Stepney Folk |
The Docks Extracted from Victorian London - Twice Round the Clock, or The Hours of the Day and Night in London, by George Augustus Sala, 1859 "But the docks of London - by which, let me be perfectly understood, (I do not, by any means, intend to confine myself to the London Docks) I speak of Dock London in its entirety of the London and St. Katherine's, of the East and West India, and the Victoria Docks - what huge reservoirs are they of wealth, and energy, and industry! See those bonding
warehouses, apoplectic with the produce of three worlds,
congested with bales of tobacco and barrels of spices;
with serons of cochineal, and dusky, vapid- The great hide warehouses, where are packed the skins of South American cattle, of which the horns, being left on the hides, distil anything but pleasant odours, and which lie, prone to each other, thirsting for the tan-pit. See the sugar warehouses, dripping, perspiring, crystallising with sugar in casks, and bags, and boxes. How many million cups of tea will be sweetened with these cases when the sugar is refined! how many tomesful of gossiping scandal will be talked to the relish of those saccharine dainties ! what stores of barley-sugar temples and Chantilly baskets for the rich, of brandyballs and hardbake for the poor, will come from those coarse canvas bags, those stained and sticky casks! And the huge tea warehouses, where the other element of scandal, the flowery Pekoe or the family Souchong, slumbers in tinfoiled chests. And the coffee warehouses, redolent of bags of Mocha and Mountain, Texan and Barbadian berries. And the multitudinous, almost uncataloguable, mass of other produce shellac, sulphur, gumbenzoin, ardebs of beans and pulse from Egypt, yokes of copper from Asia Minor; sponge, gum-arabic, silk and muslin from Smyrna; flour from the United States; hides, hams, hemp, rags, and especially tallow in teeming casks, from Russia and the Baltic provinces mountains of timber from Canada and Sweden; fruit, Florence oil, tinder, raw cotton (though the vast majority of that staple goes to Liverpool), indigo, saffron, magnesia, leeches, basket-work, and wash- leather! The ships vomit these on the dock quays, and the warehouses swallow them up again like ogres. But there is in one dock, the London, an underground store, that is the Aaron's rod of dock warehouses, and devours all the rest. For there, in a vast succession of vaults, roofed with cobwebs many years old, are stored in pipes and hogsheads the wines that thirsty London - thirsty England, Ireland, and Scotland - must needs drink. What throats they have, these consumers! what oceans of good liquor their Garagantuan appetites demand! Strange stories have been told about these docks, and the thirsty souls who visit them with tasting-orders; how the brawny coopers stride about with candles in cleft sticks, and, piercing casks with gimlets, pour out the rich contents, upon the sawdust that covers the floor, like water; how cases of champagne are treated as of as little account as though they were cases of small beer; how plates of cheese- crumbs are handed round to amateurs that they may chasten their palates and keep them in good tone of taste ; how the coopers are well nigh infallible in detecting who are the tasters that visit these "wine vaults" with a genuine intention of buying, and who the epicureans, whose only object in visiting the London Docks is to drink, gratuitously on the premises, as much good wine as they can conveniently carry. Strange, very strange stories, too, are told of the occasional inconvenience into which the "convenient carriage" degenerates; of respectable fathers of families appearing in the open street, after they have run the tether of the tasting-order, staggering and dishevelled, and with bloodshot eyes, their cravats twisted round to the backs of their necks like bagwigs, and incoherently declaring that cheese always disagreed with them. I am candidly of opinion, however, that the majority of these legends are apocryphal, or, in the rare cases when they have a foundation in fact, belong to the history of the past, and that commercial sobriety, in the highest order, is the rule in the wine vaults of the London Docks. But the Ships ! Who shall describe those white-sailed camels? who shall tell in graphic words of the fantastic interlacing of their masts and rigging, of the pitchy burliness of their bulging sides ; of the hives of human ants who in barges and lighters surround them, or swarm about their cargo-cumbered decks? Strange sight to see, these mariners from every quarter of the globe ; of every variety of stature and complexion, from the swarthy Malay to the almost albino Finn in every various phase of picturesque costume, from the Suliote of the fruitship, in his camise and capote, to the Yankee foremast-man in his red shirt, tarry trousers, and case-knife hung by a strand of lanyards to his girdle. But not alone of the maritime genus are the crowds who throng the docks. There are lightermen, stevedores, bargees, and lumpers; there are passengers flocking to their narrow berths on board emigrant ships ; there are entering and wharfingers' clerks traveling about in ambulatory counting-houses mounted on wheels; there are land rats and water rats, ay, and some that may be called pirates of the long-shore, and over whom it behoves the dock policemen and the dock watchmen to exercise a somewhat rigid supervision-for they will pick and steal, these piratical ne'er-do-weels, any trifle, unconsidered or not, that comes handy to their knavish digits; and as they emerge from the dock-gates, it is considered by no means a breach of etiquette for an official to satisfy himself by a personal inspection of their garments, that they don't happen to have concealed about them, of course by accident, such waifs and strays as a bottle of Jamaica rum, a lump of gutta percha, a roll of sheet copper, or a bundle of Havannah cigars. But a clanging bell proclaims the hour of one, and the dock- labourers, from Tower Hill to the far-off Isle of Dogs, are summoned back to their toil. Goodness and their own deplenished pockets only know how they have been lunching, or on what coarse viands they have fed since noon. Many have not fed at all; for, of the motley herd of dock-labourers, hundreds, especially in the London Docks-where no recommendation save strength is needed, and they are taken on their good behaviour from day to day-are of the Irish way of thinking; and, wonderfully economical, provident, self-denying are those much maligned Hibernians when they are earning money. They are only spendthrifts and indolent when they have nothing. They will content themselves with a fragment of hard, dry bread, and the bibulous solace of the nearest pump, and go home cheerfully at dusk to the unsavoury den - be it in Whitechapel or in Bloomsbury or in far-off Kensington, for they prefer strangely to live at the farthest possible distance from their place of daily toil - where their ragged little robins of children dwell like so many little pigs under a bed. And there they will partake of a mess of potatoes, with one solitary red herring smashed up therein, to "give it a relish." They will half starve themselves, and go as naked as the police will permit them to go ; but they will be very liberal to the priest, and will scrape money together to bring their aged and infirm parents over from the "ould country." That is folly and superstition, people will say. Of course, what people say must be right. Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little bread; for they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who still pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but to the defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious trade, now well nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining districts, known as the "tommy-shop" system. I think I need scarcely explain what this system is, for, under its twin denomination of "truck," it has already formed a subject for Parliamentary inquiry. Let it suffice to say, that the chief feature in the amiable system consists in giving the labourer a fallacious amid delusive credit to the amount of his weekly wages, and supplying him with victuals and drink (chiefly the latter) at an enormous rate of profit. The labourer is paid by his foreman in tickets instead of cash, and invariably finds himself at the end of the week victimised, or, to use a more expressive, though not so genteel a term, diddled, to a heart-rending extent. Dock-labourers who are in regular gangs and regularly employed, are the greatest sufferers by this unjust mode of payment. As to the casual toilers who crowd about the gates at early morning in the hope of being engaged for a working day, they are paid half a crown, and are free to squander or to hoard the thirty pence as they list. That industrious and peaceable body of men, the coalwhippers, groaned for a long period under the iniquities of the truck system; they are now protected by a special Act of Parliament, renewed from time to time; but the dock-labourers yet eat their bread leavened by a sense of injustice. There are none to help them; for they have no organisation, and very few friends. It is perfectly true that the dock-companies have nothing whatsoever to do with the social servitude under which their labourers groan; and that it is private speculators who work the system for their own aggrandisement; but the result to the labourer is the same. I don't think it matters to Quashie, the negro slave, when he is beaten, whether the cowhide be wielded by Mr. Simon Legree, the planter, or by Quimbo, the black driver. Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for astonishment to know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men, coarse, dirty, and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have been tenderly bred and nurtured; who have been, save the mark, gentlemen! who have received University educations and borne the Queen's commission. And here also are the draff and husks of foreign immigration; Polish, German, and Italian exiles. They have come to this - down to this - up to this, if you choose ; come to the old, old level, as old as Gardener Adam's time, of earning the daily bread by the sweat of the brow. It were better so than to starve; better so than to steal." (The above has been broken down into additonal paragraphs to facilitate easier reading.)
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