parade in gangs of four and five, or with squalid wives and a few children. They wear paper-caps and white aprons with “bibs” to them, or a sort of cross-barred pinafore, called in the manufacturing districts a “chequer-brat.” Sometimes they make a “pitch,” that is, stand face to face, turning their backs upon a heartless world, and sing. The well-known ditty of
“We are all the way from Manches-ter
And we’ve got no work to do!”
set to the tune of, “Oh let us be joyful,” was first introduced by this class of beggars. Or they will carry tapes, stay-laces, and papers of buttons, and throw imploring looks from side to side, and beg by implication. Or they will cock their chins up in the air, so as to display the unpleasantly prominent apples in their bony throats, and drone a psalm. When they go out “on the blob,” they make a long oration, not in the Lancashire or Yorkshire dialects, but in a cockney voice, of a strong Whitechapel flavour. The substance of the speech varies but slightly from the “patter” of the hand-loom weaver; indeed, the Nottingham “driz” or lace-man, the hand on strike, the distressed weaver, and the “operative” beggar, generally bear so strong a resemblance to each other, that they not only look like but sometimes positively are one and the same person.
Unemployed Agriculturists and Frozen-out Gardeners
are seen during a frost in gangs of from six to twenty. Two gangs generally “work” together, that is, while one gang begs at one end of a street, a second gang begs at the other. Their mode of procedure their “programme,” is very simple. Upon the spades which they carry is chalked “frozen-out!” or “starving!” and they enhance the effect of this “slum or fakement,” by shouting out sturdily “frozen out,” “We’re all frozen-out!” The gardeners differ from the agriculturists or “navvies” in their costume. They affect aprons and old straw hats, their manner is less demonstrative, and their tones less rusty and unmelodious. The “navvies” roar; the gardeners squeak. The navvies’ petition is made loud and lustily, as by men used to work in clay and rock; the gardeners’ voice is meek and mild, as of a gentle nature trained to tend on fruits and flowers. The young bulky, sinewy beggar plays navvy; the shrivelled, gravelly, pottering, elderly cadger performs gardener.
There can be no doubt that in times of hardship many honest labourers are forced into the streets to beg. A poor hard-working man, whose children cry to him for food, can feel no scruple in soliciting charity,—against such the writer of these pages would urge nothing; all credit to the motive that compels them unwillingly to ask alms; all honour to the feeling that prompts the listener to give. It is not the purpose of the author of this work to write down every mendicant an impostor, or every almsgiver a fool; on the contrary, he knows how much real distress, and how much real benevolence exist, and he would but step between the open hand of true charity, and the itching palm of the professional beggar, who stands between the misery that asks and the philanthropy that would relieve.
The winter of 1860-61 was a fine harvest for the “frozen out” impostors, some few of whom, happily, reaped the reward of their deserts in the police-courts. Three strong hearty men were brought up at one office; they said that they were starving, and they came from Horselydown; when searched six shillings and elevenpence were found upon them; they reiterated that they were starving and were out of work, on which the sitting magistrate kindly provided them with both food and employment, by sentencing them to seven days’ hard labour.
The “profits” of the frozen-out gardener and agriculturist are very large, and generally quadruples the sum earned by honest labour. In the February of 1861, four of these “distressed navvies” went into a public-house to divide the “swag” they had procured by one day’s shouting. Each had a handkerchief filled with bread and meat and cheese. They called for pots of porter and drank heartily, and when the reckoning was paid and the spoils equally divided, the share of each man was seven shillings.
The credulity of the public upon one point has often surprised me. A man comes out into the streets to say that he is starving, a few halfpence are thrown to him. If really hungry he would make for the nearest baker’s shop; but no, he picks up the coppers, pockets them, and proclaims again that he is starving, though he has the means of obtaining food in his fingers. Not that this obvious anachronism stops the current of benevolence or the chink of coin upon the stones—the fainting, famished fellow walks leisurely up the street, and still bellows out in notes of thunder, “I am starving!” If one of my readers will try when faint and exhausted to produce the same tone in the open air, he will realize the impossibility of shouting and starving simultaneously.