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DONKEYS IN COVENT
GARDEN
 Look
at an old picture of Covent Garden Market and the chances are you’ll
see a donkey. A hundred years ago the Piazza was seething with donkeys.
Before cars and lorries appeared on the scene they were, together
with ponies and horses, the main form of transport. Because of their
small size and wiry strength donkeys were useful for squeezing down
London’s narrow alleyways pulling carts brimming with fruit
and vegetables. In prints and paintings, back down the centuries,
you often see them standing patiently between the shafts of a wooden
cart, their long hairy ears swivelled back, not listening, in the
way that elderly people switch their hearing aids off. Meanwhile
the activities of the Market - men and women unloading wagons, piling
baskets, shouting their wares - swirls around them.
In
1861 Henry Mayhew, describing London's costermongers, wrote that “on a Saturday, the coster’s business day - it is
computed that as many as 2,000 donkey barrows... visit Covent Garden
during the forenoon”. The costermongers, who had originally
specialised in selling apples (specifically the costard apple which
grew in the orchards surrounding London) later broadened their trade
to include a great variety of fruit, flowers and fish.
 Covent
Garden Market was a noisy, bustling, earthy place in the mid 19th
century. Here is a contemporary snapshot view of the Piazza: “Against the railings of St Paul’s Church are hung
baskets and slippers for sale and near the public house is a party
of countrymen preparing their bunches of pretty coloured grass -
brown and glittering as if it had been bronzed... Under the Piazza
the costers purchase their flowers (in pots) which they exchange
in the streets for old clothes... Men and women, selling different
articles, walk about under the cover of the colonnade. One has seed
cake, another small-tooth and other combs, others old caps, or pig’s
feet, and one hawker of knives, razors and short hatchets may occasionally
be seen driving a bargain with a countryman... As you walk away
from this busy scene, you meet in every street barrows and costers
hurrying home”.
The
costermongers’ home life was inextricably linked to their
donkeys. Mayhew wrote that the donkeys were often looked after like
pets, treated with kindness. They had their share of the costermonger's
dinner: “when bread forms a portion of it, or pudding,
or anything suited to the palate of the brute. Those well-used,
manifest fondness for their masters are easily manageable”.
The
costermongers told Mayhew that it was difficult to force a donkey
to leave its stable for a second trip during a day unless it had
been fed and slept in the interval. A donkey was fed a peck of chaff,
a quart of oats and a quart of beans and sometimes a bundle of hay.
The costermongers claimed that the donkeys lived well when they
themselves made a decent profit.
The
reason for the extraordinary popularity of donkeys as a beast of
burden lies in their adaptability. Their native habitat is open
scrubby terrain, the fringe lands of deserts. Their weird and startlingly
loud ee-awing calls can be heard for two miles in such places. They
can survive on a sparser diet than ponies and horses. They also
live for longer - 40 years is not unusual.
W
J Gordon writing in The Horse World of London 1893 describes the
costermongers as beginning business selling goods from a basket, “from that he advances to a hand-truck; and from that,
when he has amassed sufficient capital, he rises to the dignity
of the donkey-cart, which first made an appearance amongst us in
the days of Elizabeth, when donkeys first became common in these
islands”.
Gordon’s
happy description of the costermongers’ donkeys has them “pattering
along with a briskness and assurance that can only come of contentment
with their work and some of the smallest even are as active and
‘packed with power’ as one could wish, and with a quiet,
fearless outlook, speaking volumes for their master’.
Many
of the donkeys who pulled carts into Covent Garden Market lived
a nice, cosy life in Stepney. In the Guardian newspaper, Dorothy
Hartley recalled how, at the turn of the century, in the East End
“there were rows of country-type cottages with shut-in
gardens at their backs and the costers’ donkeys lived there
behind the cottages and you could watch them in the morning coming
out through the front doors; picking their way, neat-footed, over
the babies playing in the narrow passage. Every coster owned a donkey,
as one of the family, and those I knew were well cared for. The
costers’ barrows and carts could be piled up in yards but
when released, each donkey trotted off to his home, and if the door
was ajar, he’d shove it open and walk in. They were very sociable
and reliable donkeys”.
 The
huge increase in traffic - which in 1974 led to the fruit and vegetable
market leaving the Piazza for Vauxhall - had earlier turned Covent
Garden into a donkey-free zone.
Before the donkeys’ final departure they showed their disapproval
- charmingly stubborn to the end. An onlooker describes what happened
when, overnight, the traffic around Piccadilly Circus became regulated. “The police arrived at 5am - for early Covent Garden Market
traffic, and the lorries and heavy dray carts jibbed a bit and a
few late night revellers’ cabs resented it, but the costers’
donkeys just rebelled: they lay down and flatly refused to go the
wrong way round. They had trotted up to the Market one way for generations.
They knew which was the right way - the way they had always gone”.
Leana Pooley, Covent Garden Area Trust
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