The white-bearded screever

George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, is his own account of washing dishes in Paris and then tramping in England. In the London half he falls in with a man called Bozo, who worked the Thames Embankment near Waterloo Bridge as a screever. Orwell explains the word the first time he uses it: a screever is a pavement artist. The work meant kneeling on the paving stones with a box of coloured chalks, drawing a picture there, and taking a hat round the people who stopped to watch.

Pitches were spaced out. At that time there was a screever roughly every twenty-five yards along the Embankment, twenty-five yards being the recognised minimum between one man and the next. Fifty yards from his own pitch, Bozo pointed out an old man with a white beard and told Orwell what he thought of him. The old man had been drawing the same picture every day for ten years: a dog pulling a child out of the water, with "A faithful friend" written underneath.

Bozo's contempt for him was a professional argument. Bozo used proper artists' colours rather than blackboard chalk, worked from a notebook of politicians copied out of the newspapers, and put up a new cartoon every day, because in his view the whole thing with cartoons is being up to date. He once heard that a child had got its head stuck in the railings of Chelsea Bridge and had the cartoon on the pavement before they had got the child out. By that standard the old man was not an artist at all. Bozo's line was that he could not draw any better than a child of ten and had learned his one picture by rule of thumb, the way you learn to put a puzzle together.

Everything the book says about the old man comes from Bozo, across fifty yards of pavement. Orwell never speaks to him and never gives his name. What Orwell adds himself is why a man in that position drew at all rather than asking outright. Under the English begging laws of the time, approaching a stranger for twopence could get you seven days, while chalking pictures on the pavement counted as following a legitimate trade.