calculation was that the needle, thimble and scissors were implements which women could ply with as much dexterity as men, and that as seamstresses were: being paid ae work at a rate much below the scale of earnings enjoyed tailors, there needed but the occasion for the gentler sex to open up for themselves a new source of income. The opportunity was then present, and such females as could turn their hands to needlework other than that of, dressmaking or shirt-making were soon in pressing demand. At shops and private houses they were eagerly sought for; but, as at first they were insufficiently numerous to meet the sudden demand, the mothers of families came to the rescue by disintegrating the old apparel of their sons, and using the several parts as patterns in the cutting out of new garments. The success which attended the mothers’ efforts in making the boys’ clothes led them in course of time to attempt similar work for their husbands and if the latter happened to be too fastidious in the matter, the good wife still showed her solicitude for the respectable appearance of her liege-lord by brushing and cleaning or sending to the dyers such garments as at less critical times would have found their way to the dealers in old clothes. Women’s work thus went on apace; and, seeing how this new female energy was working against the tailors, more than one journeyman snip, even within my own knowledge, gave a clandestine support to the movement until the close of the strike by secretly assisting in the work which the women undertook to do. By-and-by, "Mrs. Stitchem, tailoress" or some equally euphonious name and calling appeared on painted board or printed card in many a window, and the tailor on strike soon found to his cost that the public could do better without the tailor than the tailor without the public. Not only did the women turn their attention to the making up of men’s and boy’s attire, but the men and boys themselves who had no wives, mothers or sisters to restore a missing button or band to its place, or to "finedraw" a rent, found that necessity had no law nor impossibility a place when the occasion arrived for their own digits to apply the needle and thread. St. Leonardensis had not quite arrived at man’s estate, but he had been able to do his own "making" for several years; and this strike among the tailors served as an impulse to further efforts in that direction. He had no ambition to he professionally the "ninth part of a man," but having seen a good deal of the tailors’ "art and mystery" from the time when Messrs. Middlemas, Gallop, and other "snips" sat on Robinson’s shop-board by the Hastings Town-Hall, until he himself, entered the service of a draper and merchant-tailor, he acquired a knowledge of the trade which in after years he was able to turn to practical account. The comic periodical Punch was not at that time in existence, but it had its prototype in the Caricaturist. and there are, doubtless, many persons living who remember the skits and sketches of which the tailors strike formed a fruitful subject in that and other comic prints of the period. The "De’il among the Tailors" was a cartoon more bold than elegant in conception, whilst "Men and Measures" and "The Tape of the Tailoress" were equally pictures of ideal suggestions: rather than correct illustrations of the new work which women had engaged in.
The operations of the tailoress were limited to the cutting-out and making-up of garments from old models; but had it been necessary for gentlemen who required "splendid fit" to undergo artistic measurement at the hands of the gentler sex, it would have been a travesty of no greater intensity than that in which St. Leonardensis many years later, was unconsciously enlisted as one of the principal actors. A graphic account of this was published at the time, and the story needs only to be repeated in the simplest manner. A gentleman and his "son" having taken apartments at East Ascent, began immediately to patronize the tradespeople, and among those whom the visitors delighted to honour was the present writer. A superfine broad cloth had been selected from which a suit of clothes was to be made for: the "young gentleman"; and, as a good fit was desired St. Leonardensis waited upon the party at their lodgings to take the necessary measurement. As, however, the gentleman and his "son" were strangers, a deposit was asked for, but which request not being complied with, the order remained unexecuted. Certain incidents of the next few days revealed the fact that the assumed gentleman and his son were a couple of swindlers, and that the person who had been so carefully measured for a suit of clothes was not a gentleman, but a lady.
Well, after a time, the tailors resumed their seats on the shop-board, and matters settled down quietly; but the tailoresses never entirely evacuated the ground on which they had taken their stand. Some of the single women, indeed, made choice of tailors for their husbands, and when freed from their household duties were enabled to increase the family income by working at their husband’s trade. Others, I fear, who contracted such marriages found, to their sorrow, that the burden of the work — when such work was done at home—too often rested upon themselves, the husbands finding it more to their liking and less to their credit to be otherwise engaged. The town of St. Leonards was, however, growing apace, and some of the needlewomen found profitable employment in the work of household drapery and upholstery. I can call to mind several such persons who thus worked for Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Carey, or Messrs. W. and E. Honiss: but who, as well as their employers, have quitted this work-a-day life for that which is beyond the region of mortality.
The mention of W. and E. Honiss reminds me that their younger brother George suddenly quitted this earthly sphere in 1879. He died on Easter-Tuesday, April 15th, at his residence, 1 Portland place, Hastings, in the 70th year of his age. On the preceding Monday I was gossiping with an old acquaintance named Ellis, who had been upwards of forty years a resident in Rye, but who, as a native of Hastings, shared with me and others the fun of an incantation which nearly 70 years back the boys had learnt from the old’gossips of the day for raising ghosts. Of course, every town had its haunted house, and Hastings was therefore not excepted. But the curiosity in our case was that instead of the haunted house being some ancient tumbledown building as in most cases, it was, new one in an unfinished state at Cavendish place. Whether the troubled spirit had there taken up its quarters from an uneasy bed in the Rev. Webster Whistler's "Dog-kennel" or in the other contiguous burial place, it is not given me to say; but this much is certain—that despite our charms, and despite our throwing of missiles night after night, as a provocative, the ghost refused to show up. But this by the way! I have referred to my casual meeting of Mr. Ellis — which was at the Albert Memorial — because Mr. George Honiss, whom we both knew, passed us somewhat hurriedly on his way home. I noticed that his face was of a peculiarly livid hue of red and purple; but although I was amazed at my friend’s appearance, I had no thought that his life’s journey was within a few hours of completion.
At the period to which this History has reached (1834), he was principal painter and decorator in the firm of his brothers, who had show rooms both at Hastings and St. Leonards. Messrs. W. and E. Honiss carried on business as cabinet-makers, upholsterers, decorators, painters and glaziers, at 43 Marina from about 1831 until 1838; and during the earlier portion of that period their next door neighbour was Mr. Minister (son of the Minister at East Ascent), who was the fashionable tailor of the day and himself the publisher of "Gentlemen's Fashions." This brings me back again to the tailors’ strike’ of 1834, which I will not further dwell upon, except to say that there was another strike among the tailors, 33 years later, which ended as ingloriously for those who engaged in it as did that of 1834. On the latter occasion Punch apostrophised thus :—
“The tailors strike I do not heed,
Let dress grow costly as it will;
For if my clothes have ran to seed.
Full many a day they'll last me still."
I had no intention of further dilating on the tailors’ strike, but the death of an octogenarian at the time when this was being written in 1879 recalled a circumstance that had an immediate bearing on the subject. The said death was that of Mr. John Jinks, a man whose occupation was never that of a tailor, but whose pecuniary resources were nevertheless, affected in some measure by the strike. This action of the tailors had already given an impulse to the ready-made clothes trade, and had augmented the sales of two business establishments in Hastings, carried on respectively by Messrs. Bell and Strong. Before their time the little that was done in "slop" goods were mainly controlled by Mr. Richard Selden, a sedate, but much respected grocer and tea-dealer, who also sold ready-made clothes, in a small shop opposite to the Town-hall. But the most noted store was one of those previously alluded to and at the time of the tailors’ strike, and for some years after, the name of Strong was regarded almost as a talisman for cheap goods and honest dealing. But it was a long distance to the upper part of All Saints’ Street for the people of St. Leonards, and even for those of “America,” to trudge, after they had taken their wages on Saturday night; and it occured to Mr. John Jinks, who was a working bricklayer, that there was an opening for a “slop shop” in what was then the via media of Hastings and St. Leonards. He therefore opened a small store at White-rock street, just about where is now 40 Robertson street, It frequently happened, however, that even Jinks’s clothes store could not be reached on Saturday night by the St. Leonards workpeople, in consequence of the non-receipt of their wages until midnight. I have therefore seen Mr. Jinks’s small shop beseiged(sic) on a Sunday morning by workpeople in quest of new garments. But this did not last long; for, in common with the rest of the “Americans” John Jinks had to take himself off at the expiration of the seven years’ lease which was given to them in 1828 when Government laid claim to the ground. Mr. Jinks removed to Spittleman’s Down (now Bohemia place), and applied himself more exclusively to his bricklaying work. He was employed by Mr. James Troup in the erection of that gentleman’s cottage in the centre of Warrior square, and in the work of enclosing the two pieces of ornamental ground. He subsequently became the landlord of the Wheat-sheaf public-house at Spittleman’s Down—sometimes called the "New Houses," and in course of time he left the Wheat-sheaf for a similar house at Rye, Not succeeding there to his satisfaction he again took up his abode at Bohemia place, where he died on the 19th of April at the age of over 80 years. He had been a sort of right-hand man to Mr. Wastel Brisco for about 36 years, and was employed in the erection of the wall which enclosed that gentleman’s grounds, as well as in the building of the houses in White-rock road and Cambridge road, first known as Trinity place, and Trinity Terrace.
For strength and industry Mr. Jinks had not many equals, and although I knew some of his family, my only reminiscence of him at the present time is "Jinks's Passage" at Bohemia.
I have stated that the St. Leonards workmen did not get their wages sometimes before Saturday midnight. This was especially the case when the London road and the Eversfield parade were being constructed. Men made longer working days of Saturdays than they now do, and public-houses were open till a later hour than they now are; and as the wages were usually paid at a public-house, the time occupied in settling with the workmen as they were called in from the street one by one, was very considerable. Not only had the employers to find money wherewith to pay the weekly wage, but they had also to depend mainly on the efforts of the publican to provide for them a large stock of silver and perhaps an equal value of gold. The Horse-and-groom was the great rendézvous in those days, and it was no uncommon thing for Messrs. Ranger to collect in Hastings or elsewhere a requirement of forty or fifty pounds of silver to be dispensed by the contractors who used their house on a Saturday night, notwithstanding the taunt of the Hastings péople that there was "never but one five-pound note in St. Leonards." The tenancy of the Rangers was from November 1834 to January 1637, and it was. within that period that another Mr. Ranger, a relation of theirs undertook the contract for the Eversfield parade.
