The Children's Book of London Part 14

Has it ever occurred to you that money must be made somewhere? We do not find it ready made in the earth or growing on trees; and if you think a little, that could not be, for every country has its own money with its own King's or President's head on the coins. Here in England we have the King's head on one side and various designs on the other, which are different according to the coins they adorn. It would be rather nice if money did grow on bushes. Supposing we could have a row of them in the garden. The penny ones might be like gooseberry bushes, rather low down and stumpy, and mother would say, 'Now, who will go and see if there are any ripe pennies for me to-day?' and we should see the great round brown pennies hanging ready to drop, and the little wee ones just beginning to grow, or perhaps having grown to the size of halfpennies; and we might ask, 'Shall we gather all we find, or leave the halfpennies for another day to grow into pennies?'

Then there would be silver trees, where shillings and half-crowns grew, and we should be told, 'You must not go near those, they are too valuable. You might drop some of the money and lose it in the mud;' and the gold, I think, would have to be reared in hothouses only, and kept locked up very carefully.

Well, of course, this is just imagination. Take out a shilling and look at it. It probably has the King's head on it, or it may have King Edward's, or Queen Victoria's head if it is a very old one. Anything further back than that would be valuable as a curiosity. All these shillings are the same value, and it makes no difference which one you use, and they have all been made at the Mint in London. It is not difficult for anyone to get leave to go to see over the Mint, and it is a very interesting thing to do. The building is near the Tower, and does not look at all grand; in fact, it is difficult to believe that such riches can come out of any building so poor looking. Here all the money for England is coined--gold, silver, and copper. If we are lucky, the day we go we shall find the workmen making gold sovereigns, and pouring them out so fast that it is like the old fairy story of Rumpelstiltskin.

In the first room there are great furnaces, with dirty-looking caldrons hanging over them, and in these caldrons there is not soup or anything to eat, but gold, pure gold. This gold has been found in far-away countries and brought to England, and the men who bring it get paid so much for it according to its weight, and then the Mint people turn it into coins. The gold is all liquid, seething and boiling. The man who stands by the caldron has a pair of thick leather gloves to protect his hands in case sparks fly out. Suddenly he seizes the caldron with a pair of pincers, and, dragging it from the fire, he tilts it up so that the molten gold runs out in a stream into a number of tubes like long straight jars joined together. The gold flows in, bubbles up, and that one is full to the top; and then the next is filled, and the next, and so on to the end. Then the gold is left to cool. The big caldron goes back on to the furnace to boil more gold. As the gold boils a tiny quant.i.ty of it gets into the sides of the caldron and sticks to them, and this is too valuable to lose, and so after the caldron has been used a certain number of times it is broken up and melted so as to recover this gold again, and not a grain is lost.

When the gold which has been poured into the jars has cooled it is solid again, and has taken the shape of the jars--that is to say, it is in bars of gold. You will be given one to handle and feel; it is a flat bar of gleaming gold weighing a great deal. The bars are then taken and put under a machine something like a mangle, and the machine squeezes and presses them with such terrific force that they are squeezed out thinner and thinner, and, of course, get longer and longer in the process. Just think what tremendous force must be used to press out a bar of gold!

When at last they are ready these long thin slabs of gold are the thickness of a sovereign.

Now, each of these bars is pa.s.sed through a machine, which cuts out of it a double row of holes just the size of sovereigns all the way down, and the little gold pieces thus neatly cut out drop down below into a box. Take one up and look at it; it is smooth and clean and round, the size of a sovereign, but it has as yet no King's head on it, and the edges are smooth, not rough as in a real sovereign. So each of these little round gold pieces is taken away to another room to be finished, and the remainder of the long thin strip out of which they were cut goes back to the caldron to be boiled up again and made into more sovereigns.

You will notice that every time we go through a door at the Mint it is unlocked for us to go through, and locked again behind us; this is because the gold is so valuable. No one is allowed to pa.s.s in and out without being watched, lest they should carry some away with them. Every night each one of these rooms is carefully swept out, and the sweepings boiled up to get any little particles of gold that are lying about, and a large amount of money is saved in this way. The men who work in each room are responsible for the gold in it; the gold is weighed on coming in and on going out, and any weight lacking has to be made up by the men out of their wages.

Now we have got the little round sovereigns, which are cleaned and polished and put into another machine; this machine has what is called a die in it--that is, a stamping instrument with the King's head on it ready to print on the coin. The little sovereign is put on to a tiny round place, with a little collar of metal all round, and this collar is rough, like the edge of a shilling or a sovereign. Down comes the die with enormous force, and stamps on the coin King George's head; the force is so great that the coin is a little flattened out and pressed against the rough collar, so the edges become rough, too. Thus are both sides done, and the sovereign is now a real sovereign, and could be used to buy things at a shop.

There are rows of these machines all hard at work, and we feel we are in a fairy tale when we see the little round clean bits of gold drop, drop, drop without stopping on to the tiny round table with the collar; and the machine goes up and down, up and down, never stopping, and every time it does its work, and a new sovereign drops away into a box below.

Drip, drip, drip, sovereigns are raining down, dozens every minute, all newly made; it seems as if we could easily get rich if we were allowed to make money like this. But the sovereigns are not finished yet; they must go to be weighed, and all those that are not exactly the right weight, but either too heavy or too light, go back to the melting-pot to be made all over again; and only those that are exactly right are pa.s.sed out new-minted to the Bank, from whence they go to all the people in Great Britain and Ireland. It is reckoned that so many as one in every three has to go back to the melting-pot, and be boiled and hammered and squeezed all over again; so it is a good thing gold cannot feel.

On other days silver and copper are made in the same way, but gold is much the most impressive to see.

After leaving the Mint we might pay a visit to the Bank, which stands at the meeting of many streets in the very midst of the City. It is a strong place built round a courtyard, with all the windows inward so that burglars cannot get in. In the vaults below the Bank are many bars of gleaming gold, like those we have seen at the Mint; these are sent here for safety, and in time will go to the Mint to be coined. The Bank of England is very strong and safe, and anyone who keeps his money there has no fear that he will lose it. The Bank is allowed by law to make notes of its own, which are as good as money, and are received instead of money, but it cannot make more than a certain number of these notes in any one year. You have heard of bank-notes, perhaps? Have you ever seen one--a crisp, crackly bit of paper, with some printing on it, that could be burnt up any minute? These seem very unsafe to keep, but they are convenient. If a man wants to go away for some time he could not carry with him a great many gold sovereigns, for they would be so heavy; but if he takes a number of bank-notes they are quite light and easy to carry, and are just as good as money. The most common is a five-pound note. Of course, accidents do happen sometimes when people are careless. I heard of a man who lit his pipe with a five-pound note, thinking it was just an ordinary bit of paper, but this was very careless; it was an expensive pipe-light to cost five pounds.

In the Bank you are shown many interesting things, and one of the chief of these is a book where are kept all the imitation bank-notes, called forgeries, that men have made and tried to persuade people were real ones. In some cases these are so cleverly done that even the bankers themselves hardly knew the difference, and many, many people had been cheated by them.

The great machines for printing bank-notes are inside the bank, and each note has a different number. Let us follow one throughout its life. It is printed on special paper made for the bank, and not sold to anyone else, and it is printed in the Bank's own machine. It goes in at one end of the machine, just a blank bit of paper, and comes out at the other worth five pounds. This seems almost more wonderful than making gold coins. Downstairs, in the office of the Bank, a man comes in who has an account with the Bank--that is to say, he has given the Bank people a large sum of money to keep for him--and he takes out some of it when he likes. He comes this morning to ask for twenty pounds, and it is given to him in four five-pound notes, which he folds up and puts in his pocket-book and then he goes away. He has just got outside the Bank, when a friend comes up, and says: 'I say, old man, what about that five pounds you owe me?'

So the first man gives him one five-pound note. The second man has to pay his landlady's rent, and he owes her three pounds; so he gives her the five-pound note, and she gives him two pounds in gold back again.

From the landlady the note pa.s.ses to a shopkeeper, and from him to another man; and so it goes on, wandering and wandering through the hands of hundreds of people. It started a very nice clean new note; but it gets crumpled and dirty, and at last one day it comes to a man who has had some money given to him which he wants to put into the Bank, and he pays this five-pound note in with the rest. So after its life it has rest. It never goes out again into the world; but when once it comes back to the Bank it is torn up and destroyed. A great many men are kept at work only tearing up bank-notes; so every day, while many new ones are being made, many old ones are being torn up, and the number keeps about the same.

An old woman bought a mattress at a sale, and she thought she would undo it and shake up the stuff inside and make it softer, and when she cut it up she found among the stuffing some bits of paper that looked like bank-notes; but they were little tiny bits not bigger than a sixpence.

She took them to the Bank, which examined them, and saw that, though a great deal was missing, there was enough left to show that there had been twelve five-pound notes sewn up inside the mattress. They gave the old woman sixty pounds for them, saying that a bank-note meant a promise on the part of the Bank to pay, and they would keep their promise, however long ago it had been made. So the old woman did a good day's work when she bought that mattress.

From the Bank we might pa.s.s on to the General Post-Office, and see how London's letters are dealt with. You may say that there cannot be anything interesting in that--that it is quite simple to sort out letters and send them to the right persons. Yes, if you or I had perhaps six letters we could do it easily; but if we had six thousand it would be rather more difficult. The business of the General Post Office grows and increases every year, and the buildings are frequently enlarged.

Even now they form the whole of a street to themselves. On one side is the telegraphic department, where all the telegrams are received. We can understand very little about this, because it requires a long training; but we can see something of the enormous number of people whose whole work in life it is to take and send telegrams. If we get there about five o'clock in the afternoon, we shall see some girls and little telegraph-boys hurrying about with trays, on which are piles of cut bread-and-b.u.t.ter, and with great tin cans, like the cans in which hot water is carried up for your bath. These cans are full of strong, hot tea. Then we enter one room, so big that it almost startles you, and see, seated at rows and rows of tables, many men, and nearly all of them are working away at the telegraph instrument before them--tick, tick, tick, tack; they cannot hear what you say, even though you talk quite close to them, for all their attention is taken up by their work. For eight hours every day they sit here and take and send telegrams. Here comes the tea; it is poured out into the large cup waiting for it, and the man takes a drink or a bite as he works. Some of the workers buy jam to spread on their bread. In one place we see a tray with a large pile of cakes and biscuits; but these are being sold, though the tea and bread-and-b.u.t.ter are supplied by the Post-Office to its workers free. It must be a big business to make tea for about fifteen hundred persons every day. No wonder cans are used to carry it about, for teapots would be of very little use. In one room there are men doing all the telegrams for the daily papers--accounts of great speeches, or races, or anything important that people expect to hear about--and by means of one instrument one man can send the same news to five different places at the same time. This sounds like a miracle to us, who do not understand how it is done. In another room there are many girls who do just the same work, and keep the same hours as the men, but are not paid so much simply because they are women; they are having tea too. They seem to be very fond of shrimp-paste, which they spread on their bread-and-b.u.t.ter instead of jam. In every room there is always a loud noise like the wash of waves; that is made up of hundreds of busy little instruments ticking away hard all at once. It seems wonderfully quiet when we leave it behind, and step out into the street again where the lamps are being lit.

It is nearly six o'clock now, and opposite is the large building of the Post-Office where the letters are dealt with. Up the steps in front we see the huge letter-box, with a great gaping slit of a mouth into which boys and men are pouring letters as fast as they can; for at six o'clock the country letters are sent off, and any posted after that will not be delivered first thing next morning in the country, but will arrive later.

Come inside; we have a special order so that we can be admitted without any difficulty. Now we see from the inside what we saw from the outside a minute ago. It is like looking at the inside of a piece of machinery.

We see now only the big slit and the eager hands thrusting letters into it, more letters and more, which fly down inside like a snowstorm of enormous flakes. They drop into great clothes baskets, which are filled up every minute, and when full are dragged away by the postmen inside, who thrust others into their places, others which, incredibly quickly, are filled up, too, and dragged away. Rattle, rattle; down come the letters. One boy outside has a bag, which he empties by tipping it up so that a stream of letters runs down; he must be from an office. Here is another, and another; but at last six o'clock strikes, the great baskets have been dragged away, and no more letters for the country go until much later. The basketfuls have been emptied into sacks; these sacks are tied up with string and sealed with a piece of sealing-wax a good deal thicker than your wrist, and then they are flung down into the bright scarlet carts, which belong to the Post-Office, and which stand waiting outside. Each driver starts off punctually with his load, and drives to another great office in London where the country letters are sorted out and sent off. All this business used to be done here where we are, but in the last year or two it has been found better to keep the London and the country letters separate.

Now we turn to look at the London ones. There is a separate box for them to be posted in. Perhaps you who live in the country have never seen that. At every large London office there are two boxes side by side, and into one the people put their letters meant for the country, and into the other those for London. The London letters are gathered from the box and thrown out upon large tables, and down each side a row of boys and men stand and sort them out like a pack of cards, putting them all together, face up, and with the stamp in the same position. When they are arranged the boys carry a great bundle to another man who has to stamp them, so as to mark the stamp in case it should be used again.

There is a very clever contrivance for this. A little round wheel spins at a tremendous pace, and on it are dark lines covered with wet ink. A man holds the letters and pushes them one by one up to the wheel, which, when it touches them, drags them through a narrow s.p.a.ce in front, and as they pa.s.s the wheel the ink-lines run across the stamp and mark it so that it cannot be used again. So quickly does the little wheel whirr and the letters spin past that five hundred are done in a minute. Think of that; it means nearly nine a second. Nine letters stamped while you say 'One--two,' which is a second. Some letters are too thick and others too big to go through the little s.p.a.ce by the wheel, so the man who is looking after them picks out those and throws them up on to a tray, from which they are gathered up and carried to another man, who stamps each by hand, a much slower process.

When the letters are stamped they are carried off to other men, who sort them out, throwing them into different divisions, according to the part of London for which they are intended, and any that he cannot read, any that have not got a sufficient address, or any that have not a stamp on, are put aside. Those with bad or insufficient addresses are called 'blind,' which is a funny word to use in this sense; they are carried off to some men, who sit with ponderous books in front of them, and who work solemnly, hunting out names and addresses. Perhaps one address is so badly written that it looks to you and me just as if a beetle had fallen into an ink-bottle and walked over the paper. But the man at the desk is accustomed to bad writing, he soon makes it out, and writes it neatly so that it can be read and the letter sent on. Another person has put the street, perhaps on his envelope, but not the district of London, and this is hunted up and supplied, and so on; and always as the men work, gradually reducing the pile of letters before them, more are added, so that it seems as if their work would never end. Near the first men who were sorting letters are others sorting out packets and throwing them into baskets. Fast as they work, they cannot keep up with the fresh piles always poured in. They pitch the parcels into the baskets with speed and accuracy generally, but sometimes in their haste a packet flies over the rail and hits the head of a person walking past.

Here is a little table where a man is standing looking at some odd things--a clothes brush, a box of flowers, a locket, and a pair of gloves. What is he doing? These are things which have been badly tied up, and have consequently come undone in the post, and some of them have no addresses, but perhaps there is a letter inside the parcel. This letter begins 'My darling,' but there is no time to read it; all that is wanted is the address of the sender, to which the things can be returned. This is quickly found, and the parcel is tied up again and sent back. But if you do not want to have any of your letters seen by a man in the Post-Office, you had better tie them up very carefully when you send them by post. The things for which no addresses can be found go to the Dead Letter Office, and every now and then there is a sale of them.

But the Post-Office does its best always to find the people to whom the things should be sent, and tries to please everyone, which is a difficult task, and it very often comes in for a great deal of blame.

But we wonder as we leave the great building, not at the things that are occasionally lost, but at the great ma.s.s, the millions of letters, that are sent safely through to their journey's end without being either lost or delayed.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE LORD MAYOR'S SHOW AND OTHER THINGS

We have now seen a good deal of London, and know something about it; but there are a few facts that do not come very well into any of the preceding chapters, and so to end up I am going to make a chapter about the odd things.

You remember that when d.i.c.k Whittington, weary and disheartened, would have gone away from London, he heard the bells of Bow Church ringing, and what they seemed to say to him was, 'Turn again, Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London.' And he was so much encouraged that he did turn again, and persevered, and in the end he rose so high as to be Lord Mayor, not once, but three times.

It is a great thing to be the Lord Mayor. He is chosen every year, and rules the city for a year, and then resigns his grand position to his successor. There is a splendid house right in the heart of the City called the Mansion House, and here the Lord Mayor lives while he is Lord Mayor, and here he gives great banquets. Sometimes the King and Queen come to lunch with him, and all the great people from abroad who visit England go to see the Lord Mayor. When the King makes a procession through London in state he is met at Temple Bar, where the City begins, by the Lord Mayor, who hands him the keys of the City; not that there is any longer any gate that needs unlocking, but this ceremony is kept up in memory of the time when London was surrounded by a high wall, which prevented anyone getting in except by the gates.

The ninth of November is Lord Mayor's Day. On that day the new Lord Mayor, who has been chosen for the year, makes a procession all round London. This is a great holiday; the shops are shut, and people put on their best clothes and turn out into the streets, and very early in the morning the police begin to stop the omnibuses and cabs that are going down the City streets and turn them into other streets more out of the way. Then the crowds grow thicker and thicker, walking all over the roadway, so that there would be no room for anyone to drive through even if it were permitted. At last the signal is given that the procession is coming. Then the police hurry about and push the people back, and make a way for the procession, and everyone stands on tiptoe and strains to see over his neighbour's shoulders. First come bands playing gay tunes and soldiers marching, and then more soldiers and more bands, and then perhaps sailors, and it may be the fire-engine, not racing along to put out a fire, but with the horses trotting gently, while the people shout and cheer, for everyone admires the Fire Brigade.

These are followed by the lifeboat men, who save life at sea, and fight with the waves as the firemen fight with the flames. They have a great lifeboat on a car, and the people cheer themselves hoa.r.s.e at the sight of it. Then follow shows, with people dressed up to represent India or Asia, dragged along on great cars. One year there were men dressed up to represent all the Lord Mayors there had been in the City since very early times, and the gay colours and the curious old-fashioned clothes were very pretty. There may follow next the Duke of York's little soldier boys that you have read about, marching along with their band playing, and enjoying themselves very much. It is a holiday for them.

There are also carriages with the officers of the City, the sheriffs and aldermen, who help the Lord Mayor with his duties, and who will perhaps themselves take his place in turn; and at last there is a great shouting and cheering, and a huge coach appears painted with crimson and gold, like the gla.s.s coach that the fairy G.o.dmother made for Cinderella.

It comes swinging along with the Lord Mayor inside. There are four horses covered with rich harness, and the fat coachman on the box, with his three-cornered hat and brilliant livery, looks very proud of himself and his position.

When the procession has pa.s.sed the people close in over the road again, and jostle and push and laugh, and everyone seems to be going in different directions, and Lord Mayor's Show is done for another year.

When I began writing about the Lord Mayor I mentioned d.i.c.k Whittington and Bow bells. Bow Church is a very famous church. One way of expressing the fact of being a Londoner used to be to say 'born within sound of Bow bells.'

The old church was burnt down with all the others in the Fire, and the church that now stands was built by Sir Christopher Wren. In the old church it was a rule that the bell should be rung every night, and when the shopmen heard the bell they shut up their shops. Now, the men who rang the bell sometimes were late, and this made the apprentices, the young men who worked in the shops, very angry, for they wanted to get away from their work and go out into the streets to enjoy themselves; but their masters would not let them go until the bell rang. So the young apprentices made up a rhyme:

'Clarke of the Bow bell, with thy yellow lockes, For thy late ringing, thy head shall have knockes.'

And the clerk was frightened, and said:

'Children of Cheape, hold you all still, For you shall have Bow bell rung at your will.'

Cheape was the name of the street where the church stands, and it is now called Cheapside. I expect the clerk kept his promise, for the young apprentices were very st.u.r.dy, and they would have given him 'knockes' at once. I do not know how they liked being called children.

On the top of Bow spire there was a figure of a dragon, which looked very fine when the sun shone; and in another part of the City, near the Bank and the Mansion House, there was on the top of the Royal Exchange a gra.s.shopper, which was the sign of a great merchant of Queen Elizabeth's time, who built the first Exchange. Now, there was an old saying that when the gra.s.shopper from the Exchange and the dragon from Bow Church should meet, the streets of London would run with blood. But this did not seem at all likely to happen, for there is a long distance between the Exchange and Bow Church. But rather less than a hundred years ago the dragon was taken down to be cleaned, and at the same time someone thought the gra.s.shopper wanted repair, and, as it happened, he took it to the very same builder's yard where the dragon was, and the dragon and the gra.s.shopper lay side by side. Then someone remembered that old saying, and was terrified; but there was no fighting, and the streets of London did not run with blood, which shows that old sayings do not always come true.

London City is now lighted by electricity, which has almost displaced gas, but there was a time not so long ago when the only lighting of the streets was done by candles, and every man who owned a window looking out on to the street was forced to burn a candle there from six to ten o'clock every night.

You can imagine that these candles did not make a very good light, and there was plenty of opportunity for thieves and ruffians to annoy honest men. When people went out at night they used to hire boys with torches to run beside them. These boys were called link-boys, and they waited in the streets to be hired, just as cabmen wait about now. The torches they carried were flaming pieces of wood, which burned very brightly and made many sparks and much smell, and one would have thought they were very dangerous, as they might have set alight the ladies'

dresses, but we never hear of any such accidents having happened.