CURIOSITIES:THIS POTTERY FIGURE was bought for a few bob from a long-gone antique shop in Trim. It's reproduction Staffordshire ware 172mm high, and carries the name "Billy Waters" on the base, writes Andy Barclay
Who, then, was Billy Waters: a figment of the potter's imagination or a real one-legged fiddler? He was real enough. There is an illustration of him in T L Busby's Costumes of the Lower Orders of London, Designed and Engraved from Nature (1820). The text reads that Waters was "remarkable for good humour and industry, for the feathers in his hat, the grin of his countenance, and the sudden turn and kick out of his wooden limb". Hence the pose of the figurine.
Vic Gatrell, in his hilarious and compendious City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (2006), writes that Waters was "born in America; he had lost his leg after falling from the yard-arm of the British warship Ganymede on which he was serving, and had had to beg to keep his wife and beloved little daughter alive ever since. He was familiar enough on the streets to be modelled and sold as a china pot for mantelpieces, and to feature in prints."
He features, too, in Pierce Egan's 1821 bestseller Life in London: The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in Their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, and particularly in Cruikshanks's illustrations of low-life conviviality. But Waters became a victim of these pictorial celebrations of what a more sober-sided culture had begun to deplore. The evidence built up against him. A penny broadside based on Life in London had Billy singing:
"Frisk away, let's be gay,
This is cadger's holiday;
While knaves are thinking, we are drinking,
Bring in more gin and beer"
The chorus follows:
". . . Now merry, merry let us be,
There's none more happier sure than we,
For what we get we spend it free,
As all must understand!"
And in a dramatisation of Egan's book, Billy is made to complain wonderfully about the dire quality of his dinner: "No capers cut for de leg ob mutton, Bah! No real turtle, but de mock turtle! No lem'un to him weal, no oysters to him rup'-steak. Vat! Vat's dat I hears? No sassingers [ sausages] to de turkey? - [ is like] de alderman vidout him chain. Damme landlord, me change my hotel to-morrow."
The new puritan Victorians were shocked, and Billy's patrons on the streets began to desert him. As Gatrell laments: "He had to pawn his fiddle, and would have pawned his wooden leg too, had it not guaranteed that he could never be put to the treadwheel. He died in St Giles's workhouse in 1823, allegedly cursing 'Tom Jerry' for destroying his livelihood." But he fiddles away still, leg a-flying, in my cabinet of curiosities.