by Trow, M. J.
vegetable products.’11
All this was free to the public every weekday and even on Sunday afternoons. Maintenance took place on Sunday mornings when the curators and research students could get on with their work unimpeded. The Star and Garter, the Coach and Horses and the Greyhound were the hostelries that provided refreshment after all that hot traipsing through the hollyhocks.
Mortlake had sixteenth-century associations with the philosopher John Dee, magus to Elizabeth and navigation tutor to the explorer Martin Frobisher. By the magician’s own account, the angel Uriel appeared to Dee and gave him a magic stone by which he could conjure spirits. All Dickens could think to say about it was that it was the terminus of the ‘Oxbridge’ boat race, another high-day of the Thames that brought all social classes out to spectate.
Barnes Common was still open ground in the 1880s, but middle-class villas were springing up thick and fast around it. The second railway bridge over the river had been opened here in 1846. Since this stretch of the river was ideal for racing, Barnes and Mortlake amateur regatta in July 1887 saw fierce competition between the various clubs on the Thames. In fact in 1887, the Thames Rowing Club had been the winners for the past two years. There had been a bit of Anglo-American unpleasantness five years earlier when, because the American Hillsdale Crew had been admitted, everybody else refused to compete and the challenge cup, together with its £75 prize, was not awarded.
Chiswick was the ‘great garden of London’,12 only five miles west of Hyde Park Corner. The eighteenth-century artist and satirist William Hogarth lived and is buried here and for a while the Radical philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived over a grocer’s shop. Chiswick Ait was a famous landmark in the university boat races and the town had been the centre of a brewing industry since the thirteenth century.
At Hammersmith, the river bends sharply south. When Dickens was writing in 1886–7, the suspension bridge was in the process of being rebuilt. On boat-race days it had had to be closed to the public for several years in the interests of health and safety. Hammersmith had only just acquired status as a parliamentary borough and in 1887 its MP was the Conservative Major-General Goldsworthy. The Phelps family had been boatmen here for generations and in the eighteenth century Phillippe de Loutherbourg used animal magnetism (hypnosis) to cure all sorts of illnesses. The river poet James Thomson wrote in the Dove coffee house in the town and in Dickens’s own time, the artist-socialist William Morris based his Kelmscott Press there.
Fulham, the place of the fowls, gets no mention in Dickens’s gazetteer at all, even though its market gardens were important as providers for London and it was the permanent out-of-town residence of the Bishop of London. There was a long-standing Viking encampment here in the eighth century and a thousand years later the town was known for its pottery production. At that stage, salmon were caught regularly along the river bank.
It may be that the place was eclipsed by the more flamboyant Putney on the Middlesex shore, at once its ‘twin’ and rival. In Domesday (1087) it was Putlei and the bridge here replaced an earlier ferry. They made starch, candles, beer and gin nearby, but Dickens records it as a place mostly renowned for its boating crews. The Prince and Princess of Wales had just opened a new bridge on 29 May 1886, probably blissfully unaware that St Mary’s church nearby had once been the scene of the Putney debates, when the Leveller John Lilburne had argued the case for crypto-communism when the world was ‘turned upside down’ in the stormy months after the Civil War. For all he had toppled a king, Oliver Cromwell, who argued against Lilburne, remained a man of the squirearchy and rejected the Leveller’s arguments for a brave new world.
Just below the bridge, the Wandle, one of the many tributaries of the Thames, flows into the great river. It has the fastest flow of any of the tributary rivers and the name at least gave rise to the sprawling borough of Wandsworth on the Surrey shore. We shall return to the Wandle again.
The derivation of the name Battersea is wide open to interpretation. It is Patrice-cey in Domesday and there were almost certainly a number of Aits there when the Normans came. Dickens was impressed with the Park, especially in summer, with ‘its excellent drives and Rotten Row’.13 The lake was cluttered with oarsmen, the cricketers played regularly and ‘refreshments may be had at nearly all the lodgings’.14 It was in the river here that the most superb votive offering by the Celts was found – the copper-sheathed shield with its red enamel and swirling La Tene artwork. If Lilburne’s Levellers were political extremists in their day, Gerard Winstanley’s Diggers were off the scale. They ran a genuine commune on St George’s Hill. At a later date Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man overlooking the river at this point. We shall come back to the haunted waters at Battersea.Chelsea Old Church had been a religious centre since the eighth century. Near it, centuries later, Henry VIII’s Chancellor, Thomas More, lived in a house that fronted the river. He travelled regularly, courtesy of the army of watermen who plied the river in water-borne taxis, to the seats of power – the Bishop of London’s Lambeth Palace and Henry’s Hampton Court. The river stretch was known as the Cocknies’ Sea and sixty years before our trip local young men called ‘kiddies’ wore tightly curled hair and had coloured ribbons dangling from their breeches in honour of their hero, the highwayman Sixteen String Jack Rann. Chelsea was still, in 1887, a quiet village, but it was growing, especially with a large working-class influx. Its MP was the popular Liberal Sir Charles Dilke, although the promise of high office was denied him after his part in the sordid Crawford divorce case in the year before Dickens wrote.
The suspension bridge, built by the Carron Ironworks in Edinburgh in 1858 cost £80,000 but the true feat of engineering nearby was the Chelsea Embankment. Along with the similar Victoria and Albert Embankments further downstream, this was one of the largest civil engineering projects of the entire nineteenth century and one of the most successful. Its architect was Joseph Bazalgette, who, more than any other individual, changed the appearance of the Thames for ever. Where once there was a clutter of wooden wharves and jetties, where children called mudlarks grubbed in the tidal silt for coal and anything that could be cleaned up and sold, there were now clean lines and trim walls. When Aulius Plautius’ legions reached the Thames in AD 43, the river was possibly a mile wide at Kew. Bazalgette’s work narrowed and deepened it, but it made possible the affluence of streets like Cheyne’s Walk, in Dickens’s day the home of the celebrated playwright Oscar Wilde. This was the artists’ stretch of the river. J M W Turner lived in Chelsea, so did William Etty and most of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood – Rossetti, Millais and Burne-Jones – were not far away.
This had been the home, in the eighteenth century, of Ranelagh, one of those pleasure gardens, like Vauxhall and the Cremorne, where it was possible to listen to music in the twilight and watch fireworks sparkling and reflecting on the waters. The diarist Samuel Pepys went to Vauxhall in 1667, when it was still called the New Spring Gardens. He loved ‘to hear the nightingale and other birds and here a fiddle and there a harp and here a Jew’s trump and here laughing’.15
We are now in the last reaches of Dickens’s river guide for Oarsmen and Anglers. The whole thing terminates at London Bridge, as though there is no world beyond that. In one sense, this is right. By 1887, the pollution of the City and the Docks meant that fishing was dismal in the extreme and anyone trying to row in and out of the barges, wherries and ocean-going merchantmen was literally taking his life in his hands. Across the river, the skyline of Westminster was unmistakable, with the Houses of Parliament and the exclamation mark at the far end called Big Ben.16
Lambeth was the loam-hithe or muddy bank, for centuries the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It had a reputation for low life and bad health, one of the ‘great sinks and common receptacles of all the vice and immorality of London’.17 Before Bazalgette planned the Albert Embankment, the river’s edge marked the beginning of a series of shanty towns, a jungle of wharves, boat houses and rickety stai
rs rising from the dark brown mud. It became the haunt of magicians in the sixteenth century. Simon Forman lived there; so did Elias Ashmole and John Tradescant. The astrologer Forman once wrote ‘this I made the devil write with his own hands in Lambeth Fields, 1569, in June or July as I now remember’.18
Even by the 1880s, it was difficult to agree with the poet William Wordsworth’s view written from Westminster Bridge as the nineteenth century dawned. Dickens reported that the bridge itself ‘was always rather a cardboard-looking affair’ that vibrated in high winds because of the lightness of its construction. The site of Edward the Confessor’s great abbey was Thorney Island but it was a religious settlement three centuries before Edward. According to legend, St Peter himself had rowed across the river and chosen the site. Freak tides and storms made this part of the river particularly vulnerable. Six years before Dickens wrote, the water height was 17 ft 6ins. Before Bazalgette got to work, it was also prey to drought. The ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 arose from the appalling pollution in the Thames. The river was not only the great sewer of London, it was the receptacle of all kinds of chemical waste and rubbish. It was so bad that parliamentary sessions had to be cancelled and it led directly to Bazalgette’s embankments.
As the river curves again, we are passing Charing Cross on the north bank. Railway and foot bridges crossed the Thames here, linking with the huge Waterloo Station to the south. The poet Shelley was completely wrong when he prophesied that ‘the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers’.19 Industry was here to stay by the time he wrote those lines. The watermen, who numbered in their thousands in his day, were reduced to about 1,500 by the middle of the nineteenth century. Cowper’s Gardens had taken the place of Lambeth Marsh at the entrance to the bridge on the south side before the railways changed the shape of the river crossings for ever.
The Temple Pier is on our left, near the stairs on the north bank and we shall return this way later. Ahead of us looms the bridge that marks the end of the Angler’s and Oarsman’s River – London Bridge. The many-times rebuilt medieval version had so many buttresses to hold it up that the river became rapids under its arches and only the boldest waterman would go there. The playwright and poet Ben Jonson paints a fascinating portrait of the bustle of this part of the river –
From thence we will put in at Custom-house quay there,
And see how the factors and prentices play there,
False with their masters; and geld many a full pack
To spend it in pies at the Dagger, and Woolsack.
Nay, boy, I will bring thee to the bawds and roysters
At Billingsgate, feasting with claret-wine and oysters.
From thence shoot the Bridge, child, to the Cranes in the Vintry,
And see there the gimblets, how they make their entry.20
The medieval and Tudor bridge was a riot of overhanging shops with market stalls and a chapel. There was even a public convenience, one of the first in the world, at the southern end. In the severe winters of the mini ice age of the fifteenth–seventeenth centuries, the bridge’s buttresses slowed the river and the ice covered it 18 inches deep. Frost Fairs were held on the glassy surface, with eel pies and roast ox for sale and jugglers and acrobats to entertain the crowd.
But all that changed with the warmer weather and the bridge itself changed with the coming of the great docks and steam. In January 1815, the London newspapers announced ‘the public are informed that the new London steam-boat packet Margery, under Captain Cortis, will start precisely 10 o’clock on Monday morning the 23rd inst. from Wapping Old Stairs near London Bridge’.21 The great architect John Rennie built the new bridge which was opened, with bands playing and flags flying, by George IV in 1827. It had only five arches, the central one being 152 feet long. In 1887 it had policemen stationed along it to keep traffic moving, but even so there was frequent gridlock. Dickens advised staying away from the place in rush hour.
The Thames below London Bridge which Dickens did not describe is now almost unrecognizable, but the ghost of 1887 was captured, fortuitously, by a series of panoramic photographs of both sides of the river taken by the Port of London Authority in 1937. Much of what we see in these astonishing pictures was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, when, at the height of the Blitz, the river seemed like a flow of molten lava and the East End became a rubble-strewn shambles. Dickens dismisses London Docks in a mere fourteen lines, but they were the largest in the world in 1887 and provided work for thousands.
Part of the reason for the lack of awareness about the importance of Dockland is that virtually all the comings and goings of ships went on behind solid walls that were 20 feet high. Unless Londoners worked in the docks, they were an unknown quantity. Virginia Woolf wrote about them in the 1930s, but she could have been describing the Victorian riverscape:
If we turn and go past the anchored ships towards London, we see surely the most dismal prospect in the world. The banks of the river are lined with dingy, decrepit-looking warehouses. They huddle on land that has become flat and slimy mud … Behind the masts and funnels lies a sinister dwarf city of workmen’s houses. In the foreground cranes and warehouses, scaffolding and gasometers line the banks with a skeleton architecture.22
By that time there were 1,700 wharves and warehouses along the Thames from Brentford to Gravesend.
As we glide past London Bridge, the church of St Magnus the Martyr and the Monument are clearly visible beyond the warehouses at Hammond’s and Cock’s Quay. Both these buildings are reminders of the terrible four nights of fire that destroyed the medieval city, 6,000 of its shops and houses and killed six of its citizens. Such was the heat in the old St Paul’s in 1666 that the stones exploded like cannonballs and terrified Londoners swore they saw French and Dutch warships on the river, firing broadsides at them.23
On the south side of the Thames, in the congested area which was once the stews of Southwark, stood Shakespeare’s Globe and the other Jacobean theatres, jostling with bear-pits and brothels, most of them on land belonging to the Bishop of Winchester. There were granaries and mills here too, prefiguring the industrial river of the nineteenth century. The owners of Hay’s Wharf carried out extensive modernization in the 1850s, employing thousands of dockers. Despite the two-week blaze of the warehouses in Tooley Street in 1861, the area survived intact at the time of our river trip.
This is the Upper Pool and already by 1887 most of the little alleyways that led to the river between the legal and sufferance quays had gone.24 To the east of the Tower, with its familiar turreted keep, its Yeomen warders and its ravens, lay the oldest of the London docks, St Katherine’s, a 23½ acre site built originally as Howland Great Dock in the late 1820s. The densely packed streets with their estimated 11,000 inhabitants were demolished as architects Thomas Telford and Philip Hardwick got to work. The Custom House, where Geoffrey Chaucer once worked as Comptroller of the King’s Wines and Woollens, regulated the docks from here. Irongate and St Katherine’s Wharf dominated the skyline with the grim, high-walled architecture and swinging cranes which now ran all the way to the sea.
Truman’s beer was loaded and unloaded at the Black Eagle Wharf and officials of the Dock Company lived in pierhead houses alongside the narrow entrance to Wapping Dock. John Rennie built this in 1805, just along from the Red Cow Inn at Wapping Stairs where, legend has it, the hanging judge, James Jefferies, was caught trying to flee the country in 1688. Oliver’s Wharf was still new in 1887, elegant in its Gothic frontage.
The iconic Tower Bridge existed only as a blueprint when Dickens was writing. On the South Bank, Mark Brown’s Wharf ran alongside Pickle Herring and St Olave’s. Pickle Herring Stairs was the new subterranean crossing point of the river, a subway that carried passengers via cable-drawn trams. Coffee and cocoa were unloaded at Wilson’s Wharf and Hay’s and Humphrey’s Docks were designed by William Snooke and Harry Stock and built by the greatest of all the Victorian building firms, Thomas Cubitt.
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On the north bank, Old Aberdeen Wharf replaced the earlier Sun Wharf that lay next to Wapping Police Station at 259 Wapping Stairs. The men stationed here would find themselves very busy in the months of 1887–9.
The river arches once more at Shadwell, flowing on to Limehouse and Poplar. Dickens, anxious to paint an idyllic and quaint picture of the river, glosses over Limehouse Reach in five lines and does not mention Shadwell at all. There was a six hundred-year history of lime kilns in the area, but in Dickens’s day the place was still Chinatown with a reputation of oriental skulduggery in opium dens.
Across the river was Bermondsey, the eye or island of Bearmund. A Cluniac abbey stood here in the fourteenth century, but by Shakespeare’s time the ‘Stink’ industries had gathered in its place: the gluemakers and hide workers. Street names reflect these trades – Leathermarket, Morocco, Tanner – and the hatters of Bermondsey were among those who breathed in the mercury solution said to drive them mad. The place had been torn down by 1887, but Jacob’s Island had been the most notorious of the river’s rookeries for sixty years, standing on barnacle-encrusted stilts out of the slimy mud and home to thieves real and fictional.
The huge East India Docks ran along the north bank from Orchard Wharf to that loop of the river that skirted the Isle of Dogs. There were still teaclippers sailing sedately up river in Dickens’s day, but the advent of steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal twenty years earlier meant that their death-knell was already sounding. Steamers ran from here to London Bridge every half an hour, at a cost of 6d (forward) or 4d (aft). Horse-drawn omnibuses ran to the Bank of England, fare unknown.
Rotherhithe had been a haven for Saxon sailors and the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from here on the Mayflower in 1620 hoping for a better life in the land of the free. The Baltic Docks specialized in timber and grain, but sulphur from Sicily was also unloaded along this river frontage.