London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1
Mayhew, Henry
1861
Of the Street-Sellers of Walking-Sticks.
The walking-sticks sold in the streets of London are principally purchased at wholesale houses in and , Borough, and their neighbourhoods. "There's no street-trade," said an intelligent man, "and I've tried most that's been, or promised to be, a living in the streets, that is so tiresome as the walking-stick trade. There is nothing in which people are so particular. The stick's sure to be either too short or too long, or too thick or too thin, or too limp or too stiff. You would think it was a simple thing for a man to choose a stick out of a lot, but if you were with | |
438 | me a selling on a fine Sunday at Battersea Fields, you'd see it wasn't. O, it's a tiresome job." |
The trade is a summer and a Sunday trade. The best localities are the several parks, and the approaches to them, Greenwich-park included; Hampstead Heath, Common, and, indeed, wherever persons congregate for pedestrian purposes, Battersea Fields being, perhaps, the place where the greatest Sunday trade is carried on. Some of the greater thoroughfares too, such as and the City-road, are a good deal frequented by the stick-sellers. | |
This trade—like others where the article sold is not of general consumption or primary usefulness—affords, what I once heard a street-seller call, "a good range." There is no generally recoguised price or value, so that a smart trader in sticks can apportion his offers, or his charges, to what he may think to be the extent of endurance in a customer. What might be to a man who "looked knowing," might be to a man who "looked green." The common sticks, which are the "cripples," I was told, of all the sorts of sticks (the spoiled or inferior sticks) mixed with "common pines," are the dozen. From this price there is a gradual scale up to the dozen for "good polished;" beyond that price the streetseller rarely ventures, and seldom buys even at that (for street-trade) high rate, as fourpenny and sixpenny sticks go off the best; these saleable sticks are generally polished hazel or pine. "I've sold to all sorts of people, sir," said a stick-seller. "I once had some very pretty sticks, very cheap, only a piece, and I sold a good many to boys. They bought them, I suppose, to look like men, and daren't carry them home; for I once saw a boy I'd sold a stick to, break it and throw it away just before he knocked at the door of a respectable house Sunday evening. I've sold shilling sticks to gentlemen, sometimes, that had lost or broken or forgot their own. Canes there's nothing done in now in the streets; nor in 'vines,' which is the little switchy things that used to be a sort of a plaything. There's only stickman in the streets, as far as I know—and if there was, I should be sure to know, I think—that has what you may call a capital in sticks. Only the other day I saw him sell a registered stick near Charing-cross. It was a beauty. A Bath cane, with a splendid ivory head, and a compass let into the ivory. The head screwed off, and beneath was a map of London and a Guide to the Great Exhibition. O, but he has a beautiful stock, and aint he aristocratic! 'Ash twigs,' with the light-coloured bark on them, not polished, but just trimmed, was a very good sale, but they're not now. Why, as to what I take, it's such a uncertain trade that it's hard to say. Some days I haven't taken , and the most money I ever took was Derby day at Epsom—I wish there was more Derby days, for poor people's sakes—and then I took The most money as ever I took in London was — Sunday, in Battersea Fields, when I had a prime cheap stock of bamboos. When I keep entirely to the stick trade, and during the sum- mer, I may take in a week, with a profit of | |
The street stick-sellers are, I am assured, sometimes about in number, on a fine Sunday in the summer. Of these, some are dock-labourers, who thus add to their daily earnings by a day's labour; others, and a smarter class, are the "supers" (supernumeraries) of theatres, who also eke out their pittance by Sunday toil; porters, irregularly employed, and consequently "hard pushed to live," also sell walking-sticks on the Sundays; as do others who "cannot afford"—as a well-educated man, a patterer on paper, once said to me—"to lose a day if they were d——d for it." The usual mode of this street-trade is to carry the bundle of sticks strapped together, under the arm, and deposit the ends on the ground when a sale is to be effected. A few, however, and principally Jews, have "stands," with the walking-sticks inclosed in a sort of frame. On the Mondays there are not above a of the number of stick-sellers there are on the Sundays; and on the other days of the week not above a , or an . Calculating that for weeks of the year there are every day sticksellers, each taking, on an average, a week (with a profit, individually, of about ), we find expended in walking-sticks in the streets. | |
On clear winter days a stick-seller occasionally plies his trade, but on frosty days they are occupied in letting out skates in the parks, or wherever ponds are frozen. | |