“Sandwich-Men” by Leonard Raven-Hill

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Sandwich-Men

Leonard Raven-Hill

1900

Walter Besant's East London (1901), facing p. 244.

Henry Mayhew placed "boardmen" among the lowest division of "street-folk," along with bill-stickers and so forth (13), and Leonard Raven-Hill has captured the sheer monotony of their lives by showing a whole line of them traipsing along in the gutter on a rainy day, all sporting the same ironic message on the front of their contraptions: "DON'T LOOK AT MY BACK." On the smaller board above their heads, suggestive at once of their burden and their role, is written "WHAT'S ON."

Such work "can generally be found at a shilling or one shilling and twopence a day," says Walter Besant (243), explaining that it was undertaken both by older men good for nothing else, but still fit enough to walk the streets all day long, and younger ones temporarily down on their luck. [Commentary continues below.]

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In describing sandwich-men in general, Besant focuses on those who have "left off trying" to do anything better (243). He notes particularly the soul-destroying nature of the work. "It is interesting to walk slowly along the pavement while the single file of sandwich men pass along, one after the other," he writes:

They never talk, there is no exchange of jokes, they never chaff the workmen or the girls or the lads or the drivers who threaten to run over them; on the other hand, no one chaffs them; they are by common consent held sacred, as men in the world but not of the world. Some of them carry a pipe between their lips, but merely as a habit; it is an empty pipe; there is no speculation in their faces; they manifest no interest in anything; there may be a police row and a fight, there may be a horse down, the sandwich man pays no attention; he looks neither to the right nor to the left; the show that he advertises is not for himself; the wares exposed in the shop-windows are not for him to buy; the moving panorama, the procession of active and eager life along which he marches is nothing to him; he takes no longer any interest in anything; he is like the hermit, the anchorite, the recluse — he is dead to the world; he is without friends, without money, without work, without hope; his mind has nothing to occupy it; he thinks of vacant space; he walks in his sleep; he is comatose; if he lifts his eyes and looks upon the world it must be in wonder that his own figure is not in its proper place, its old place — it ought to be there. Why is it not? How did he get into the gutter, one of a line in single file, with a board in front of him and a board behind him? Newsboys shout their latest; the shops light up till every street is a fairyland of brightness; the carriages go up and down. To all the sights around him, to the meaning of the show and to the dance of life, which is so often the dance of death, the sandwich man remains indifferent. He has nothing left of all the joys and toys and dreams and vanities of the world; the past is a blurred memory on which he will not dwell if he can help it; there is no future for him, only the day's tramp, the shilling at the end of it; fivepence will give him warmth, light, a bed, and a modicum of food; eightpence, or, if he is lucky, tenpence, must find him food, drink, and tobacco for the following day, with some means of keeping the mud and water out of his boots. [244-47]

Other accounts suggest that life was even worse for the sandwich-men than Besant supposes, and that it was common practice to revile these people as impediments, throw mud at them, knock them into the gutter, kick or whip them, and so forth, since they had no way of protecting themselves against such insults, or responding to them (see Jackson 258).

It was to raise the consciousness and prospects of such social outcasts that Besant had wished to set up facilities in the East End, specifically the People's Palace in the Mile End Road. But he had been disappointed by the lack of response to his initiative. In the end, as seems all too predictable now, such amenities served the more advantaged rather than the more deprived.

Related Material

Bibliography

Besant, Walter. East London. New York: Century, 1901. Internet Archive. Uploaded by Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Web. 11 June 2014.

Jackson, Lee. A Dictionary of Victorian London. London: Anthem Press, 2006. (Excerpt from J. Thomson and Adolphe Smith's Street life in London [1877]).

Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Selected and ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Last modified 14 June 2014