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Updated: June 10, 2025
He told them about the London costers, how they had hundreds of pearl buttons and velvet collared coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor outside the Mansion House.
We got very clever at it finally and very impudent and as the people were only two yards from us my windows being on a level with the tops of the buses and as we had a flaring illumination that lit up the street completely we had lots of fun with them especially with the busses, as we pretended to believe that the advertisements referred to the people on the top, and we would ask anxiously which lady was "Lottie Collins" and which gentleman had been brought up on " Mellin's Food" We had even more fun with the swells coming home from the Gala night at the opera and hemmed in between costers and Pickford's vans loaded down with women and children.
It is very narrow, and, further, blocked by costers' barrows, so that on Saturday nights it is hard work to get through it at all. The pressure is increased by the electric trams, which run on a single set of rails to the Broadway. In King Street is the Hammersmith Theatre of Varieties, the West End Lecture-Hall, and the West End Chapel, held by the Baptists.
With its condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow roadway strewn with costers' refuse it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows.
Scorching winds which parched the throat and made everything one wore hot to the touch were enough to oppress the staunchest soldier, but these sterling Territorials, costers and labourers, artisans and tradesmen, professional men and men of independent means, true brothers in arms and good Britons, left their bivouacs and trudged across heavy country, fearless, strong, proud, and with the cheerfulness of good men who fight for right. What I said in those early days of the great advance was more than borne out later, and in the capture of Jerusalem, in taking Jericho, and in forcing the passage of the Jordan this glorious Division of Londoners was always the same, a pride to its commander, a bulwark of the XXth Corps, and a great asset of the Empire.
The better-class artisan is always a gentleman who never offers nor endures a liberty; but some of the flash sort are unendurable, and their womenkind are worse. With costers and bargemen one can always get on familiarly: it is the pretentious, vulgar men and females who are horrible.
R.L. Stuart attended to much of his business at his residence, Twentieth Street and Fifth Avenue, and the same may be said of the Costers, Moses Taylor, and others. These men had no hesitation in receiving in their homes after business hours the people whom they employed. I remember distinctly before gas was generally introduced how very economical in its use those who had it were.
"Bless your young innocence! this is nothing. Bad times for the costers, my boy; they'll get nothing cheap. Here you, Shock, as you are come, help with these here ropes; and mind, you two, you look after these new ropes and the sacks." "Look after them!" I said innocently.
Think of the picture; a scholar who never opens a book, an orator who addresses only costers and work-girls, a writer who writes nothing, a leader of men who exerts no public influence; and what is this wilful destruction of high faculties but social waste and robbery?
It felt the stern joy which warriors feel with foemen worthy of their steel. It suspended its juggling feats with vegetable baskets, and devoted itself exclusively to the task of silencing our guns. Porters, costers, and the riff-raff of the streets crowded in a semicircle around us. Just then it was borne in on us how small our number was.
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