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[-152-]
THE ICE HARVEST.
THE north wind is raging abroad, ferocious as a savage with his teeth newly
filed, seeking whom he may devour, while the land lies benumbed under the heavy
hand of frost, and it seems impossible that tender green wheat and fragile
flower stems should ever again force their way through the floor of rock. Still,
all the dull day, all the bleak night, one crop is growing, out of which poor
men make their bread, and pile fire in the grate, and comfort their little
children. A crop as important in its way as many a one grown and sown under the
genial influence of soft rain and summer sunshine; a harvest, the fruit of which
in the season of its consumption is regarded as a blessing, as a healthful
luxury, and as grateful to the palate as rich ripe wine or strawberries newly
plucked. It is the ice harvest.
It is a saying amongst the busy poor of the great city, that
there "are always crumbs for the London sparrows," or, in other words,
that a man in health, though never so poor, may always find a loaf by diligent
seeking; and the reader who is sceptical on that point may, with a little
trouble, discover an eloquent fact in support of it. Let him some frosty
morning-well wrapped up, of course, and with his inner man fortified against
cold by a hearty and substantial breakfast-let him rise two or three hours
before his accustomed time, and while it is yet dark make his way to the North
of London, and manfully trudge the [-153-] country
road that leads to Highgate, Hampstead, or Enfield. If he starts from home
between five and six, he will probably reach one of the places mentioned about
seven o'clock; but he will not have found the way lonely.
The roads are alive with ice-getters, who with eager eyes and
their blue noses peeping over the ridge of ragged comforter in which their
throats are enveloped, are hurrying to the ponds to see what sort of a crop King
Frost has grown for them during the night. Yesterday they were there reaping the
icy water-fields clean; and in their anxiety to make up a good load - one that
might prove the last - with their drags, their hooks, and their poles, they
gleaned in-shore even the small straggling lumps that floated here and there. As
they lay abed the night before, these poor fellows, shivering may be under their
thin coverlets, could hear the snow-flakes coming with a muffled thud against
their chamber windows; and as they heard the keen wind spitefully spinning the
creaking chimney cowl, they muttered, "There's comfort in that, although
it's cold comfort. The ice is baking beautifully on the ponds up Hampstead way.
I'll just try and have another hour's sleep, and then I'll be up and after
it."
And here they are after it - in vehicles for the greater
part; in carts and "half-carts," and "shallows" and barrows,
tumble-down, paintless, and poverty-stricken, that nothing in the world could
match except the gaunt and rib-bare horses and ponies and donkeys that are
attached in the shafts. But they are not all owners of quadrupeds, these
ice-getters; very many have nothing but a barrow, on which, all the way there,
Jack gives Bill a ride, on condition that Bill takes the shafts on the homeward
journey with the load. It is still freezing hard, and the stars are twinkling in
the cold sky, when the ponds are reached; it is not yet seven o'clock, but the
troop of ice carters are not the first in the field.
Other poor fellows, poorer than themselves, are there before
[-154-] them - men who have neither horse nor barrow. They have nothing
in the world but a pole with a home-made iron hook at the end of it, and a
pickaxe, but in desperately willing hands those tools are sufficient to win a
loaf with. They brake up the ice, the poleman and his mates; they smash it into
convenient pieces, and with icicles dangling from the fringe of their ragged
trousers, turned up higher than their knees, they plash and dabble in the deadly
cold water to bring the ice ashore, and they help to pack it into the carts at a
charge of fourpence per load. It is well worth the ice-carter's while to pay for
this assistance. The sooner he is loaded the sooner he may be off to where the
great well is gaping its insatiable jaws for more and still more, and where the
well owner is waiting with the "bit o ready money," so precious in
frosty days to the poor man with a family. It is very important to be in time
with the first load. Unless a man is tolerably early at the "well," he
may have to abide his turn for an hour and more; and meanwhile. maybe, the
youngsters at home, having turned out of their bed, are hungrily waiting round
the bit of fire by which they made the kettle boil for father, who will bring in
the bread and the coffee.
The ice trade of London and the suburbs is in the hands of
half a dozen merchants; and the ice-wells or "Shades," as they are
sometimes called, are few and far between. That one to which the northern
ice-carters resort is situated in the Caledonian-road, just by the New Cattle
Market. Its exterior on ordinary occasions is not very remarkable. It is simply
a brick-built, windowless, "round house," with some sort of machinery
that looks like a gigantic mouse-trap surmounting its roof. I have looked into
that arctic gulf, and its aspect on a blightingly cold December day is almost
enough to turn one's hair white; a terrible pit, seventy-two feet in depth-the
height of a Belgravian mansion, measuring from the area to the attic-and
forty-two feet in circumference. It was night when I looked down into it, and [-155-]
there were flickering lamps to light the men at the various
"shoots" - flickering lamps down in the chasm, where, amid the
shattered spiky ice, the levellers were at work with their shovels, and in
awfully imminent peril did they look, poor fellows, down there, whence came up a
breath as cold as the breath of death, struggling and slipping, pounding and
shovelling while all the time load after load went shooting down, crashing and
clattering, and making the glassy splinters fly about their purple ears. It was
quite a relief to hear one of them whistle a tune lively enough to dance to, and
to observe another wipe the perspiration from his brow ere he raised to his lips
a beer measure, and took a swig long and hearty. The ice well at Islington
contains, when packed from floor to ceiling, three thousand tons; to make up
which seven thousand loads, little and big, are requisite. As I was informed, it
was one of the best seasons that had happened for years. Every man to his trade;
but I confess that the cheery tone in which the good ice merchant announced this
last fact gave me no great amount of satisfaction.
I never could have supposed that ice-dealing was so
moneymaking a business; and, considering the increasing summer demand for the
highly useful article in question, it is a matter of no small surprise that many
more adventurers do not embark in the speculation. The price at which the rough
ice is bought ranges from 15d. the barrow-load to 8s. the pair-horse van load;
which is, as was explained to me, an average of 2s. a load, "take them all
round;" but the easiest way of reckoning will be to take the fact that the
well of 3,000 ton capacity takes 7,000 loads to fill and that the average price
is 2s. a load. So 3,000 tons of rough ice costs £700 carted and delivered. On
the other hand, the contract price between the merchant and the fishmonger or
the confectioner is 2s. per hundredweight, or £2 per ton; 3,000 tons of
ice returning £6,000, or a gross profit of £5,300.
[-156-] But the reader may
exclaim, "There is the waste to be accounted for. It is all very well in
the winter, but storing ice in the summer time, when the heat is at eighty in
the shadiest of places, must be a ticklish operation." That certainly was
my idea before I was better informed. The wasting of the stored ice is curiously
small. I cannot exactly state it, but the reader with a mind for figures may
easily reckon it for himself. The well, as before stated, is seventy-two feet
deep and forty- two feet in circumference, and the ice is packed as closely as
possible; but by-and-by it settles and becomes one dense mass, so solid that it
has to be hacked to bits with axes; yet the shrinking from the wall on all sides
of this dense block is only six inches. No artificial means are adopted to keep
the temperature of the well low. It supplies itself with air cold enough to
maintain freezing point. The ice trade begins in May; this great ice-holder is
then broached, and by the end of July it is emptied. Indeed, it would be quite
impossible to supply London with ice grown and garnered out of our suburban
waters. We draw largely on Norway. Mr. Carlo Gatti, of the Islington well, is a
mighty man of ice. At home he farms the New River and the Regent's Canal, and
sends out his own carts and barges to get in the crops; and besides this he has
ships on the sea constantly trading with regions which are almost perpetually
icy, and which yield a pure block ice dearer than the rough by a shilling the
hundredweight.
And I wish that there were a dozen wells as broad and as deep
as this one. There is a grim satisfaction in seeing poor fellows "taking a
rise," as it were, out of their stern and implacable enemy; albeit it must
be terribly hard and perishingly cold work, this picking the teeth of Death, of
which frost and ice are symbolical, in order to win an honest loaf.