by Tom Blass
It stank long before the coining of the term the Great Stink in 1858. Tobias Smollett had complained ninety years before of a river ‘impregnated with all the filth of London . . . human excrement [being] the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals and poisons used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of beasts and men, and mixed with the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers within the bills of mortality’.
A myriad of quotidian and extraordinary tragedies contributed to the stench. There were those that could stun even the most hard-nosed of cities.
Early in my forays I chanced upon a plaque at the bankside at Woolwich which remembers (or reminds us) how on the warm and clement evening of 3 September 1878 a 220-foot steamboat called the Princess Alice was returning from the long-vanished Rosherville Pleasure Gardens at Gravesend, its 700 passengers, women, children and day trippers, in high, holiday spirits.
It moved me, this story – an abrupt beginning to my estuary adventures.
Alice was fast and narrow, built as a blockade runner for the Confederate army during the American Civil War and, such being the curious life of ships, recommissioned for pleasure on the Thames. At a notorious bend near Woolwich she was struck amidships by a Newcastle collier steaming out towards the North Sea and her bows almost severed. Alice sank quickly, dragging her passengers into the flooding and opaque current.
A city no stranger to shocks, London was seized by a collective frenzy. At Woolwich a makeshift mortuary was soon choking with swollen bodies and grief. Scarcely mentioned by the press, which otherwise gorged on the Princess Alice story, was that the victims were covered in the raw filth released by Joseph Bazalgette’s famous sewage works, which saved London from the excrement which had coursed through its streets but failed to treat it.
Londoners possess short-lived and selective memories. The sinking of the Alice is forgotten bar the plaque, but the horror of the accident resurfaced in 1989 when another pleasure boat, the Marchioness, sank following a collision, claiming 51 lives. Just as it had in 1878, the press laboured the youth, beauty and potential of the victims and the public clamoured for new measures and a safer river.
Ghosts dance with shades of glory on the waters of the London Thames. But what lay beyond the shimmering lights, the prettified river walks, the temples to Mammon? Indeed it was a pleasure boat trip (unhampered by disaster) that spurred me to explore the lower reaches of the Thames, which my naive and cosmopolitan mind’s eye could only imagine as mute, disquieting and beyond the pale. Who were its inhabitants, flung by the city’s centrifuge to its outer edges? Where does the river become the sea? And did the silvery notes that glanced, sometimes, from its otherwise stalwartly green waters, presage some deeper, more intriguing beauty beyond? Thus charged I ventured, if not without apprehension, east towards the long-eclipsed estuary.
At Tilbury the river pilot hands the baton to the sea pilot, who in his trim-as-a-captain’s-cap launch guides the big ships into dock, where they unload cargoes of timber, toys and shiny cars, and fill up before heading out again, waterlines set by the balance-of-trade deficit. And from here the cruise ships dinner-dance to Nice, St Petersburg and Bergen. On sunny days I’ve seen couples sitting upon their fold-up chairs on the foreshore, beamingly content, watching these vessels come and go like un-murmuring servants, their bulk sitting lightly on the water, disarmingly quick, ponderously silent. But back from the ordered riverbank the land gives way to a patchwork of unkempt pastures, where travellers graze ponies among the wreckage of burned-out cars, and where amid a haphazard smorgasbord of allotments, pylons and pockets of bucolic countryside I came across a city built on shoes.
The faded vision of Bataville at Tilbury has its twin in the Czech town of Zlin. Its founder Tomasz Bata said he was inspired by Henry Ford to create a metropolis devoted to the manufacture of footwear in which, in return for loyalty and labour, his workers would receive housing, training, childcare and something respectable to put upon their feet. Drawn by cheap land and labour, Bata replicated the entirety of Zlin’s Corbusier-inspired work-life complex of factories and houses replete with school, cinema, hotel and ballroom in a patch of wasteland beyond Tilbury dock.
Life in East Tilbury, for five bizarre decades, was dominated by a micro-economy driven by the manufacture of heels, soles and uppers – which also added wholly new elements to the gene pool. The county district of Thurrock became almost a colony of Czechoslovakia, all the more so when the Soviets established their own foothold in Prague, nationalising the Zlin factory and putting greater pressure on Tilbury to make up the volumes if the shoe company was to maintain its profits. By the late 1980s Bata had succumbed to the charms of cheap Asian labour, and wound down its operations. The factories, once famed for their light and airy interiors, are now unlit and patrolled by men with dogs. Terraces of workers’ cottagers born on a Bauhaus drawing board have turned native, acquiring a peculiarly English cast of dishevelled pokiness. Above many flies the ubiquitous standard of the scowling and dispossessed, the George Cross.
For all that, the Czech connection has yet to wither. I met a man called Peter Cermak mowing grass outside a storage hut. Peter’s parents arrived at Tilbury in the 1930s to train the locals in the Bata method of sole adhesion. War and the Iron Curtain interrupted their return, and he grew up in what he remembers as ‘half idyll, half authoritarian state’. The dance hall, he said, was the best in Essex. But the bosses were heavy handed, demanding unquestioning loyalty and fiercely intolerant of dissent or unionism. Cermak, who also worked for Bata, spent some time abroad but returned. ‘Here I am now, tending the lawn in the ruins of my childhood.’
He warned me that Bataville’s inhabitants were not friendly. Old linkages had been broken, and unemployment was high. A scheme for massive redevelopment and thousands of new homes loomed over Thurrock like the shadow cast by some voracious raptor, hence the unequivocal demand to FUCK THE THAMES GATEWAY sprayed in several choice locations. I stole a surreptitious photograph of this, catching a fish and chip shop in the frame. The fryer turned in my direction and raised an angry finger.
Tomasz Bata’s detractors accused him of espousing a philosophy with fascistic overtones. Ironically for a man who made his fortune by helping the masses keep their feet firmly on the ground, he died in an aeroplane crash in 1932. It was, said those who had known him, characteristic of Bata that he’d goaded his private pilot to fly to Switzerland in the face of an oncoming storm. Close to the long-abandoned reception building, in a privet-hedged garden on a fading patch of lawn littered with cigarette papers and beer bottles, stands a statue to Bata.
‘Do you know,’ said Cermak, ‘that Henry Ford built a city in the Amazon called Fordlandia, which was overgrown by jungle within three decades of the first stone being laid? That’s what comes of outsiders and their grand schemes.’ And he turned away, drowning me out with the sound of his strimmer.
Beyond Tilbury lie the marshes: the Cooling Marshes, Whalebone Marshes, Cliffe Marshes, Fobbing Marshes, Allhallows Marshes, Lee Marshes . . . It is a landscape little changed since Pip’s fictional and fateful encounter with his future benefactor Magwitch – who threatens to cut his throat, turns him upside down to empty his pockets and dislodges no more than a piece of bread – a tableau of tidal creeks and paths through smuggler-beloved water meadows, the domain of patrolling harriers and owls. Very low tides reveal the bones of the hulks, decrepit prison boats of the kind from which Magwitch escaped, protruding from the rank bed of the river and its offshoots.
It is the tide that takes, brings, hides and sculpts the estuary – and sometimes musters forces of extraordinary destructive power, rolling up the seas, flinging them at the shore. On the night of the Great Flood of 31 January 1953 a tidal surge swept across Canvey Island, drowning 53 people, many in their own beds. In Essex and Kent another 200 met the same end. And in the Netherlands, where the surge swept across low-lying polders, briefly r
eclaiming them for the sea, almost 2,000 people perished in what the Dutch call the Watersnoodramp, the most devastating natural disaster in post-war Europe. Most of those who died on Canvey were the inhabitants of jerry-built shacks, uncounted and unregistered, ‘temporary accommodation’ for victims of the Blitz that no one had seen fit to condemn.
There’s an irony that Canvey and the Netherlands should have borne so much of the brunt of the Great Flood. Canvey would not have existed had it not been wrested out of the mud by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, who at the invitation of James I brought a boatload of dyke-building labourers from across the North Sea to drain the marshes. They settled, built octagonal cottages like fancy cakes utterly at odds with the vernacular clapboarded dwellings of Essex and set up their Dutch homes beneath the north bank of the Thames.
Then England fell out with Holland. In the first week of June 1667 the legendary Admiral Michiel de Ruyter drove his fleet into the maws of the Thames and the Medway and set about burning British ships and forts and throwing London into convulsions of panic. Samuel Pepys, on hearing that the underwater chain that protected the capital had been broken, confided to his diary, ‘all our hearts do now ake . . . I do fear too much that the whole kingdom is undone.’
It was, in a sense, a false alarm. De Ruyter wasn’t bent on invasion, only on punishing perfidious Albion for its duplicity – plotting with France against Holland while purporting to negotiate with Amsterdam in good faith. Duly humbled, Charles II signed a peace treaty with the triumphant Dutch, and their erstwhile tormentor rose so high in the estimation of the relieved British public that when De Ruyter was struck down by Spanish grapeshot in 1677 there was little celebration among his former foes. The relationship had been both intimate and intricate. De Ruyter’s ships had been the scourge of the North Sea throughout the Anglo-Dutch Wars, but he was never vicious. Within weeks of his death a biography of De Ruyter became a Cheapside bestseller.
In life, wrote its author Robert L’Estrange, the man who had sacked the estuary was ‘not fat, but fleshy, of a gracefull and majestic countenance, his aspect pleasant and chearfull, not terrible by too much fierceness, nor by too great mildeness un-awful; of a complexion sanguine, and a constitution temperate and healthfull; sober in his diet and moderate, though free in his words, neither sullen with rigid and morose reservedness . . .’ (De Ruyter’s nightshirt, a lasting testament to the ‘fleshiness’ L’Estrange describes, takes pride of place in the maritime museum in the Dutch town of Vlissingen, which the English have long known as Flushing.)
In the sore weeks after De Ruyter’s raid anti-Dutch feeling ran rampant. Vengeful mobs of Englishmen put the little cottages to the torch – punishment for their inhabitants’ imagined crimes of sending signals to the enemy fleet and general treachery. Overnight Canvey lost the character it had assumed, bar its dykes, sea wall and two cottages – one of which now houses a collection of corn dollies. That the causeway connecting Canvey to the mainland is called the Avenue of Remembrance is a nod to the victims of the flood, not to the creators of the island, who were brutally dispossessed. Today Canvey sounds like a joke, a third-rate seaside resort for anyone lacking the money or imagination to travel further afield. It is almost wholly the product of post-war sprawl. But within the (unmistakably Dutch) high sea wall that encloses it there’s a Netherlandish gentleness in its quiet, grid-like and idiosyncratic cul-de-sacs.
Occupying an acre or so of the island’s northern shore is a ramshackle marina at the candidly named Small Gains Creek, a veritable dogs’ home of yachts, smacks and working boats, many in an advanced state of decay, ribs jutting defiantly from mud-wedded keels. Many are houseboats, either by destiny or design, reachable by rickety plank walks suspended on stilts in approximations of garden paths. Few of these vessels will ever float again, but nor will anyone remove them, so they stay, disintegrating by degrees. But the mess and entropy of the marina provide an antidote to the civically sensible order imposed on Canvey by the planners of the early 1960s, with their boxy vision of spirit-sapping dullness. It helps Canvey resurrect (against a backdrop of tanning parlours, carports and takeaways) something of the flash of De Ruyter’s cannon, of fireships and musket shots, all of which can be conjured by squinting into the old-gold river-sea.
Canvey, like Tilbury and towns across the river in Kent – Chatham, Rochester, Gravesend – is long steeled to the threat of invasion, whether by Dutch, French, Spanish or Germans (less so to ‘foreign’ fauna like the Asiatic clam and zebra mussel). In 1795 an ex-military man called George Hanger wrote to the Admiralty:
I have seriously reflected on my pillow on the danger the capital has been exposed to within these few months, since the French have been in possession of Holland, the easterly winds prevailing, with dark and long nights, and not a ship in the mouth of the Thames, or near it, or any defence whatever, that I know of, to protect the capital. I confess it is to my utter astonishment that they have not run a body of men over in the long nights from Holland into the Thames, for in seven hours after landing, they might have been in London without opposition; indeed, they have had their hands pretty full of business, which I believe is the only reason they did not, but this is no reason why we should think they will not do it.
The forts at Tilbury and Gravesend, which squat like crabs, almost invisible from the river, Martello towers like sandcastles and Maunsell Forts, are perhaps only the physical extrusions of a general sense of fear that has persisted over generations. In the First World War the Martellos, built to defend against French invasion more than a century previously, were reactivated – Tower C in Jaywick, for instance, became a picket post for the 8th Cyclist Battalion of the Essex Regiment – while the soft contours of England’s hazy eastern flank were stiffened with pillboxes and rumour.
In November 1914 German warships fired a salvo of shells at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. It landed ineffectually on the beach but still showed Britain’s vulnerability to seaborne threats. In the same month the German spy Carl Lody was executed by firing squad at the Tower of London having been found guilty of, among other crimes, spying on the movements of the British fleet while masquerading as an artist. Soon afterwards the New York Times giddily ran an article suggesting that the raid had only been made possible by the existence of a German spy network working on the English coast. The Lody trial, it said, ‘showed how easily information could be transmitted to Germany through Holland’, explaining that flashlights and pigeons were the secret behind the ‘spy peril’, with agents on the British coast sending signals to boats flying neutral flags. These would steam close to the German shore and release message-carrying pigeons.
All this put pigeons in the firing line: ‘The bird shot at Framlingham, a short way inland from the Suffolk coast, on Tuesday, has been identified definitely as a foreign pigeon, and the police are following up information which has come into their hands.’ Further proof of a spy network was furnished by villagers in Norfolk and Suffolk who told of ‘big cars rushing wildly through the night’. No doubt there were some spies and, archaic as they might seem now, pigeons, torches and big cars could be powerful tools for the agents of the Kaiser, especially in conjunction with a submarine and a handful of dreadnoughts. In a churchyard in Harwich there stands an empty German shell case turned collection box, which, says its plaque, is ‘enduring testament to the perfidy of the invidious Hun’.
Less than a fortnight after that New York Times article was published, a fleet of German battlecruisers and destroyers shelled Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, killing 137 people and wounding a further 600 before the vessels returned to their home ports almost unscathed by the British fleet. A US newspaper, the Independent, reported how, ‘Sudden as a lightning flash in a lowering storm half a dozen cruisers of the Black Eagle shoot out of the mist that hovers over the North Sea and bombard the coast of the boasted invulnerable isle.’
Of all the estuary’s sulkiest corners, Shoeburyness is among its most wary and impenetrable. Or so it s
eemed on a day of scattered showers punctured by interludes of intense, almost hallucinatory sunlight. The Ministry of Defence owns much of this shoreline, but at weekends it lowers its guard, and when I arrived with a photographer friend at an entrance – high mesh gates prettily garlanded with unfriendly-looking fencing – men in berets waved us through neither querying nor demurring. We drove slowly onto a dead-straight road, a steep ditch on either side, coming to an abrupt halt at the sea wall where it would have otherwise tumbled into the estuary.
The transition from civilian to military worlds is sudden, dark and exciting. Painted signs warn against picking up strange objects and the (strictly prohibited) taking of photographs. It is all somehow Wyndhamesque, old-fashioned but suffused with menacing potential. Or from another stance sublimely beautiful, looking out towards the estuary at a vision that Turner might have held in his mind’s eye, of waves heavily tinted with silt marching in from the North Sea, uniformly khaki, no foam breaking and the sky above soot grey.
We watched as a flock of waders scattered itself across the gloom like cinders. The southern shore of the Thames was just visible in silhouette, and haphazard platoons of black geese unevenly dispersed across both the fluid elements. Out of the long cold grass a panting yellow Labrador brushed hot and wet past our legs holding in its mouth a limply quacking teal. In pursuit of the dog came a red-bearded man clad in a green hunting jacket, and our first thought was that, although we hadn’t heard the shot, he had bagged the duck. He scowled after the dog, but she was far off down the path with her prize.
The skeins of geese continued gathering in the sky as if conjured from the clouds – they had beaten down the spine of the North Sea from their nesting grounds in Siberia to shelter in the relative clemency of the estuary. ‘Oh no!’ The red-haired man had stopped by us to apologise for the savagery of his Labrador. ‘It’s instinct, I guess,’ he said, and we agreed and fell into step and conversation.