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continually “What do you lack … Will you buy …” The cry of the “mercury-women,” “Londons Gazette here,” was eventually superseded by that of the newsboy with his “Pa-a-par!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