Round the Galley Fire

by William Clark Russell

Not very far from the London Docks, and within a stone’s throw of that refined and odoriferous thoroughfare known as Leman Street, Whitechapel, there is situated a large, fine building, with entrances commanding two streets, and a summit that towers very nobly among the adjacent roofs. Once upon a time the Royal Brunswick Theatre stood where that house now stands, and vestiges of the old structure still linger in the form of some pillars or columns at the main entrance, and various underground avenues, in whose atmosphere, despite forty years of very strong marine flavouring, there seems to lurk to this hour a kind of ghostly smell of ancient orange-peel. The house is known far and wide as the Well Street Home for Sailors, and I once accepted an invitation from the manager to overhaul the premises, and judge for myself to what extent the Home improves upon the comforts and privileges the sailor flatters himself he may obtain at a common seamen’s boarding or lodging house. I must own that I approached the place with a certain amount of foregone prejudice. Establishments known as Harbours of Refuge, Seaman’s Sheet Anchor, Ports of Call, and the like, all mariners who will not sham piety for the sake of a coat, or a plug of tobacco, or a meal of bread and meat will keep to windward of. Jack objects to this kind of classification. He dislikes to be dealt with as something apart from the ordinary run of mortals; to be preached to in language which the minister may fondly imagine to be the dialect of the sea; to have tracts doled out to him in the form of marine allegories, as if he could comprehend no other allusions to life and death, and sin and virtue, than those which referred to heaving billows and storm-driven barks and broken tackle; and when ashore, to make one of a flock of seamen, to meet nobody but seamen, to go to prayers in a church filled with seamen;—to be treated, indeed, as if he ought to carry a badge or number on his back, as if his whole class were socially tabooed. So, thinking this Well Street Home to have something of the old unpleasant and ill-judging form of charity mixed up in its composition, and considerably disturbed in mind by the first four lines of its forty-seventh annual report, I entered the Dock Street entrance, never doubting but that I should meet with plenty of features to account for the sailor’s preference for the grimy, frowsy, and squalid lodging-houses, of which there were some dozens in the neighbourhood.

I found myself in a very large hall filled with seamen. There was perhaps hardly a nationality that was not represented. Englishmen and Scandinavians were plentiful; but in numerous places were black and yellow skins, the sight of which carried the mind thousands of miles east and south, and brought up visions of skies different indeed from the brown heavens which were careering in gloomy folds over the chimney-pots visible through the windows. In a few moments I was joined by the manager, and we proceeded to inspect the premises. In a manner it was like surveying St. Paul’s Cathedral. Big as the building looked outside, it seemed four times as large again when I began to roam about it. Room led into room, wing conducted into wing, until methought Whitechapel itself might seem to lack area enough for the accommodation of this most ramified and capacious interior. Behind a glass front stood a porter wading through several huge piles of letters in search of those expected by some dozen men, who eagerly waited while he looked.

“The correspondence here must be enormous,” said I, “judging by those samples.”

“It is enormous,” answered the manager. “Thousands upon thousands of letters and telegrams are received and distributed in the course of the year.”

We entered a large room with a circular counter in it, behind which were several clerks hard at work over their ledgers, while a number of seamen were drawing or paying in money.

“This is the bank,” said the manager; “here we receive such moneys as the men choose to deposit, and credit them with the wages which they have to receive from the ships they have been discharged from. Here, too, we cash their allotment notes, and what we do in that way you may guess by looking at that long box there, that is full of allotment notes which are maturing at various dates.”

“But,” said I, “I thought the allotment note was only made payable to a relative or to a savings-bank. This is not a savings-bank?”

“Oh,” he exclaimed drily, “there are two kinds of allotment notes. One is, as you say, payable only to a relative or a savings-bank; the other is an illegal document, sanctioned by the Board of Trade, February, 1868—here it is in the corner: you see their imprimatur?” said he, handing me one of the notes.

“What is the meaning of this,” said I, “at the bottom of the note?—‘Caution.—The Merchant Shipping Act does not provide summary remedy in the case of this note.’”

“Only a confession that a blunder was made,” he answered, “when the Act was passed. The advance note was said to encourage crimping; accordingly the allotment note was substituted. The seaman protested, as he found the note practically useless. Instead of rescinding or modifying the Act, an illegal concession was made by the issue of notes payable to anybody, like the old advance note. The issue is sanctioned by the Board of Trade, who compromise with their official conscience by giving the holder of the note to understand that he cannot recover upon the note by summary remedy. The old advance note was made payable three days after the man had sailed in the ship; in the present note the shipowner protects himself by making the note payable fifteen days, or in some instances thirty days, after the man has sailed. This may not increase the risk, but the delay in payment causes the holder to charge a heavier rate of interest for cashing the note, so that practically the Act leaves the sailor as much at the mercy of the boarding-house keeper as he was in the days of the advance note. We have hitherto charged nothing for cashing these notes; but we shall have to do so in self-protection, for we are perpetually losing money by them, and the law, which sanctions their issue, yet deprives the holder of all means of recovering on them.”