FOREIGN LONDON.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14925, 24 February 1912, Page 5 (Supplement)

FOREIGN LONDON.

ITS MYSTERY AND ROMANCE. ]\s interesting article on the foreign quarter in the East End of London, written V bv Mr. P. Gibbs, who lias explored that .' little known region by night and by day, appears in the London Daily Chronicle. "It seeing curious to mc," he writes, "that this district does not give more trouble to the police, for there are herded I together here in the most squalid and evil conditions men and women whose hearts beat with fire desires for the gaiety and the pleasures of lite, who work like slaves yet listen to the call of liberty, and ,who, with more intelligence and imagination and education than the English poor, are engaged in a deadly struggle for existence, gome of them find a safety valve for their desires and ambitions in the gamblingdens, the dancing-halls, the night clubs, arid the anarchist meetings in which they gather after a long days work. foreign Workshops. That work is as a rule sweated labour. These Russians and Poles, Jews and Christians, are paid at piecework rates, by "masters" of their own nationality, who in turn are sweated by big employers or wholesale houses. I have been into the houses of some of the master tailors. They are three-storeyed houses in streets which branch off from the great highways of Whitechapel. On the ground floor live one or two families, in two or three rooms. On the first floor lives the master with his family and an occasional lodger. On the next floor is the •'factory, where in a square room, badly ventilated, and so dirk as a rule that gas is kept burning all day long, are 12 or 15 Noung men and women making trousers and coats and costumes which will be worn by the smart customers of West End shops. They work silently, cutting and pressing and stitching. The men have taken their coats off to their work, and one sees among them broad boulders and well-knit figures, us though belonging to men who have once been soldiers. Remarkably keen and .-rood-looking fellows some of them are, and here and there among the women, one is struck by a Jewish beauty, with full red lips and lustrous eyes, or by the pale haunting melancholy" of a Slav face with dark brooding eyre in which passion seems to smoulder. Homes of Sweated Labour. In each one of these private workshops, ps a rule, there are " learners" who are paid next to nothing at all for the first six months or so until they have been initiated into the art of cutting and pressing. The ambition of each one of them is to scape together enough to become a "master" in his turn and to sweat those who are still the under-dogs. The welldressed men who pour by thousands into the city in the morning with well-creased trousers and good black coats, the smart girls who go golfing in tailor-made costumes know nothing of those Russians and Poles who were paid at piecework wages for those clothes. They know nothing of those gas-lit rooms in the East End from which those clothes were sent to city and suburban West End shops, nor of the brooding thoughts that go swiftly through the brains of those foreign men and women as they sit and stitch and fold and press to provide themselves with the bare necessities of life and something in the nature of a mental stimulant to atone for the drudgerv of their daily toil. There are other factories ami other trades in the East End to which '• I ho English need apply." I have been into the cigarette factories which give work to thousands of these foreigners. Some of them are great establishments with scores of men and women in one room, all rocking to and fro in a rhythmic way as they .load the cigarette papers with the golden grain, with fingers incredibly swift and nimble and I have been into the private factories, in the back parlours of tobacconist*', shops, where half-a-dozen men and women are making those cigarettes which will soon be puffed away into smokeclouds far from these workshops of my Lady Nicotine. But never have I seen an English face among these cigarettemakers. The trade is entirely in the hands, , of, foreigners, rnanv of whom can hardly tpeak a word of English. Watching them, I have wondered what kind of lives they lead when they leave these great factories and small parlours, to what kind of homes they go, and what is their ambition and philosophy in life. For many of them have faces full of character and eves that tell a story of slumboring pass'ions, of tragic memories, of restlessness and Tevolt, of deene and emotion. . . At night they go to the music-halls and afterwards to the dancing-halls. They are passionately fond of dancing I find, and fate into the night many of these men and women who have been sitting all day at the tailor's bench or the pile of cigarette papers exercise their bodies and warm their blood to the strident tunes of a hardworked orchestra. It i* a harmless amusement for people who have a natural instinct for the gaieties of life. Not so harmless are other haunts which attract the wilder spirits of this foreign colony. Gamblers and Anarchists. Often at night down some street where the gas lamps glimmer faintly one may see a group of dark figures standing outside a baker's shop, or one of those small restaurants whose blinds are drawn across the windows even in the day. One of the men gives a peculiar knock at a side door, which is opened stealthily, and one by one the men go inside. Until the early hours of the morning a light Burns in an upper room- The policeman on bis beat watches the shadows that cross the blinds. He knows what is going on inside, but he does not interfere. It is a foreign gamb-ling-den, where young Russians and Poles are playing with* greasy cards in an atmosphere thick with smoke and the fumes of coarse spirit. ' "A nest of hornets," says the English policeman. " Shouldn't care to face them single-handed." Thev have other meeting-places in the dark streets of night. One of them is on the first floor of a Russian hotel. I went there twice, without invitation, and pushed my way through a crowd of men and women,"gathered or. the stairs and listening to a voice from the room above, a guttural German voice, raised in a long monologue on the philosophy of anarchy. Gradually I worked my way into that room where the anarchists of East End London were assembled to hear their leader's oratory. They were mostly young men and women, sitting close together on wooden benches, and leaning against the bare walls. They were neatly and even smartly dressed," though most of them dwell "in the basement houses of this district and live on the wages of sweated labour. But they make their own clothes, and get their own cloth cheap. Sullen eyes glared at me, and I looked back into strange, haunting faces. Many of these men and women had escaped from the prisons of Riga. Many of them have known th« horrors of a Russian pogrom. Some of their bodies still bear the marks of the lash and chains. They are all exiles for the sake of liberty. As they listened to the fierce words of their leader denouncing the tyranny of capital and all forms of modern government their black eyes burned with, the fires of hatred and revolt. Yet as I came to know some of them, breaking down their suspicion. I found them civil, intelligent, interesting people, well-read in literature which in more dangerous to the fabric of society than bombs and nitro-glycerine. In these foreign quarters of the East End, of which I can give but a glimpse Or two in this space, there are many degrees of poverty —the last degree being the stark naked* starving poverty which dwells in the foulest dens of Whitechapel, the breeding grounds of disease and crime. Desperate characters lurk in streets which are still a sanctuary for foreign thieves and murderers. Queer lives, queer trades-, queer tragedies may be found in those byways by those who have the password. There are educated men who have taken their degrees in Russian universities now working in the cigarette factories. There are women here whose beauty is very dangerous for their peace of mind. There are hatreds between race and race which divide these foreigners among themselves, and many of them live in art atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy. If one could pass the barriers one would get to the heart <if many a strange romance of low life which would make the, fortune of a playSsnght or novelist,