London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) (60 page)

‘This chanter was made by old William McDonnall, who’s been dead these many hundred years. He was one of the best pipe-makers that’s in all Scotland. There’s a brother of mine has a set of drones made by him, and he wouldn’t give them for any sit of money. Everybody in Scotland knows William McDonnall. Ask any lad, and he’ll tell you who was the best pipe-maker that ever lived in Scotland – aye, and ever will live. There’s many a farmer in Scotland would give 30
l
. for a set of pipes by old William McDonnall, sooner than they’d give 30
s
. for a set of pipes made now. This chanter has been in our family ever since McDonnall made it. It’s been handed down from father to son from that day to this. They always give it to the eldest. William McDonnall lived to be 143 years old, and this is the last chanter he made. A gentleman in London, who makes chanters, once gave me a new one, merely for letting him take a model of my old one, with the size of the bore and the place for the holes. You tell a good chanter by the tone, and some is as sweet as a piano. My old chanter has got rather too sharp by old age, and it’s lost its tone; for when a stick gets too sharp a sound, it’s never no good. This chanter was played by my family in the battles of Wallace and Bruce, and at the battle of Bannockburn, and every place whenever any of the Macgregor clan fought. These are the traditions given from family to family. I heard it from my father, and now I tell my lads, and they know it as well as I do myself. My great grandfather played on this stick when Charley Stuart, the Pretender, came over to Scotland from France, and he played on it before the Prince himself, at Stirling and the Island of Skye, and at Preston Pans and Culloden. It was at Preston Pans that the clans were first formed, and
could be told by their tartans – the Macgregors, and the Stuart, and the Macbeths, and the Camerons, and all of them. I had three brothers older than me, but I’ve got this chanter, for I begged it of them. It’s getting too old to play on, and I’ll have a copper box made for it, and just carry it at my side, if God is good to me, and gives me health to live three weeks.

‘About my best friends in London are the French people – they are the best I can meet, they come next to the Highlanders. When I meet a Highlander he will, if he’s only just a labouring man, give me a few coppers. A Highlander will never close his eye upon me. It’s the Lowlander that is the worse to me. They never takes no notice of me when I’m passing: they’ll smile and cast an eye as I pass by. Many a time I’ll say to them when they pass, “Well, old chap, you don’t like the half-naked men, I know you don’t!” and many will say, “No, I don’t!” I never play the pipes when I go through the Lowlands – I’d as soon play poison to them. They never give anything. It’s the Lowlanders that get the Scotch a bad name for being miserable, and keeping their money, and using a small provision. They’re a disgrace to their country.

‘The Highlander spends his money as free as a duke. If a man in the 93rd had a shilling in his pocket, it was gone before he could turn it twice. All the Lowlanders would like to be Highlanders if they could, and they learn Gaelic, and then marry Highland lassies, so as to become Highlanders. They have some clever regiments composed out of the Lowlanders, but they have only three regiments and the Highlanders have seven; yet there’s nearly three to one more inhabitants in the Lowlands. It’s a strange thing, they’d sooner take an Irishman into a Highland regiment than a Lowlander. They owe them such a spleen, they don’t like them. Bruce was a Lowlander, and he betrayed Wallace; and the Duke of Buccleuch, who was a Lowlander, betrayed Stuart.

‘I never go playing at public-houses, for I don’t like such places. I am not a drinker, for as much whisky as will fill a teaspoon will lay me up for a day. If I take anything, it’s a sup of porter. I went once into a public-house, and there was a woman drinking in it, and she was drunk. It was the landlord told me to come inside. She told me to leave the house, and I said the master told me to come: then she took up one of these pewter pots and hit me in the forehead. It was very sore for three weeks afterwards, and made a hole. I wouldn’t prosecute her.

‘My little boy that goes about is fourteen years old, and he’s as straight and well-formed as if he was made of wax-work. He’s the one that shall have the chanter, if anybody does; but I’m rather doubtful about it, for he’s not steady enough, and I think I’ll leave it to a museum.

‘If I had a good set of pipes, there’s not many going about the streets could play better; but my pipes are not in good order. I’ve got three tunes for one that the Queen’s piper plays; and I can play in a far superior style, for he plays in the military style. McKay the former piper to her majesty, he was reckoned as good a player as there is in Scotland. I knew him very well, and many and many a time I’ve played with him. He was took bad in the head and obliged to go back to Scotland. He is in the Isle of Skye now. I belong to Peterhead. If I had a good set of pipes I wouldn’t be much afraid of playing with any of the pipers.

‘In the country towns I would sometimes be called into Highland gentlemen’s houses, to play to them, but never in London.

‘I make all my reeds myself to put in the stick. I make them of Spanish cane. It’s the outer glazed bark of it. The nearer you go to the shiny part, the harder the reed is, and the longer it lasts. In Scotland they use the Spanish cane. I have seen a man, at one time, who made a reed out of a piece of white thorn, and it sounded as well as ever a reed I saw sound; but I never see a man who could make them, only one.’

[pp. 216–20] ‘I’ve been on and off at photographic-portrait taking since its commencement – that is to say, since they were taken cheap – two years this summer. I lodged in a room in Lambeth, and I used to take them in the back-yard – a kind of garden; I used to take a blanket off the bed, and used to tack it on a clothes-horse, and my mate used to hold it, if the wind was high, whilst I took the portrait.

‘The reason why I took to photographing was, that I thought I should like it better than what I was at. I was out busking and drag-pitching with a banjo then. Busking is going into public-houses and playing, and singing, and dancing; and drag-pitching is going out in the day down the little courts – tidy places, little terraces, no thoroughfares, we call drags. I’m a very determined chap, and when I take a hidea into my head I always do it somehow or other. I didn’t know any thing about photographs then, not a mite, but I saved up my money; sometimes a 1
s
.; if I had a good day, 1
s
. 6
d
.; and my wife she went to work at day boot-binding, and at night dancing at a exhibition, or such-like (she’s a tolerable good dancer – a penny exhibition or a parade dancer at fairs; that is, outside a show); sometimes she is Mademoiselle, or Madame, or what it may be. I got a loan of 3
l
. (and had to pay 4
l
. 3
s
. for it), and with what I’d saved, I managed to get together 5
l
. 5
s
., and I went to Gilbert Flemming’s, in
Oxford-street, and bought a complete apparatus for taking pictures; 6½ by 4¾, for 5
l
. 5
s
. Then I took it home and opened the next day to take portraits for what we could get – 1
s
. and over. I never knew anything about taking portraits then, though they showed me when I bought the apparatus (but that was as good as nothing, for it takes months to learn). But I had cards ready printed to put in the window before I bought the apparatus. The very next day I had the camera, I had a customer before I had even tried it, so I tried it on him, and I gave him a black picture (for I didn’t know how to make the portrait, and it was all black when I took the glass out), and told him that it would come out bright as it dried, and he went away quite delighted. I took the first Sunday after we had opened 1
l
. 5
s
. 6
d
., and everybody was quite pleased with their spotted and black pictures, for we still told them they would come out as they dried. But the next week they brought them back to be changed, and I could do them better, and they had middling pictures – for I picked it up very quick.

‘I had one fellow for a half-guinea portrait, and he was from Woolwich, and I made him come three times, like a lamb, and he stood pipes and ’bacca, and it was a thundering bad one after all. He was delighted, and he swears now it’s the best he ever had took, for it don’t fade, but will stop black to the end of the world; though he remarks that I deceived him in one thing, for it don’t come out bright.

‘You see, when first photography come up I had my eye on it, for I could see it would turn me in something some time. I went and worked as a regular labourer, carrying pails and so on, so as to try and learn something about chemistry; for I always had a hankling after science. Me and Jim was out at Stratford, pitching with the banjo, and I saw some men coming out of a chemical works, and we went to “nob” them (that’s get some halfpence out of them). Jim was tambo beating, and we was both black, and they called us lazy beggars, and said we ought to work as they did. So we told them we couldn’t get work, we had no characters. As we went home I and Jim got talking, and he says, “What a fine thing if we could get into the berth, for you’d soon learn about them portraits if you get among the chemicals;” so I agreed to go and try for the situation, and told him that if I got the berth I’d “nanti panka his nabs snide;” that means, I wouldn’t turn him up, or act nasty to him, but would share money the same as if we were pitching again. That slang is mummers’ slang, used by strolling professionals.

‘I stopped there for near twelve months, on and off. I had 10
s
. at first, but I got up to 16
s
.; and if I’d stopped I’ve no doubt I should have been foreman of one of the departments, for I got at last to almost the management
of the oxalic acid. They used to make sulphate of iron – ferri sulp is the word for it – and carbonate of iron, too, and I used to be like the red man of Agar then, all over red, and a’most thought of cutting that to go for a soldier, for I shouldn’t have wanted a uniform. Then I got to charging the retorts to make carbonate of ammonia, and from that I went to oxalic acid.

‘At night me and Jim used to go out with the banjo and tamborine, and we could manage to make up our shares to from 18
s
. to a guinea a week each; that is, sharing my wages and all; for when we chum together we always panka each other bona (that is, share). We always made our ponta (that is, a pound) a week, for we could average our duey bionk peroon a darkey,’ or two shillings each, in the night.

‘That’s how I got an idea of chemicals, and when I went to photography many of the very things I used to manufacture was the very same as we used to take portraits, such as the hyposulphate of soda, and the nitrate of silver, and the sulphate of iron.

‘One of the reasons why I couldn’t take portraits was, that when I bought my camera at Flemming’s he took a portrait of me with it to show me how to use it, and as it was a dull afternoon he took 90 seconds to produce the picture. So, you see, when I went to work I thought I ought to let my pictures go the same time; and hang me if I didn’t, whether the sun was shining or not. I let my plate stop 90 seconds, and of course they used to come out overdone and quite white, and as the evening grew darker they came better. When I got a good one I was surprised, and that picture went miles to be shown about. Then I formed an idea that I had made a miscalculation as to my time, and by referring to the sixpenny book of instructions I saw my mistake, and by the Sunday – that was five days after – I was very much improved, and by a month I could take a very tidy picture.

‘I was getting on so well I got some of my portraits, when they was good ones, put in a chandler’s shop; and to be sure I got first-rate specimens. I used to go to the different shilling portrait galleries and have a likeness of myself or friends done, to exhibit in my own window. That’s the way I got my samples to begin with, and I believe it’s done all over London.

‘I kept at this all the winter, and all the time I suppose I earned 30
s
. a week. When summer come again I took a place with a garden in the Old Kent-road, and there I done middling, but I lost the majority of my business by not opening on a Sunday, for it was a religious neighbourhood, and I could have earned my 5
l
. a week comfortable, for as it was I cleared my 2
l
. regular. Then I had a regular tent built up out of clothes-horses.
I stopped there till I had an offer of a good situation, and I accepted of it, at 2
l
. a week.

‘My new place was in Whitechapel, and we lowered the price from a shilling to sixpence. We did well there, that is the governor did, you know, for I’ve taken on the average from 60 to 100 a day, varying in price from sixpence to half-a-guinea, and the majority was shilling ones. The greatest quantity I ever took was 146 in one day, and 124 was taken away as they was done. The governor used to take 20
l
. a week, and of that 8
l
. clear profit, after paying me 2
l
., the men at the door 24
s
., a man and woman 29
s
., and rent 2
l
. My governor had, to my knowledge, 11 other shops, and I don’t know all of his establishments; I managed my concern for him, and he never come near us sometimes for a month.

‘I left on my own accord after four months, and I joined two others on equal shares, and opened a place of my own in Southwark. Unfortunately, I begun too late in the season, or I should have done well there; but at first we realised about 2
l
. a week each, and up to last week we have shared our 25
s
. a head.

‘Sunday is the best day for shilling portraits; in fact, the majority is shilling ones, because then, you see, people have got their wages, and don’t mind spending. Nobody knows about men’s ways better than we do. Sunday and Monday is the Derby-day like, and then after that they are about cracked up and done. The largest amount I’ve taken at Southwark on a Sunday is 80 – over 4
l
. worth, but then in the week-days it’s different; Sunday’s 15
s
. we think that very tidy, some days only 3
s
. or 4
s
.