Produced by MWS, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED YORK STREET, ST. JAMES’S LONDON, S.W. 1 MCMXX
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
It has been said that any man of mature age could write at least one interesting book, if he confined himself to relating his own experiences.
Well, that is what I have done. This is primarily the story of my life, interspersed with various anecdotes, “wheezes,” and “gags,” pertaining to a profession concerning the real inside of which the public is mostly ignorant.
Like Topsy, the book “growed.” An incident recalled here, a story remembered there, has been jotted down at haphazard as the mood seized me.
I may add that the incidents recorded in Chapters XIV. and XV., as also the human telescope story in Chapter XIII., first saw the light in the _Strand Magazine_, to the Editor of which periodical I am indebted for permission to reproduce them here.
EARLY EXPERIENCES PAGE Work as a telegraph messenger boy--First attempts at “public” entertainment--Small but appreciative audiences--I introduce the cycle to the post office--Christmas-boxing on my own-- I am rewarded with the “Order of the Sack”--Hard times--A home-made conjuring outfit--On tramp to Southend--Busking on the sands--Wrathful “niggers”--“Stage” fright--“Best clear, kid”--I clear--On the road back to London--Hunger and thirst--Four shows for fourpence--A “welcome” home--No food in the house and the brokers in--“Covering the spot”--Jimmy Jennings--I win watches--Beat a game and gain a friend--“A quick way of making money”--Learning to be a street patterer --Tricks of the showman’s trade--Nearly a riot--Jimmy grows anxious--Good-bye to London once more--A new pitch--And the beginning of a new life 3
Practising conjuring--Why I rarely play cards--The great Maskelyne and Cooke box trick--I make a trick box of my own-- The “Flying Lady” who flew--away--In partnership with Gypsy Brown--My life with the show folk--I begin to make money-- The kings of the fair grounds--Caravan life and cookery--The Romany people and their ways--Gypsy Brown cheats me--How the “bluers” work--Fights in the Fair Ground--The etiquette of the showmen--In a boxing booth--Taking on all comers--A rough life--“Do a slang to get a pitch”--The tricks of the travelling boxing-booth proprietors--A gypsy duel with cocoanut balls 17