In September 1939, with the outbreak of war, the beach was closed, as were other Thames bathing spots. By then it had been used by an estimated 400,000 people, such was Londoners’ love of holidaying by the Thames, even within the City. In July 1946 it reopened with new ladders, taken from the SS Rawalpindi, and that year Pathé News filmed ‘Tower Bridge Pleasure Beach’, with ‘800 feet of beach right in the heart of London’. There was ‘plenty of good, soft sand’, to ‘build fairy castles’ or to laze on, with deckchairs ‘for mum to snooze in and dad to read the paper in’. But it had been a close call; the PLA had wanted to remove the sand, saying it interfered with shipping.
There was also a sandcastle-building competition judged by Tessie O’Shea, the actress and singer whose ‘theme tune’ was ‘Two Ton Tessie from Tennessee’. A picture from 1949 shows children eagerly queuing up to enter the beach on 26 September, the last day of the summer season. ‘It was pure joy,’ remembers one visitor, ‘it was freedom, it was a day out, it was our Southend. It was something you looked forward to.’
‘As a kid I was taken to Tower Beach a lot,’ says Ron Osborne, ‘as it was near to Mile End where we lived, having moved from a rundown tenement flat in Shadwell to a proper house in Mile End to avoid the bombing of the Docks in the war. In the 1950s Tower Beach was very popular and was packed at weekends if the sun was out, or even if it wasn’t.’ The Thames might have been declared biologically dead, but the shore was still a social place to meet for lunch and have a singsong, and parents were still taking their children there in the late 1960s with ‘bucket and spade and sandwiches and bottles of pop’.
Yet the beach never quite regained its former glory; the boatmen had gone although there was still an attendant. No more sand was added and, explains Rose, there was growing awareness of ‘the dangers of bathing in a sometimes polluted and strongly flowing river’. In 1971 the beach was closed because of cost, pollution and safety fears, and it stayed shut as ‘an anti-terrorist measure’. Then in 1990 a committee was formed to campaign for the beach to reopen. There was to be a two-month trial and the idea was to truck in more sand and open it for twelve days a month, taking up to 500 people at a time. The committee’s medical adviser, a professor from Guy’s Hospital, told the press that ‘the water quality of the Thames was probably at least as good as most British beaches, and better than some’. However, the plans were dropped after the death in 1991 of one of its chief instigators, Labour politician Donald Chesworth, and the beach remained closed.
In the end London children didn’t get the tidal playground for ever as promised by the King in 1934, but such is the pull of the Thames that we’ve found new ways to use the foreshore. ‘Londoners appear to have forgotten that they have a river,’ says Rose, and few would ‘contemplate crowds bathing in the lower Thames’. But with increasing interest in the shore as an environmental and archaeological resource, the Tower Beach is now open for two days a year with free activities organised by Historic Royal Palaces, COLAS and Thames 21. The event began in July 1998, with access by Irongate Stairs, which the tide reached sooner than the rest of the beach. It was then repeated in 2000 and this time people were allowed to use the Queen’s Stairs. The weekend is intended mainly for children, but anyone can search for treasures washed up or buried on the shore during two hours or so of low tide, the only time of the year the public is allowed access.
On the last weekend in July, I come back to the Tower of London where at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning there is already a queue of about thirty people. Some are mudlarks, I’m told, wearing sturdy boots, camouflage trousers and kneepads, carrying rucksacks and trowels. The original mudlarks were nineteenth-century children and adults who scavenged the banks of the Thames at low tide, looking for coal, iron, brick, copper, canvas, and bones to sell to dealers. In the early twentieth century the word was used to describe schoolchildren who begged passers-by to throw coins into the Thames mud for them to retrieve. Today’s mudlarks search the riverbank for objects of historical and archaeological interest and are more likely to use metal detectors – but they are strictly forbidden at this event. There are around seventy licensed mudlarks, of whom just seven are women.
Everywhere I look are large Health & Safety signs, a warning about Weil’s disease and a long list of rules – ‘Children must be accompanied by an adult. WALK – do not run. The beach is very rocky in parts – be careful how you move. There may be sharp objects on the beach – be vigilant. Do not touch your mouth or eyes after being on the beach.’ Anyone with an open cut or graze is to ask for a plaster, and ‘if you find yourself in deep mud stop and walk back out the way you went in’. The warnings seem excessive to me – how dangerous can it really be to go down to a beach? – but presumably an event like this can’t be run without them. Even sadder is the idea that ‘venturesome’ children’s freedom to play has to be curtailed, as if we can’t trust kids to run around on the sand any more (and perhaps dodge a few rocks and survive some cuts and scrapes) when, after all, that’s what beaches are for. Today’s rules would seem very strange to those who used the beach before us. Now banning swimming and closing down old bathing spots is seen as an easier option than the effort required to create safer places to swim.
COLAS have set up tables on the grass on the other side of the Thames Path, where I meet Rose Baillie. ‘This foreshore,’ she says with a sweep of her hands, ‘was always a place where children played.’ She points behind to the green spire of All Hallows church, one of the oldest in the City of London, where Revd ‘Tubby’ used to preach. ‘He saw kiddies nearly drown,’ she says, ‘but instead of saying “let’s ban it”, he said “let’s make it safer”.’ And he did. I rejoin the queue and chat with a woman from Yorkshire. ‘My dad worked here in the sixties for a construction company and he found this.’ She pulls a small cannonball out of her pocket. Her father died recently and she seems to have brought the cannonball with her as a memento of his life and the very reason she’s here at the Thames. Suddenly there’s activity on the Queen’s Steps: they’re being cleaned with a hosepipe. I lean forward and see the water is right at the bottom of the steps, and I wonder how long it will be before the tide recedes and we’re allowed down. More mudlarks arrive, skilfully managing to join the front of the queue, with ‘hey, mate’ and hearty handshakes.
Now we have to sign a Health & Safety form and put on blue surgical gloves. At last, an hour later, a Yeoman Warder in full regalia says we can enter the Queen’s Steps. A woman shouts, ‘don’t run’ and then asks me quite sharply if I have gloves and if so why I haven’t put them on. The stairs are steep and wet but I manage not to slip, and then I start walking along the beach, with no idea what I’m looking for. There is something dreamy about looking down on stones, strolling on a hot day by the Thames in central London, right at river level for once. I try to conjure up what it would have been like here in the 1930s at the city’s Riviera, with deckchairs and sandcastle competitions, toffee apples and unlimited lemonade.
Today the old children’s beach at the Tower of London is open for two days a year. Children no longer swim, but it’s an opportunity to find riverbank artefacts.
Then I seea man wearing a bright yellow jacket and, assuming he’s a volunteer, I go up to ask for tips. He turns out to be Graham Keevill, a consultant archaeologist and one of the initiators of the foreshore event who has worked at the Tower for twenty years. He is Historic Royal Palaces’ professional supervisor for the beach open day and is known as Mr Archaeologist. ‘It’s a thrill,’ says Graham, ‘even after thirteen years.’ I ask him what people normally find: ‘clay tiles, pottery going back to Roman times. It’s a piece of history, our history, and we don’t mind people taking it away with them.’ A volunteer approaches; he says the tide will be in in an hour and the water will get to the stairs, ‘then we have to get people out. But there will still be a bit of beach and they don’t realise they are getting cut off at the steps, because they don’t want to leave.’
Graham
says people particularly like picking up bones; ‘you see them with armfuls, it’s some sort of dinosaur fixation’. Others find cannonballs and broken cannons – the Tower supplied the royal army with weapons from medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century – as well as coins. The Tower was home to the Royal Mint for 500 years until 1812. ‘There is a sense of the people who were up there,’ Graham points to the Tower, ‘and down here,’ he points to the beach, ‘this was the Tower’s own private dock.’ To archaeologists like those involved in today’s event the Thames is a keeper of our history, preserving relics from bygone days on its shore, fragments from the past, signs of industry and battle, even of England’s old place in the world. And now at last, after nearly thirty years, the public is allowed to come here again.
Someone once found a Roman oil lamp, Graham tells me, and there are plenty of clay pipes. ‘That red stuff,’ he gestures down at my feet, ‘is brick or kiln material.’ ‘What, like this?’ I ask, picking up a big chunk. ‘That,’ he says, ‘is a Roman tile, you can tell by the ridge that it was an end-of-roof tile.’ So far all I’ve found is a chocolate wrapper, a plastic water bottle and lots and lots of stones. But then, as he’s talking, I suddenly see a coin-sized piece of pottery with a pretty blue and white design, and then fragments of clay pipes, which I’d thought were bits of discarded tubing.
The beach is busy now; everywhere is the sound of people scraping in the sand, kids filling up buckets with stones and bones. Volunteers have set up a table with pictures of animal skeletons; I hand over a bone and am told it’s a sheep’s metatarsal. Next I present a piece of pipe; it has quite a big central hole so that makes it nineteenth-century, then a green bit of pottery which I’m told is a piece of border ware from Surrey or Hampshire made in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and would have been used for cooking or storing food. By now my arms are aching with all my treasures, the heat is overwhelming and it’s time to make way for the children behind me queuing at the information table, some with bones as big as their hands.
It’s clear that the reopening of the children’s beach at Tower Bridge, even for just one weekend a year, has been a great success, giving us free access to an area we want to explore. Other places could follow, with recent calls for a year-round beach on the Thames. The campaign group Reclaim the Beach argues that ‘with the water cleaner every year, it will soon be fit for swimmers again’ and suggests one could be below Victoria Tower Gardens and another on the South Bank.
Artist Amy Sharrocks also has a dream for Tower Beach. She has been ‘making work about people and water’ for around ten years and her projects include SWIM in 2007, an ‘all-access swim across London’, and Museum of Water at Somerset House in 2014. For the past few years her plan has been to organise a swim across the Thames. ‘I’m doing it to try and get a different sense of London; it’s a conceptual art piece, a dream. I’m not doing it for charity. It’s an artwork. It’s crucial to think about this river and how we use it.’
Swim the Thames is scheduled for 2015 and would start from the south side of the river, ending underneath the Tower of London, where the children’s beach used to be, probably in September, as ‘we need a dry month, before the rain and the sewers overflow’. It would begin about thirty minutes before low tide; swimmers will be pulled by the current, catch the slack water and then be taken around in an arc. At the moment Amy is ‘marshalling people. I have around a thousand names of people who want to do it. Everyone’s like, “Oh I want to swim the Thames, where do I sign?”’ But when she asked the PLA ‘if I could swim from Vauxhall, or anywhere really, they said “no way, no one touches the Thames”. I’m not doing a guerrilla swim: I want them to recognise our right to it. In Roman times London was a water city. Now we’re leading dry lives alongside an oasis of water.’
She had aimed to do the swim in 2012, but this was suspended because of the Olympics, and now the new by-law is in place. ‘They close London off if it’s a race or if it’s to raise money,’ she says, ‘but this is just for the joy of doing it. If just once a year they could stop industry for a swim . . .’
Others are attracted to Tower Bridge, too, not for art but for stunts. In July 2009, twenty-seven-year-old Australian freestyle motocross star Robbie Maddison performed a spectacular back-flip over an open Tower Bridge. ‘People say I’m crazy,’ he told the press, ‘but I just love taking on these huge challenges.’ Tower Bridge also remains a good spot for a demonstration. In July 2012 a man said to be a taxi driver dived head first off the bridge during a protest by London taxi drivers who wanted to be allowed to use the Olympic Games Lanes. A group of drivers travelled slowly across Tower Bridge tooting their horns when, at around 4 p.m., a man apparently wearing a white Stetson hat, jumped. He was pulled from the river by the marine policing unit, having, according to the BBC, almost been hit by a tourist ferry and arrested for a public order offence – just like Victorian divers Tom Burns and Marie Finney who once dived upstream at London Bridge.
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London Docklands
‘We loved everything about the river . . . it was our playground, our life’
John Daniel, Thames lighterman, 1950s
Downriver from Tower Bridge the River Thames now begins to enter London Docklands, once part of the Port of London and the world’s largest port, and an area where people have been swimming and bathing for at least a century, including in the docks themselves. In Roman and medieval times ships docked at small quays in the Pool of London, between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. Then, in 1696, the Howland Great Dock in Rotherhithe was built, providing a more secure place for large vessels. The Georgian era saw the opening of the West India Dock in 1802, followed by several others, while more docks were built in Victorian times, mainly further east, such as Royal Victoria and Millwall. Some were for ships to anchor and be loaded or unloaded; others were for ships to be repaired. ‘Lightermen’ on small barges carried the cargo between ships and quays, while quayside workers dealt with the goods onshore. In 1909 the PLA took over management of the docks, replacing a number of private companies, and built the last of the docks, the King George V, in 1921.
The docks suffered heavy bomb damage during the Second World War and while trade recovered in the 1950s they weren’t big enough to cope with larger vessels transporting cargo in containers, so they began to close. In 1981 the London Docklands Development Corporation was formed to redevelop the area, today a centre for business and luxury apartments. It’s also home to the Museum of London Docklands, on the side of West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs.
I arrive to find a grand old Georgian sugar warehouse, with spiked bars at the windows giving it a Bastille-like air, flanked by restaurants and bars, while down at the waterside an old boat is dwarfed by a huge glass building housing a bank. The Museum opened in 2003 and tells the history of the Thames and Docklands with twelve galleries spread over four floors. I walk around looking at artefacts, models and pictures, an atmospheric recreation of nineteenth-century riverside Wapping and a gallery explaining the city’s involvement in transatlantic slavery. But I can find little reference to swimming, except for a poster from 1870 announcing a fête at West India Dock.
‘The Thames, from London Bridge onwards, is a difficult and dangerous place to swim,’ says Tom Wareham, currently Curator of Community and Maritime History, ‘but people did. You weren’t supposed to bathe in the docks or the entrances to docks, but there is evidence that people drowned while bathing. Most drowned in winter when conditions were icy or smoggy, but there was also a peak in the summer. There was usually a beach, a stretch of silt, at the entrance to most docks, and kids were drawn to it.’
I follow him to a small meeting room where he’s arranged a number of documents on the table, including photocopies of Victorian ledgers written in beautiful cursive script and modern colour-coded bar charts. Such was the concern at the number of fatalities in the late nineteenth century that the docks committee ordered an investigation. An unnamed clerk looked at fa
tality reports from four sample periods between November 1873 and December 1891. The results were alarming: nearly three people drowned every month – 176 deaths over a seventy-one-month period. This was despite the fact that the various private dock companies encouraged their employees to learn to swim, and even offered lessons in an outdoor tank at the West India Docks.
Of the known causes of death, five boys drowned while bathing. But far more fell from barges and ships; one boy was knocked into the water by a rope, a stevedore missed his footing coming ashore, a ship keeper slipped off a gangway ladder. Records from the winters of 1873–4 and 1879–80 show that most drownings happened at West India Dock, which was one of the biggest areas of water with a large number of people living close by.
In the early 1900s police paid young boys half a crown for every body they retrieved from the Pool of London, with many deaths the result of swimming under a boat and getting trapped. But soon amateur swimmers were racing in the docks and newspaper photographs from 1895 illustrating ‘A Swimming Fete at the Docks’ show nine bathers, all apparently men, about to leap off a floating wooden board on which stand two suited officials. One swimmer is already in the water; behind the raft is a rowing boat full of people, while the sides of the dock are dense with spectators. Another image catches two divers in midair, having just thrown themselves off a temporary diving stage.
In 1906 the London and India Docks Swimming Club held their gala at Millwall Cutting, and again pictures show a row of men about to dive off a raft, although this time it seems to be covered in clothing as part of the ‘50 yards wet shirt handicap’, with corner poles holding up bunting. By the early 1930s the docks had become the setting for swimming events run under ASA rules. The Port of London Authority Swimming Club had an annual open-air gala at the Millwall Cutting, starting at 3.15 in the afternoon, complete with printed programmes costing threepence. The Daily Mirror featured a front-page photo of ‘Dock as Swimming Bath’ showing the fifty yards championships at the PLA’s swimming gala at the Millwall Cutting. The dock looks vast, like a lido, with concrete sides and a group of officials at one end, all set against a grey background of warehouses, bridges and ships’ funnels.
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