“It’s seldom as I has a shop to sweep out, and I don’t do nothink with shutters. I’m getting too old now for to be called in to carry boxes up gentlemen’s houses, but when I was young I found plenty to do that way. There’s a man at the corner of Chandos-street, and he does the most of that kind of work.”
The Bearded Crossing-Sweeper at the Exchange.
Since the destruction by fire of the Royal Exchange in 1838, there has been added to the curiosities of Cornhill a thickset, sturdy, and hirsute crossing-sweeper—a man who is as civil by habit as he is independent by nature. He has a long flowing beard, grey as wood smoke, and a pair of fierce moustaches, giving a patriarchal air of importance to a marked and observant face, which often serves as a painter’s model. After half-an-hour’s conversation, you are forced to admit that his looks do not all belie him, and that the old mariner (for such was his profession formerly) is worthy in some measure of his beard.
He wears an old felt hat—very battered and discoloured; around his neck, which is bared in accordance with sailor custom, he has a thick blue cotton neckerchief tied in a sailor’s knot; his long iron-grey beard is accompanied by a healthy and almost ruddy face. He stands against the post all day, saying nothing, and taking what he can get without solicitation.
THE BEARDED CROSSING-SWEEPER AT THE EXCHANGE.
[From a Photograph.]
When I first spoke to him, he wanted to know to what purpose I intended applying the information that he was prepared to afford, and it was not until I agreed to walk with him as far as St. Mary-Axe that I was enabled to obtain his statement, as follows:—
“I’ve had this crossing ever since ’38. The Exchange was burnt down in that year. Why, sir, I was wandering about trying to get a crust, and it was very sloppy, so I took and got a broom; and while I kept a clean crossing, I used to get ha’pence and pence. I got a dockman’s wages—that’s half-a-crown a-day; sometimes only a shilling, and sometimes more. I have taken a crown—but that’s very rare. The best customers I had is dead. I used to make a good Christmas, but I don’t now. I have taken a pound or thirty shillings then in the old times.