MECCA OF BEGGARS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20420, 23 November 1929, Page 3 (Supplement)

MECCA OF BEGGARS.

GENERAL HEAD-QUARTERS

THE SOFT-HEARTED SHOPPERS

Kind-hearted women shoppers are making Oxford Street, London, the Mecca of England's beggars. More and more of the fraternity are deserting the suburbs for the penny-a-mimite glories of this great shopping centre. From Marble Arch to Holborn the whole street is lined at discreet intervals with singers, paralytics, matchsellers, " blind bootlace sellers, hymn-singers, harmonium players, and tin-whistlers. Ihe only absentees from this " G..H.Q." of mendicity are the pavement artists. ] lie tootways are too crowded. '"Women are 100 soft-hearted,' said an Oxford Street shopkeeper recently. " There they are, thousands and thousands of them, all up for the day, from the country or the suburbs.

" So we have upwards of 50 of these pests in front of our windows every day of the week. Iheir takings, all drawn from middle-class housewives, amount to dozens of pounds every day. t see woman after woman turn back self consciously to the sturdy fellow selling bootlaces just here, and tender a silver com. As ofien as not she will accept, no change, and probably she will not lake the bootlaces cither."

One of the best pitches is (hat of a hymn-singer by Oxlord Circus, where the 'buses stop. Coppers rattle into his tin mug at the rate of three or four a minute? and every few minutes he has surreptitiously to empty it into his pocket. The most " fetching" type of all to heavily laden women shoppers arc the poor but neatly dressed mothcr-and-father-and-baby group. Ihe father sings in a cracked voice; the mother holds out a cap in a shaking hand; the baby (probably borrowed) sleeps. They do very well on Wednesdays, which is *' cheap ticket dav" for many suburbs. A few," very few. arc deserving cases. Most of them simply prey on the softness of the feminine heart. .