The contents of every dust bin in this vast London are carried away periodically. The dustman receives a small gratuity from each householder, and when be has collected a cartload, he demands a shilling at the gate of the Paddington wharves as he deposits it within their precincts. A dust-heap is very valuable to the contractor, and a large one is said to be worth four or five thousand pounds. It has to be sifted, sorted, and disposed of. We give but a slight idea of its miscellaneous contents.
Its chief constituent element is cinders, mixed with bits of coal, from the carelessness or waste of thousands of servants, which the searchers pick out of the heap to be sold forthwith. The largest and best of the cinders also are selected for the use of laundresses and braziers, whose purpose they answer better than coke. The far greater remainder is called breeze, because it is the portion left after the wind has blown the cinder-dust from it through large upright iron sieves, held and shaken elbow-high by the women who stand in the heap, whilst men throw up the stuff into the sieves. The breeze and ashes also are sold to brickmakers, the ashes are mixed with the clay of the bricks, and the breeze is used as fuel to burn between their layers.
But the heap likewise includes soft ware and hard ware. The former includes all vegetable and animal matter—all that will decomроsе. All these are carried off to be employed as manure. Stale fish and dead cats come into this list—the skins of the latter being stripped off by the sifters, who can sell them for fourpence or sixpence, according to their colour, white being most in request. The “hard ware” does not merely mean broken pottery, though of this there is great abundance. Part of the pottery is matched and mended by the woman who finds it, and becomes their perquisites; the rest, withvthe oyster-shells, is sold to make new roads. But hard-ware in the dust-heap means rags, which go to the paper-makers; bones, which go the bone-boilers; old iron, brass, and lead, to salesmen of those metals broken glass, to old-glass shops; old carpets, old mattresses, old boxes, old pails, old baskets, broken tea-boards, candlesticks, fenders, old silk handkerchiefs, knives, and salt-cellars, not forgetting old shoes, which go in baskets to the “translators,” who turn old shoes into new; everything, in short, that the householder has thought “not worth mending,” besides many a wasteful addition which the masters never knew, from mansions where reckless and extravagance bear rule.
Some of the contents are the sifters’ perquisite—a certain amount of cinders and as much paper and wood as they can carry, and corks of bottles, by which alone some boast they can find themselves in shoe leather; pill-boxes, also, and gallipots, are their lawful property. Jewellery, silver forks and spoons, and money, are occasionally found, and too often appropriated by the finder. One day check for a considerable sum was discovered among the waste paper.
Kent Times, Tonbridge and Sevenoaks Examiner, Tonbridge, Kent, England, July 26, 1862
