Low-Life Deeps: An Account of the Strange Fish to Be Found There

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LOW-LIFE DEEPS

AN ACCOUNT OF THE STRANGE FISH TO BE FOUND THERE

BY JAMES GREENWOOD AUTHOR OF "THE WILDS OF LONDON"

Chapter 1: In the Potteries

ALMOST every day of the week, in the summer season, there appear in the newspapers urgent and touching appeals directed to the benevolent for the promotion of philanthropic schemes to enable the multitude of court and alley dwellers of London, especially the little children, to enjoy just one day out in the green country or by the sea side. It is a fact, however, despite all that has been said and written respecting the unparalleled disadvantages of the unfortunates in question, that, in the matter of opportunity for inhaling fresh air and enjoying rural sights and sounds, there are other cities and places the inhabitants of which are worse off twenty times than they are. There is not a back-street resident in any part of the metropolis who has not, within thirty minutes' walk of his own door - supposing him not to be a cripple, and to be able to step out briskly as does a man eager for the distant feast which is already spread for him - a broad and handsome, well-wooded, green-sloped, flower-bedecked park, where he may roam about to his heart's content.

Such blessings are not vouchsafed to all townsfolk. Take the people of one of the largest towns - Manchester, for instance. Recently I happened to be in that vast and prosperous city, and walked out in the morning, under the fiercely hot June sun, to see what the suburbs were like, and presently I came to Ardwick Park. We Londoners have a queer sort of park, so called, Whetstone by name, situated somewhere behind the houses in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but Whetstone Park is merely a little joke with us on account of its diminutive size, and the fact that no green thing grows there. Ardwick Park, Manchester, is larger than Whetstone, but not vastly so. It is a wedge-shaped bit of ground, and, as regards size, bears about the same relation to our Regent's and Victoria Parks as a pound and a half piece cut out of a Cheshire cheese does to the half-hundredweight of which it formed part. It is a regular park though, and has its lodge at the gate, and the customary notice-board of pains and penalties against flower-pickers, gamblers, and trespassers on paths which are sacred; but for all that, and regarding it as a pleasure-ground, it is but a sad-looking enclosure. It is paved evenly with pepper and salt-coloured asphalt, with here and there an edging of grass, as wide in comparison as is the list to the broad-cloth, with here and there a few flowers of the hardier kinds languishing in beds of sickness and unmistakably dying of consumption.

But the gem of the Ardwick Park is a fountain in the middle of a good-sized basin, in which are rockwork and gold and silver fish, and all round the basin are fixed seats, that at a pinch might accommodate a hundred and fifty sitters. On that bright Sunday morning, every form was as completely occupied as are the seats in the pit of a theatre when a popular piece is being played, and all by working folk, while scores of other work-people, too late for the front rows, sauntered over the hot asphalt, patiently waiting for a chance to sit down and enjoy at their ease the beauties of nature, and listen to the refreshing trickling of the plashing fountain. Many of them must have thought it worth while to trudge a long way to participate in the treat, for their shoes were white with dust, and the lodge-keeper was doing a brisk trade in ginger beer. But it was for fresh air that these mill hands, all the week pent up, thirsted chiefly, and there they sat in solemn silence, inhaling mouthful of it, as though it were physic of a flavour foreign and strange to their taste, but in the efficacy of which they had learnt to place perfect faith.

There are people, however, who are worse off than the mill hands, whose abiding places are the slums of Manchester. I should not have thought it possible, but so it is. There are toilers and sweaters for daily bread whose condition in life is worse even than that of the miner who delves in the bowels of the earth or the smelter of iron who works naked to the waist. A creature of goblin aspect, who wears a leather mask to keep his eyes from being melted in his head, as is the red ore in the melting-pot it is his business to feed and keep at a molten simmer. I have visited the Potteries and passed half a day in Longton, which is the centre of the murky region where half the crockery that is used in the world is produced; and I am afraid to say how many times dirtier, smokier, and to the unaccustomed, more stifling than any other pottery parish round about. As it happened, it was a wet morning when I first approached Longton, and allowance should perhaps be made for that unfavourable circumstance; but I think I never in my life was more amazed. Amazed is exactly the word. As I approached the place from Fenton, the choking smoke that blew from Longton in my direction forced me to cover ray mouth and nostrils with my pocket-handkerchief; but, advancing towards the main street, I discovered the utter futility of the precaution. It was as idle as shutting one's mouth with the head held under water as a safeguard against getting drowned. There was not the least use in sneezing and coughing; there was literally nothing for it but to breathe chimney smoke, or to turn and flee to purer air before it was too late.

I have not the faintest hope of doing justice, by any description of which I am capable, to the smoke of Longton. I might do better with a fairer chance; but the moment it beset me I became a victim to its obfuscating influence, and, filled with smoke in every crevice and cavity, had for the time barely sense remaining to gasp and grope my way. The nearest approach to it that I had ever previously experienced was a very foggy day in London. But London fog is a mild and pleasant mixture compared with the subtle concoction that comes pouring out of the pottery kilns. There is much more sulphur in the latter, and a sharpness which is refreshing as far as a single whiff goes, like the odour of vinegar sprinkled on a red-hot fire shovel. But the great difference between a stout and substantial London fog and the daylight darkness of Longton consists in the fact that fogs, as a rule, come in winter time, when keen winds blow and the air is frosty; whereas, in the other case, we have a fog of equal density, with the thermometer registering eighty in the shade.

Nor, when a man grew somewhat used to the smarting mist, and could look about him a little, was there the least reason for wondering that Longton should be so afflicted. From one end to the other, it is chockfull of manufactories where pots and pans and plates and dishes are turned out every day by the hundred thousand, and kilns may be counted ten and a dozen in a single street. And let it be understood a pottery kiln is no mere chimney shaft. It is an oddly shaped thing, the sight of which, especially when the imagination is assisted by the unearthly fumes that rise on every side, is vividly suggestive of that bottle which the fisherman in the "Arabian Nights" found on the beach and uncorked, and out of which, in the midst of evil-smelling and blinding smoke, the escaped genii appeared. The kilns of Longton are brick-built, squat-bellied bottles, with wide gaping mouths, out of which issues, as though by necromantic art, a constant out-rolling of vapour that looks as substantial as wool, and a little of which must go a long way towards poisoning any current of pure air it may happen to fall in with. On a very fine day it is not unlikely that a great part of this ascends and is dispersed by the winds, but on such a day as that when I was there-a still and sultry day with close rain falling steadily - the before-mentioned "wool," as soon as it was vomited. Forth, seemingly became saturated with water, and after staggering with its load a few feet above the housetops, sank down into the streets.

But nobody seemed to recognise in the existing state of things anything particularly uncommon. I went into a shop to buy a newspaper, and as I opened the shop door, the heavy smoke came tumbling after me as though it had been waiting on the threshold, and was glad of the chance of getting in. But the shopkeeper seemed quite unaware of it. "Nice day, sir," he cheerfully remarked. "But just a little cloudy, I think," I ventured. "Well, perhaps it is," said he, as he swept some soot off the newspaper before he handed it to me. "Perhaps it is, but the rain cools the air and makes it pleasant." If this was pleasant weather at Longton, what must it be in November or December, when, in the brightest of places, rain and fog, and mire combine to make the short day appear even too long, and every one is eager for evening, when the shutters may be closed, and the cheerful lamp set to illumine the cosy room? It is no exaggeration to imagine that at such times Longton, and Fenton, and Burslem, but especially the first, must be so dark as to make it difficult to see from one side of the street to the other, even at noon; while, as for the plague of "blacks," which, even with us, is at certain seasons of the year so sharp .a thorn in the side of the decent housewife, they must fall as thickly as snow. Perhaps snow at Longton is black - it is quite impossible that the fleecy particles could penetrate the tangle of thick chimney stuff overhead and descend white - and that the roads, and paths, and the people, and the cabbage of the greengrocers, and the meat in the butchers' shops, are one and all, thickly covered with feathery grime; and that the children play at soot-balls.

And how fares it with the population of such a gruesome place? Neither worse nor better than might be expected. 1 had a good opportunity of observing this, for by the time I had walked once through Longton, the bells began to ring for "knocking off" for the day; and out from the scores of "yards," at the head of which a swag-bellied, black-muzzled kiln so snugly nestles, came swarming the pottery hands - men, women, and children - until the gloomy street was alive with them, if any place could be made livelier by the presence of such a sickly-looking company. In a purely mining district the crowd one encounters in the streets, when the day's or the night's labour is over, is certainly not a prepossessing one; but the "pit lad," be he old or young, with his face and all that is visible of his body as black and as polished as jet, and his coarse and patched frock and trousers of heavy flannels, is, at least, an individual capable of enjoying that state of life to which it has been his destiny to be called; and he is ever ready to go in heart and soul, when he is free to do so, for those sports and pastimes in which he takes delight.

But, if he may be judged from his appearance, the pale-faced potter is a man of quite another kind. It is by no mean; a cheerful spectacle this turning out of pottery hands in the dusk of evening. One and all - and there seem to be as many women as men, and as many children as either - they are as white as bakers, as the most careless of journeymen, who recklessly splash their shabby clothes with flour slop, and are not at all particular as to how much flour finds lodgement in their hair and whiskers, and in the folds of their neckerchiefs. They are like bakers - toilers in the most dingy and unwholesome of our London underground bread-making places - in their haggard aspect, in their shambling gait, in the wearied and utterly "knocked-up" expression of their countenances. Males and females, grown-up and children, they are all of the same type. "All work and no play" has made the dullest of "boys" of them, and their white figures stalk through the smoke which fills the streets in a manner that suggests but one idea - that they are hurrying home to get to bed as soon as possible to rest their weary limbs, and fortify themselves against the drudgery of tomorrow.

And the worst of it is, as I am informed, matters are fully as bad as they seem with the unhappy potter and his wife and family. Their work is sadly against their health. They are, in the majority of cases, dangerously exposed to alternate heat and cold, and the dust of the baked clay goods it is their business to scrape and plane and polish, finds its way to their lungs and breeds fatal disease there. This would be bad enough if, on being released from his hurtful work, the potter were blessed with pure air to breathe; but, with the seeds of consumption thriving within him, with a bad cough, he is doomed, poor fellow to pass his nights as well as his days in the kind of atmosphere I have already attempted to describe.

It occurred to me, as I contemplated the potter children, as well as the potter fathers and mothers, creeping home in so melancholy a manner, what a splendid thing it would be if a great committee of kind-hearted ladies and gentlemen were to take in hand the task of treating the inhabitants of each district to say, three days at some seaside place. It would be an experiment that would require careful management, however. In all probability there ate at sonic of the worst of these localities - at Longton, for example - scores of young men and women whose belief is that the sun is ray less and lemon-coloured, and that the world at large is shrouded constantly in chimney-smoke. What their first sensations would be on making acquaintance with perfect light, and pure air, and dazzling sunshine, is doubtful. It would be embarrassing if, like bats and owls routed out of their gloomy abodes at noontide, they were dazed with the strange glare of real day, and on their arrival at Brighton terminus they went blinking and blundering about, and knocking their confused heads together, and against all manner of hard projections, and, taking fright at the mere threshold of enlightenment, scuttled back to the comparative dinginess of the railway carriages, obstinately refusing to budge from them until they were conveyed home again. Equally awkward for the projectors of the scheme and those who were responsible for its propriety, if the brisk and light quality of the Brighton air had an intoxicating effect on the white-faced host, causing it, with delirious yells, and leaps, and hand-clapping, to overrun the town and swarm the beach.

The most serious result, however, and one that would be almost inevitable, would be the immediate revolution that would ensue in the pottery trade. It is only reasonable to assume that least half the enlightened excursionists would never return to Longton. A very few hours' acquaintance with the new life with which the sweet and bracing air of the sea and the downs would endow them would effectually settle the question of staying where they were, and picking up a living somehow - anyhow - or going back to be once more enshrouded in the black smoke from the Pottery kilns; and as to those who found the courage to return, they would no doubt insist on such measures being adopted by the master potters as should insure for them a longer life and a merrier one.

In the potteries coal-pits abound, and while exploring the delectable locality I availed myself of the privilege of peeping into a pitman's pothouse.

When at full blast, as miners say, it is an awful spectacle, and one that would possibly daunt the courage of even doughty Sir Wilfrid himself, supposing him to have conceived the idea of bearding the lion of beer in its den, and of commencing the campaign in the neighbourhood of Brierly or Hanley. The pitman fresh from home, and taking his accustomed "last pipe" and his evening wet before he is lowered into the black bowels of the earth, is not a very remarkable-looking individual. To be sure the brand of carbon is indelibly set on his brow. He may, and in all probability has, within the last six hours, had his sousing in the big wooden tub that in a pitman's home is as indispensable an article of domestic convenience as a chair to sit on or a bed to lie on; but nothing short of a scientific process can free the lines and wrinkles of his hard face from the ingrain of coal dust. Besides, leave alone his visage and his eyes, that blink at the glare of gaslight, and his horny hands dotted with dull blue scars, and with the finger nails as blunt as though they had been filed, however a pitman may be attired and wherever he may be met, he can at once be known to be the man he is the moment he opens his mouth-not by the style of language that issues there from, but by the dazzling whiteness of his teeth, scrubbed constantly by the ebon grit, and by his gums, which from the same cause, are ruddier than coral.

But this is not the individual regarding whom I have suggested that Sir Wilfrid would probably hesitate ere he attacked him with the virtuous intention of dispossessing him of his beer at the moment when lie is at the point of indulging in it - it is the pitman who has recently come up. A score of these honest delvers of coal, roistering in a dingy room by firelight - the miner can see almost as well in the dark as by aid of gas or candle - is an appalling sight. There is no creature in existence that is as black as a pitman. A negro is merely slate-coloured beside him, a chimney-sweep a person of dusky complexion; coal is black, but the pitman is blacker than coal, a shinier black; he has jetty grit in his hair and in his eyebrows, and it glistens in the very lashes of his eyes, heightening the contrast to his eyeballs, which roll in their orbits like marbles of white china. He is dressed in his "flannels," which are as thick as ordinary blanketing, and his frock is all open at his hairy chest, which is laden with so much pounded coal as to suggest the possibility of kindling a fire there by the aid of a stick of wood and a Lucifer match. He is not a tall man, but he is immensely broad, his shoulders are rounded, and he carries his shaggy head as a man who does not often enjoy the luxury of standing upright. When he sits, as be almost invariably does, with his great black hands spread out on his knees, he has the appearance of a creature that is about to spring at you. There are miners rough and miners smooth, and I am now speaking of the former; and I say that a man must possess a fine spirit who while a score of such jolly fellows were clinking cans, and using towards each other - quite in a friendly kind of way - such language as to suggest the notion that the pit from which they had recently emerged must have been the bottomless one, would go in amongst them and snatch away their beer.

One who is less virtuous, however, and who is so debased as not to feel shame in making confession that there are many flavours more repugnant to his taste than those of malt and hops, may sit for half an hour in such company, with nothing to fear and perhaps something to gain. To some extent I discovered the truth of the latter statement. There was, in the bar room in which the men sat, a newspaper which reported the speech of the farmer who found that his men, after a few weeks of roughing it in the world, had yearned for the peace and pure air of the distant Suffolk village, and finally fairly ran back to those blessings as a truant child runs back to its mother. I could make out from a grizzled old pitman's reading of the newspaper by the firelight, that Hodge had extended his explorations in search of better wages (it was at the time of the agricultural strike) even into the Black Country, and that, tempted by seven shillings a day, he had made a desperate plunge six hundred feet under the earth, of which his previous knowledge had gone no deeper than a beetroot.

I had no opportunity of discovering how Hodge acquitted himself as a miner; but there could be no doubt - judging, that is, from the tone of the comment which followed the grizzled one's reading - that the pitmen present very strongly resented the pretensions of the innocent countryman to "come a-pokun his nose" into their field of industry. So far as I could understand, certain agricultural lock-outs had sought and get employment in some neighbouring pit, and had taken a sudden departure there from; and my friends of the glistening teeth and the gritty eyelashes had settled it in their minds that the penitent "hands" spoken of by the Suffolk farmer were these identical fellows. No pity was expressed for them. As regards the revolt of the men generally, the pitmen were unanimous in their expressions of approval; and one gentleman who had brought up out of the pit his coal-pick, and who drove its blade deep between the floor bricks by way of illustrating what should be done, if he had his way, with every pig-headed old farmer in England, so pleased the rest that, upstanding, every pitman present emptied his quart of the much or little it contained in the speaker's honour. It was on all sides declared that the contributions towards the men's keep should be kept up by all other trades, even though the lock-out lasted for a whole year. Had a gang of locked-out labourers been coming that way at that time, and by chance looked in at the Baker's Rest - they have the queerest signs for these pitmen's drinking shops - they would have been joyously received and generously treated; but I verily believe if the gang had expressed its intention of seeking a job of pit-work there would have been a row and broken heads on the spot.

I can imagine my young man from the country advancing so far into the town as Black horse-lane, but not going a single step further. Black Horse-lane is not at the outskirts of the town. It is within three minutes of the market-place, and the town hail, and the bank, and the post-office. That the more immediate associations of Black Horse-lane are not entirely barbarous is sufficiently proved by the fact that at one corner of it there is a cosy-looking beer shop bearing the alluring sign of the Old House at Home, and at the opposite corner there still appeared, when I was there, sticking to the wall a placard referring to a Christmas pudding club held in the vicinity; but two hundred yards distant is a spectacle appalling enough to make the hay-coloured hair under Hodge's billycock, adorned with a sprig of green wheat, rise in horror. The entrance to Black Horse-lane is rising ground, and standing there with the back to the street, one looks down into a hollow, and at first sight, especially at dusk of evening, it appears as though nothing less than a dreadful earthquake had just commenced, and that presently the towering black chimney shafts, marked by the ragged caps of flame, must come toppling down with a crash.

Amidst such distracting din and such stifling murk it is not easy to give a correct estimate of space, but I should think that the scene in question occupies not more than three acres - but such a three acres! Hodge, the aghast beholder, is aware of a rustic ditty in which a tender swain, addressing his lady-love, says, "More lover-ly art thou than an evenun in June!" and, in face of his ferocious outlook, he shudders as he reflects on the fire-and-brimstone order of young woman that might be truthfully likened to the kind of June evening he has now encountered. A hideous sunken patch, hedged all about with mountains of jagged slag and pit refuse seething, boiling, and bubbling in the midst of dense smoke and steam, spurting up sudden and fierce in unexpected gusts like the jets from the touchholes of great cannon; while below all manner of fire seems to peep up out of the ground or leap a-tiptoe high up into the air as our flame-headed London monument. With a roaring and rattling noise, with a body big as a tun, and with outstretched arms and forked fingers, the flames leap from the squat chimneys of the iron smelters, or the fires are smouldering, winking, and blinking in various colours - green, yellow, and crimson - and everywhere seemingly striving to tear a way through the heavy black pall that is stifling them. And then the noise, or rather the blending of a thousand noises that are so appropriate an accompaniment to the hissing steam-jets and the leaping flames. The engine that heavily groans, the engine that shrilly shrieks, the engine that is spasmodic in its ejaculations and utters intermittent yells and roars as though some of the fiery demons in attendance were torturing it by pulling out its teeth; squealing engines - engines chiefly used there for sucking mighty lifts of water out of mines that otherwise would be speedily drowned - engines that gasp and snort and whistle and scream; while through all and over all are heard the puny and piping voices of the swarms of men whose half-naked forms may be dimly seen flitting hither and thither, in the midst, as it seems, of the fires and the steam and the choking smoke.

Everywhere fires; and, as the evening becomes night, spellbound Hodge perceives that they burn with a merrier blaze, and that they exist in spots hitherto unsuspected. Before it grew dark he had observed notice-boards stuck on the vast hillocks of slag and cinders, that trespassers would be prosecuted. It would have been more candid if the words had been " Trespassers will probably be burnt to death;" for, as though taking advantage of the darkness, here, there, everywhere in these pit-heaps, fiery forms, that all through the daylight had lurked under the rubbish and ashes, now wriggle out like glow-worms of boa-constrictor size, play about the black surface, and making towards each other, join heads and tails, and writhe into a quivering heap, to make a blazing night of it. And it is to this singeing, scorching, pestilent place that jog-trot Hodge, with the clay of the quiet fields still adhering to his boots, and with the scent of growing clover still in his nostrils, has come to better himself! I think I see that scared-visage young fellow lingering, long after dark, on the great furnace-clinker he has utilised as a seat at the mouth of Black Horse-lane, contemplating the life that coal-miners and iron smelters and casters and forgers lead, and weighing in his sobered mind whether the inconveniences of the agricultural frying-pan are not probably more endurable than a sweating, toiling, grimy existence in this ugly district of smoke and fire, despite the advantage of increased wages; whether fifteen shillings and the old wholesome work, and the healthful Newmarket breezes, and the easy old manners and customs are not on the whole to be preferred by such a slow-moving, calm-loving creature as he is, to thirty shillings and all the dirt and hurry and uproar that are inseparable from bread-winning in the Black Country.

What will be his share of domestic comfort if he stays here? For the probably not model, but still homely, cottage, with the bit of flower garden in front and the few rods of vegetable ground at back, he will have - provided it is his intention to "rough it," as thousand of pitmen do - to lodge in a brick-floored hovel in an ill-drained back street; his food will be coarse and inferior, his companions such as have been described partaking of the social glass at the Baker's Rest. If he be a bachelor these are the maidens he must in future consort with - these shock-headed, bare-armed, ankle-jack-wearing damsels, of whom a sample three pause on their way to chaff him and chuck him under the chin to the great amusement of a bevy of middle-aged married women who are engaged in friendly gossip on the other side of the way, lounging on the doorsteps and window-sills, and each one smoking her pipe-not a short pipe, but a regular full-length "churchwarden" that was brought in with the last half-gallon of beer from the public-house. Hodge ponders on all these things, and if, a week afterwards, he is found whistling amongst the ripening corn a more contented man I for one see no great reason for wondering at it.