Chapter III · —THE COAL EXCHANGE.

Near to the Custom House rises one of the most ornate edifices in the metropolis,—the Coal Exchange of London,—in which is carried on one of our most stupendous trades.

It is Wednesday—a market day—we ascend the steps of a beautiful sort of round tower, and pass through the folding swing-doors of the principal entrance. The space here, or little vestibule, forms the base of the centre of a well-staircase of iron. You look up, through the coiling balustrades as they climb up to the top, and at the very top you see a painting in the Rubens style of colouring, (though a long way after Rubens in other respects,) of the figure of a prodigal lady, who is upsetting a cornucopia, full—not of coals—but of all the most richly coloured fruits of Italy and the East, which seem about to descend straight through the centre of the well-staircase, and shower down upon your wondering and expectant head. Cupids—or, at least, little chubby boys, tumbling in the air—are also in attendance on this theatrical Goddess of Abundance.

Passing from this entrance into the grand central market, you find yourself in a circular area boarded with oak planks of a light and dark hue, arranged in a kind of mosaic of long angles, which converge to a centre piece, wherein a great anchor is inlaid. Beside this, there is a wooden dagger, to the blade of which a legend of no interest is attached. Three ranges of cast-iron galleries rise all round, terminating above in a large glass dome, with an orange-coloured centre of stained glass. Around the floor of the area, at due intervals, long desks of new polished oak, with inkstands let into the wood, stand invitingly ready for the transaction of business. The City Arms, on a series of small shields, is the simple adornment of the outer balustrade-work of the three galleries,—except, also, that these galleries often have many lady-visitors who lean over and contemplate the ‘dark doings’ of the busy black-diamond merchants who congregate below.

But let it not be supposed that the ornaments of the Coal Exchange of London are confined to the City Arms, or even the beauty of the lady-visitors. Private offices, and recesses for business, having the most neat, orderly appearance, even to a primness and propriety worthy of the Society of Friends, are observable round the area, beneath the galleries; but the panels of the woodwork that separate these offices, rejoice in the most lively adornments, à la Jullien. They are covered with emblematic, fanciful, and not very characteristic pictures and designs, all in the brightest hues; and, being painted on a light ground, they have a look of gaiety and airiness quite of a continental character. The weight and gravity of the City has, for once—and by way of smiling antagonism to what every one would expect of a coal-market—determined to emulate the gayest places of public amusement in France or Germany. Restaurants, cafés, dancing-rooms—and oh!—shall we say it—a touch of Cremorne! In one panel you see a figure of Watchfulness, typified by a robed lady, with a wise-faced owl at her side. The river Severn is typified by Naïads and a dolphin—by a little poetic licence. In another panel we have Charity, bearing a couple of children, with a figure of old Father Thames sitting among rushes below. Then, we have Perseverance for the Avon, emblemed by a snail at the foot of a brunette lady with black eyes,—the favourite style of beauty of the artist, Mr. Sang. The Trent and the Tyne are similarly illustrated, 249and all in the brightest colours, on a light ground.

Let us now return to the principal entrance, and ascend to the first gallery. The panels all round, are painted as below. The chief subject of most of them appears to be a colliery—that is, the works above ground, such as the little black house of the steam-engine, with its long chain passing over the drum, and then over a wheel above the pit’s mouth. The first we come to is the celebrated Wallsend colliery. Each has fanciful designs above and beneath, as if to atone for the dark reality of the centre piece, picturesque as this is always made. Over some of these we find heraldic monsters of the right frightful Order of the Griffin, prancing above greyhounds who crouch on each side of a large ornamental cup, not unlike a head-dress of the ancient South American Indians, which however is supported by a lady in the bright costume of a Mexican peasant, wearing wings. Beneath there lies a rich grouping of grapes, arborescent ferns, with vulture-headed griffins, and flowers of the cactus. The collieries are occasionally varied with a sea-piece, in which, of course, a black collier-vessel is sailing from the North. Sometimes the scene is a shore-piece with a collier boat; but presided over by the usual sort of nut-brown mining beauty with Italian eyes, and hair in no particular order, bearing a fruit-basket on her head, piled up with all sorts of ripe fruit of the most tempting size and colour. Beneath her, we again find the griffin vultures holding watch over some logs of antediluvian trees.

Wandering onwards in this way, we observed, a little in advance of us, a seafaring man, in a rough blue pilot coat, with a face so weather-beaten that it looked as hard as a ship’s figure-head, and a pair of great dangling hands that seemed hewn out of solid oak. He was very busy in front of one of the panels, admiring a lady with very good-humoured black eyes, and cheeks as red as ripe tomatos, carrying on her head a basket of Orlean plums and alligator pears, richly grouped with a profusion of grapes, and crimson flowers of the cactus. Her face was turned smilingly upwards at a collier brig in full sail.

We congratulated him on his ‘choice,’ and the suggestion appearing to please his fancy, a little colloquy ensued, from which it turned out that he was Thomas Oldcastle, of Durham, captain of the collier brig ‘Shiner,’ of South Shields, and having just discharged his cargo at Rotherhithe, had come to London to amuse himself for a few hours. Arriving at the entrance in the course of our talk, we ascended the stairs together, and soon reached the second gallery.

The flooring of this gallery—in fact the whole of it, like the previous one, was of cast iron. In the semicircle of the entrance was a picture of Newcastle, on one side, with its iron bridge and railway combined, and its old stone bridge below. It was very well and characteristically painted, and of a sombre and rather smoky colour, which Captain Oldcastle said was too like to be very pleasing. His thoughts were evidently reverting to the very highly coloured operatic ladies below. On the other side of this entrance was a picture of Durham, with the cathedral among the trees—also a very good and truthful picture. Captain Oldcastle, after great deliberation, and the slow pocketing of both hands, was obliged to confess that it was something like the old place. But this wall was not right—any how—and that spire did not look so—when last he saw it—in short, it was clear he wanted reality, could not make out perspective differences, and preferred the handsome looks of the brunette fruit-bearer in the lower gallery.

But though our honest friend had no good taste in pictures, there was a great mass of good solid practical knowledge in the hard-outlined head of this rough captain of the North Sea. It turned out that he was an old friend of Mr. Buddle, the coal engineer of Wallsend, and often quoted him as authority. Chancing to ask him some question about the number of people employed in the coal trade on the Tyne and the Wear, he said that he had heard Buddle say (twenty years ago) there were nearly 5,000 boys, and quite 3,500 men underground in the works near the Tyne: and nearly 3,000 men, and 700 boys above ground. On the Wear, he said there were 9,000. All of these were employed in the mines, and taking the coal to the ships on the two rivers. Captain Oldcastle estimated the vessels employed at about 1,400, which would require 15,000 sailors and boys to work them “as all ought to be.” Besides these, there were lots more hands in other parts of the great coal trade of the north.

But as this estimate of his friend Buddle, we remarked, had been made twenty years ago, was it not pretty certain that the numbers had immensely increased by this time? To this the Captain replied that it was so, no doubt; and supposing that every other district, besides the North, of the entire coal trade of England, had increased in the same proportion, and if you added to this all the agents, factors, clerks, subordinates, whippers, lightermen, wharfingers, &c., there would be found upwards of 200,000 men engaged in the Coal trade of England,—enough, he added with a grimly comical look, if a war broke out, to furnish the army and navy with 20,000 men each, at a week’s notice.

“If they liked the work,” we added; but the Captain had walked on, attracted by a picture in one of the panels. It was a portrait of a miner in his underground dress—when he wears any—the darkness of his figure and position in the mine being pleasantly and appropriately relieved by an immense quantity of highly coloured tropical fruits, flowers, griffin vultures, long and sleek-necked cranes, arborescent ferns, various logs of wood known 250in fossil botany, with here and there a string of choice jewels,—rubies, emeralds, and carbuncles of prodigious size, such as one has seen in “Blue Beard” and “Pizarro.” The next figure was a miner with a Davy-lamp, whom Captain Oldcastle shrewdly conjectured to be looking out for some of those jewels so profusely accorded to the fortunate miner in the previous picture.

In walking round these galleries, amidst so many adornments attracting the attention, a visitor might be excused for not too hastily turning his thoughts to utility. But this thought, in these too practical days, will obtrude itself. The number of the private rooms for offices, on each gallery, is considerable; their accommodations, all that could be desired; their appearance most neat, quiet, and unexceptionable; but by far the greater part are empty. Nobody will take them. Many of those on the ground-floor, or area of the market—obviously the best place by far—are unlet. These are of the high-priced, of course; still, as the price decreases with the ascent, why are not more of the upper offices taken? Here—in the very centre of all the great Coal trade of England!—and not one-third, not one-fourth, we think, of the offices let? We expressed our astonishment to the Captain.

“Oh!” said he, “the City is a queer place, and the City authorities are a rum sort of reasoners. They asked too much rent for these berths at first; and though but a few factors and merchants can afford to give it, the City still persists. And so they are obliged to go to the expence of fires in all the empty offices to keep them aired three-quarters of the year round, rather than see the place full at a moderate rent. That’s how I read their log.”

We now ascended to the third gallery. Here, the cold, though not the “beggarly array of empty boxes,” was most expressive of the mismanagement, somehow and somewhere of this well-placed, and most commodious building, on which so much money has been expended.

The paintings in the entrance of this uppermost gallery were of ‘Shields’ on one side, and ‘Sunderland’ on the other. That of Shields was a view of colliers in the river by moonlight, with a dull sky of indigo blue, and smoky clouds—very well done, and truthful, having a sufficient mixture of reality for the nature of the subject, and of fancy for the picturesque. The picture of Sunderland, with its one-arched iron bridge, which is so high above the water, that a collier can pass underneath without striking her topmasts, is also a night scene; but by torch-light; the red flashes of which fall upon a train of little upright waggons full of coals, coming from the pit to be shipped.

The panels round this gallery are adorned with paintings of gigantic ferns, fragments of the trunks of the lepidodendron, and the sigillaria, and other stems and foliage of those antediluvian plants and trees which subsequently contributed most largely to the coal formations. These paintings are interspersed with various miners’ tools, above which rises the glass dome of the building.

Descending the well-staircase, we asked Captain Oldcastle what capital he thought was employed by the great coal owners on the Tyne and Wear. He said—quoting his friend Buddle again, as authority—that they could not have embarked less than a million and a half of money, without reckoning any of the vessels on the river; but taking these into the account, the capital employed would not amount to less than between eight and ten millions. And this estimate was made by Buddle twenty years ago!