London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  Even as the poor trader died-or left some scanty stock to another-his or her cry was taken up like an echo. It was certainly true that, as Addison wrote in 1711, “People know the Wares they deal in rather by their Tunes than by their Words.” The words were often indistinct or indistinguishable: the mender of old chairs was recognised by his low and melancholy note, while the retailer of broken glass specialised in a sort of plaintive shriek quite appropriate to his goods. But even the music itself might become confused and confusing. The vendor of shrimps could adopt the same tune as the vendor of watercress, and potatoes were sold with the same cry as that of cherries.

  There was also in the passage of years, or centuries, the steady clipping or abbreviation of jargon. “Will you buy any milk today, mistress” became “Milk maids below,” then “Milk below,” then “Milk-o” and, finally, “Mieu” or “Mee-o.” “Old clothes” became “Ogh clo” or “owld clo.” “Salted hake” became “Poor Jake” or “Poor Jack”; then “Poor John” became the recognisable phrase for the vendors of dried cod. The chimney-sweep’s cry became “’we-ep” or “’e-ep” and Pierce Egan, author of Life in London, recalled “one man from whom I could never make out more than happy happy happy now.”

  As London grew larger and noisier, the cries became louder-perhaps, even, more desperate and more hysterical. From a distance of half a mile, they were a low, steady and continuous roar much like a fall of water; they became a Niagara of voices. But in the middle of the city, they were a great turmoil of notes. London to foreign observers was “a distracted City” and Samuel Johnson noted that “The attention of a new-comer is generally first struck by the multiplicity of the cries that stun him in the street.” Stun, stunner, stunning-it is a true London word. As the print salesman said of his wares placed in an upturned umbrella-“It’ll show stunnin’, and sell as yer goes.”

  The cries of the street-seller were joined by those of the “common criers” who announced such items of public news as “If any man or woman can tell any tydyngs of a grey mare, with a long mane and a short tayle …” There were the shopkeepers of Cheapside, Paternoster Row, East Cheap and a hundred other localities calling out continually “What do you lack … Will you buy …” The cry of the “mercury-women,” “Londons Gazette here,” was eventually superseded by that of the newsboy with his “Pa-a-par! ainy of the mornin’ pipers.” The horn of the sow-gelder plying his trade mingled with the bell of the dustman and the sound of the “Twancking of a brass Kettle or a Frying-pan” together with the myriad and unending sounds of the London traffic.

  Today, street markets are still alive with chatter and patter; most of the cries have vanished, although even in the twenty-first century you might still hear the bell of the muffin-man or the horn of the knife-grinder and see the pony-and-trap of the “any-old-iron” or rag-and-bone man. There were also the barrow man with “Shrimps and winkles all alive-o,” the lavender seller, and the “lilywhite” celery and watercress man who cried out, “’Ere’s yer salory and watercreases.”

  In the past there were also the ballad-singers and the street patterers and the peripatetic vocalists and the almanac vendors and the “flying stationers” who would take up their pitch on any corner and sell single sheets on juicy murders or fashionable songs.

  Perhaps the oldest form was the broadside, a sheet printed on one side which bore the latest news and the newest sensations. From the earliest years of the sixteenth century this was the language of the street-“Sir Walter Raleigh His Lamentations! … Strange News from Sussex … No Natural Mother But a Monster …” Alongside these “headlines,” as they might appropriately be called, were such broadside ballads as “A Maydens Lamentation For A Bedfellow Or I Can Nor Will No Longer Lye Alone … The Mans Comfortable Answer To The Mayden … This Maid Would Give Ten Shillings For A Kiss.” These were the songs which were shouted down the streets and pasted on the walls. Their vendors did not expect to get paid for their voices but, instead, drew a crowd and then sold their wares for a halfpenny a sheet. There was of course an especial delight in “Last Dying Speeches” sold to the crowd at the very moment of execution by “flying patterers” otherwise known as “death hunters.” In a city which lived upon rumour, sensation and sudden alterations of mass feeling, the crying out of news and the singing of popular ballads were the perfect forms of communication. The politic John Dryden was not able to compete with the political ballad, “Lillibullero,” which outsold him in every sense, and another balladeer wrote: “Dryden thy Wit has catterwauld too long,/Now Lero Lero is the only song.” Songs, like slogans and catchphrases, could sweep through the streets for days or weeks before being utterly forgotten.

  Then new songs, together with an old ballad for company, would in turn become part of a “long song” which comprised several ballads printed together on a roll of paper. They might also come into the hands of the “pinner up” who fastened many hundreds of ballads on iron railings or an area of “dead wall.” In the 1830s some eight hundred yards of wall on the south side of Oxford Street were used to display these song-sheets, until the arrival of shops and shop-fronts transformed the thoroughfare.

  Yet some ballads retained their individual popularity for many years. “Willikins and his Dinah,” “Billy Barlow” and “The Rat-Catcher’s Daughter” remained great favourites with the London crowd-the pretty daughter of the rat-catcher herself having “such a sweet loud voice, sir,/You could hear her all down Parliament Street/And as far as Charing Cross, sir.” She was representative of those itinerant street-performers whose lives were often as pathetic and terrible as the ballads they sang. They performed mainly in the evening, sometimes accompanied by a flute or a cracked guitar, and were to be found upon every corner from the Strand to Whitechapel. Charles Dickens recalled his encounter with one such “itinerant singer” by the Upper Marsh on the south side of the river-“Singing! How few of those who pass such a miserable creature as this, think of the anguish of heart, the sinking of soul and spirit, which the very effort of singing produces!”

  The ballad-singer had as a counterpart in the London streets the “running patterer” who cried out the romances and tragedies of the day. Henry Mayhew described their activities in his usual laconic style: “It is … a ‘mob’ or ‘school’ of the running patterers (for both these words are used) and consists of two, three or four men. All these men state that the greater the noise they make, the better the chance of sale.” They would often take up positions in different parts of the street and pretend to vie with each other for attention, thus heightening interest in the latest crime, murder, elopement or execution. Once again, the requisite in the city is sheer volume of noise.

  Commotion and rumour are certainly more important than “truth,” if that commodity can ever actually be found in London, and the patterer often supplied his auditors with “cock”-politely described as a “pleasing fiction”-which was then sold as a “catchpenny.” The offender was known as a “cock-crower” and sometimes advertised his false wares with a lurid picture, often incorporating the London motifs of blood and flame mounted upon a pole.

  It would be unfair to scorn these products of native art. Joshua Reynolds confessed that he borrowed a motif from a woodcut he had found pinned to a dead wall; Walter Scott studied street literature, chapbooks and ballads to stimulate his interest in folk myth and history. It is important to emphasise once again how Cockney taste can enter and animate a more “refined” cultural tradition.

  The voices of the running patterers and the itinerant singers were invariably joined by the often discordant airs of the street musicians. Hector Berlioz, visiting London in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote that “no city in the world” was consumed so much by music; despite his profession, he was concerned less with the melodies of the concert hall than with those of the barrel-organ, the barrel-piano, the bagpipes and the drums which filled the streets. As Charles Booth noted in his survey of the East End, “let a barrel organ strike up a valse at any corner and
at once the girls who may be walking past, and the children out of the gutter, begin to foot it merrily. Men join in sometimes, two young men together as likely as not,” while an appreciative crowd watched the dancing.

  There were German bands, as well as Indian drummers and blacked-up “Abyssians” who played violin, guitar, tambourine and castanets; there were glee singers, and minstrels (generally a couple) who could be heard crooning “Oh where is my boy tonight?” and “Will you meet me at the Fountain?” In the 1840s there was a blind musician who played the violoncello with his feet, and a crippled trumpeter who drove around in a dog-cart.

  The cacophony was immense and yet, in one of those gradual but necessary transitions of London life, most of it has passed away leaving only buskers to entertain cinema queues and inventive players of illegal music in the underpasses of London’s transport system.

  CHAPTER 18. Signs of the Times

  An eighteenth-century traveller remarked that “if towns were to be called after the first words which greeted a traveller on arrival, London would be called Damn it!” At the beginning of the twentieth century it would have been called “Bloody” and today “Fuckin’.”

  “Fucking” is one of the longest-serving terms of abuse, having been heard on the London streets since the thirteenth century, and it is perhaps no surprise that the prevalent adjective applied to the language of Londoners is “disgusting.” The “disgust” is a response to that undertow of violence and anger which exemplifies life in the city, while such miseries as sexual abuse may have testified to the distaste which Londoners have had for their own fallen and once dirty condition. Contemporary standards of hygiene and more liberal sexual mores have not, however, materially diminished the “fucking” and “cunts” heard in the street. Perhaps modern Londoners are simply mouthing the words which the city itself has bequeathed to them.

  In this context the obscene gesture should not be forgotten. In the sixteenth century a biting of the thumb represented aggression; this in turn led to the hat being cocked backwards and, in the late eighteenth century, “by a jerk of the thumb over the left shoulder.” The thumb then moved to the tip of the nose to represent contempt, and by the twentieth century two fingers were raised in the air as a “V” sign. The arm and elbow were then employed in an upward thrust to suggest derision.

  The hand gestures of the street could also be free of sexual innuendo. There was once, everywhere, a pointing hand on the palm of which a destination was offered-“please to go this way,” whether to an eating-house or a toyshop. London was a city of signs. In 1762, according to Jenny Uglow’s Hogarth, the “Society of Sign Painters” announced a “Grand Exhibition” of its products, and in some rooms off Bow Street were exhibited “Keys, Bells, Swords, Poles, Sugar-Loaves, Tobacco Rolls, Candles,” all the “ornamental Furniture, carved in Wood.” It was meant as a reproof to the more tasteful productions of the Society of Arts, but its comic variety was also a testimony to an ancient but still living tradition of street art.

  Once a pole draped with red rags was the emblem of the barber-surgeon who was permitted to bleed customers on his premises, the pole itself a token of the wooden rod which the customer held to keep his arm steady. The red rag later turned into a red stripe, until it became the customary barber’s pole of succeeding centuries. Almost every house, and certainly every trade, had its own sign so that the streets of the city were a perpetual forest of painted imagery: “Floure de Lice … Ravyns Head … Corniyshe coughs … The Chalice … The Cardinal’s Hat.” There were images of chained bears and of rising suns, of sailing ships and angels, of red lions and golden bells. There were also simple tokens of residence. Mr. Bell, for example, might hang the sign of a bell outside his house. But there were also well-known, if somewhat surprising, conjunctions in pub signs such as the Dog and Gridiron or the Three Nuns and a Hare. There were unusual attributions, too. As Addison pointed out, “I have seen a Goat set up before the Door of a Perfumer, and the French King’s Head at a Sword-Cutlers’s.” Tom Jones, in Henry Fielding’s novel of that name, takes up the litany: “Here we saw Joseph’s Dream, the Bull and Mouth, the Hen and Razor, the Ax and Bottle, the Whale and Crow, the Shovel and Boot, the Leg and Star, the Bible and Swan, the Frying Pan and Drum.” Adam and Eve represented a fruiterer, while the horn of a unicorn symbolised the shop of an apothecary; a bag of nails denoted an ironmonger, a row of coffins a carpenter. A sign of male and female hands conjoined might sometimes be completed by the message “Marriages performed within.”

  It was a question of reading the street, of making the right associations and connections in an environment which needed a thorough decoding to mitigate its chaos and variety. Interpretative tracts, such as the elegantly titled Vade Mecum for Malt Worms, were also published. In 1716 John Gay gave best expression to the situation, however, in “The Art of Walking The Streets in London”-a theme taken up by many writers-with his portrait of a stranger who “dwells on ev’ry Sign, with stupid Gaze/Enters the narrow Alley’s doubtful Maze.”

  There were also signs and plaques carved into the stone of London’s buildings. Small tablets marked newly laid-out streets-“This is Johns Street Ano Dom 1685”-while corporate heraldry was employed in the “arms” of a district or company affixed to various buildings; the symbol of St. Marylebone contains lilies and roses, because these were the flowers found in the grave of St. Mary after whom the district is named. At a later date even the lowly coal-hole covers were richly decorated, so that those who preferred to look down upon the ground were still assaulted by symbols of dogs and flowers. A nailed hoop upon a door or wall denoted the presence of fresh paint, while a small bouquet of straw meant that building work was taking place in the vicinity.

  The city is indeed a labyrinth of signs, with the occasional but unnerving suspicion that there may exist no other reality than these painted symbols which demand your attention while leading you astray. As one commentator said of the modern and brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus, “it is a wonderful sight-unless you can read.”

  The signs of the city were distracting in another sense. They hung out so far from the wall that they touched those on the opposite side of the street, and they were sometimes so large that they blocked out sight of the sky. They could also be dangerous; they were meant to be placed at least nine feet above the level of the pavement, so that a horse and rider could pass beneath, but the regulation was not always obeyed. They were very heavy and there were occasions when the weight of sign and leaden support was too great for the wall to which they were fixed-one “front-fall” of this kind in Fleet Street injured several people and killed “two young ladies, a cobbler, and the king’s jeweller.” On windy days in the capital, the noise was ominous, their “creaking Noise” a sure sign of impending “rainy Floods.” So, in the same years as the exhibition of street signs off Bow Street, the city authorities concluded that they had become an impediment to the ever increasing traffic of the streets and ordered that they be taken down. Ten years later came street numbers.

  But all colour was not lost. The passion for street art simply changed its form, with the expansion of advertising. There had always been posters wrapped around the wooden posts of the street to publicise the latest auction or the latest play, but only after the demise of street signs did other forms of public art properly emerge. By the early nineteenth century London had “grown wondrously pictorial” with a variety of papier-mâché ornaments or paintings placed in shop windows to denote the trade of the occupant. An essay in The Little World of London, entitled “Commercial Art,” lingers pleasurably on these objets d’art. Many coffee houses had a symbol of loaf and cheese together with cup; fishmongers painted the walls of their premises with “a group of fish in the grand style” all variously and picturesquely coloured, while grocers specialised in “conversation pieces” which portrayed various benevolent London matrons “assembled round the singing kettle or the simmering urn.” Boots, cigars and sealing wax, in gigantic form, were al
so suspended over the doors of various premises, while the destruction of Pompeii seemed a fitting advertisement for a patent cockroach exterminator.

  One great innovation of the nineteenth century was the advertising hoarding, and in some of the earliest photographs of London they can be seen lining the streets and the new railway stations offering everything from Pear’s Soap to the Daily Telegraph. Advertising was in that sense very much part of the ideal of “progress,” since the hoardings themselves had first been erected to protect the streets from the myriad building sites and railway improvements. Once posters had been enlarged to cover these wooden frames, then advertising images appropriate to the city itself-large, gaudy, colourful- began to emerge. There were certain popular sites, among them the north end of Waterloo Bridge and the dead wall beside the English Opera House in North Wellington Street. Here, according to Charles Knight’s London, could be found “rainbow-hued placards vying in gorgeous extravagance of colour with Turner’s last new picture … pictures of pens, gigantic as the plumes in the casque of the Castle of Otranto … spectacles of enormous size … Irishmen dancing under the influence of Guinness’s Dublin Stout.”

  “A London Street Scene,” painted by J.O. Parry in 1833, could serve as an introduction to any street scene over the last two centuries. A small blackened sweep-boy looks up in admiration as a poster for a new performance of Otello is placed over one advertising John Parry in The Sham Prince; there is a bill proclaiming “Mr. Matthews-At Home,” “Tom amp; Jerry-The Christening-!!!!!!” and a narrow strip asking “Have You Seen The Industrious Fleas?” Thus the walls of the city become a palimpsest of forthcoming, recent and old sensations.

  On a dead wall today, close to where I am now writing this book, and not far from the site of the 1833 painting, can be seen posters for “Armageddon,” “To Heathrow in Fifteen Minutes,” “Mr. Love Pants Is Coming,” “Meltdown ’98 Festival,” “Drugstore-Sober-New Single Available,” “Apostle” and “The Girl With Brains In Her Feet.” More mysterious advertisements suggest that “There’s A Revolution In Sight,” that “The Magic Is Closer Than You Think,” and that “Nothing Else Moves Me.”