London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1
Mayhew, Henry
1861
Of the Street-Purchasers of Game and Poultry.
AS the purchasers of game and poultry are of a different class to the costermongers' ordinary customers, I may devote a few words to them. From all the information that I could acquire, they appear to consist, principally, of those who reside at a distance from any cheap market, and buy a cheap luxury when it is brought to their doors, as well as of those who are "always on the look-out for something toothy, such as the shabby genteels, as they're called, who never gives nothing but a scaly price. They've bargained with me till I was hard held from pitching into them, and over and over again I should, only it would have been days anyhow. They'll tell me my birds stinks, when they're as sweet as flowers. They'd go to the devil to save farthings on a partridge." Other buyers are old gourmands, living perhaps on small incomes, or if possessed of ample incomes, but confining themselves to a small expenditure; others, again, are men who like a cheap dinner, and seldom enjoy it, at their own cost, unless it be cheap, and who best of all like "such a thing as a moor bird (grouse)," said hawker, "which can be eat up to a man's own cheek." This was also the opinion of a poulterer and game-dealer, who sometimes sold "goods" to the hawkers. Of this class of "patrons" many shopkeepers, in all branches of business, have a perfect horror, as they will care nothing for having occupied the tradesmen's time to no purpose. | |
The game and poultry street-sellers, I am told, soon find out when a customer is bent upon a bargain, and shape their prices accordingly. Although these street-sellers may generally take as their motto the announcement so often seen in the shops of competitive tradesmen, "no reasonable offer refused," they are sometimes so worried in bargaining that they refuse. | |
In a conversation I had with a "retired" game salesman, he said it might be curious to trace the history of a brace of birds—of grouse, for instance—sold in the streets; and he did it after this manner. They were shot in the Highlands of Scotland by a member of parliament who had gladly left the senate for the moors. They were transferred to a tradesman who lived in or near some Scotch town having railway communication, and with whom "the honourable gentleman," or "the noble lord," had perhaps endeavoured to drive a hard bargain. He (the senator) have a good price for his birds, as he had given a large sum for the moor: and the season was a bad : the birds were scarce and wild: they would soon be "packed" (be in flocks of or instead of in broods), and then there would be no touching a feather of them. The canny Scot would quietly say that it was early in the season, and the birds never packed so early; that as to price, he could only give what he could get from a London salesman, and he was "nae just free to enter into any agreement for a fixed price at a'." The honourable gentleman, after much demurring, gives way, feeling perhaps that he cannot well do anything else. In due course the grouse are received in Leadenhall, and unpacked and flung about with as little ceremony as if they had been "slaughtered" by a Whitechapel | |
124 | journeyman butcher, at so much a head. It is a thin market, perhaps, when they come to hand. A dealer, fashionable in the parish of St. George, , has declined to give the price demanded; they were not his money; "he had to give such long credit." A dealer, popular in the ward of Cheap, has also declined to buy, and for the same alleged reason. The salesman, knowing that some of these dealers buy, quietly says that he will take no less, and as he is known to be a man of his word, little is said upon the subject. As the hour arrives at which fashionable game-dealers are compelled to buy, or disappoint customers who will not brook such disappointment, the market, perhaps, is glutted, owing to a very great consignment by a later railway train. The , or the , are in due course quoted by the London papers, touching the "extraordinary sport" of a party of lords and gentlemen in the Highlands; and the "heads" of game are particularized with a care that would do honour to a The salesman then disposes rapidly of divers "brace" to the "hawkers," at or the brace, and the hawker offers them to hotel-keepers, and shopkeepers, and housekeepers, selling some at the brace, some at , at , at , and at less. "At last," said my informant, "he may sell the finest brace of his basket, which he has held back to get a better price for, at a-piece, rather than keep them over-night, and that to a woman of the town, whom he may have met reeling home with money in her purse. Thus the products of an honourable gentleman's skilful industry, on which he greatly prided himself, are eaten by the woman and her 'fancy man,' grumblingly enough, for they pronounce the birds inferior to tripe." |
The best quarters for the street-sale of game and poultry are, I am informed from several sources, either the business parts of the metropolis, or else the houses in the several suburbs which are the furthest from a market or from a business part. The squares, crescents, places, and streets, that do not partake of or the other of these characteristics, are pronounced "no good." | |