THE NIGHT WORKERS OF LONDON

Taranaki Daily News, 19 January 1935, Page 15 (Supplement)

THE NIGHT WORKERS OF LONDON

Darkness Brings A New And Enthralling Activity To England’s Metropolis

PERHAPS it is the half-forgotten - lure of ancient melodrama titles, perhaps a romantic hope of grim disclosures, but few travellers can resist the invitation to “See London by Night.” The hour when churchyards yawn is full of earnest and practical activity in working London, and the Londoner of the night working factory, the early markets, and the allnight restaurant cares little for that strange old London, whose night was darkness, and whose day is now a dream (writes a woman correspondent in an exchange).

The electric signs were blazing gaudily when we drove down Piccadilly, where less than 50. years ago footmen lighted the carriages home with flaring torches. We were in search of a darker quarter, a back street in Whitechapel, where the Salvation Army of the East End had already begun to gather in the homeless for a night’s lodging. With a group of match-sellers, charwomen, and belated travellers we sought admittance from a murky alley, and were presently in the cheerful warmth of a women’s shelter. For 7d we could have a clean bed, with unlimited use of running hot water in one of the white tiled bathroom s > for a penny a dinner of hot stew and bread, for a shilling the crowning luxury of a room of one’s own.

There are no institution rules, even about baths. I heard that remarkable woman, the Adjutant, calmly settling this point with a shocked visitor. She explained in her pleasant, cultured voice, “This is not a home. It is an hotel. If you were staying at the Ritz and had paid your bill, the manager would not inquire if you had had your bath in the morning.” Three hundred women and one dog —even the London vagrant may share the national passion for pets—were accommodated at the shelter that night. A neighbouring men’s hostel, of which there are many in London, has beds for 580. Later we had a glimpse of the great goodsheds on the embankment that are used as a clearing-house for the homeless. This, too, is all-night workThe dear and familiar bustle of Fleet Street was our midnight enter” tainment. Those of us who were on a busman’s holiday read the latest European news as it was typed out by the uncanny little machines of the press agencies, delved into the inferno of the stereo, plant and the vast rooms where the printing machines were flinging down an appalling number of copies a minute; innocently accepted the offers of kindly compositors to give us pieces of mat, or our names in lead, as novel mementoes, Even busier, if possible, than this scene were the headquarters. of the greatest newspaper distributing agency in England, where armies of grim and harassed clerks were filling and checking, for dear life, thousands of news agents’ wrappers to catch

the press trains for the ends of the kingdom. At no time is it an office for dreamy and leisurely souls.. The King’s newspapers, specially stitched down the middle, are among those which go out in the small hours from these premises. The “city” at that hour in the morning was curiously still and silent, a dark town of deserted banks and offices and a lonely Royal Exchange. The Tower, black and ghostly, was no longer London's playhouse, but a fortress, locked against all comers.

We passed over a river of black and silver, with mysterious reflections of queer-shaped barge?, and immediately were back in the world of practical, every-night realities. Bril-

liantly lit, London’s favourite wholemeal flour mills were grinding with exceeding speed under the hands of the night shift, Back jn Trafalgar Square we saw the lights of St. Martin’s in the Field still burning, and there found a picture for Dore, or any of the old masters of symbolic light and shadow. The crypt of this ancient- city church, ever since the war, is kept open all night long for those-who, for. whatever reason, are stranded in London. One part is set aside for men, one for women, and there, on the old wooden benches, the hapless keep strange company. Two women police look after the stranded women, who may be- there' for no stranger reason than that they have missed a last train home to the

’ country, or hfive had their purses stolen. One little refugee, with hunted eyes, had the most prosaic story. She was the wife of a Sussex farm labourer, with five children, and she had run away from heme suddenly because she could endure no longer the problem of keeping house and paying rent put of his wage Of 30/- a week. Next day she would go back again, her resolution stiffened and a miraculous gift of silver in her purse. Nowadays such reckless and over-burdened souls semetimes find themselves in shelters like this instead of in the cold Thames.

After looking wistfully at the pie stalls where homely Londoners can make an early morning supper of “corfee and a doorstep,” we came to an all-night corner house where there were warmth and cheerfulness and bacon and eggs, There was also the fascinating but unprofitable problem of what one's fellows might be doing there at 3 in the morning, especially as they looked so obstinately unlike musicians, dancers, bookmakers, or belated revellers. < , Billingsgate had a queer kind of charm, as one. took in the amazing

picture from a convenient bridge. The whole thoroughfare, was one moving mass of fish porters, balancing baskets of salt-water wares on top of. their wooden bowler hats. There was time to watch the dawn break over the Thames, before losing ourselves in the dewy beauty of Covent Garden market, where the freghest and most beautiful and flowers in the world greet the London morning. I do not know whether Londoners ever stay up all night to see their city, but I do know that nq one has ever felt its full magie until he has seen the light return, and listened to that strange, shrill twittering of birds, the waking chorus of the starlings, that never at any other time can be heard in the heart of London.