Some Make a Living Writing Speeches for Other Men to Deliver-Some, Again, are Handwriting Experts and Tree Surgeons – Some Catch Rats, and Others Collect Cigar Stubs.
By Gregory Clark, January 10, 1914.
In a city the size of Toronto there are many queer trades and professions, practised by only a few men, and preserved from becoming common trades by the narrowness of their scope and the smallness of their patronage. Among the strangest are the professional speech writers, of whom several are said to have plenty to do in Toronto, whose names, however, are little known except to some of Toronto’s best after-dinner speakers, who jealously guard the names of their particular geniuses. Mr. Arthur Hawkes the well-known politician and journalist, used to be, in his young days in the Old Country, one of these professional speechwriters. It was fine, says Mr. Hawkes, as well as inspiring, to go to a meeting and hear some dignified town councillor spouting forth your own words, swinging his arms according to your bracketed directions, and to hear him thunderously applauded at the end, into the bargain.
Another queer profession, one that in Toronto is practised by only two men, is that of the handwriting expert. He figures in law suits, trials. and in the preparation of criminal cases. The two Toronto experts are W. H. Shaw, of the shorthand school, and O. B. Stanton, the Yonge street stationer.
Mr. Stanton, and his father before him, have figured in many a famous criminal case in Toronto. The method used in determining whether, say, a cheque is a forgery or not, is to have a photographic enlargement of cheque and of a sample of the genuine signature made, many sizes larger than ordinary writing. With past experience and training, the handwriting expert goes to the particular letters and particular curves, and angles of letters, and compares the cheque with the genuine sample. He knows certain rules, chiefly common rules of simple psychology, which show him where a man cannot disguise his writing and these rules he explains to judge or jury.
In Europe, in Paris, principally. the study of hand-writing in relation to crime is highly developed.
Tracing a letter to a particular typewriting machine, a thing that figures In some criminal cases, is one expert profession. But the papers and samples have to be sent to New York from Toronto in cases of extreme doubt.
Tree Surgery
Tree-Doctoring and tree surgery is practised by three or four firms in Toronto. In Queen’s Park subjects of tree surgery can be seen – grand old oaks, with the side of their trunks filled in with black asphalt. If a gentleman falls in love with a tree under which he romped as a boy on the home farm, and wishes to have it placed on his front lawn in the city, for his children to romp under, these firms will undertake to transplant it – any number of miles.
In connection with the detection of crime, there is the finger-print expert, only one of which works in Toronto Mr. Hugh Duncan, of the Detective Department. He blackens the convicts’ hands, takes prints of them on paper, and these are considerably enlarged into photographs. These are kept on file.
In case a finger print is found on paper or an article of furniture connected with a crime, it is moistened, powdered lightly, and pressed on to paper. If it corresponds with the suspect’s finger print, it is regarded as most damaging evidence by the police.
Autograph hunting as a profession is said to have its exponents in Toronto, although no explicit examples are to be had. An amusing case is that of a Frenchman, Ludovic Picard, who made a steady income out of autograph hunting for many years. His most successful coup was accomplished with a letter in which he posed as “one of the unappreciated who is meditating suicide, and seeks for counsel and aid in this hour of sore distress.” This effusion drew a number of celebrities, including Beranger and Heine1. Lacordaire sent ten closely written pages, which were promptly converted into cash. Dickens also fell a victim, and took trouble to answer in French. Eventually Picard was shown up in the press by Jules Sandeau, and had to seek another occupation.
Rat-Catching
In the lower stratum of society, in the “submerged tenth,” a great number of queer professions flourish, none queerer being that of the professional rat-catcher, or “rat-eater,” as the police call them. Every big establishment has to have the services of these quaint professors, modified pied pipers. Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and the St. Lawrence Market find them indispensable. At night-fall these “rat-eaters” enter the darkened edifices, and in those nooks and crannies where their professional knowledge directs them, they set traps and lay poison. They are paid prices, ranging from 1 to 5 cents, according to the anxiety of the proprietors, per rat head.
The boot beggar’s queer trade borders close on vagrant crime or mendicancy. The boot-beggar calls at your door, a pitiable sight, with his toes protruding from dilapidated boots, and tearfully begs a pair of old boots. If you respond, as you are likely to do, he walks down the street to where his wife is standing, on the watch for a stray policeman, and hands her your boots to add to her already bulging apron-full. Detective William Wallace, of the Toronto staff, who is a devoted student of all these petty forms of crime and queer turns of human nature, says that the boot beggar averages 80 cents per pair for the old boots he gets for nothing, when, sold to the junk dealer.
Picking Up Cigar Butts
The city man who rises with the sun in the summer for the sake of health will often see a man much resembling the comic paper’s hobo, shambling along the streets picking up cigar-butts and cigarette ends. This is a profession, as they seldom smoke what they rescue from the gutter. Where the tobacco goes is a mystery to the police. But it is suspected that it goes whence it come back into the mouth of the smoker, in the form of a cheap cigar or cheap cigarette. These hoboes are “snipe-shooters” of the police lists.
The “finders” are closely allied to the “snipe shooters,” only they frequent the busy corners and fronts of hotels and theatres at daybreak; and carefully turn over the papers and rubbish in search of dropped coins and car tickets. It is surprising to learn from the police that these men “find” enough to make a living, miserable though it be.
The “pollackers” are other early birds, or early worms, as the case may be, who search through the garbage barrels of the city in search of tea-lead2, bottles, rags – all of which are merchandise in the eyes of the slum dwellers.
A profession that has a slight following in Toronto is that of “sandwiching”- being a human advertising board. Stray vagrants from London, where the human back is considered a good advertising ground, sometimes offer their services to Toronto firms.
Editor’s Notes: This is one of Greg’s earliest credited works in the Star Weekly. Sometimes when he was first credited, it was as Gregg Clark, like in this one. I’m not sure if that was a typo or he wanted to be called that initially.
