Tag: hawking

‘A great nuisance’ but a dedicated body of men and women. How the Salvation Army got their message to the people

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Yesterday’s blog concerned the Salvation Army with two of their ‘soldiers’ being warned about annoying a local man with the ‘infernal din’ they made playing music outside his house on a Sunday. That was in 1896 when the organization was beginning to establish itself in late Victorian society. It was still an object of suspicion for some, and ridicule for others but it was well on its way to being widely recognized as the charitable religious body it is regarded as today.

William Booth had founded the East London Christian mission in 1865 and adopted the name ‘The Salvation Army’ in 1878. Booth and his wife Catherine (pictured below right) were Methodists and their intention was to bring religion and abstinence from alcohol to the poor of the East End. Unusually for the time Catherine (and all women in the mission) was able to preach on the same terms as her husband. In the early 1880s the Salvation Army began to expand its operations overseas, opening branches in the USA, Ireland and Australia and of course their success was in no small part due to their ability to promote the Army and to as many possible ‘volunteers’ as possible.

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They did this by public meetings and marches, all accompanied by brass bands made up of members, a military system of organization (with “General’ Booth at the head), and by selling their weekly paper, The War Cry. This was sold on the streets and in public houses and, as this case from 1882 shows, this could sometimes bring them into dispute with the local constabulary.

Thomas Dawson was an unlikely looking occupant of the dock at the City Police court. He was described as being about 30 years of age, ‘delicate looking’ and wearing the uniform of the Salvation Army. He had been summoned for ‘obstructing the footway in Liverpool Street’ while attempting to hawk copies of the Army’s publication.

Appearing for the City of London police chief inspector Tillcock said that there had been a growing problem with Sally Army men and women standing on the streets and drawing crowds. It was ‘a great nuisance’ he stated and caused by the ‘peculiar actions and dress’ of those involved. Perhaps the public was curious and stopped to hear what the soldiers of Booth’s army had to say; I suspect some stopped to harangue them as misguided or laugh at their costumes.

PC 934 City had tried to move Dawson on several times but each time the man had simply returned to the same position and carried on his business. When challenged about it in court Dawson declared that he had just as much right to sell the paper as anyone else and was causing no more obstruction than a Punch and Judy show. He felt the constable was picking on him because he didn’t like the message the Army was keen to broadcast but he wasn’t about to stop for anyone. The Salvation Army was, he stated in court, ‘something they wanted everyone to know about’.

Sir Robert Carden, the presiding magistrate, found for the police and begged to differ regarding the merits of an organization that took a doctrinal position that differed from the established, Anglican, church. Regardless of the virtues of the War Cry or the Army’s message he couldn’t allow the obstruction of City roads and pavements so he fined him 2s 6d plus costs and warned him that if he came before him on a similar charge again he would double the fine. Dawson asked the justice what the alternative to paying the fine was.

‘Three days imprisonment’ he was told. He thanked the magistrate and was taken into custody. Perhaps he preferred to suffer some gaol time rather than reducing the income of the Army. If so he was a very dedicated soldier for the cause and that probably tells us all we need to know about the eventual success of the Salvation Army. Whatever we might think of it, or the people that sign up as new recruits, it was men and women like Thomas Dawson that  helped ensure that William and Catherine Booth’s vision prospered and developed into the global charity it is today.

[from The Illustrated Police News etc, Saturday, April 29, 1882]

‘What could parsons, bishops, politicians, and the editors of the daily press do without lying’? An Anarchist exposé of hypocrisy

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In 1884 the Imperial Federation League was formed in London and in several other colonial cities throughout the empire. Its aim was to create a federation of self-governing states under the umbrella of the British Empire. At the heart lay the idea of British Nationalism – a greater Great Britain if you will – and was very much concerned with white nationalism.

In a break from my usual sources for this blog I’ve had a look at the political newspapers that are made available via Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Within these I found an article in The Anarchist from September 1885 which references the notion of a ‘Federation of the Empire’ and the racism that underpinned it.

It reported that a number of ‘Indians’ had applied to a district court which was presided over by a Police Magistrate named Mr Panton. The group wanted to obtain license to trade on the streets door to door (hawking) but were refused. The writers was indignant on their behalf:

‘Those Indians are our fellow-citizens, members of the same empire; but they are unfit to hawk goods in this part of the world! We have seen several of them about the streets, and were impressed with their cleanly appearance and respectable bearing. For hawkers, we thought them a immense improvement on any of our own race that we have seen in the same trade’.

The article goes onto say:

‘And what of the Chinese? They hawk and very properly too. And they are not of the same empire. We presume were China conquered and annexed to the British Empire, all Chinese would be refused hawker’s’ licenses here. This is a good commentary on the Federation craze’.

The author ends by declaring that his society accused ‘swarthy Indians’ of being ‘noted liars! Ah, that is sad. But is that any reason they should be refused hawkers’ licenses?’ he asks.

‘have we no liars in Melbourne of the British race? What could parsons, bishops, politicians, and the editors of the daily press do without lying? To honestly carry our any law against lying would be to shut up most of the churches, most of the newspapers, to stop most trades, to abolish royalty, levees, parliaments, and what not.

Let us have fair play all round, and favor to none, whether truthful or not’.

Despite having some popular political support in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the IFL never managed to persuade enough politicians that it was viable and the outbreak of war in 1914 effectively killed it as an idea. However, there it has remerged as a possible solution to life after Brexit; CANZUK (a political union of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK) has been mooted as a viable alternative economic force to the EU.

[from The Anarchist, Tuesday, September 15, 1885]

Two thieves ‘going snowing’ are caught by the peeled eyes of a child detective.

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I have a dictionary of underworld slang on my shelves. It is a fascinating compendium of words associated with crime, criminals and punishment. There are dozens of words for policeman for example, very few of them nice ones! Much of it is thieves ‘cant’; slant – such as cockney rhyming slang – used to conceal meaning and confound attempts at arrest or prosecution. So we get slang words or phrases for certain sorts of offences, many of them to do with different kinds of theft.

One of these is ‘going snowing’. Nothing to do with the inclement weather we are currently experiencing but instead a reference to stealing clothes or linen from washing lines.

Ruth Williams and Catherine Conway usually earned their living by selling (or ‘hawking’) lace on the streets. I rather suspect that they weren’t always absolutely honest in revealing the sources of the materials they sold on, and in December 1849 a sharp-eyed young girl landed them in court.

Williams and Conway entered the garden of house in Chelsea and knocked on the door, offering to sell some of their lace. As Williams discussed her goods with the woman at the door Conway stayed close to a line of washing drying nearby. When she was quite sure she wasn’t being watched she must have snatched a few items from the line and concealed them about her person. The pair then made off, no doubt to try the scam elsewhere.

However, this time they had been observed. The house belonged to the Walbedge family and their 11 year-old daughter had been carefully watching the two strangers from the moment they arrived. As soon as they left through the gates the girl ran to tell her mother that she thought she’d seen them steal some linen.

Mrs Walbedge quickly despatched the child to follow the women at a  distance, to see where they went. Meanwhile she checked, and discovered that they had indeed been robbed. The little girl stuck to her task and followed the thieves for ‘some considerable distance’ before she met a policeman, ‘quietly’ told him what she’d seen and had the pair arrested.

Back at the police station the women were searched and the missing linen found on them. When they appeared at Westminster Police Court they were committed for trial on the child’s evidence. Shaw Taylor would be have been proud – ‘keep ’em peeled’ as he used to say on Junior Police Five.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, December 14, 1849]

The pair don’t seem to have made it to the Old Bailey on this occasion but just two years later a Catherine Conway was acquitted of a very similar theft (of a shirt that was wet, suggesting it had come from a line), in a location not that far from this one.