TALES BY OLD LONDONERS.

Colonist, Volume LI, Issue 12469, 19 February 1909, Page 4

TALES BY OLD LONDONERS.

A London paper has -recently given old Londoners' stories of 'the "good old times." Some of the old meu intexyiewed have told lurid stories' of a kind of life which no one wants revived. There have been reminiscences of garrotters, riverside thieves, fore the eyes of mobs of fashionable thrown drunk from public" houses intj the dirt-heaps outside; of women pugilists, fighting for wagers, andstakes; of men and women hanged before the eyes.ofmoba of fasjaoiiable' people, and roughs, and school children. Those were the days when black flags waved over streets . closed lo traffic on acount of cholera, when "Little Hell" and the Irish "rookery" of St, Giles existed,' like festering sores, within a stone's throw of ' Oxford street,- when Hackney was a ' warren of filthy wooden hovels,packed witli poor families. One old fellow i tells how he slept in rotting watercarts, and had his head kicked if he attempted to cra^l into one alrady occupied. Others relate the orgies of the "tea gardens," where tea was apparently the last thing thought of, and wild nights -at the penny gaffs,, where the audience fought and applauded with bottles. Plenty of witnesses remember the "sparring parlours," the illicit drinking dens, the haunts of the crimps by the docks, the old. watchmen who preceded the police, the nest of thieves at Westr minister, Waterloo, and Blackfriars. They have given personal experience of the Chartist riots in Kensington , and Spitalfields, the strike of the cabmen who refused to carry lamps, the old friars, the old songs with their homely choruses, the freezing of the: Thames and. the roasting of an < ox upon the ice, and the fires of the Houses '61 Parliament and the Tower of London. But nearly all the. old I petfple agree that, although it has less bqnolorj present-daj .London lias more hunger and more unemployment than had' the London >of -fifty or ' sixty yeaTs ago.