VANISHING BOOTBLACKS

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 April 1935, Page 11

VANISHING BOOTBLACKS

ONLY ABOUT 40 LEFT. A census of street traders by a party of social workers reveals that the oncefamiliar bootblack of the London streets and squares has almost disappeared. In a few years’ time there will probably be none left. Only about 40 survive. Before the war there were more than 1.000. Many of them worked under the aegis of the Shaftesbury Society and Ragged School Union, which equipped them comfortably in Bootblacks’ Homes, and even helped them with the rent of their “pitches.” At one time the London bootblack could expect to earn £4 or £5 a week, but to-day he thinks he has done well if he has turned over £1 in a week. The substitution of the old “blacking” by the more enduring polishes and the disappearance of the horse and the great improvements in the cleansing of the streets are responsible tor the change. “Stockbrokers and City men used to think nothing of having their boots cleaned in the City twice a day,” said one of the census workers. “There used to be six bootblacks outside the Royal Exchange. Now- there are only two.”

It is many years since the last of the Bootblacks’ Homes fell into disuse, and a longer time still since the night schools for bootblacks in Leman Street, Whitechapel. Marylebone Road, the Borough, York Road. King’s Cross, and Holland Park, Kensington, were discontinued. Bootblacks first made their appearance on the streets of London in 1851. when “Rob Roy” Macgregor organised a number of them to “work” the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.