East London

by Walter Besant

Setting aside these, what becomes of all the rest?

They have the music-hall; there are half a dozen music-halls in which the gallery is cheap; they go to one of these places two or three times a week in winter; they have the public house, but these lads are not, as a rule, slaves to drink so early in life; their own lodgings are not inviting either for comfort or for rest or for society. They have, however, the street.

It is the street which provides the casual hand; it is also the street which produces the drunkard, the loafer, the man who cannot work, the man who will not work, the street rough, the street sneak, and the street thief. The long evening spent in the street nourishes and encourages these and such as these of both sexes.

It is of course the old story—the abuse of liberty. We shorten the hours of work, and we offer nothing in the place of work, except the street; we leave the lads, whom we thought to benefit, to their own devices, and to discover, if they can, the way to turn the hours thus rescued from drudgery into a means of climbing to a higher life. We leave them, even, in complete ignorance as to any higher life at all. Their own idea of employing their idle time is to do nothing, to amuse themselves, and, as the street is the only place where they can find amusement for nothing, they go into the street.

They begin by walking about in little companies of two and three; by way of asserting their early manhood the boys smoke cheap cigarettes, called, I believe, “fags”; also, by way of asserting their own importance—no one knows the conceit and vanity of lads of fifteen and sixteen, the age between the boy and the man—they occupy a great deal of the pavement, they hustle each other, regardless of other people; they get up impromptu fights and sham fights; they wrestle; they make rushes among the crowd; they push about the girls of their own age, who are by no means backward in appreciating and returning these delicate attentions; they whistle and sing, and practise the calls of the day and the locality. A very favorite amusement, in which they are joined and assisted by the girls, is to get up a little acting in dumb show; some of them are excellent mimics. I have, for instance, read more than once in the columns of temperance organs or the letters of philanthropists, tearful or indignant, most melancholy accounts of precocious drunkenness among the boys and girls of East London—that poor East London! “I have seen,” writes the visitor to Ratcliffe and Shadwell, “with my own eyes, boys and girls, quite young boys and girls, reeling about drunk,—actually drunk, hopelessly drunk,—the girls, poor creatures, worse than the boys. I spoke to one. She was no more than thirteen or so—a pretty child, but helplessly intoxicated. When I spoke to her she tried to reply, but became inarticulate; she gasped, she laughed—the awful laugh of a drunkard! She made a gesture of helplessness, she fell sideways on the pavement, and would not rise. Her companions, as far gone as herself, only laughed. A sad sight, truly, in a civilized country!”

A very sad sight, indeed! This observer, however, did not understand that the personation of drunken people is one of the favorite amusements of the boys and girls in the evening streets. They have every day opportunities of studying their subject. A life school exists in every street, and is thrown open every night, and the fidelity with which every stage of drunkenness is represented by these young actors would be remarkable even on the boards of Drury Lane. Had the indignant writer of that letter known so simple a fact his pity and his wrath would have been reserved for a more worthy object.

The “Hooligans.”

Acting and running and shouting are amusing as far as they go, but they are not enough. The blood is very restless at seventeen; it wants exercise in reality. This restlessness is the cause of the certain street companies of which the London papers have recently spoken with indignation. They are organized originally for local fights. The boys of Cable Street constitute themselves, without asking the permission of the War Office, into a small regiment; they arm themselves with clubs, with iron bars, with leather belts to which buckles belong, with knotted handkerchiefs containing stones—a lethal weapon—with sling and stones, with knives even, with revolvers of the “toy” kind, and they go forth to fight the lads of Brook Street. It is a real fight; the field is presently strewn with the wounded; the police have trouble in putting a stop to the combat; with broken heads, black eyes, and bandaged arms, the leaders appear next day before the magistrate.

The local regiment cannot always be meeting its army on the field of glory; the next step, therefore, to hustling the people in the street is natural. The boys gather together and hold the street; if any one ventures to pass through it they rush upon him, knock him down, and kick him savagely about the head; they rob him as well. In the autumn of last year (1899) an inoffensive elderly gentleman was knocked down by such a gang, robbed, kicked about the head, and taken up insensible; he was carried home, and died the next day. These gangs are the modern Mohocks; South London is more frequently favored with their achievements than the quarter with which we are here concerned; they are difficult to deal with because they meet, fight, and disperse with such rapidity that it is next to impossible to get hold of them. It is an ugly feature of the time; it is mainly due to the causes I have pointed out, and it will probably disappear before long. Meantime, the boys regard the holding of the street with pride; their captain is a hero, as much as the captain of the Eleven at a public school.