the event of a large fire being kept in the range or grate, ignites.” This opinion as to the fires in the chimneys being caused by the scamped work of the knullers must be taken with some allowance. Tradesmen, whose established business is thus, as they account it, usurped, are naturally angry with the usurpers.
There is another evil, so say the regular masters, resulting from the employment of the knullers—the losses accruing to persons employing them, as “they take anything they can lay their hands upon.”
This, also, is a charge easy to make, but not easy to refute, or even to sift. One master chimney-sweeper told me that when chimneys are swept in rich men’s houses there is almost always some servant in attendance to watch the sweepers. If the rich, I am told, be watchful under these circumstances, the poor are more vigilant.
The distribution of the knullers or queriers is as follows:—Southwark (17), Chelsea and St. Giles’ (11 each), Shoreditch and Whitechapel (10 each), Lambeth (9), Marylebone, Stepney and Walworth (8 each), St. George’s in the East and Woolwich (7 each), Islington and Hackney (6 each), East London, Rotherhithe, and Greenwich (5 each), Paddington, St. Pancras, East London, Rotherhithe and Greenwich (5 each), Paddington, St. Pancras, Bethnal Green, Bermondsey, and Clapham (4 each), Westminster, St. Martin’s, Holborn, St. Luke’s, West London, Poplar, and Camberwell (3 each); St. James’s (Westminster), Clerkenwell, City of London, and Wandsworth (2 each), Kensington (1); in all, 183.
Like the single-handed men the knullers abound in the suburbs. I endeavoured to find a knuller who had been a skilled labourer, and was referred to one who, I was told, had been a working plumber, and a “good hand at spouts.” I found him a doggedly ignorant man; he saw no good, he said, in books or newspapers, and “wouldn’t say nothing to me, as I’d told him it would be printed. He wasn’t a going to make a holy-show [so I understood him] of his-self.”
Another knuller (to whom I was referred by a master who occasionally employed him as a journeyman) gave me the following account. He was “doing just middling” when I saw him, he said, but his look was that of a man who had known privations, and the soot actually seemed to bring out his wrinkles more fully, although he told me he was only between 40 and 50 years old; he believed he was not 46.
“I was hard brought up, sir,” he said; “ay, them as’ll read your book—I mean them readers as is well to do—cannot fancy how hard. Mother was a widow; father was nobody knew where; and, poor woman, she was sometimes distracted that a daughter she had before her marriage, went all wrong. She was a washerwoman, and slaved herself to death. She died in the house [workhouse] in Birmingham. I can read and write a little. I was sent to a charity school, and when I was big enough I was put ’prentice to a gunsmith at Birmingham. I’m master of the business generally, but my perticler part is a gun lock-filer. No, sir, I can’t say as ever I liked it; nothing but file file all day. I used to wish I was like the free bits o’ boys that used to beg steel filings of me for their fifth of November fireworks. I never could bear confinement. It’s made me look older than I ought, I know, but what can a poor man do? No, I never cared much about drinking. I worked in an iron-foundry when I was out of my time. I had a relation that was foreman there. Perhaps it might be that, among all the dust and heat and smoke and stuff, that made me a sweep at last, for I was then almost or quite as black as a sweep.
“Then I come up to London; ay, that must be more nor 20 years back. O, I came up to better myself, but I couldn’t get work either at the gun-makers—and I fancy the London masters don’t like Birmingham hands—nor at the iron-foundries, and the iron-foundries is nothing in London to what they is in Staffordshire and Warwickshire; nothing at all, they may say what they like. Well, sir, I soon got very bad off. My togs was hardly to call togs. One night—and it was a coldish night, too—I slept in the park, and was all stiff and shivery next morning. As I was wandering about near the park, I walked up a street near the Abbey—King-street, I think it is—and there was a picture outside a public-house, and a writing of men wanted for the East India Company’s Service. I went there again in the evening, and there was soldiers smoking and drinking up and down, and I ’listed at once. I was to have my full bounty when I got to the depôt—Southampton I think they called it. Somehow I began to rue what I’d done. Well, I hardly can tell you why. O, no; I don’t say I was badly used; not at all. But I had heard of snakes and things in the parts I was going to, and I gently hooked it. I was a navvy on different rails after that, but I never was strong enough for that there work, and at last I couldn’t get any more work to do. I came back to London; well, sir, I can’t say, as you ask, why I came to London ’stead of Birmingham. I seemed to go natural like. I could get nothing to do, and Lord! what I suffered! I once fell down in the Cut from hunger, and I was lifted into Watchorn’s, and he said to his men, ‘Give the poor fellow a little drop of brandy, and after that a biscuit; the best things he can have.’ He saved my life, sir. The people at the bar—they see’d it was no humbug—gathered 7½d. for me. A penny a-piece from some of Maudslay’s men, and a halfpenny from a gent that hadn’t no other change, and a poor woman as I was going away slipt a couple of trotters into my hand.
“I slept at a lodging-house, then, in Baldwin’s-gardens when I had money, and one day in Gray’s inn-lane I picked up an old gent that fell in the middle of the street, and might have been run over. After he’d felt in all his pockets, and found he was all right, he gave me 5s. I knew a sweep, for I sometimes slept in the same house, in King-street, Drury-lane; and he was sick, and was going to the big house. And he told me all about his machines, that’s six or seven years back, and said if I’d pay 2s. 6d. down, and 2s. 6d. a week, if I couldn’t pay more, I might have his machine for 20s. I took it at 17s. 6d., and paid him every farthing. That just kept him out of the house, but he died soon after.