As We Are and As We May Be - Walter Besant (most recommended books txt) 📗

as rat-catchers, and in that capacity were able to carry away plunder previously concealed by their friends; some, called _scuffle-hunters_, stood on the quays as porters, carrying bags under their long white aprons in which to hide whatever they could pilfer. It was estimated that, taking one year with another, the depredations from the shipping in the Port of London amounted to nearly a quarter of a million sterling every year. All this was carried on by the riverside people. But, to make robbery successful, there must be accomplices, receiving-houses, fences, a way to dispose of the goods. In this case the thieves had as their accomplices the whole of the population of the quarter where they lived. All the public-houses were secret markets attended by grocers and other tradesmen where the booty was sold by auction, and, to escape detection, fictitious bills and accounts were given and received. The thieves were known among themselves by fancy names, which at once indicated the special line of each and showed the popularity of the calling; they were bold pirates, night plunderers, light horsemen, heavy horsemen, mud-larks, game lightermen, scuffle-hunters and gangsmen. Their thefts enabled them to live in the coarse profusion of meat and drink, which was all they wanted; yet they were always poor because their plunder was knocked down for so little; they saved nothing; and they were always egged on to new robberies by the men who sold them drinks, by the women who took their money from them, and by the honest merchants who attended the secret markets.

I dwell upon the past because the present is its natural legacy. When you read of the efforts now being made to raise the living, or at least to prevent them from sinking any lower, remember that they are what the dead made them. We inherit more than the wealth of our ancestors; we inherit the consequences of their misdeeds. It is a most expensive thing to suffer the people to drop and sink; it is a sad burden which we lay upon posterity if we do not continually spend our utmost in lifting them up. Why, we have been the best part of two thousand years in recovering the civilization which fell to pieces when the Roman Empire decayed. We have not been fifty years in dragging up the very poor whom we neglected and left to themselves, the gallows, the cat, and the press-gang only a hundred years ago. And how slow, how slow and sometimes hopeless, is the work!

The establishment of river police and the construction of docks have cleared the river of all this gentry. Ships now enter the docks; there discharge and receive; the labourers can carry away nothing through the dock-gates. No apron allows a bag to be hidden; policemen stand at the gates to search the men; the old game is gone--what is left is a surviving spirit of lawlessness; the herding together; the hand-to-mouth life; the love of drink as the chief attainable pleasure; the absence of conscience and responsibility; and the old brutality.

What the riverside then was may be learned by a small piece of Rotherhithe in which the old things still linger. Small repairing-docks, each capable of holding one vessel, are dotted along the street; to each are its great dock-gates, keeping out the high tide, and the quays and the shops and the caretaker's lodge; the ship lies in the dock shored up by timbers on either side, and the workmen are hammering, caulking, painting, and scraping the wooden hull; her bowsprit and her figurehead stick out over the street, Between the docks are small two-storied houses, half of them little shops trying to sell something; the public-house is frequent, but the 'Humours' of Ratcliff Highway are absent; mercantile Jack at Rotherhithe is mostly Norwegian and has morals of his own. Such, however, as this little village of Rotherhithe is, so were 'Wappin in the Wose,' Shadwell, Ratcliff, and the 'Limehouse' a hundred years ago, with the addition of street fighting and brawling all day long; the perpetual adoration of rum, quarrels over stolen goods; quarrels over drunken drabs; quarrels over all-fours; the scraping of fiddles from every public-house, the noise of singing, feasting, and dancing, and a never-ending, still-beginning debauch, all hushed and quiet--as birds cower in the hedge at sight of the kestrel--when the press-gang swept down the narrow streets and carried off the lads, unwilling to leave the girls and the grog, and put them aboard His Majesty's tender to meet what fate might bring.

The construction of the great docks has completely changed this quarter. The Precinct of St. Katherine's by the Tower has almost entirely disappeared, being covered by St. Katherine's Dock; the London Dock has reduced Wapping to a strip covered with warehouses. But the church remains, so frankly proclaiming itself of the eighteenth century, with its great churchyard. The new Dock Basin, Limehouse Basin, and the West India Docks, have sliced huge cantles out of Shadwell, Limehouse, and Poplar; the little private docks and boat-building yards have disappeared; here and there the dock remains, with its river gates gone, an ancient barge reposing in its black mud; here and there may be found a great building which was formerly a warehouse when ship-building was still carried on. That branch of industry was abandoned after 1868, when the shipwrights struck. Their action transferred the ship-building of the country to the Clyde, and threw out of work thousands of men who had been earning large wages in the yards. Before this unlucky event Riverside London had been rough and squalid, but there were in it plenty of people earning good wages--skilled artisans, good craftsmen. Since then it has been next door to starving. The effect of the shipwrights' strike may be illustrated in the history of one couple.

The man, of Irish parentage, though born in Stepney, was a painter or decorator of the saloons and cabins of the ships. He was a highly-skilled workman of taste and dexterity; he could not only paint but he could carve; he made about three pounds a week and lived in comfort. The wife, a decent Yorkshire woman whose manners were very much above those of the riverside folk, was a few years older than her husband. They had no children. During the years of fatness they saved nothing; the husband was not a drunkard, but, like most workmen, he liked to cut a figure and to make a show. So he saved little or nothing. When the yard was finally closed he had to cadge about for work. Fifteen years later he was found in a single room of the meanest tenement-house; his furniture was reduced to a bed, a table, and a chair; all that they had was a little tea and no money--no money at all. He was weak and ill, with trudging about in search of work; he was lying exhausted on the bed while his wife sat crouched over the little bit of fire. This was how they had lived for fifteen years--the whole time on the verge of starvation. Well, they were taken away; they were persuaded to leave their quarters and to try anther place, where odd jobs were found for the man, and where the woman made friends in private families, for whom she did a little sewing. But it was too late for the man; his privations had destroyed his sleight of hand, though he knew it not; the fine workman was gone. He took painters' paralysis, and very often when work was offered his hand would drop before he could begin it; then the long years of tramping about had made him restless; from time to time he was fain to borrow a few shillings and to go on the tramp again, pretending that he was in search of work; he would stay away for a fortnight, marching about from place to place, heartily enjoying the change and the social evening at the public-houses where he put up. For, though no drunkard, he loved to sit in a warm bar and to talk over the splendours of the past. Then he died. No one, now looking at the neat old lady in the clean white cap and apron who sits all day in the nursery crooning over her work, would believe that she has gone through this ordeal by famine, and served her fifteen years' term of starvation for the sins of others.

The Parish of St. James's, Ratcliff, is the least known of Riverside London. There is nothing about this parish in the Guide-books; nobody goes to see it. Why should they? There is nothing to see. Yet it is not without its romantic touches. Once there was here a cross--the Ratcliff Cross--but nobody knows what it was, when it was erected, why it was erected, or when it was pulled down. The oldest inhabitant now at Ratcliff remembers that there was a cross here--the name survived until the other day, attached to a little street, but that is now gone. It is mentioned in Dryden. And on the Queen's Accession, in 1837, she was proclaimed, among other places, at Ratcliff Cross--but why, no one knows. Once the Shipwrights' Company had their hall here; it stood among gardens where the scent of the gillyflower and the stock mingled with the scent of the tar from the neighbouring rope-yard and boat-building yard. In the old days, many were the feasts which the jolly shipwrights held in their hall after service at St. Dunstan's, Stepney. The hall is now pulled down, and the Company, which is one of the smallest, worth an income of less than a thousand, has never built another. Then there are the Ratcliff Stairs--rather dirty and dilapidated to look at, but, at half-tide, affording the best view one can get anywhere of the Pool and the shipping. In the good old days of the scuffle-hunters and the heavy horsemen, the view of the thousand ships moored in their long lines with the narrow passage between was splendid. History has deigned to speak of Ratcliff Stairs. 'Twas by these steps that the gallant Willoughby embarked for his fatal voyage; with flags flying and the discharge of guns he sailed past Greenwich, hoping that the King would come forth to see him pass. Alas! the young King lay a-dying, and Willoughby himself was sailing off to meet his death.

The parish contains four good houses, all of which, I believe, are marked in Roque's map of 1745.

One of these is now the vicarage of the new church. It is a large, solid, and substantial house, built early in the last century, when as yet the light horsemen and lumpers were no nearer than Wapping. The walls of the dining-room are painted with Italian landscapes, to which belongs a romance. The paintings were executed by a young Italian artist. For the sake of convenience he was allowed by the merchant who then lived here, and employed him, to stay in the house. Now the merchant had a daughter, and she was fair. The artist was a goodly youth, and inflammable; as the poet says, their eyes met; presently, as the poet goes on, their lips met; then the merchant found out what was going on, and ordered the young man, with good old British determination, out of the house. The young man retired to his room, presumably to pack up his things. But he did not go out of the house; instead of that, he hanged himself in his room. His ghost, naturally, continued to remain in the house, and has been seen by many. Why he has not long ago joined the ghost of the young lady is not clear unless that, like many ghosts, his chief pleasure is in keeping as miserable as he possibly can.

The second large house of the