The East-End boy, again, is quite a character; we had four hundred at Oxford House in one club, besides some hundreds of others in brigades. When you told an East-End mother that fact, she would generally say, "My word, I find one quite enough!" And certainly, on a Whit Monday, when one had at least a hundred and fifty to convoy to London Bridge and get safely down to some friend's house and back again, they were a fine handful.
(Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd.)
THE PEOPLE'S PALACE.
One day I noticed the express stopping pretty often, and wondered why, as it was not advertised to stop anywhere. At last the guard came to see me at a wayside station, with a very red face, and said he would hold me responsible for what my boys were doing; he said that they had pulled the danger connecting-rod three times. I went round to see what was happening, and asked whether any of them had done it. "Oh, yes," said a little chap at once; "it was me; I was only 'anging my 'at up on it!"
Few things abash the East-End boy. At the end of the journey, my friend, who lived near a very magnificent house, was showing us through the rooms, and I heard a little boy say confidentially to his neighbour, without meaning to be overheard, "'Em! just like our little back parlour at home!" The good result of all the trouble which such expeditions involved, was shown by the contempt they displayed—as they marched back crowned with flowers, with horses curveting round them, and cabs charging through them, in consequence of the inspiriting notes of the band—for the groups of drunken men and women we used to meet, who had spent their Bank Holiday in quite another way. Once implant in a boy the love of a "better way" of spending a holiday, and you have got a long way on the road to make him love "a better way" of spending his life altogether. Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do, but if those hands are employed in handling a musket, or playing a flute, or clinging on to a horizontal bar—they have ceased to be idle at all.
But space will soon fail me if I go through all the component parts of the population in detail. The young girls, with their limbs aching for active recreation after long confinement in factories or workshops, have been graphically depicted by Sir Walter Besant, and few people are doing more good in the district than those ladies who, at great trouble, often with real self-sacrifice, are running girls' clubs every evening for the girls after their work.
As, of course, is well known, it was one great object of the People's Palace to provide this sort of innocent recreation for the people, and though it has thrown its strength lately rather into its excellent technical classes, it has not left out of sight its original mission.
The gymnastic instructor at the People's Palace told me a year or two ago that he had no better and more spirited class than a large factory girls' class; and I have seen the magnificent Queen's Hall filled to overflowing for a nigger entertainment on a Saturday night, and more than half-full for a sacred concert on Sunday afternoon.
When one is asked, then, what is the matter with East London, and what lies behind those great thoroughfares, which look so broad and inviting on a fine summer's afternoon, one can only reply by taking one's questioner away from the broad thoroughfares into the crowded streets and alleys which lie behind them and between. Here is a photograph of a crowded back street, which gives an idea of what is going on, say, of a Sunday morning during the Bird Fair in Slater Street, or the Dog Fair at the top of Bethnal Green Road, or the old clothes sale down by Petticoat Lane. We are too thick on the ground, that is what it is; the census does not rise, because it can't rise: we are crammed so full that we can take no more.