LAST CROSSING-SWEEPER

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 18960, 10 March 1936, Page 2

LAST CROSSING-SWEEPER

"OLD JQW OF LONDON

A GREAT FIGHTER

MEMORIES OF THE PAST

It it were possible "Old Joe" should be handsomely pensioned and his occupation placed under a glass case in the London Museum. l\& is the last of the London crossingsweepers, the heroes of many of the oldtime ballads'and pathetic recitations. They have all vanished together with the link-boys, the chairmen, the llaringgas street lamps, and the growler cabs. A'Juddy roads are no longer popular in these days Of water-proof highways, and with organised street-cleaning machinery the metropolitan boroughs have swept the old crossingsweepers into oblivion. All except old Joe Pond, London's last crossing-sweeper. Eighty-seven years old, Joe has lived with the postehaises, the bustles, the trailing skirls and the coffee houses iu the days when the Cockneys had a language of their own and spelt it "vith a wee." And in this era, when gangsters imported on to the screens are even bumping off the old Coc|cney dialect, old Joe still steps out from a' little Chelsea street with bis broom to the stately and distinguished environment of Eaton Square—the last of his kind.

KINSHIP OF ACE

Only once a week now, though. Every Sunday lie goes at church time, and although Eaton Square is scrupulously Vsleah, there are old swells and tolls, u world apart from Joe in status, who feel so sadly near him in age that they compassionately drop a copper for the sake of the days gone by. "I've. not. missed a Sunday for 30 years," said .Joe. "and my people there include an ex-Prime Minister, Lord A'berdare, Lady Cadogan, Lord Gladstone, and maybe Mr. W. Ei. Gladstone himself !

"I used to be called to the big houses to get the coal in and to sweep out the areas, but I can't do that now." Joe remembers Chelsea when it was Little more than a village, with cottages and; green lanes. Four-in-hands used to run from Chelsea to London, and out Kensington way were vast orchard areas. His mother lived in a little, cottage in Chelsea- for 50 years.

A FIGHTING MAN

.Toe was a great fighter over 60 years ago. "You had to be," he said. "Gangs came* to Chelsea from London. One leilow down this very street wa* cock ot the place. "1 fought him for An hour and beat hirn. I had my nose broken twice and all my teeth knocked out." Poor old Joe ! He has. worked hard for Something like 75 years, and although he suffers badly from bronchitis, if spared, as he says, he will be at his crossing again next Sunday--"alone in London." to crib a Victorian play title.