He was particularly interested in the formation of the vortex, since there if anywhere is to be found a microcosm of water itself. The flowing river is after all part of what has become known as the “hydrologic cycle,” the vortex of the earth, the circle of life. The process, not fully proven until as late as the mid-seventeenth century, has the twin merits of harmony and simplicity. The water evaporates from the sea and land, and is thus drawn into the atmosphere; it falls back as rain or snow or sleet, and thus replenishes the rivers and water-courses that return it to the sea. It has been estimated that, each year, 95,000 cubic miles of water rise into the atmosphere; of these, 80,000 cubic miles ascend directly from the oceans, to which return 71,000 cubic miles. The rest of the falling water replenishes the lakes and streams and rivers or nourishes the land. The trees and plants are of course part of this endless circle, and each day a single birch-tree can transpire some 70 gallons (318 l) of water. Larger trees can disperse hundreds of gallons. One drop of water may spend a few days in a river, or a few hundreds of thousands of years locked within the ground, but that drop is not lost. Eventually it will return.
There is a manuscript map of Kent in the eighteenth-century treatise Ankographia (1743), which shows the drainage system of the Thames in the form of a man half-kneeling upon the ground. It is a haunting image, as if the human shape had risen out of the topography like the ghost or spirit of the place. He holds a pail with which he pours the waters into the sea.
The hydrologic cycle propounds another mystery. It is best expressed in the words of Ecclesiastes 1:7: “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” There is a glimpse here of some divine apotheosis, when that which is filled to overflowing can never contain enough. All flows into the One. Seneca meditated upon the flow of rivers and “thus contemplating them, we should reverence a fountain of Life flowing into Itself…simple, self-moved and self-worked…a knowledge surpassing every kind of knowledge, and always contemplating Itself, through Itself.” The image of bliss, or perfection, may be found in the contemplation of the circle rather than of constant movement. The movement of the Thames itself, restless and heaving as it proceeds downward to the great sea, can provoke such reflections.
It is a beneficent cycle that has affected the metaphors of time and human destiny. It has no beginning and no end—or, rather, the beginning and the end cannot be identified with any certainty. There is no trace of a beginning, and no thought of an end. It suggests some interior harmony that we may extrapolate into the cosmos itself. Plato believed that the human body, like nature, adhered to some universal law of circulation. The process of life is in a constant state of becoming. All of these attributes affect our perception of the Thames itself.
CHAPTER 17
The Leveller
Water is the greatest of equalisers. It is well enough known that water seeks an even level, but this is more than a metaphor. Throughout its history it has been understood that the river is free to all people. In the Magna Carta, sealed by the banks of the Thames, the great rivers of the English kingdom were granted to all men and women alike. A parliamentary committee of the nineteenth century declared the Thames to be “an ancient and free highway” with the attendant right of the public “to move boats over any and every part of the river through which the Thames water flows.” The monarch does not own the river, despite many tendentious claims to the contrary, any more than the Corporation of London owns that part of the river that flows through the city. In truth the river belongs to no one.
The water of the Thames was available both to rich and poor, whether for bathing or for cleansing, for cooking or for drinking; the need for it was so universal that it was deemed to be common to all. A pamphlet of 1600 quotes with approval the Muslim belief that “no money nor fee should be exacted for the use of water which God had freelie bestowed on poor and rich.” In the same period the Thames provided the setting for the festivals that united the people of the city. The food of the Thames fed everyone. The riverside was also the home of rich and poor, with palaces and hovels almost literally side by side. As Sir William D’Avenant described the northern bank of the Thames in 1656, “Here a lord, there a dyer, and places of the worst kind between both.” In his early drawings of the river Turner contrasts the baroque architecture along the river-banks with the neighbouring waterworks and coal-barges. The river actively worked against hierarchy and division of all kinds, particularly because water is a dissolving and unifying element. The Thames also provided work, and profit, for the diverse people along its banks. At the height of the boating “craze” of the late nineteenth century, the locks and weirs saw the close congregation of lords and cockneys; this resulted in what one observer called “spontaneous gaiety,” as if the values of the ordinary world had for a moment been turned upside down. It is this innate egalitarianism that explains the “water language” of the boatmen conventionally directed against their ostensibly richer or more socially superior passengers.
Thus we have the association of the Thames with various levelling movements. In the late fourteenth century the rebellion of Jack Straw, against the exactions of Richard II and the poll tax, was largely instigated by the disaffection of the Thames fishermen along the estuary in villages such as Mucking and Vantage. The first riots broke out in Fobbing, and the county history of Essex records that “the portion of the country most implicated [in the revolt] was along the Thames shore.” The river was involved in much of the violent action. There were rebel uprisings in Barking and at Dartford, and there were incendiary riots in Gravesend. One contingent of rebels marched from Blackheath to Southwark and to Lambeth where they stormed the archbishop’s palace. The river seems to call forth the defenders of liberty. In the same riverine spirit the bargemen of the Thames were once known as the “Sons of Liberty,” albeit in an ironical sense.
In the fifteenth century the sect of the Lollards, opposed to hierarchical tenets as well as the corruption of the established Church, was strongly represented in the Thames Valley. They were well established, for example, at Marlow and at Faringdon, at Abingdon and at Buscot. They were also active in the vicinity of Oxford. The Lollard rebellion of 1431 was in fact crushed at Abingdon itself, where they could expect the most loyal support, but Lollard ideas were still retained in the regions around the river. The Baptists emerged most powerfully, for example, in old Lollard strongholds. The connection of the Baptist movement with the river itself, not least in the ritual of immersion, suggests how much the presence of the Thames can be felt in the espousal of egalitarian creeds.
The Levellers, the sixteenth-century group of republicans and democrats who emerged in the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, congregated in the church of St. Mary, by the banks of the river at Putney, in 1647. It was here that they engaged in the “Putney Debates” and put forward an “Agreement of the People” or new social contract. Then, two years later, Walton-on-Thames became the setting for the experiment in living conducted by the Diggers under the inspiration of Gerrard Winstanley; they proclaimed themselves to be “the true Levellers,” and proceeded to cultivate the common ground of St. George’s Hill. They espoused a primitive form of communism derived from the principles of Magna Carta. So the Thames runs through all of these levelling proceedings. For a short time in the 1990s a village was established by the river at Battersea, named “Land and Freedom,” dedicated to the principles of communal equality and ecological rectitude; it was following an ancient calling.
You can feel “free” on the river. Indeed the Thames itself seems to encourage some dissolution of the identity. It encourages various forms of communal revelry, such as the “frost fairs” that were conducted on the frozen river during various preternaturally cold episodes. All classes and sections of London society congregated on the river during these unnatural episodes:
Straight comes an arch wag, a young son of a whore,
And lays the squire’s h
ead where his heels were before.
Class distinctions seem to disappear in the process of going upon the river, even in its frozen state, and through the centuries the Thames was an emblem of liberty. All the divisions and distinctions of dry land are washed away and erased. As Richard Jefferies says in The Modern Thames (1885), “on the river people do as they choose, and there does not seem to be any law at all—or at least there is no authority to enforce it, if it exists.” The bargemen, for example, knew no law. They deemed themselves to be as free as the river gypsies. The various pilferers and smugglers who used the river as the focus of their activities genuinely believed that they were doing no wrong. That is why the establishment of the river police provoked such outrage. It is still considered somewhat offensive to ask someone, on the river, to desist from one activity or another. Some of the greatest radical enterprises of English history, in particular the sailors’ revolt or “Nore mutiny” of 1797 and the dockers’ strike of 1889, have taken place upon the Thames. The river is the zone of liberty.
PART VII
The Working River
Barges at Blackfriars
CHAPTER 18
River Boat
There have been wherries and clinkers, hoys and onkers, houseboats and skiffs, yachts and motor-boats, tilt-boats and shallops, peterboats and eel-boats, punts and lighters, funnies and cutters, barges and steamships, coracles and canoes, scullers and colliers, barques and schooners, gigs and dinghies, whiffs and randans, rowing boats and dhows and narrow boats. They used to be made out of oak, mahogany and spruce; the fastenings were made with copper, and the bands with iron. They have sailed on the Thames out of ancient times.
When coracles were launched, on certain rivers in India, a sheep was sacrificed and blood sprinkled upon the new vessel. In Madras a pumpkin was placed under the keel of a new boat and squashed upon its entry into the water; the pumpkin was the substitute for a human head. The Solomon Islanders were accustomed to place the head of a slaughtered enemy in the prow of any newly built canoe. We will soon have cause to notice the connection between heads and the Thames, so that some domestic version of this custom cannot wholly be ruled out. This may not be a very long way from the ritual breaking of a bottle of champagne—the “neck” of the bottle is said to be broken—and there is some ceremony still to be observed in the launching of new craft upon the river. Boats are blessed and venerated, in advance of their journeys upon the waters.
The flat-bottomed barge became over many centuries the model for most of the vessels that negotiated the Thames, but there were modifications of the essential structure. The Vikings, for example, introduced a version of “clinker-built” vessels that have been in use on the river ever since; the “clinker boat” is one in which the external planks are overlapping. Large log-boats, or “dug-outs,” have been dated to the Saxon period. It is possible that some of them were employed as ferries. The shallow draught of such vessels was important; the log-boat became the punt, which in turn was enlarged to become the familiar “Western barge” with square-cut hull that sailed over the Thames waters. The simple “punt” or “flat,” now celebrated as the transport of Oxford and Cambridge, was thus originally a working boat of great antiquity. The “peter-boat” can also claim to be of hallowed age; it is a fishing boat, named after the patron saint of fishermen.
Medieval ships, of approximately the same design, have been reclaimed from the river-bed. One large boat, and a smaller “lighter,” were found in close proximity. The larger boat was carrying cereals and other produce; the lighter was transporting stone. It seems likely that they were involved in a collision. The ships of medieval merchants have also been recovered—some of them galleys with masts and oarsmen, and others known as “cogs” with a single square sail and very high sides. There were some twenty-eight types of medieval boat upon the Thames, according to Laura Wright’s Sources of London English (1996). There was the “skumer” or light ship and the “cock,” a workboat sometimes known as “the masons Cokke” or “the Carpenters Cokke.” The “farcost” or “varecost” was employed to transport stone, while the “mangboat” was used by fishermen. A “flune” was a small ship, and a “cog” went back and forth across the Channel. There was the “crayer” or “croier” or trading vessel, and there was the “shout” or “showte,” a flat-bottomed craft for the transporting of goods. The name itself probably derives from that of the Dutch eel-boat or “schuyt” known from the middle of the fourteenth century; the name persisted until the 1930s, in fact, and is some indication of the Dutch influence on Thames craft.
So the boats of the Thames flowed down from these originals. A statute of 1514 declared that “it had been a laudable custome and usage tyme out of mind to use the River in Barge or Whery Boate.” “Tyme out of mind” was a ritual phrase, meaning further back than anyone could remember. The barge was the most familiar craft upon the river, being a variant upon the prehistoric vessels that had sailed along the Thames. It was also synonymous with “lighter,” and a parliamentary Act of 1859 classified the lighterman as “any person working or navigating for hire, a lighter, barge, boat, or other like craft.” Barges were the work-horses of the river, sturdy, dependable and capacious. It was said of their draught that they could sail anywhere after a heavy dew or anywhere a duck could swim. Certainly, in the upper stretches of the Thames, they needed to negotiate the shallowest waters. They even reached as high as Eynsham, near the source.
They carried every conceivable cargo from stone and wheat to butter and manure and gunpowder. They even carried letters. They had a crew of two men and a boy, and the largest of them could carry cargoes of almost 200 tons (203 tonnes). The average load, however, was between 60 and 80 tons (61 and 81 tonnes). The barges on the middle and upper reaches of the Thames were known by their diminishing size as the “western barges,” “trows” or “worsers” the lighters were known as “dumb barges,” perhaps because they had no sails. There were “stumpies,” with no top mast, and “stackies” or hay barges. There were also estuary barges known as “hoys,” but the name was predominantly associated with Margate. The “Margate hoy” became famous as a conveyance, and is popularly supposed to be based upon the design of the Norman vessels that crossed to Hastings. They were not universally appreciated, however. A report of 1637 remarks that “the hoy, like the grave, confounds all distinctions; high and low, rich and poor, sick and sound, are indiscriminately blended together…I would not recommend it to ladies of great delicacy.”
There are engravings of barges being towed by ropes through empty riverscapes. The rope was fastened to the top of the mast, to keep it clear from obstructions on the river-bank, and two horses were generally used for the journey upriver. There are also engravings of barges complete with small iron funnels, which might suggest that they had bowed to progress and converted to steam. In fact the funnels were used for the smoke of the fire where the bargemen cooked their food.
There were a variety of barges, of all sizes, designed to cope with the riverine conditions in their particular neighbourhoods. The sails of all of them, however, were a distinct reddish-brown. The exact hue was created with a judicious mixture of cod oil, red ochre, horse fat and sea water. It became the colour of the Thames, to be seen in a thousand paintings. The barges were often gaily painted, with a variety of colour and ornament to accentuate their singularity. They endured for a thousand years, but then, like their sails, slowly mixed with the sunset. At the end of the nineteenth century there were some 2,500 barges still plying their trade upon the river; now there are approximately twenty of them left.
The other familiar and popular craft through the centuries was the wherry, which was noticeable for its shallowness, its broad stern and its sharp stem. It was “clinker”-built with overlapping planks, and was generally equipped with a wooden back-rest on which the boat’s name was emblazoned. It was technically a “ran-dan” ferry, because it allowed room for three people rowing at the same time, but it became the sole prerogat
ive of the sometimes surly waterman. It was approximately 26 feet (8 m) in length, with a beam of over 51/2 feet (1.6 m), and could hold between six and eight passengers—although there were many occasions when it was overloaded. “To take a pair of sculls” was to be rowed by a single waterman, while “to take a pair of oars” was to be rowed by two. They were employed for carrying light freight as well as passengers, and were often in use as ferries at various points across the river. They could move very quickly indeed, and in 1618 the secretary to the Venetian Ambassador wrote that “the wherries shoot along so lightly as to surprise everyone.” There are few, if any, wherries now operating on the river.
The oldest way across the river is by means of ferry. There were “accommodation ferries,” intended only for passengers, and “navigation ferries,” for livestock and goods as well as people. One of the oldest ferries carried animals and travellers from the north bank at Vauxhall to Lambeth; it is still enshrined in the name of Horseferry Road. There is also a Horseferry Place in Greenwich, from where the ferryman took his passengers to East Ferry Road on the Isle of Dogs. The ferry between Erith in Kent and the north bank of the Thames is first recorded at the beginning of the eleventh century; the route was eventually taken up by the Ford Motor Car Company in 1933 for the ferry between Erith and the Dagenham car works. There was a ferry between Dowgate, in the City, and Southwark on the opposite shore; it survived until London Bridge was constructed out of stone at the beginning of the thirteenth century. There were no less than four ferry services operating at Cookham, and the ferry at Twickenham was celebrated in song:
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