"Silk Hats For Hire"

1910

Sign In Old Dickens' Quarters, London, Forced to Go Under Modern Pressure

London. — Among the landmarks of London that have disappeared of late are some old shops in Houghton street, Kingsway, the district that Dickens loved. The irruption of the house-breaker into this little thoroughfare has done more to disturb old buildings to make way for modern office blocks — it has displaced an old world little man, Christopher Clark, whose business for years has been one of the queerest in all London.

Till the London county council laid reforming hands on the dim little shop it bore in the window the notice:

Gentlemen's Silk Hats
Lent on Hire for Weddings
and Funerals.

The old man seemed strangely out of place in the daylight that had been let into that hitherto dingy bypath of the metropolis as he stood by the door a day or two before closing the shop for the last time and retiring as an old age pensioner. A big white apron enveloped his bent form and he peered suspiciously at the questioner who asked him how he fared.

Gradually, however, he thawed and admitted that he was eighty-four years old. "Certainly, I have had a good business. This used to be a good street for trade. Lawyers used to use it as a route to the courts, but all those changes are taking the life out of London. Folks now get underground like moles when they want to move about the city. And every messenger boy who wants to, sports a cheap tall hat.

"What sort of customers? Most respectable customers I have always had. If a silk hat was wanted for some special occasion I would supply a good one for a shilling a day — a hat no man could fail to be proud to go out in.

"A shilling a day, mark you" (the old man lovingly polished a shining specimen of his head gear with his sleeve), "and the hat to be returned to me in the condition in which it left the shop. Should a client require a hat for more than a day a reduction would be made. There was no fixed charge. There were times when a man positively had to have a silk hat, and — well, I was not too hard on the man whose fortune was small."

"No, trade latterly has not been always brisk. It has sometimes happened that more than a month has passed before a client has come in here to hire a hat, though sometimes I might have as many as four in a day. It used to be very different. Not even a funeral is conducted decently nowadays Everything is rush and tear."

And the old man sighed as he thought of the former days, when times were good and Londoners jogged comfortably along, with the silk hat as their badge of respectability on special occasions.