There was a religious organization, called `The Mugsborough Skull and Crossbones Boys', which existed for the purpose of perpetuating the great religious festival of Guy Fawkes.This association also came to the aid of the unemployed and organized a Grand Fancy Dress Carnival and Torchlight Procession.When this took place, although there was a slight sprinkling of individuals dressed in tawdry costumes as cavaliers of the time of Charles I, and a few more as highwaymen or footpads, the majority of the processionists were boys in women's clothes, or wearing sacks with holes cut in them for their heads and arms, and with their faces smeared with soot.There were also a number of men carrying frying-pans in which they burnt red and blue fire.The procession - or rather, mob - was headed by a band, and the band was headed by two men, arm in arm, one very tall, dressed to represent Satan, in red tights, with horns on his head, and smoking a large cigar, and the other attired in the no less picturesque costume of a bishop of the Established Church.
This crew paraded the town, howling and dancing, carrying flaring torches, burning the blue and red fire, and some of them singing silly or obscene songs; whilst the collectors ran about with the boxes begging for money from people who were in most cases nearly as poverty-stricken as the unemployed they were asked to assist.The money thus obtained was afterwards handed over to the Secretary of the Organized Benevolence Society, Mr Sawney Grinder.
Then there was the Soup Kitchen, which was really an inferior eating-house in a mean street.The man who ran this was a relative of the secretary of the OBS.He cadged all the ingredients for the soup from different tradespeople: bones and scraps of meat from butchers:
pea meal and split peas from provision dealers: vegetables from greengrocers: stale bread from bakers, and so on.Well-intentioned, charitable old women with more money than sense sent him donations in cash, and he sold the soup for a penny a basin - or a penny a quart to those who brought jugs.
He had a large number of shilling books printed, each containing thirteen penny tickets.The Organized Benevolence Society bought a lot of these books and resold them to benevolent persons, or gave them away to `deserving cases'.It was this connection with the OBS that gave the Soup Kitchen a semi-official character in the estimation of the public, and furnished the proprietor with the excuse for cadging the materials and money donations.
In the case of the Soup Kitchen, as with the unemployed processions, most of those who benefited were unskilled labourers or derelicts:
with but few exceptions the unemployed artisans - although their need was just as great as that of the others - avoided the place as if it were infected with the plague.They were afraid even to pass through the street where it was situated lest anyone seeing them coming from that direction should think they had been there.But all the same, some of them allowed their children to go there by stealth, by night, to buy some of this charity-tainted food.
Another brilliant scheme, practical and statesmanlike, so different from the wild projects of demented Socialists, was started by the Rev.
