Then there were the hulks, a baleful sight upon the Thames for almost a hundred years. These were the prison ships, otherwise disused vessels that were refitted to contain a captive crew; they had been established in 1776, and the last of them did not burn until the summer of 1857. Ships such as the Discovery, the Retribution, and the Belliqueux were used to hold convicts who, as a result of the War of Independence, were unfortunately deprived of the opportunity of being taken to America. Many thousands of them served their sentences at Deptford, at Woolwich, at Chatham and elsewhere, where they were forced to labour on shore-works. They returned to their ships each night, where they were kept in chains. They inhabited the lower decks, some five or six hundred prisoners confined on each—the new prisoners were consigned to the lowest deck of all—where “the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin” are better imagined than described. One prisoner explained that “of all the shocking scenes I had ever beheld, this was the most distressing…Nothing short of a descent to the infernal regions can be at all worthy of a comparison with it.” The river had become a hell. The wharf at Deptford was popularly known as Deadman’s Dock. When the inmates died, their bodies were taken to the marshes and perfunctorily buried there. There is a red-flowering nettle that grows along the marshes at Plumstead and the Arsenal; it was once known as “the convicts’ flower.”
There were other prisons beside the river. The Clink was next to the water at Southwark, while the Fleet prison was erected less than 100 yards (90 m) from the Thames shore. Tilbury Fort was employed as a prison, and the Millbank penitentiary (now the site of the Tate Gallery) was a famous “modern” prison organised on Benthamite principles. The octagonal shape of the gaol is still visible from the air; a sculpture by Henry Moore, “The Locking Piece,” marks the point where the prisoners boarded the ships that would take them down the Thames on their way to Australia. The river would be one of their last views of England.
CHAPTER 22
The Workers of the River
In her pioneering survey, Sources of London English, Laura Wright has listed the variety of medieval workers who took their livings from the Thames—from the baillies of Queenhithe and Billingsgate, who acted as customs officers, to the ubiquitous and necessary watermen. There were conservators, who were responsible for maintaining the embankments and the weirs, and there were the garthmen who worked in the fish garths or enclosures; there were galleymen and lightermen and shoutmen, called after the names of their vessels, and there were hookers who were named after the manner in which they caught their fish. There were water-bailiffs and sub-conservators to manage the river. The searcher patrolled the Thames in search of illegal fish weirs, and the tideman worked on its banks and foreshores whenever the tide permitted him to do so.
All of these occupations persisted for many centuries, as did those jobs that depended upon the trade of the river. There were always warehousemen and porters, but along the sixteenth-century Thames there were infinite gradations in the status and employments of such people. There were tacklehouse porters and ticket porters, fellowship porters and companies porters. These were the four “brotherhoods,” each of which had a special monopoly on certain goods. The ticket porters, for example, had a monopoly on materials imported from Danzig as well as all Irish products. Their hold upon trade of course meant that they received various special privileges and sometimes over-generous compensation. The tacklehouse porters were paid 1 guinea for discharging 100 quarters (1.27 tonnes) of malt, when other porters would have been happy to undertake the work for 8 shillings and 4 pence. The river was always a haven of restrictive practices.
Yet it was not easy work for any of them. They carried most goods upon their backs, since the rough surfaces of the quays and nearby streets were not suitable for wagons or large carts; the merchandise characteristically arrived in barrels which could be rolled from the ship along each quay. If the burden was too great to be carried by a single man, then the goods were slung on poles resting on the shoulders of two men. It was a slow and expensive method of business.
There was also a puzzling change of status. By the late eighteenth century dockside labour was considered to be the most disreputable, and certainly the least desirable, form of work. Before that time river work had been seen in a generally favourable light. For Langland, writing in the fourteenth century, the labourers working on river merchandise “throve the best.” The porters of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were obliged to be freemen of the city, and were if anything aristocrats of labour. But in the years from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries there was a marked change in attitude. This was in part because the working river was within the region of the East End, which in this period acquired an unenviable reputation.
It could be said in fact that the first industrial population in England grew up around the Thames. With the dockers and the porters, the engineers and the warehousemen, the watermen and the draymen, the costermongers and the touters, the clerks and the carters, the smiths and the stevedores—as well as the vast assembly of ancillary trades such as tavern-keepers and laundresses, food-sellers and street-hawkers, shopkeepers and prostitutes, marine store dealers and oyster-men—there was a working population of many thousands congregated in a relatively small area of the East End. It has been calculated that, in the neighbourhood of Shadwell, some 60 per cent of men earned their living as seamen or watermen while 10 per cent were engaged in ship-building and repairs. There were more varieties of business to be observed by the riverside than in any other part of the city. As a result, with the possible exception of Seven Dials, the East End was also the most intensively inhabited region of London. The Isle of Dogs, for example, was in the nineteenth century colonised by the small houses put up for workers and their families by William Cubitt.
In that century, too, dockside work was believed to be the poorest paid, and generally deemed to be the least skilled and the most irregular of employments. None of these charges was in fact accurate. Dockers could earn more than the carmen of the metropolis, for example, and there was plenty of work for those who were fit enough to undertake it. Yet it was also considered to be rough and dirty labour, the province of the lower classes of workers or of those who were otherwise unemployable. The atmosphere of the working river was one of dust and mud, of filth and smoke. The faces of some dockers were blue with indigo or black with coal-dust, their garments smeared with the detritus of the merchandise they carried. There was also some connection with the generally bad reputation of watermen and bargees. The river was linked with licence and bad language. The river was associated with smuggling and theft. To work on, or by, the river was in itself disreputable.
It was a world apart, with its own language and its own laws. From the Chinese sailors in the opium dens of Limehouse to the smugglers on the malarial flats of the estuary, the workers of the river were not part of any civilised dispensation. The alien world of the river had entered them. That alienation was also expressed in the slang of the docks, which essentially amounted to backslang or the reversal of ordinary words. This backslang also helped in the formulation of Cockney rhyming slang, so that the vocabulary of Londoners was directly affected by the life of the Thames.
Other slang emanated from the river. The workers in the grain and corn warehouses of Milwall Docks were known as “toe-rags,” because of the sacking they wore over their boots; the word itself then became a synonym for a despised individual. The lightermen in the Port of London referred to their colleagues working downriver as “chalkies” or “carrot crunchers.” The stevedores who characteristically worked at the Surrey Docks were named after the Spanish word for a packer, estibador.
The reports in the nineteenth-century press reveal a heterogeneous world of dock labour, in which the crowds of “casuals” waiting for work at the dock gates at 7:45 a.m. include penniless refugees, bankrupts, old soldiers, broken-down gentlemen, discharged servants, and ex-convicts. There we
re some four or five hundred permanent workers who earned a regular wage and who were considered to be the patricians of dockside labour. But there were some 2,500 casual workers who were hired by the shift. Henry Mayhew, in London Labour and the London Poor (1849–50), has left an account of those congregated at the entrances of the docks waiting to be chosen for employment—“some in half-fashioned surtouts burst at the elbow, with the dirty shirts showing through; others in greasy sporting jackets, with red pimpled faces; others in rags of gentility; some in rusty black; others with the knowing thieves’ curl on each side of the jaunty cap.” The work for which they competed had become ever more unpleasant. Steam-power could not be used for the cranes, for example, because of the danger of fire. So the cranes were powered by treadmills. Six to eight men entered a wooden cylinder and, laying hold of ropes, would tread the wheel round. They could lift 20 hundredweight (1 tonne), to an average height of 27 feet (8.2 m), forty times in any one hour. This was part of the life of the river unknown to those who were intent upon its more picturesque aspects.
There were other workers by the river. There were the dredgers or “river-finders” who searched the water looking for articles that had fallen overboard from the argosy of ships going up and down the Thames. The derisory word “tosh” comes from the activity of the “toshers,” the group of watermen who dredged the river for flotsam (those articles that are found floating in the water, unattached to any particular source) and jetsam (those goods and articles that are deliberately thrown into the sea, perhaps for lightening a ship in peril of sinking). Then there were the “mud-larks” who worked on the foreshore, many of them very young children or very old women who spent their lives in the filthy water searching for small bits of coal, lumps of metal, or stray pieces of wood. They waited by the stairs until the tide had gone down sufficiently to uncover the banks, and then they scattered in all directions. Henry Mayhew described them silently crouched over the mud beneath their feet and “with a stolid look of wretchedness they plash their way through the mire, their bodies bent down while they peer anxiously about.”
They were among the wretchedly poor living in the courts and alleys of the riverside, “scarcely half-covered by the tattered indescribable things that serve them for clothing; their bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.” These were the people of the river.
There were also many immemorial occupations upon the Thames. The history of the river, for example, is in part the history of the sailor. Their occupation did not noticeably change over the centuries, although there were obvious alterations in their appearance. In the Saxon period the sailors wore red or blue (the Danish sailors were dressed in black) but in the medieval period they wore leather jerkins and costumes of coarse felt. By the fifteenth century they were dressed with quilted jackets and leather breast-plates; they were also given leather helmets. In the sixteenth century they wore short coats of white or sky-blue, as well as wide and baggy breeches; they wore fur caps rather than helmets, in the manner of pilgrims. In the late seventeenth century the fashion had changed to one of striped trousers, with short jackets and buckled shoes. In his New London Spy (1794) Sir John Fielding, junior, wrote of the sailors at Wapping that their “manner of living, speaking, acting and dressing, behaving are so peculiar to themselves” they formed a quite different race. Then, by the early nineteenth century, they were wearing bell-bottom trousers, waistcoats, and striped jumpers with open collars; their costume was completed with the monkey-jacket and the black silk foulard.
There were more specific Thames “types” among the teeming humanity by the river. These included the porter, the lumper, the holder, the decker and the myriad other divisions of labourer. But more particularly there was the figure of the Thames waterman, renowned in song and story as the epitome of the tidal river. He was deemed to be wild, uncultivated, surly and rough of speech.
The Watermen’s Company was established in 1555, but of course the occupation is much older. There is a document of 1293, for example, in which the watermen between London and Gravesend were prosecuted for over-charging—that “they did take from passengers unjust fares against their will,” extorting 1 penny each rather than the customary halfpenny. This particular complaint was levelled against them over many centuries. In “London Lackpenny,” an anonymous poem of the early fifteenth century, a traveller visits London:
Then hyed I me to Belynges Gate
And one cryed “Hoo go we hence”
I prayed a bargeman, for God’s sake
That he would spare me my expence
“Thou stepst not here,” quoth he, “under II pence.”
There was also the problem of overcrowding. Many watermen of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were prosecuted for taking more than three people in any one vessel. They were also forbidden to moor on the south bank of the river, in case “thieves and malefactors” took possession of their boats. It is a clear indication of the perceived difference between the two shores, with the river acting as a boundary just as it had once been a frontier between warring British tribes. There were also later restrictions, such as the measures in the mid-seventeenth century prohibiting transport on Sunday; it was considered to be “prophanation” for “any one coming by water to his Lodging on the Lords Day,” and soldiers were posted on both banks of the Thames to arrest any malefactors. It is a matter of some interest why travelling by water, rather than by land, was considered to be unholy. There was in this regard, in the nineteenth century, a Society for Promoting Religion among Watermen, Bargemen and Rivermen in general.
There is an important distinction, however, between the boatmen of the river. Watermen were (and are) those who are concerned with the carriage of people upon the river, employing barges or wherries for that purpose, whereas lightermen are concerned with the transport of goods within lighters. As in most riverine trades the skills of the watermen were passed from fathers to sons. They would be trained in the lore of the tides, and the variations within each different reach of the river; they would learn the effects of the wind, where the river changes course, and would learn to gauge the depth of the water at any particular point.
At the end of the sixteenth century there were estimated to be some three thousand watermen, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century that number had risen to eight thousand. By the end of that century the number had risen still further to twelve thousand, two thousand of whom were apprentices. There are other authorities who believe the figures to be much higher—claiming that there were some twenty thousand watermen on the river in the sixteenth century, and some forty thousand in the eighteenth century, but all numbers must be approximate. It is important only to note the supremacy of river traffic and river transport. The energy of the city, and of the country, was the energy of the river. In the nineteenth century, however, their numbers began to fall away as new forms of transport appeared on the Thames and as new bridges were constructed between the shores. Waterloo Bridge, for example, was erected between 1811 and 1817. Mayhew calculated their number, in 1850, as sixteen hundred.
They were obliged to wear a badge upon their arm, for the purposes of identification, but they also wore a distinctive short jacket and hat. Their most celebrated representative, John Taylor, the “water poet,” confessed that “there are many rude uncivil fellows in our Company” but then excused their behaviour on account of the provocations they received from their passengers. Thus the “roaring boy” or gallant would “no sooner kiss the cushions, but with a volley of new coined oaths…he hath never left roaring, row, row, row, a pox on you row…and when his scurviness has landed where he pleases, he hath told me I must wait on him, and he will return to me presently.” And of course he never does.
There were other perils facing the watermen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, they became peculiarly liable for “impressment” or enforced conscription into the navy whe
re their riverine skills were deemed to be useful. So in the late eighteenth century Charles Dibdin wrote a famous song on the woes of the watermen:
Then farewell my trim-built wherry,
Oars, and coat, and badge farewell!
Never more at Chelsea Ferry
Shall your Thomas take a spell.
Whatever their misfortunes, however, the watermen of the Thames were generally considered to be degraded and reprehensible. There is a famous engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, entitled “Miseries of London” and dated 1807, which shows a group of voracious watermen—recognisable by their hats and badges—harassing an old lady on Wapping Old Stairs. Rowlandson depicts them bawling out “Oars, Sculls, Sculls, Oars, Oars.”
More reprehensible still, in the public imagination, were the bargees of the river. They piloted, and for brief periods lived upon, the barges otherwise known as “canal boats,” “monkey boats” or “wussers.” They were known for their pugnacity and their caustic wit. It was said that Richard Burton, the lachrymose author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, was only known to be amused when he frequented Folly Bridge at Oxford in order to listen to the conversations of the bargees. As a chronicler of Oxford put it, “nothing at last could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-Foot in Oxford and hearing the Barge-men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his Sides and laugh most profusely.” The bargees were also proficient at the more unconventional practices of fishing, and were well known for their skill with the picking and mixing of herbs. They were well acquainted with the places along the bank where certain medicinal “simples” were to be found, and they sold them in the towns through which they passed. Their barges were often brightly coloured, with various riverscapes painted on their sides in the most garish colours; these paintings were known as “cuts.” Like the gypsies who once used to encamp along the course of the river, the bargees were a separate and exclusive caste whose members married and intermarried. They mixed rarely with the villagers along the Thames, and indeed the two parties seemed to hold each other in mutual contempt. The villagers in fact classed the bargees with the gypsies, blaming both for misdemeanours and thefts such as the stealing of ducks’ eggs. In 1600 they were described as “a fewe dronken and beggerley fellows.”
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