A POOR MAN'S PICNIC.
A GREAT pleasure-party left the Eastern Counties Railway station at Shoreditch on Monday, to spend the day in the pleasant neighbourhood of Havering-atte-Bower. Every year the poor of the parish of St. Mathias in Bethnal Green are carried out into the country, to see how Nature made the hills and the values before Man made Spitalfields; being too numerous for expor- tation in one mass, the holyday-makers are taken out in different parties; and this time the company included some twelve or four- teen hundred souls. And a strange sight was it to see them pour- ing by one of the side-doors on to the platform of the station, in order that they might be absorbed into the carriages of the train : now came a charity-school of boys—one of girls—a body of weavers in their Sunday clothes—a score of workhouse men—an aged couple—a miscellaneous crew of weavers, men, women, and children, young and old, fat and lean, grave and gay, dirty and clean—a score of old workhouse women—a horde of boys—the Sunday school teachers, the aristocracy of the race—more mis- cellany : there seems no end to them : the hour wears away, and still they come, like ants in Africa. The only change is, that as the time slips on, they come faster : the railway officers stimulate them with a Now 1 this way 1 Carriages in front! " Boys get excited and run; fat women with large families display a power of collective locomotion which is amazing ; aged couples do their best—which is not much.
The spectacle ought to be a pleasant sight, as any multitudinous holyday should be ; but it is not, at least on the surface. The race thus filing before you is not prepossessing ; neither does it look happy. It is upon the whole a stunted race; plain flat features, with pallid cheeks, are the staple—not a starved, but an underfed, unwholesome, unventilated look. The old people are short, small- limbed, and big-faced ; slenderer types of Teniers's human kind. The boys are dull and heavy-looking—less stupid than dull : they can get up a run, and a shout and a grin; but they cannot mus- ter the radiant life of your country boy. The women are better —women always are I—less deteriorated : but they are homely if not squalid, careworn, feeble, oppressed with the troubles of life. Some are bad sights—brutal and joylessly malignant : no spectacle can be more repulsive than your robuster workhouse hag, spoiled to all memories except a brutal profligacy, deadened to all hope ex- cept the brawling gin-bottle. The girls are the best—women as yet unspoiled, except by whatsoever has stunted their growth. Beauty peeps out here and there, faintly, like a wild flower in the neglected alleys of Bethnal Green. But for some part of her life at least woman carries the affections in her countenance, and that charm cannot be obliterated.
Altogether it is a depressing sight—so many living things, and so little life. Their mien is disengaged, as if free from restraint, yet they are on the whole subdued and slow. At last the vast herd is packed away, and the train moves off. From the embankment you view the miserablest tract of inhabited land—that parish of Bethnal Green from which these people have been drawn—an overpeopled, dingy, bustling, tumbledown place; you see squalid back-yards—rbehind the scenes of that low drama ; squalid loungers mounted at window and on house-top to cheer the parting train.
The engine, swift and steady, bears you into the freshening air ; the lands grow greener and more green. The train stops; the narrow defiles of Romford station slowly disgorge the invad- ing tribe; and when at last you take the road, the street of the market-town is filled with the moving mass. Already they look more cheerful ; and they fall into good walking order—though, the town passed, some few do run to the hedges to pluck the first dog-rose.
A slow journey is it to Havering, three miles off; but not a dull one. Exercise lends its healthful stimulus ; and when at last the multitude turns into the great open field on the hill-side, breaking into varied and scattered groups, the people have grown quite gay and sportive. They sit down to the dinner they have brought with them, and then spread abroad. But excellent order they keep. - How is that ? Some unseen spirit of order must possess this great herd of creatures from the troubled region of Spitalfields ; where, you know, the people are too wretched to be virtuous, Where they are so sunken as to be beneath the influence of order. And indeed here is such a spirit. Moving among them, nn: marked except by his ubiquity and the unostentatious deference paid to him, goes a man in black—guiding their steps, animating the feeble, checking the disorderly : he it was who planned the expedition, who orders the carriages, who mapped out the route, who conciliated the local authorities—who provides for that multitudinous march its object, its means of transport, its fixed path, its order. It is the clergyman of St. Mathias, the Reverend Joseph Brown, of whom Lord Ashley made such respectful mention. He is there with his family ; his excellent wife—a true working parson's kind and diligent companion, and his active sons ; and even the infant is brought out to share the holyday of his people.
It is a priest in his duty—the father of his flock, their com- panion and guide, the teacher and exemplar of manners to his people, be they never so lowly and lost. He it is that brings them again from the stifled oblivion of the crowded Spitalfields to the presence of Nature—carries them out into the fresh fields to sing the praises of God, and to bear home with them kind and healthy memories—flowers that never fade. He does his duty in the pulpit, with credit and approval in the church to which he is appointed ; but here we find him doing a wider duty in the roof- less church which is open to all, be they never so poor or so sunken. He is working for the welfare of the people. The con- sequence is obvious : he not only bears his doctrine where the mere pulpit preacher cannot reach, but he fastens upon his people an influence once common to the church, but now well nigh for- gotten. Carlyle has said that the function of the priest, as a teacher and guide, has passed to the more modern "cloth" of literary writers : and the remark is true—because the priest has forgotten duties which the want and misery of Bethnal Green have recalled to the kind and acute mind of Joseph Brown.
Of course such a man finds help ; and accordingly, Mr. Brown was surrounded by a few friends, clerical and lay, who aided him in his active duties. But strangers also assist : a leading Magis- trate came down to the Romford station, to help in the tasks of guidance and order ; he had in his pocket the keys of Romford Townhall, sent by a brother Magistrate, in case it should rain ; a gentleman at Havering lent the grounds; the local clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Faulkner, was on the spot, hospitably active for the comfort of Mr. Brown's personal friends. The ruling spirit extended to all engaged. It is penetrating no secret to say that Mr. Brown must be a poor man, looking after other interests than his own : but he is powerful in zeal and rich in kindness, and by those two great influences, although he cannot renew the miracle of feeding the whole multitude from his own scanty store, he does contrive that they shall have their holyday in ease and comfort, without hinderance and without reproach.
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