The bad language also became a matter of public statute. In 1701 the Corporation of Watermen made it illegal to “use immoderate, obscene and lewd expressions towards passengers and to each other, as are offensive to all sober persons, and tend extremely to the corruption and debauchery of youth.” The punishment for “swearing or cursing” was 2 shillings, and that of “reviling passengers” was also 2 shillings. It did not stop the flow, and in 1773 there were complaints about “indecent Conversations” as well as “horrid Oaths and imprecations” to be heard at the riverside. When a riverside resident of the early nineteenth century remonstrated with a bargee for tying his rope to a small punt post, “he answered that if he chose, he might fix the Rope to the knocker of my Street door. The Language used by the Men was very improper to be within the hearing of the Ladies in the House.”
The watermen were not the only offenders. Richard Jefferies, the mid-nineteenth-century naturalist and novelist, wrote in an essay entitled The Modern Thames (1885) that everyone felt free to swear upon the river and that “on the Thames you may swear as the wind blows—howsoever you list. You may begin at the mouth off the Nore and curse your way up to Cricklade. A hundred miles for swearing is a fine preserve: it is one of the marvels of our civilisation.” There were often complaints about the language of the trippers and loafers who hired launches or small boats for expeditions on the Thames; they were known for becoming drunk and for what were called their “impudent” or “beastly” expressions. The dockers of the river swore with such regularity that the obscenities were given no emphasis. The explanation for this endless flood of profanity by the water is perhaps not difficult to find. It has to do with the freedom and the equality which the long history of the Thames induces. Or as Jerome K. Jerome put it in Three Men in a Boat, “when a man up the river thinks a thing, he says it.”
CHAPTER 23
The Natives
The river can get into the blood. There are families now working on the Thames whose lineage stretches back for many generations, families such as the Hobbses of Henley, the Turks of Kingston, the Cobbses of Putney, the Phelpses of Hammersmith, the Murphys of Wapping, the Coes of Barking, the Crouches of Greenhithe, the Luptons of Gravesend, the Fishers of Limehouse, and the Salters of Oxford. It would seem that there is not one populated stretch of the Thames that does not have its own presiding family of boatmen.
The Bossom family was associated with the river, at Medley and at Wallingford, from the eighteenth century until the 1960s. Charles Bossom was mentioned as a bargeman in 1754, and in 1878 William Morris recorded that he sailed from Medley to Kelmscott with “Bossom and another man to tow us as far as New Bridge.” There is a photograph of Bossom’s Boatyard, near Oxford, taken in 1880 by a famous photographer of the river, Henry Taunt; Bossom’s Boatyard is still there. Sargent Brothers (Thames) deal in such riverine matters as pilotage and hydrographic services; their association with Woolwich goes back for three centuries, and Thomas Sargent was a shipwright in the eighteenth-century Woolwich Dockyard. Their present headquarters are still in Woolwich. The Tough Brothers of Teddington have been connected with the river since the beginning of the nineteenth century. These are continuities that the river seems to foster, patterns of labour and habitation that persist beside the ever-flowing Thames.
The Freebodys are first mentioned in a document of the mid-thirteenth century as ferrymen and bargemen; John Freebody was a bargeman at Hurley in the early seventeenth century. Peter Freebody still has a boating business at Hurley, and is celebrated for the building of traditional craft. There are other river families, such as the Bushnells and the Woottons, the Parrotts and the Coopers, who began their association with the river as gravel diggers or as bargemen; they have continued that association ever since in their modern incarnation as boat-builders or leisure-boatmen. The Livetts of Gravesend and London can be traced back to the early eighteenth century, when the first Livett arrived in Bermondsey as a French seaman. For the last 150 years the Livetts have been concerned with tugs and towing, but Chris Livett now runs a thriving passenger business on the Thames; he himself married the daughter of a waterman and has already apprenticed their son and daughter to the same trade. The Purdues were associated with Shepperton for five hundred years, although they now seem to have departed.
It has been claimed that there are also regional characteristics shaping, for example, those who live and work along the upper Thames and the estuary. Those who harbour a topographical imagination tend to view the various communities as in some way reflecting the characteristics of the river. The people of the Upper Thames are then considered to be calm and contemplative, almost languorous; the people of the estuary are deemed to be quick and alert, almost mischievous. This is all perhaps fanciful. Yet there is not one area or one community beside the Thames that is not touched in some unique way by the presence of the river. If a riverine family can trace itself back seven or eight generations—as many still can—then the Thames is part of its inheritance.
The population of the Upper Thames was until recent years relatively stable; there was no noticeable immigration into the region after the close of the eleventh century, and with the absence of large towns and cities (with the exception of Oxford) there was little of that spirit of innovation and change associated with the medieval merchant or the modern businessman. Until the advent of the First World War, in fact, it has been claimed that four-fifths of the population of the Upper Thames lived and died within 10 miles of their birthplace. This is of course true of many rural areas, but the relative seclusion of the Thames Valley rendered that isolation all the more noticeable.
There are accounts and histories of the region, most notably Alfred Williams’s Round About the Upper Thames (1922) and Folk Songs of the Upper Thames (1923), that treat the resident population as if it had some tribal force or spirit. In the first of these volumes Williams invokes the Thames as the presiding deity of a place whose “whole life is governed by the river, that operates in a hundred ways, openly and secretly, determining all things, and whose decrees are absolute and irrevocable.” He traces the history of the population from the earliest settlements to the period of his writing, and in this progress he touches upon the most local and circumstantial details of the riverine world—from the particular mist or vapour that hangs over the vicinity to the popularity of eel-pie in the various villages of the Thames Valley. There are stories of ghosts, of witches buried by the roadside, and of a certain local “peggy-wiggy” pie made of the stillborn young of the long-eared white sow.
It has been said that the inhabitants of the Thames Valley were once unusually fond of singing, as if Pan were still busy in the reeds; the closer the inhabitants lived to the source of the river, the more strident became their voices. In Folk Songs of the Upper Thames Alfred Williams describes the “wassails,” for example, held by the source at Thames Head. These exuberant games and dances are of much anthropological interest. Common sense would suggest that they were the surviving elements of very ancient rituals. Williams transcribes the song of Thames Head and observes that “I have not heard it except around the Thames source”:
Here’s to the ox, and to his long horn;
May God send our maester a good crap o’corn!
A good crap o’corn, and another o’hay,
To pass the cold wintry winds away.
Williams records more than two hundred songs of the river region, a large number for such a relatively small area. Among them are “When Morning Stands on Tiptoe,” “I Once Had Plenty of Thyme,” “The Downhill of Life” and “The Husbandman and the Servingman” glossed by Williams as very popular “around the Thames Head at Kemble, Somerford Keynes and Oaksey.” Some songs were confined to one village, and indeed to one singer. Thus we have “The Sower’s Song,” “words of Mrs. Mackie, Lechlade”:
Old earth is a pleasure to see
In sunshiny cloak of red and green:
The furrow lies fresh, and this year will be
A
s years that are past have been.
If there are constant themes in the songs of the Thames, they are of permanence and of endless renewal. These matters are deeply congenial to the nature of the territory. Some of the songs are obscure, and others are obscene. But they all exude the strong spirit of the locality. They are not in dialect form, curiously enough, and Williams believes that dialect songs were an artificial introduction of the mid-nineteenth century. The songs in his collection are delivered in what might be called simple Saxon English.
Williams suggests that there were once thousands of songs circulating in the Thames region, and “I have frequently come into contact with those who have assured me that such and such a one knew from two hundred to three hundred pieces.” At the singing matches in the inns, the competition was not for him who sang best but for him who sang most. One man “commonly issued a challenge to the village, or the neighbourhood, and declared himself able and willing to sing continuously for twelve hours—from morning till night—and to have a fresh piece each time.” The competitions then lasted for two days.
In this context Williams mentions Elijah Isles of Inglesham whose songs “were gently humorous and witty” and William Warren, a thatcher of South Marston, who specialised in “the romantic-historical kind.” There were also “singing families,” such as the Pillingers of Lechlade and the Wheelers of Buscot, all of whom sang and who passed their gift from generation to generation. At Lechlade, too, the songs were taught to the children at school. Certain villages acquired a reputation for song, among them Standlake and Castle Eaton. Before the arrival of the church organ every hamlet or village in the region had its own small band, composed of fiddle, bass viol, piccolo, clarionet, the cornet, the trumpet and something known as “the horse’s leg.” At the beginning of the twentieth century the most celebrated ballad-sellers of the Thames Valley were a couple, a man and a woman, each of whom possessed only one eye.
Yet the music passed away. It was perhaps fated to disappear in any case because, as Williams puts it, “a countryman never sings to a stranger.” It seems that the true decline began when the police objected to public singing in the inns of the neighbourhood, and by degrees the traditions were lost. The songs died with their last singers. It would be unwise to suggest that the region of the Thames was the only one in which such traditions were maintained for many centuries. But as Williams notes, it is instructive to recognise that this region, reputed to be “about the dullest part of England…cut off, as it were, from the heart of the great world,” could create the conditions for melodies that “quickened” the hearts and feelings of the people who lived by the Thames. By prolonged absorption in what was then the isolated life of this region, Williams was able to invoke what has now become an alien and immeasurably distant culture. It was a culture of the river which, with its traditions of communal feeling and of competitive singing, might hold the key to much earlier phases of life beside the Thames.
The native people of the tidal river, for example, bear striking similarities to the inhabitants of the Upper Thames. They shared an aptitude for singing. On New Year’s Eve, a few minutes before the change of the year, the inhabitants of Wapping and of Rotherhithe used to congregate alongside the piers and quays of their river world and there begin to sing. In response the ships and tugs on the river would blow their sirens. Is there some deep connection between the river and song? The people of the London river also shared with their upriver cousins the habit of interbreeding between local families. The Morning Post reported at the beginning of the twentieth century that in an attendance register of a school at Bow Creek, known then as “Bog Island,” there were 100 Lammins among a total number of 160 children; the rest were comprised almost entirely of Scanlans or Jeffrieses.
So the people of the docks were cut off geographically from their neighbours. As a result they used to evince a strong collective spirit. Even within the terrain of the docks themselves there were regional variations. Swing bridges and large gates separated the inhabitants of the Isle of Dogs from the people of Rotherhithe; there were fierce rivalries between them. In March 1970, for example, the people of the Isle of Dogs blockaded their bridge and declared themselves to be an independent republic of twelve thousand people. The protest, for such it was, lasted only for a day. Rotherhithe Street, known popularly as “Downtown,” was distinct from neighbouring Bermondsey and Southwark. But they had in common a preoccupation with the life of the river. It was the centre of their work, most of it casual, and of their little leisure; it was their means of transport, and their common sewer. It was the centre of their being, their various thoroughfares, streets and alleys leading unfailingly to the quays and stairs and other points of access to the foreshore and the dark water. The children collected pieces of coal and driftwood to light their families’ fires. It might seem to the observer that life for the majority of riverside people was the sum of a dark house and a dark street but, where a thousand such houses are found together, there can breathe a spirit of adventure and of wonder.
Those interested in the survival of remote Thames customs might do worse than to study the habits of the river gypsies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the gypsies were well known for their skill at catching fish, although they were quite devoid of any knowledge of angling; they used the old-fashioned method of a stick and spear, and occasionally employed a blunt instrument like a wooden sword with which they would bludgeon the fish. They constructed rude boats, like canoes, out of willow wood. Their skills were, therefore, of very ancient provenance.
The habitations of the river people have been considered as undesirable as the river people themselves. The small and unsanitary cottages of the Thames villagers were hardly ever deemed worthy of comment; the wharfingers and bargees of Marlow and Henley (the bargees never lived permanently on their barges) inhabited rows of damp and narrow terraces where the more respectable townsmen did not venture. But the conditions of riverside London were always the subject of much morbid description. The world of Wapping and of Rotherhithe was one of decayed streets, dark and malodorous, with an occasional gas bracket, its glass broken, high on a dank wall. The uneven cobbled streets that ran from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to Deptford Docks, or from Tower Street along Wapping High Street to Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, were marked by taverns and pawnshops and brothels and low lodgings for sailors. It may be that the dwellings of those who go down to the sea in ships will always have a makeshift and temporary air. They are not to be loved—the ship is to be loved—only to be endured. The streets at night, with names like Malabar Street and Canton Street, Amoy Place and Pekin Street, were clothed in an inky blackness broken only by distant or diminished lights. The houses were so uniform that analogies were made with the reefs that grow within water; they were like accretions of coral polyp. The people, and their habitations, are in every sense determined by the neighbouring river. Curiously enough, the Thames was rarely seen; it was the invisible brooding presence behind these mean streets.
The book that most effortlessly and vividly evoked the riverine neighbourhood was Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, published in 1917. It created a sensation at the time, not least for its intense descriptions of the vice and squalor of an area that no one presumed to explore. It was a world of “mephitic glooms and silences,” where an acrid tang hovered in the air and where “every corner, half-lit by the bleak light of a naked gas-jet seemed to harbour unholy things, and a sense of danger hung on every step.” It was an over-heated vision, perhaps, but it was balanced by Burke’s calmer observations of “the fried-fish shops that punctuate every corner” and the “general” shops that contained assorted rags, and broken iron, and basins of kitchen waste.
There is a special language of the river. In Alfred Williams’s books there is a record of the local speech of the Thames Valley, for example, which seems to have been a variant of rural demotic—“Ef thee’st a kipt thi eye and that owl’ elm yander, same as I telled tha, thee’st a ’e
d un right.” “Chorus” was pronounced as “chorius” and “breek” was used as “break.” It is also worth remarking that “v” was substituted for “w,” as in “ven” or “Villiam” could this usage have migrated down the Thames until it was co-opted into mid-nineteenth-century Cockney vocabulary? When the ground became inundated with flood-water, it was described by the local people as “goggy” or “patey.” To be shrewd was “deedy,” and snail-shells were “guggles.” There may be some trace here of a primordial language long since fallen out of customary use, perhaps derived from the Wessex or Mercian tongues.
It is sometimes claimed, in fact, that the English language emerged among the first communities by the Thames; it was then fashioned into the national speech by Alfred, who was deeply inured to the dialects of Wallingford and of Farringdon. It is not so exotic a suggestion as it may appear. There is a deep connection between the river and language, exemplified by the emergence of written communication in the river-plains of Mesopotamia. The first cities were created by the rivers, and the exigencies of communal expression thus arose in connection with the flowing waters. The rivers were known in the early myths as “the voice of God,” and in classical texts the flowers of rhetoric are described as flumen orationis, “the stream of speech.” So we speak of liquid consonants. Water is the presiding deity of flowing or fluid language, of language without break, of freely associative language, and of rhythmic or harmonious language. The metaphor is a persistent one because it rests upon an ancient association. Ruskin once said of Turner’s relationship to the Thames that “he understood its language.”
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