The Good Old Summer-time All through the summer the crowd of ragged-trousered philanthropists continued to toil and sweat at their noble and unselfish task of making money for Mr Rushton.
Painting the outsides of houses and shops, washing off and distempering ceilings, stripping old paper off walls, painting and papering rooms and staircases, building new rooms or other additions to old houses or business premises, digging up old drains, repairing leaky roofs and broken windows.
Their zeal and enthusiasm in the good cause was unbounded.They were supposed to start work at six o'clock, but most of them were usually to be found waiting outside the job at about a quarter to that hour, sitting on the kerbstones or the doorstep.
Their operations extended all over the town: at all hours of the day they were to be seen either going or returning from `jobs', carrying ladders, planks, pots of paint, pails of whitewash, earthenware, chimney pots, drainpipes, lengths of guttering, closet pans, grates, bundles of wallpaper, buckets of paste, sacks of cement, and loads of bricks and mortar.Quite a common spectacle - for gods and men - was a procession consisting of a handcart loaded up with such materials being pushed or dragged through the public streets by about half a dozen of these Imperialists in broken boots and with battered, stained, discoloured bowler hats, or caps splashed with paint and whitewash; their stand-up collars dirty, limp and crumpled, and their rotten second-hand misfit clothing saturated with sweat and plastered with mortar.
Even the assistants in the grocers' and drapers' shops laughed and ridiculed and pointed the finger of scorn at them as they passed.
The superior classes - those who do nothing - regarded them as a sort of lower animals.A letter appeared in the Obscurer one week from one of these well-dressed loafers, complaining of the annoyance caused to the better-class visitors by workmen walking on the pavement as they passed along the Grand Parade in the evening on their way home from work, and suggesting that they should walk in the roadway.When they heard of the letter a lot of the workmen adopted the suggestion and walked in the road so as to avoid contaminating the idlers.
This letter was followed by others of a somewhat similar kind, and one or two written in a patronizing strain in defence of the working classes by persons who evidently knew nothing about them.There was also a letter from an individual who signed himself `Morpheus'
complaining that he was often awakened out of his beauty sleep in the middle of the night by the clattering noise of the workmen's boots as they passed his house on their way to work in the morning.`Morpheus'
wrote that not only did they make a dreadful noise with their horrible iron-clad boots, but they were in the habit of coughing and spitting a great deal, which was very unpleasant to hear, and they conversed in loud tones.Sometimes their conversation was not at all edifying, for it consisted largely of bad language, which `Morpheus' assumed to be attributable to the fact that they were out of temper because they had to rise so early.
As a rule they worked till half-past five in the evening, and by the time they reached home it was six o'clock.When they had taken their evening meal and had a wash it was nearly eight: about nine most of them went to bed so as to be able to get up about half past four the next morning to make a cup of tea before leaving home at half past five to go to work again.Frequently it happened that they had to leave home earlier than this, because their `job' was more than half an hour's walk away.It did not matter how far away the `job' was from the shop, the men had to walk to and fro in their own time, for Trades Union rules were a dead letter in Mugsborough.There were no tram fares or train fares or walking time allowed for the likes of them.
Ninety-nine out of every hundred of them did not believe in such things as those: they had much more sense than to join Trades Unions:
on the contrary, they believed in placing themselves entirely at the mercy of their good, kind Liberal and Tory masters.
Very frequently it happened, when only a few men were working together, that it was not convenient to make tea for breakfast or dinner, and then some of them brought tea with them ready made in bottles and drank it cold; but most of them went to the nearest pub and ate their food there with a glass of beer.Even those who would rather have had tea or coffee had beer, because if they went to a temperance restaurant or coffee tavern it generally happened that they were not treated very civilly unless they bought something to eat as well as to drink, and the tea at such places was really dearer than beer, and the latter was certainly quite as good to drink as the stewed tea or the liquid mud that was sold as coffee at cheap `Workmen's' Eating Houses.
There were some who were - as they thought - exceptionally lucky: the firms they worked for were busy enough to let them work two hours'
overtime every night - till half past seven - without stopping for tea.Most of these arrived home about eight, completely flattened out.Then they had some tea and a wash and before they knew where they were it was about half past nine.Then they went to sleep again till half past four or five the next morning.
They were usually so tired when they got home at night that they never had any inclination for study or any kind of self-improvement, even if they had had the time.They had plenty of time to study during the winter: and their favourite subject then was, how to preserve themselves from starving to death.