Bob turns the boat around and we head downstream. I ask Steve what this scene would have looked like in Victorian times. ‘They had wharves and lighter boats twenty-four/seven, they had all sorts of boats, but they wouldn’t have had the piers. The Thames is narrower here now, so the tidal stream is faster, and it’s more enclosed. It was more common to be on the river then. But they wouldn’t have had as many passenger boats.’
Bob stops the engine; we’re going with the tide now and we’re moving fast as we reach Wapping police station. ‘I don’t want to be macabre,’ says Martin, ‘but this is where the bodies go.’ He points at a pier with a little shuttered boathouse. ‘If we got a report of a body right now,’ he says as we turn and head back to the Tower, ‘we’d go and find it.’ I think of Andy Nation and Lewis Pugh, both of whom argue that as long as we do it safely we should be allowed to swim in what is a free public resource. But, on the other hand, I wouldn’t want to have Martin’s job and to have to explain to inexperienced swimmers why this stretch of the Thames can be treacherous, or to be the one on call when a swimmer dies.
Steve would prefer no swimming all the way from Putney to the Thames Barrier: ‘it’s dangerous, however strong a swimmer you are.’ Yet what about all the old Thames swimmers, those like Horace Davenport, who won the first long-distance amateur championships in 1877 from Putney to Westminster; Annie Luker, who in 1892 swam from Kew to Greenwich; and Montague Holbein, who managed forty-three miles from Blackwall to Gravesend in 1899? There they were racing in the filthy waterway, surrounded by hundreds of boats and watched by thousands of spectators, and there was no law to stop them. I haven’t even got started on all those who came after them – Annette Kellerman, John Arthur Jarvis, Lily Smith and Eileen Lee – when Martin turns away from surveying the river out of the patrol boat’s window and asks: ‘The Victorian era? Wasn’t human life cheaper then?’
15
Battersea–Lambeth
‘I seek not to wander by Tyber or Arno,
Or castle-crown’d rivers in far Germanie;
To me, Oh, far dearer,
And brighter, and clearer,
The Thames as it rimples at fair Battersea’
Excerpt from a song published in
Bentley’s Miscellany, 1839
Some three miles downstream from Putney, on the south side of the river and heading towards central London, is the inner city district of Battersea. While the recent by-law means people can’t in theory swim around here, it was a popular place for bathers and racers from at least the 1600s. Back then, when the river was generally considered clean, Charles II and his brother James enjoyed many an evening dip ‘to bathe themselves’ around Battersea, Putney and Nine Elms. King Charles was certainly a river lover, with ‘a propensity for swimming in the Thames at 5.00am at all seasons,’ writes his biographer Antonia Fraser, plunging into its freezing waters while ‘his courtiers shivered on the bank’. He was also said to have established contests on the Thames, when it was common for members of the aristocracy to sponsor working men to swim for a wager.
Swimming and ‘foot races’ became fashionable in England during his reign, explains The Badminton Library, and when Colonel Blood was arrested in 1672 for stealing the Crown Jewels at the Tower he confessed he ‘had engaged’ to shoot His Majesty as he went to swim in the Thames above Battersea. However, as Colonel Blood was about to take aim, ‘the awe of majesty paralyzed his hand’ and he changed his mind.
One of the earliest Thames races reported by the press took place at Battersea, some 150 years later, when in August 1826 ‘a party of printers took an aquatic excursion up the river’ in order to decide a wager ‘between them and a gentleman of some sporting celebrity’. The course was from Battersea Bridge to Blackfriars, four and a half miles with the tide without stopping, which another swimmer had successfully managed a few weeks earlier for a twenty-guinea bet. In this case a Mr Jolley, ‘champion of the Typos’, managed the swim in one hour thirty-five minutes, accompanied by pleasure boats and a band that played ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes!’ as he got to Blackfriars – a tune that it would become standard practice to play for future long-distance Thames swimmers. The tide must have added to Jolley’s speed considerably, as he appears to have been doing a mile in twenty-three minutes, while he ‘only turned himself on his back for 40 yards’ twice during the whole time.
It’s a bleak morning in early May and everything looks dull when I get off a bus at Battersea Bridge. I’m intending to walk a little way upstream from here to try and find the site of a swimming match held in 1838. The road, the pavements and even the sky are grey, while ahead of me the row of Victorian street lamps that line the bridge look suitably gloomy.
The original bridge was a wooden construction, completed in 1771, and by Victorian times it was the scene of many boating accidents. In one incident in the 1870s three young men were rowing upriver and when one stood up under the bridge to haul in his oar the boat capsized. The bridge was crowded with pedestrians and the cries for help soon reached the Thames Police. All three men survived; as usual, none of them could swim.
The job of the Thames Police, formed in 1798 and described as England’s oldest police force, was to protect property in the ships, barges and wharves within London, to ‘keep the river clear of reputed thieves and suspected persons’ and to rescue those in trouble. The Victorian press often reported on ‘terrible discoveries in the Thames’, such as the day the police found a ‘set of lungs’ floating under Battersea Bridge, and twelve hours later another set at the railway pier. In 1873 the Thames Police saved 32 people from drowning, and ‘prevented’ six suicides. In total there were 150 deaths in the Thames that year, four times the number there are today: 25 were suicides, 79 were accidentally drowned, 4 were from accidents. In the remaining forty-two cases it wasn’t clear how the person came to be in the river and they were therefore classed as ‘found drowned’.
As I leave Battersea Bridge and walk right along the river I pass a series of moored houseboats and a sign warning ‘Private Property’. Between the boats and the road there is a beach of sorts, its surface a slimy green; a group of ducks huddle on a pile of twigs, bottles and plastic bags. I’m heading to Cremorne Gardens where one of the first recorded swimming races on the Thames was held, between pupils of the recently formed National Swimming Society ‘and others’ for silver cups and snuff boxes during an exhibition match from Cremorne House Stadium to Battersea and back to Chelsea.
In 1831 Cremorne House, the former residence of Lord and Lady Cremorne, had been bought by Charles Random, also known as Baron De Berenger. He turned part of it into a sports club and his plans for ‘The Stadium’ or ‘British National Arena’ included a six-day Olympic Games, with one day devoted to ‘feats in swimming and other aquatic exertions’. The twenty-four-acre site would be a place for ‘manly and defensive exercises, equestrian, chivalric and aquatic games and skilful and amusing pastimes’. The art of swimming, wrote Random, was ‘so much neglected, although so truly an important acquirement to persons in all spheres of life’. Lessons would be offered, ‘aided by novel contrivances’, but only early in the morning in order not to offend ‘decency’, as presumably the pupils were naked. There was a 4-foot-deep ornamental lake, which would serve as a School of Natation for young beginners, and ‘The Honourable the Thames Navigation Committee’ had recently granted ‘the extraordinary privilege to the Proprietor of the Stadium, of constructing a floating swimming school of large dimensions, with permission to moor the same in the river’.
A balloon ascent at Cremorne Gardens depicted by Walter Greaves in 1872. The twelve-acre pleasure gardens opened in the 1840s, before this it was the site of a sports stadium, which boasted a school of natation and where races were held across the Thames.
This certainly sounds an organised way of promoting the art of swimming. As with the opening event of the first National Olympian Games at Teddington Lock in 1866, the Thames was seen as the ideal spot for some ‘ma
nly exercise’ in a city that was now home to numerous sporting clubs, societies and associations. During the 1838 race, the two heats ‘started with the discharge of artillery’, then at half past three swimmers wearing different coloured jockey caps and flannel drawers ran out of tents on the riverbank and ‘plunged into the bosom of father Thames’. It appears to have become a regular event. In 1840 the Morning Herald announced, ‘SPORTING NOVELTIES. A SWIMMING RACE twice across the Thames by AQUATIC JOCKEYS will take place at Cremorne house, King’s Road, THIS DAY’. The Town ran a colourful description of the scene: ‘Upon entering the grounds, we observed a number of faces familiar to us, amongst which were the Duke of Dorset, the most noble the Marquis of Waterford, Lord Waldegrave, Count D’Orsay . . . “Here come the jocks!” saluted our ears . . . We turned round and beheld a file of stark naked adults, marching round the grounds, in order to show themselves’ before diving into the Thames. A moment later and ‘a multitude were unrobed. The Duke of Dorset was the first to fall into the line. His Grace’s skin had a shrivelled, yet very glossy appearance.’
Despite aristocratic enthusiasts eager to prove themselves in the Thames, Random’s grand plans were not to be and a few years later the Stadium closed. Cremorne then became one of several pleasure gardens along this stretch of the river, offering concerts, fireworks, balloon ascents and galas. The Thames was now a place for entertainment and carnival, as it would be a little later on the upper river. The artist James Whistler moved to Lindsey Row in Chelsea in 1863 and his windows faced the Thames which he painted over forty years, whether the exposed piers of Battersea Bridge at low tide or fireworks at Cremorne Gardens. But for bathers in this area the river could be dangerous. In the summer of 1857 a sixteen-year-old boy died while bathing near Cremorne Gardens when he fell into ‘one of the mud-holes’ with which ‘the river is intersected’.
A bright blue sign announces I’ve arrived at the Gardens, a tiny park with cobbled stones and benches. On the right is a set of big black gates, ornately decorated with flashes of gold, which open on to a small patch of grass. I walk towards the river, to a pier and iron railings. In front of me is a large red ‘No Swimming’ sign. The shore below is covered in pebbles and rocks; water has collected in a big dirty puddle. I knock on the door of the park keeper’s office and ask if this used to be the Victorian pleasure gardens. ‘Pleasure gardens?’ replies the park keeper. ‘I’ve no idea.’ He comes outside and looks around. ‘Although someone once told me their great-great-grandfather used to come here and there was a wire across the river and they used to walk across it.’ And does he ever see anyone swimming here now? ‘No,’ he says, ‘though we did see David Walliams go past. We were saying, “is it him or is it a seal?”’ Aside from naked races in Victorian times and the swimming school outlined by Random, Battersea was also the location for a proposed floating bath, a precursor to various pontoons along the Thames such as the one at Kingston in 1882. ‘The want of proper accommodation for bathers and swimmers in the Thames has long been felt,’ explained the press. But now a limited company had been formed, with a capital of £60,000, ‘for the purpose of constructing floating baths on rivers and lakes, with filtered water of uniform depth and temperature’. This would begin with ‘a covered and well-ventilated iron bath, to be placed in the Thames off Battersea Park’. Lloyd’s Weekly reported in 1870 that there would be a 60×40 feet bath, but it’s not clear if this ever happened because it wasn’t until 1875 that the ‘first floating bath’ on the Thames was announced and that was at Charing Cross, off the Embankment, while the following year another was proposed near Albert Bridge.
There is little in the way of any modern swims or races recorded at Battersea, although in the early 1950s local children often enjoyed jumping from the bridge. One remembers ‘street urchins, myself included, jumping from the first arch’ into the river. They then ‘swam to the adjoining steps, ran along the warm pavements back on to the bridge, and jumped off again’. Bridge jumping appears to have been quite common in the 1950s. Londoner Alan Smith told his children he had been the youngest person ever to dive off Hammersmith Bridge, upstream from here, in 1952. ‘He was fifteen years old and he was in a diving squad of some kind,’ says his daughter Stephanie, and when he died the family scattered his ashes on the river he loved so much that he always called it ‘Old Father Thames’.
Bridge jumping was once quite common in central London; as late as the 1950s local children enjoyed jumping from Battersea Bridge. Here two divers leap off the Embankment near Westminster Bridge in May 1934.
More recently, Battersea was where politician John Prescott set off for a swim in 1983 to protest against the government policy of dumping nuclear waste at sea. He’d agreed to take part in a National Union of Seamen and Greenpeace demonstration to attract attention to the issue. His mission was to swim two miles from Battersea Bridge to the House of Commons in ‘frogman’s gear’ with a mask, oxygen and wetsuit. John liked the notion of a long swim – ‘it reminded me of Chairman Mao swimming down the Yangtze’ – but didn’t fancy the water: ‘one gulp of the Thames and you’d be a goner’. Appearing on TV-am shortly before his swim, he said he hoped it would be ‘over quick’. His plan was to wait until the tide had gone out ‘with the rest of the crap’ and then set off. A congratulatory telegram from comedian Spike Milligan advised him to have a typhoid shot.
Originally, John wanted to climb out of the water at the Palace of Westminster, go up the steps on to the House of Commons terrace and deliver a petition to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at No. 10. But he wasn’t allowed to land at the House and was told the steps couldn’t be used ‘for a political purpose’. He argued that if he was refused landing rights he might be in danger, quite apart from the danger he might already be in from the polluted river. It was finally agreed he could arrive at the steps, but couldn’t walk up them to Parliament. Instead he’d step into a boat and then move off again.
John completed the swim in ‘about an hour’ on a freezing cold December day, accompanied by demonstrators in boats. He climbed out at the steps of Parliament, got in a boat and went to a landing stage at Westminster Bridge where he walked to Downing Street, still in his swimming gear. Greenpeace demonstrators ‘had been planning to use me as a Trojan horse,’ he later wrote, ‘to get into the Palace of Westminster’, by following him up the steps. A few weeks later, they took another route by climbing the clock tower of Big Ben.
The only other swim at Battersea to have received any coverage in recent years was that of a five-metre-long Northern bottlenose whale. It was spotted on 19 January 2006, having swum through the Thames Barrier, the first time the species had been seen in the Thames since records began in 1913. The following day it was seen at Battersea and then, near Albert Bridge, it was captured and lifted into a barge, but died before it could be returned to the sea.
The tradition of swimming around Battersea seems to have been lost in recent decades and while it was once a place of manly exercise and amusing pastimes with a school of natation for beginners, there are no plans to introduce swimming events as has happened further upstream. Perhaps the river here is perceived as just too dirty and crowded, quite apart from the ‘No Swimming’ sign and the 2012 ‘ban’.
I leave Cremorne Gardens and walk back along the Thames on my way to Chelsea and then Lambeth bridges. The sun is coming out and Battersea Bridge looks more inviting now; a cherry tree is heavy with blossom, golden inlays on the side of the bridge glisten and soon I come to Albert Bridge with its silver towers and pink-panelled sides, its unusual colour scheme chosen in order to make it more visible to ships during heavy fog. There are plenty of boats moored in the middle of the river, while on the roadside are regular danger signs warning of strong currents. On the opposite side is Battersea Park, once the proposed site of a floating bath.
When I get to Chelsea Bridge, nearly a mile downstream, the entrance is blocked by builders and a small forklift truck; on the southern side loom the chimneys of Battersea Power S
tation. The original bridge opened in 1858, with four cast-iron towers topped with lamps that were to be lit only when Queen Victoria was staying in London. Long before the bridge was built, in the mid-1600s, Sir Dudley North, civil servant and economist, was known for his swims around here. He was an intrepid swimmer and a ‘master of the Thames’ who could ‘live in the water an afternoon with such ease as others walk upon land’. He would leave his clothes on the shore, run naked ‘almost as high as Chelsea’ for the ‘pleasure of swimming down to his clothes before tide of flood’, gliding along with the current like an arrow, dodging anchors, ‘broken piles and great stones’.
Chelsea was also where two well-known eighteenth-century figures chose to swim. ‘I am cruel thirsty this hot weather,’ wrote Jonathan Swift to his friend Esther Johnson in June 1711, ‘I am just this minute going to swim.’ He presumably went naked, as he had someone ‘hold my night gown, shirt, and slippers’ and borrowed a napkin from his landlady ‘for a cap’. He assured Johnson, ‘There’s no danger, don’t be frighted. I have been swimming this half hour and more; and when I was coming out I dived, to make my head and all through wet, like a cold bath; but as I dived, the napkin fell off and is lost, and I have that to pay for.’ He also had trouble with ‘the great stones’ which were so sharp that as he came out of the Thames he could hardly set his feet on them. The next night it was back for a dip again, but with ‘much vexation . . . for I was every moment disturbed by boats, rot them . . . the only comfort I proposed here in hot weather is gone; for this is no jesting with these boats after ’tis dark . . . I dived to dip my head, and held my cap with both my hands, for fear of losing it. – Pox take the boats! Amen.’
Benjamin Franklin, who would become one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the United States of America, also swam at Chelsea. During a stay in England in 1726 he showed off his swimming skills on a Thames excursion with friends: ‘At the request of the company, I stripped and leaped in the river, and swam from near Chelsea to Blackfriars (3½ miles) performing on the way many feats of activity, both upon and under water, that surprised and pleased those to whom they were novelties.’ One report has him demonstrating overarm, breaststroke, backstroke and then overarm again as people, clearly surprised and impressed in a city where few could swim, stopped to watch.
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