BEGGARS OLD AND NEW

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1777, 1 July 1926, Page 7

BEGGARS OLD AND NEW

The London Mendicity Society was founded in 1818 by the great Duke of Wellington, at a time when the country swarmed with disbanded soldiers after the Napoleonic war. Roughly it played the part in the London' of that time that is played after the Great War by our ex-service organisations. The society still exists, and, now, as then, it acts as a sort of clearing-house for information about London's street beggars and begging-letter writers. It-was evidence of the steady continuity of things in England to find the present Duke of Wellington taking, the chair in Apsley House to-day at the society's meeting. It is, a s the Duke (pointed out, due to the work of the societies that help ex-servicemen that the streets are not swarming with beggars -as they were a century ago. There has been no great increase of begging since the war, but the fear was expressed that as disabled men get older—and perhaps, though this was not said, as people forget men who fought in the Great War—some may come clown to begging.

About a thousand beggars are taken up by the police every year in the London.streets. 'About a third of this number are professionals, and the remainder are casuals or recruits. The society has its own constable who specialises in beggars, and, probably knows more than anyone in London about ithem. A great part of the work is sifting out worthy and unworthy begging-letter writers. Inquiry is made more difficult by the habit of practised begging-letter writers of using accommodation addresses for the receipt of replies. Many deliver their own letters and wait for an answer.

Attention is also given to the small money-lender who • preys upon the poor, and the hope was expressed today that the Bill now in the Hou t se of Lords would catch in its net the small fry as well as the big sharks. Examples were given at the meeting of money-lenders who have been known to charge four shillings weekly interest on a loan of £2, which comes to round about 1000 per cent.

Apsley 'House is one of the best known of London's famous houses, apart from the Piccadilly frontage, which the great iDuke faced with Bath stone, thus masking an Ad,am house of red brick. Everyone has heard how the Duke's windows were broken by the mob during the Reform agitation, which caused him to put up bulletproof iron blinds. In the big room overlooking Hyde Park the Waterloo Banquet was held every year during\ the Duke's life.

Inside the house is hardly altered from the days of the Duke's "occupation—it is full of tarnished and rather forbidding splendours. There are colossal portraits—Wilkie's George the Fourth looked down on the meeting to-day—and there are portraits of kings and emperors of the French War period. There is a pale company of marble busts of Napoleon and of the great Duke. Napoleon appears, too, in a big picture of the Battle of Waterloo, of which the Duke is reported to have said "Good, very good; not too much smoke."

The house contains, too, fine services of porcelain, and things in silver presented to the Duke by Allied Sovereigns and the City of London, and altogether Apsley House is a wonderful memorial of the heroic daysManchester Guardian.