Down and Out in Paris and London (25 page)

free of charge. Of course, they have not really taken the first

photo; and so, if the victim refuses, they waste nothing.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists

rather than beggars. An organ-grinder named Shorty,

a friend of Bozo’s, told me all about his trade. He and his

mate ‘worked’ the coffee-shops and public-houses round

Whitechapel and the Commercial Road. It is a mistake to

think that organ-grinders earn their living in the street;

nine-tenths of their money is taken in coffee-shops and

pubs—only the cheap pubs, for they are not allowed into

the good-class ones. Shorty’s procedure was to stop out-

side a pub and play one tune, after which his mate, who

had a wooden leg and could excite compassion, went in and

passed round the hat. It was a point of honour with Shorty

always to play another tune after receiving the ‘drop’—an

encore, as it were; the idea being that he was a genuine en-

tertainer and not merely paid to go away. He and his mate

took two or three pounds a week between them, but, as they

had to pay fifteen shillings a week for the hire of the organ,

they only averaged a pound a week each. They were on the

streets from eight in the morning till ten at night, and later

on Saturdays.

Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes

not. Bozo introduced me to one who was a ‘real’ artist—that

is, he had studied art in Paris and submitted pictures to the

Salon in his day. His line was copies of Old Masters, which

he did marvellously, considering that he was drawing on

stone. He told me how he began as a screever:

‘My wife and kids Were starving. I was walking home late

at night, with a lot of drawings I’d been taking round the

dealers, and wondering how the devil to raise a bob or two.

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Then, in the Strand, I saw a fellow kneeling on the pavement

drawing, and people giving him pennies. As I came past he

got up and went into a pub. ‘Damn it,’ I thought, ‘if he can

make money at that, so can I.’ So on the impulse I knelt

down and began drawing with his chalks. Heaven knows

how I came to do it; I must have been lightheaded with hun-

ger. The curious thing was that I’d never used pastels before;

I had to leam the technique as I went along. Well, people be-

gan to stop and say that my drawing wasn’t bad, arid they

gave me ninepence between them. At this moment the oth-

er fellow came out of the pub. ‘What in —are you doing on

my pitch?’ he said. I explained that I was hungry and had to

earn something. ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘come and have a pint with

me.’ So I had a pint, and since that day I’ve been a screever. I

make a pound a week. You can’t keep six kids on a pound a

week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking in sewing.

‘The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next

worst is the interference you have to put up with. At first,

not knowing any better, I used sometimes to copy a nude

on the pavement. The first I did was outside St Martin’s-

in-the-Fields church. A fellow in black—I suppose he was

a churchwarden or something—came out in a tearing rage.

‘Do you think we can have that obscenity outside God’s

holy house?’ he cried. So I had to wash it out. It was a copy

of Botticelli’s Venus. Another time I copied the same pic-

ture on the Embankment. A policeman passing looked at it,

and then, without a word, walked on to it and rubbed it out

with his great flat feet.’

Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the time

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Down and Out in Paris and London

when I was with him there had been a case of ‘immoral con-

duct’ in Hyde Park, in which the police had behaved rather

badly. Bozo produced a cartoon of Hyde Park with police-

men concealed in the trees, and the legend, ‘Puzzle, find the

policemen.’ I pointed out to him how much more telling

it would be to put, ‘Puzzle, find the immoral conduct,’ but

Bozo would not hear of it. He said that any policeman who

saw it would move him on, and he would lose his pitch for

good.

Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or

sell matches, or bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few

grains of lavender—called, euphemistically, perfume. All

these people are frankly beggars, exploiting an appearance

of misery, and none of them takes on an average more than

half a crown a day. The reason why they have to pretend to

sell matches and so forth instead of begging outright is that

this is demanded by the absurd English laws about begging.

As the law now stands, if you approach a stranger and ask

him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you seven

days for begging. But if you make the air hideous by dron-

ing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee,’ or scrawl some chalk daubs

on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches—in

short, if you make a nuisance of yourself—you are held to be

following a legitimate trade and not begging. Match-selling

and street-singing are simply legalized crimes. Not profit-

able crimes, however; there is not a singer or match-seller in

London who can be sure of 50 pounds a year—a poor return

for standing eighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the

cars grazing your backside.

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It is worth saying something about the social position of

beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found

that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help be-

ing struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards

them. People seem to feel that there is some essential dif-

ference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men. They

are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes.

Working men ‘work’, beggars do not ‘work’; they are para-

sites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted

that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a

literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence,

tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially

despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSEN-

TIAL difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of

numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is

said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging

a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar

works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting

varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any

other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable

trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar com-

pares well with scores of others. He is honest compared

with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded

compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable

compared with a hire-purchase tout—in short, a parasite,

but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more

than a bare living from the community, and, what should

justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over

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Down and Out in Paris and London

and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about

a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people,

or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?—for

they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple

reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice no-

body cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or

parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profit-

able. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social

service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get

money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become

the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for

this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a

week at begging, it would become a respectable profession

immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a

businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in

the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most

modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the

mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow

rich.

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XXXII

I want to put in some notes, as short as possible, on Lon-

don slang and swearing. These (omitting the ones that

everyone knows) are some of the cant words now used in

London:

A gagger—beggar or street performer of any kind. A

moocher—one who begs outright, without pretence of doing

a trade. A nobbier—one who collects pennies for a beggar.

A chanter—a street singer. A clodhopper —a street dancer.

A mugfaker—a street photographer. A glimmer—one who

watches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee—it is pronounced

jee)— the accomplice of a cheapjack, who stimulates trade

by pretending to buy something. A split—a detective. A flat-

tie—a policeman. A dideki—a gypsy. A toby—a tramp.

A drop—money given to a beggar. Fuhkum—lavender

or other perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer—a public-

house. A slang—a hawker’s licence. A kip—a place to sleep

in, or a night’s lodging. Smoke— London. A judy—a wom-

an. The spike—the casual ward. The lump—the casual ward.

A tosheroon—a half-crown. A deaner—a shilling. A hog—

a shilling. A sprowsie—a sixpence. Clods—coppers. A

drum—a billy can. Shackles—soup. A chat—a louse. Hard-

up—tobacco made from cigarette ends. A stick or cane—a

burglar’s jemmy. A peter—a safe. A bly—a burglar’s oxy-

acetylene blow-lamp.

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Down and Out in Paris and London

To bawl—to suck or swallow. To knock off—to steal. To

skipper—to sleep in the open.

About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries.

It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some of them,

though one or two —for instance, ‘funkum’ and ‘tosher-

oon’—are beyond guessing. ‘Deaner’ presumably comes

from. ‘denier’. ‘Glimmer’ (with the verb ‘to glim’) may have

something to do with the old word ‘glim’, meaning a light,

or another old word ‘glim’, meaning a glimpse; but it is

an instance of the formation of new words, for in its pres-

ent sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. ‘Gee’ is a

curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, mean-

ing horse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of

‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scr-

ibo, but there has been no similar word in English for the

past hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come direct-

ly from the French, for pavement artists are unknown in

France. ‘Judy’ and ‘bawl’ are East End words, not found west

of Tower Bridge. ‘Smoke’ is a word used only by tramps.

‘Kip’ is Danish. Till quite recently the word ‘doss’ was used

in this sense, but it is now quite obsolete.

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly.

The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees,

with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished

utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have

come up in the ‘forties (it is first mentioned in an American

book, Herman Melville’s WHITE JACKET), and Cockney

is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’

for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as

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they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with

the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the

‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming

slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with

it—a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It

was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now

it is almost extinct*. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned

above will have vanished in another twenty years.

[* It survives in certain abbreviations, such as ‘use your

twopenny’ or ‘use your head.’ ‘Twopenny’ is arrived at like

this: head—loaf of bread—twopenny loaf—twopenny]

The swear words also change—or, at any rate, they are

subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the Lon-

don working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now

they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still repre-

sent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with

people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless

he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved

up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the

purposes of the working classes. The current London adjec-

tive, now tacked on to every noun, is ——. No doubt in time