Days and Nights in London; Or, Studies in Black and Gray

by J. Ewing Ritchie

And if the lovely Thais sits beside me, provided she does not lay a stress upon my head and purse (I am a married man, and the father of a family, and always hope to behave as such), I don’t object. He is not a wise man who quarrels with his bread and butter; he is a fool who expects to find no thorns amongst his roses. What I have gone through, dear madam—for it is to the ladies I appeal—what I have gone through, dear madam, is really astounding, at any rate to myself. How I have survived at all is “one of those things no fellah can understand.” Repeatedly ruin has stared me in the face. Repeatedly have my young affections run to waste. Repeatedly have I been crossed in love, and tramped up and down Cheapside and Fleet Street, a blighted being. At this very moment, if I may trust to my medical knowledge, I am now suffering from three distinct diseases, any one of which is mortal; and yet if you were to meet me in the street, or have a chat with me in a quiet café over a cigar, or sit next me at a City dinner, you would swear that I was one of those old fogies whom nothing troubles, without nerves or feelings, who vegetated rather than lived in the little tragi-comedy we call life. It may be that little personal details are uninteresting. I admit they are not matters of transcendent importance. You do not need master them if you are going up for your degree, or going in for a Civil Service examination. I mention these merely to show that I can put up with a good deal—that I am not easily put out of the way; and that I should be one of the last persons in the world to call anything a nuisance, unless it were really such. Under these circumstances, I may claim a right to be heard; and, when I state that I have no private aim, that, laying my hand upon my heart, my only motive is the public good, I believe that I shall not lift up my voice in vain.

Well, to waste no more words about it, of the nuisances of London it may be said their name is legion. In the first place, there are the streets. If you get out at Farringdon Street Station, and walk towards the Holborn Viaduct, it is of little use your having had your boots cleaned that morning—a little shower of rain, and the pavement is covered with mud. This ought not to be. Let us take another nuisance. All at once, as you walk along, you see a chimney vomiting forth clouds of smoke. This is a great nuisance, especially on a fine summer day, when the atmosphere of the City may be said to be almost clear; and this nuisance is the more unbearable as there is a law to put it down, which law is actually to a certain extent carried out. Let anyone take his stand on some spot where he can get a good view around him, and he will be sure to see some chimney, in spite of the law, darkening the sky and poisoning the air. Then there is the orange-peel, which has shortened many a valuable life, and quenched the light of many a home. Then there is the crowded traffic of the streets, which renders all locomotion impossible, and keeps you sitting, angry and fuming, in a cab, when it may be you are hurrying off to save a bill from being dishonoured, to keep an appointment with a rich aunt or uncle from whom you have great expectations, to have a last fond look at someone whom you dearly love. As to the disputed points as to the pavements, I have nothing to offer. To those who have to live and sleep in the City, asphalte, I should say, must be the greatest boon devised by the art of man. With asphalte you may talk pleasantly to a friend in Cheapside, you may get a reasonable night’s sleep in St. Paul’s Churchyard, or you may crack a joke without bursting a blood-vessel opposite the Mansion House itself. Be that as it may, as the question as to the comparative merits of asphalte, or granite, or wood will be settled by wiser heads than mine, I say no more; but what I complain of, and what is a nuisance to everyone, is the perpetual tinkering and repairing always going on in the streets, and the consequent blockade for a time of certain important thoroughfares. What with the drainage, and the water, and the gas pipes, and the telegraph wires, there is in most of the City ways as much bustle almost under the street as on it, and an ominous board with a notice from the Lord Mayor turns aside a tremendous traffic, and is a terrible nuisance as long as it lasts. Surely this waste of time and annoyance is, a great deal of it, unnecessary. All that is wanted is a little more contrivance and forethought. I was once discussing the subject with a leading City man and an M.P., as we were travelling together in a railway carriage on our way to a pleasant gathering of City people many miles away beyond the sound of Bow Bells. “Well,” said he, with a suggestive wink, “the thing is easily explained; the rule is, for the surveyor’s son to marry the contractor’s daughter, or something of that sort, and so between them they manage to play into each other’s hands, and always have done so.” Of course the M.P. was joking. No one could conceive it possible that our civic guardians, our common councilmen, our aldermen, our City officers, would allow themselves to be imposed on, and the public to be robbed in this way; but, alas! it is a pity that there should be ground for such a joke, that it should seem in any way to be founded on a fact. We are not so bad as we were, I admit, but that is no reason why we should not be better. Even now there are parts of London to which Gay’s lines are applicable when he writes:

Though expedition bids, yet never stray
Where no ranged post defends the rugged way;
Here laden carts with thundering waggons meet,
Wheels clash with wheels, and bar the narrow street,
The lashing whip resounds, the horses strain,
And blood in anguish bursts the swelling vein.

Something like this may be met with any day when the stones are greasy on Fish Street Hill, as the waggons turn up from Thames Street laden with the heavy merchandise of that quarter of the town. As I have quoted Gay, let me give another quotation from him. In one of his fables he writes:

How many saucy airs we meet
From Temple Bar to Aldgate Street.
Proud rogues who shared the South Sea prey,
And spring like mushrooms in a day,
They think it mean to condescend
To know a brother or a friend.
They blush to hear their mother’s name,
And by their pride expose their shame.

There are just such men as Gay wrote of to be met in our streets, and they are a nuisance, but the law of libel, in the interest of rogues who live by getting up bubble companies, is hard on the press, and I prefer to quote Gay to making original remarks of my own, remarks which may be true, which may be useful, but for which the proprietor of any paper that would publish them would have to pay heavily, at any rate in the way of costs.

Later in the day, one of the nuisances in the streets is “Those horrid boys.” They have come home from work, or school; they have had their tea, it is too early for them to go to bed, their fathers and mothers don’t know what to do with them at home, and so they loiter about the streets, and carry on their little games in them, much to their own satisfaction, but very much to the annoyance of everyone else. One of their favourite amusements is to run in groups, like so many wild Indians or a pack of wolves, howling and shrieking in a way very alarming. It is no use talking to them. It is no use putting the police on after them. The belated citizen, on his way home to the inevitable suburb, is frightened into fits ere he reaches his much-hoped-for haven of rest. And the small shopkeepers in the quiet streets—which they more especially affect—in terror rush to the door, believing either that there is a fire, or that Bedlam has broken loose, or that the Fenians have come. In some parts, as in Whitechapel, the wild girls of the streets are even worse.

There are many local nuisances in London; one of the chief of these is the conduct of the watermen about the landing-places near the Custom House. Females and foreigners, who have to take boats to the large steamers lying in the river, are frightfully plundered in this way. These men feel that they can rob you with impunity, and they abuse their privileges.

“Ah,” said one, after he had squeezed a five-shilling piece out of a poor foreigner for rowing him a few yards, “I’ll put up with it this time, but don’t do it again,” as if he, the boatman, and not the poor foreigner, had been the victim of a most atrocious fraud. Such fellows as these should be kept honest somehow. Who does not recollect that chapter in “Vilette,” in which Charlotte Brontë has recorded her waterside experiences? How she was landed by the coachman in the midst of a throng of watermen, who gathered around her like wolves; how she stepped at once into a boat, desiring to be taken to the Vivid; how she was fleeced by the waterman, as she paid an exorbitant sum, as the steward, a young man, was looking over the ship’s side, grinning a smile in anticipation of the row there would have been had she refused to pay. I had an experience somewhat similar myself. Perhaps I got off easily. In those dark wharves on that black river, here and there lit by a distant and dimly-burning lamp—at that midnight hour, when all good people are in bed, it is well that there is nothing going on worse than robbery in such a mild form. Had I been dropped overboard, I am sure few people would have known it; and I am not certain that I have no reason to be grateful to the lot amongst whom I found myself that they attempted nothing of the kind. Late at night there are many dark and lonely spots in the City suggestive of dark deeds. In some one walks with fear and trembling. Suspicious people have a knack of turning up in such dark places; and the police can’t be everywhere.

Then there is the water supply. It is all very well to have a spirited foreign policy abroad, but we do want a little common sense at home; and the sanitary state of the nation is of the first importance. You cannot blame a man that he refuses to drink bad water, and takes beer instead; and if anything be clearer than another, it is that the water supplied to the working man is bad; for whilst the rich man can have his cisterns regularly cleaned out, and his water filtered, the working man, as a rule, uses the water as he can get it, and suffers in consequence, both in person and in pocket. Under the influence of this state of things, it is not surprising to find mothers refusing to allow their children to drink water on the plea that it is bad for their health. Nor are these mothers to be blamed. It is a fact that in England and Wales alone upwards of eight hundred persons die every month from typhoid fever; a disease which is now believed to be caused almost entirely through drinking impure water. It is a fact that in London we have little pure water to drink, the companies are put to a great expense to filter their water, and yet every week we read such reports as the following from Dr. Frankland, the official to whom is entrusted the analysing of such matters: “The Thames water, delivered by the West Middlesex, Southwark, and Grand Junction Companies, was so much polluted by organic matter as to be quite unfit for dietetic purposes.” The other day I had to pay my water rates; imagine my disgust at having to do so when the Government inspector in the daily papers informed me that the water supplied by the company was totally unfit for dietetic purposes! The evil is no new one. It has been ventilated in every way; and yet in London, the wealthiest city in the world, we cannot get a cup of pure water. People can have it in Manchester and Glasgow and New York; but in London—which claims to be the capital of commerce, the seat of Legislation, the model city—we have poison in the cup—as science tells us that we cannot take with impunity the living organisms and fungoid growths with which London water more or less abounds. Lately the working men met at Exeter Hall to say that it was time to put a stop to this disgraceful state of things. As Cardinal Manning said, if they wanted to give a subject the slip, the proper way was to get a committee of inquiry, and if they wanted to bury it altogether the right thing to do was to have a Royal Commission. Action is what is wanted. There are ten Parliamentary boroughs, and it was proposed to hold public meetings in each of them, to form a central committee, and thus to create a public pressure to which Parliament would have to give way. As it is, as Sir Charles Dilke pointed out, we have eight water companies in London who have increased the cost of water all round without improving the quality. What is to be asked is, that a body of men be formed in London to have the care of the water supply; and, as Mr. J. Holms, M.P., pointed out, the sooner this is done the better, as every year the companies’ properties increase in value, and there will have to be paid to them additional compensation. The importance of the subject was, perhaps, most pointedly brought out by Dr. Lyon Playfair, who argued that, as in each average individual there were 98 lb. of water to 40 lb. of flesh and bone, he calculated that there were before him at that time as many as 25,000 gallons of water; and if that water was impure it must vitiate the blood and lower the health of all. We must have, he said, a good supply of water, pure at the source. We must have good receptacles for storing it, and we must have a constant system of supply.