London Bridge is broken down,
Broken down, broken down,
London Bridge is broken down,
My fair lady.
In its twelve verses it evokes a bridge that is continually being destroyed and rebuilt. Thus “Wood and clay will wash away … Bricks and mortar will not stay … Iron and steel will bend and bow … Silver and gold will be stolen away.” Why should such strange sentiments issue from the mouths of London children, unless it be a reference to the ancient belief that only the sacrifice of a child can placate the river and preserve the bridge unnaturally set across it? The Opies themselves suggest that the song “is one of the few, perhaps the only one, in which there is justification for suggesting that it preserves the memory of a dark and terrible rite of past times”; they then describe the connection of child-sacrifice with the building of bridges. So the singing child is alluding to a dreadful destiny within the city, and perhaps there is also an intimation that London itself can only be reared and protected by the sacrifice of children.
There is some element of this fatal relationship in that other great London song, “Oranges and Lemons,” where the invocation of old London churches reaches a climactic moment with the lines
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Again the origins of this verse are mysterious. It has been suggested that they allude to the journey of a condemned man to the scaffold, when the bells of London rang out to mark the stages of his progress, or that in some way the song commemorates the bloody marital career of Henry VIII. Yet its power resides in its almost magical invocation of sacred places, with their names ringing out like an incantation. “Ring ye Bells at Whitechapple … Ring ye Bells Aldgate” as well as those at St. Catherine’s, at St. Clement’s, at Old Bailey, at Fleetditch, at Stepney and at Paul’s. A sacred as well as ferocious city is being invoked. It could be suggested, then, that death was often in the minds of London children.
“Pray, do tell me the time, for I have let my watch run down.”
“Why, ’tis half an Hour past Hanging-time, and time to hang again.”
In one of those silent patterns of oral mnemonics “hanging” became “kissing,” although of course the halter was known as “the kiss” or “the cheat.”
The point of rhymes and riddles was to train the perceptions of small children, so that they might learn how to survive in a difficult environment. That is why there is a tradition of sharpness and impertinence among young Londoners. When Winston Churchill met a boy outside Downing Street and asked him to stop whistling, the child replied: “Why should I? You can shut your ears, can’t you?” Aubrey and Swift collected examples of wit and sallies from street children, as have other compilers from Dickens and Mayhew to the Opies. The “artful dodger” is perhaps only a slightly dramatised version of any “street-wise” London child, that imp of the perverse who seems somehow to have inherited all the levelling and egalitarian spirit of the city in his or her own small person.
There was a film made just after the Second World War, entitled Hue and Cry, in which a boy’s quick-witted observations thwart a criminal gang. He is asked, “So you’re the boy who sees visions in the streets of London?” It is a question which might have been posed in the early medieval city. In a climactic scene of the same film the criminals are pursued by a gang of children across the bomb-sites and ruined buildings of the Blitz; here again is an eternal image of urban childhood. There are many pictures and descriptions of the London child against a background of flames, of the child carried to safety during the incursions of Boudicca or the depredations of the Great Fire, yet somehow the image of children clambering over ruins is more poignant. Whether it be Saxon children playing among the vestiges of Roman London, or twentieth-century children leaping among the bomb-sites of the Second World War, it summons up associations of eternal renewal and invincible energy which are precisely the characteristics of London itself.
Boys and girls come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep,
And join your playfellows in the street.
This mysterious image of streets filled with play is amplified by Zechariah VIII: 5-“And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the street thereof.” Children can be found clustering in certain areas for play, among them Exmouth Market, the Commercial Road, south and east of the Elephant and Castle, along the Goswell Road, and of course the scores of small parks and recreation grounds which echo across the capital. Certain areas seem to draw them towards games, as if the presence of the children will soften them and render them inhabitable. Children, for example, always congregated east of Aldgate Pump.
In 1931 Norman Douglas published a scholarly volume entitled London Street Games, perhaps in order to preserve the memory of a world which he sensed to be in some kind of transition. But it is also a vivid memorial to the inventiveness and energy of London children, and an implicit testimony to the streets which harboured and protected their play. There were girls’ games such as “Mother I’m Over the Water” or “Turning Mother’s Wringer” and skipping-rope games such as “Nebuchadnezzer” and “Over the Moon.” Their voices rose to the tapping of their feet upon the pavement.
Charlie Chaplin, meek and mild,
Stole a sixpence from a child,
When the child began to cry,
Charlie Chaplin said goodbye.
The texture of the city itself can create opportunities for play. Marbles were rolled in the gutters, and the paving stones were marked with chalk for a hopping game. Children made use of walls, against which “fag-cards” were flicked in games such as “Nearest the Wall Takes” or “Nearest the Wall Spins Up.” It was remarked that these games “make the boys uncommonly nimble with their hands, and this must help them later on, if they go in for certain trades like watch-making.” Then there were the “touch” games, one entitled “London.” The game of “Follow My Leader” was popular in the streets of London, particularly in the suburbs: it included crossing the road at precarious moments, following the route of railway lines, or knocking upon street-doors. And there was an evening game called “Nicho Midnight” or “Flash Your Light”; as one Cockney boy put it, “You have to play in the dark because torches are no good in the daytime.” Street games can be played in the darkness of London because “sport is sweetest when there be no spectators.” That is why old tunnels, disused railways lines, dilapidated parks and small cemeteries have become the site of games. It is as if the children are hiding themselves from London. From that secluded vantage, the boisterous may jeer or throw missiles at passing adults, or shout insults such as “I’ll punch your teeth in!” An instinctive savagery and aggression often seem to be at work in the city air.
Some of the most poignant memorials of children date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Carvings of charity children, for example, are still to be seen in Holborn and Westminster. There were statuettes of schoolchildren by St. Mary, Rotherhithe, where a “Free School for eight sons of poor seamen” was established in 1613. Two children of Coade stone were placed outside St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, with badges numbered “25” and “31.” Those belonging to St. Bride’s School were three feet six inches in height, which is a token of the average size of the London child. There are children in Hatton Garden and Caxton Street and Vintner’s Place; some of them wear the costume dating back almost three hundred years, with blue coat and yellow stockings (apparently worn to ward off rats), and are a perpetual reminder of an otherwise forgotten aspect of London childhood. They can be associated with all the other stone or wooden representations of children within the city. The “fat boy” in Giltspur Street, the pannies boy in the Bread Market near St. Paul’s, the boys playing a game of marbles above a doorway on Laurence Pountney Hill, the child brandishing a telephone in Temple Place, all are images of the child living within the city but no
w, as it were, taken out of time. In that sense they embody the eternal nature of childhood itself.
Yet the city of time could still degrade them. A late sixteenth-century writer noted that “manye lytle prettie children, boyes and gyrles, doe wander up and downe in the stretes, loyter in Powles, and lye under hedges and stalles in the nights.” In the spring of 1661 Pepys records that “In several places I asked women whether they would sell me their children; that they denied me all, but said they would give me one to keep for them if I would.” Samuel Curwen, another seventeenth-century diarist, was walking down Holborn when he noticed a crowd of people around a coach filled with children. They were aged between six and seven, “young sinners who were accustomed to go about in the evenings stealing, filching and purloining whatever they could lay their little dirty claws on, and were going to be consigned into the hands of justice.” Most of such children had been abandoned by their masters, or by their parents, to fall upon the mercy of the streets. Benjamin and Grace Collier, as reported in the County Records of the late seventeenth century, “privately made away with their goods and run away, leaving their children destitute.” Sara Rainbow served in an alehouse in Long Alley, Little Moorfields, for nine years “with very much hardship and of late a month’s causeless imprisonment in Bridewell, and other great cruelties, which she could not endure.” In 1676 she ran away, together with her two brothers; one boy sold himself for five shillings to a clipper bound for Barbados, while the other was never seen again.
There are pictures of such children selling, or begging, or stealing, upon the streets, “almost naked and in the last degree miserable, eaten up with Vermin, and in such nasty Rags, that one could not distinguish by their Clothes what Sex they were of.” Contemporary illustrations verify this unhappy condition. One image of a street child shows him wearing the ragged clothing of an adult with a tattered greatcoat and pitifully torn breeches; his hat and shoes are much too large, and by his side he carries a tin bowl to be used both for drinking and for cooking. He seems to be of no age and of every age, the acquisition of cast-off adult clothing serving to emphasise this ambiguous status. These wandering children are as old, and as young, as the city itself.
The records of parish children in the eighteenth century are filled with images which provoke sorrowful contemplation. Foundling children were often named after the part of London where they were taken up; the registers of Covent Garden parish are replete with names such as Peter Piazza, Mary Piazza and Paul Piazza. The phrase for those dropped or abandoned was “children laid in the streets,” which itself is sufficiently evocative. The parish officers were given ten pounds for each child brought into their care, on which occasion there was a feast known as “saddling the spit”; it was assumed “that the child’s life would not be long, and therefore the money might be spent on jollification.” Once more it is the pagan nature of these urban rituals which requires emphasis. A general opinion prevailed “that a parish child’s life is worth no more than eight or nine months purchase,” and it seems likely that their deaths were hastened by unnatural means. A parliamentary report of 1716 revealed that “a great many poor infants and exposed bastard children are inhumanly suffered to die by the barbarity of nurses.” In one Westminster parish, only one child survived out of five hundred “laid in the streets.”
If they lived, the poor children were lodged in the parish workhouses. These were essentially primitive factories where, from seven in the morning until six in the evening, the little inmates were set to work spinning wool or flax and knitting stockings; an hour a day was spent upon the rudiments of learning, and another hour for “dinner and play.” These workhouses were generally filthy and overcrowded places. That in the parish of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, for example, was “obliged to put thirty nine children into three beds.” It combined the aspects of both factory and prison, thus confirming its identity as a peculiarly urban institution; many of the children infected one another with “disorders” and contagious diseases, and were then despatched to hospitals. The quartet of London confinement-workhouse, factory, prison and hospital-is complete.
Children were confined precisely because, in their natural and liberated state, they were considered to be wild. They were still “half-naked or in tattered rags, cursing and swearing at one another … rolling in the dirt and kennels, or pilfering on the wharfs and keys.” These were the “ill natured cattal” with which “our prisons are daily filled and under the weight of which Tyburn does so often groan.” Very few social observers chose to discuss whether the conditions of London itself brutalised or dehumanised these small children; the reality was too overwhelming, and too palpable, to elicit any cogent analysis beyond the imagery of bestiality and savagery. Once the vagrant children had been trained to labour in the parish workhouse, for example, they are “as much distinguished from what they were before as is a tamed from a wild beast.” But that imagery can be applied elsewhere in the commercial jungle of London. “The master may be a tiger in cruelty, he may beat, abuse, strip naked, starve or do what he will to the poor innocent lad, few people take much notice, and the officers who put him out the least of anybody.” The reference here is to the “parish child” being sold off as an apprentice; although that condition has been immortalised in Oliver Twist in 1837, the cruelties and hardships associated with this trade in children have a particular eighteenth-century emphasis.
Consider the plight of chimney-sweeps, apprentices known as “climbing boys.” They were usually attached to their masters at the age of seven or eight, although it was also common for drunken or impoverished parents to sell children as young as four years old for twenty or thirty shillings. Small size was important, because the flues of London houses were characteristically narrow and twisted so that they became easily choked with soot or otherwise constricted. The young climbing boy was prodded or pushed into these tiny spaces; fearful or recalcitrant children were pricked with pins or scorched with fire, to make them climb more readily. Some died of suffocation, while many suffered a more lingering death from cancer of the scrotum known as “sooty warts.” Others grew deformed. A social reformer described a typical climbing boy at the close of his short career. “He is now twelve years of age, a cripple on crutches, hardly three feet seven inches in stature … His hair felt like a hog’s bristle, and his head like a warm cinder … He repeats the Lord’s prayer.” These children, blackened by the soot and refuse of the city, were rarely, if ever, washed. They were coated in London’s colours, an express symbol of the most abject condition to which it could reduce its young. A familiar sight, they wandered about, shouting out in their piping voices “to sweep for the soot, oh!” It was known as “calling the streets.”
In the harsh condition of London, however, they were rarely the objects of compassion. Instead, they were condemned as thieves, part-time beggars and “the greatest nursery for Tyburn of any trade in England.” Yet in one of those astonishing displays of theatrical ritual, of which the city was always capable, once a year they were allowed to celebrate. On the first of May, they were painted white with meal and hair-powder and as “lilly-whites,” to use the contemporaneous expression, they flocked through the streets where they called “weep weep.” They also banged their brushes and climbing tools as they paraded through the city. In this reversal we recognise both the hardness and gaiety of London: they had very little to celebrate in their unhappy lives, yet they were allowed to play, and become children again, for one day of the year.
But there are other connotations here, which reach deep into the mystery of childhood in the city. The climbing boys were characteristically dressed in foil, gold leaf and ribbons just as were the children in the pageants of the medieval city; in that sense they came to represent once more holiness and innocence, in however vulgarised a fashion. Yet, banging the instruments of their trade along the thoroughfare, they also become lords of misrule for the day; thus their wildness is being emphasised, itself a threat to the city unless it were formalised
and disciplined within ritual patterns. All these elements converge-playfulness, innocence, savagery-to create the child in the city.
Peter Earle, in A City Full of People, has noted that early eighteenth-century London “offered many enticements” for young people. In particular the city offered “the lure of bad company, gambling, drink, idleness, petty theft and ‘lewd women.’” So London children were, from the beginning, at a disadvantage. In the spirit-shops lurked “children, who drink with so much enjoyment that they find it difficult to walk on going away.” In the engravings of Hogarth, too, children are often characterised as malevolent or mischievous tokens of the city; their faces are puckered up in misery or derision, and they tend to mock or imitate the conduct and appearance of their elders. In the fourth plate of A Rake’s Progress a young boy can be seen sitting in the gutter; he is smoking a small pipe, and reading with attention a newspaper entitled The Farthing Post. The sign of White’s gambling house can be seen in the distance, down St. James’s Street, and in the foreground five other children are engaged with dice and cards. One boy is a bootblack who has literally lost his shirt; another is a seller of spirits, while a third is a newspaper vendor known as a “Mercury.” Of nineteenth-century street-boys, too, it was noticed that “gambling was a passion with them, indulged in without let or hindrance.” In the early decades of the twentieth century, also, quite young children were still being arrested for street-gambling in games such as “Buttons.” So for at least two centuries London children have been associated with, or identified by, gambling. And why should they not be gamblers, faced with the general uncertainty of life in the city? Another boy, away from the foreground in the Hogarth engraving, is stealing a handkerchief from the rake himself. Here in miniature is the image of the eighteenth-century London child, busily engaged in all the adult life and activity of the streets. Their features are also stamped with greed and acquisitiveness, like tutelary spirits of place. In the series of engravings, “Morning,” “Noon,” “Evening” and “Night,” children play a significant role. Some of them wear exactly the same clothes as their elders, so that they have all the appearance of dwarf-like or deformed citizens; others are ragged street urchins, fighting for food in the gutter or huddled together for warmth beneath wooden street stalls.
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