Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  There was one individual inhabitant of the river through whom the spirit of the place spoke. Douglas Chellow was born in 1790 in High Timber Street, Rotherhithe, and for the rest of his life he lived or wandered within the neighbourhoods of the river from Chelsea to Southend. One day he encountered by Blackfriars Bridge the writer and periodical editor, Charles Whitehead, who subsequently described the strange meeting: “He wrung his hands as if finding all hopeless, and then suddenly quietened and was all smiles and concern. It seemed that he wanted only to convey his love of the river to anyone who would listen and I found the interest to hear him many times.”

  Chellow discoursed on the Romans and Saxons who had commandeered the Thames, on the medieval merchants who sailed through London, and on the monks who built their establishments on the banks of the river; he spoke of Chaucer, and of Tyler. He described the great “frost fairs” that had taken place on the frozen river, and after the Princess Alice disaster of 1878 he walked up and down the river-banks with a placard on which was inscribed: “CAN WE BE MASTERS OF THE SEA IF WE CANNOT KEEP A PLEASURE BOAT AFLOAT ON THE THAMES? THE RIVER HAS HAD HER REVENGE.” The police records of the period note that he haunted the temporary mortuary and the coroner’s court with the same message.

  This was indeed his belief—that the river was an ancient deity, sometimes beneficent and sometimes implacable, that had to be appeased. He printed broadsheets entitled “Crimes Against the River Thames,” aimed at the river pirates and profiteers, as if the river itself were the injured party. Towards the end of his life he erected for himself a shack or hovel on the river-bank at Greenwich Reach. Each morning he made his obeisance to the river, according to Alan Wykes in An Eye on the Thames (1966), by “throwing up his arms and then prostrating himself on the shore, and calling on London’s river to claim him as his follower.” One morning his body was found, on the foreshore, at low tide.

  PART VIII

  The River of Trade

  The entrance to the West India Docks

  CHAPTER 24

  The Trade of the World

  In A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), Daniel Defoe calculated that there were some two thousand vessels on the Thames during any one day. But his principal interest lay in the amount of “revenue” or “income” that the river could generate. For him the “silver Thames” was silver indeed, liquid coin running through the heart of London. It has always been a river of trade. Its tidal reaches, from the Nore to London and its environs, have always been hard at work. The Thames has been touched by sweat, and labour, and greed, and poverty and tears. Its docks and wharves and factories were once the great machinery of empire, but its mercantile history stretches much further back.

  By the twelfth century it was already an ancient port. There are some extant verses of that century, written by William Fitzstephen in the preface to his biography of Thomas à Becket, Vita Sancti Thomae, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopis et Martyris, describing the wealth of the commodities that the merchants brought by sea:

  Arabia’s gold, Sabaea’s spice and incense,

  Scythia’s keen weapons, and the oil of palms

  From Babylon’s rich soil, Nile’s precious gems,

  Norway’s warm peltries, Russia’s costly sables,

  Sera’s rich vestures, and the wines of Gaul,

  Hither are sent.

  Already there were wharves for wheat and rye and wine, flax and hemp and linen cloth. In the thirteenth century there was a wharf close to the Tower of London known as the Galley Quay, since it was the place where the Venetian galleys were moored during their annual visit to London from the Serenissima; they were protected by a company of archers. The most important export of the period—and one that was loaded onto the Venetian galleys in exchange for sugar, spices and silken garments—was raw wool. By the fourteenth century it was estimated that one hundred thousand sacks of wool were transported overseas each year. There was now so much trade that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries major centres for ship-building and ship-repairing were established at Shadwell, Rotherhithe and Deptford—in which quarters they remained for four hundred years. In the following century the great yard at Blackwall was also opened. The presence of these docks meant in turn that the riverside became populated by tradesmen such as coopers and sail-makers who joined the porters and labourers in acquiring their income directly from the Thames. There were biscuit-bakers and store-shippers in Tooley Street, ship-chandlers at Wapping and famous rope-makers at Limehouse. Other river trades flourished from the sixteenth century. Gunpowder was produced at the Rotherhithe water-mills in the Tudor period, and it was later manufactured at the riverine sites of Greenwich and Woolwich. Cannon and lead-shot were also forged by the Thames.

  In the seventeenth century it was declared that “the greatest ships that ride upon the sea come and unload in London in the very harte of the towne” these vessels “either bringeth to it or carryeth from it, all merchandize the world can afforde it or it the worlde.” Trade was always brisk. In 1606 James I granted the City of London the right to tax all the coals, grain, salt, apples, pears, plums and other goods coming by the river. Three years later these rights were extended to oil, hops, soap, butter and cheese. A third charter, some seven years later, ordered that all coals be landed on the legal quays. It was “notoriously known” that the Thames was “so necessary, commodious and practicable” to the continuing life of the city. Certainly, by the end of the seventeenth century, the London quays were handling 80 per cent of the country’s exports, and 69 per cent of its imports. A foreign traveller, Count Magalotti, writing Travels in England (1669), observed that there were fourteen hundred large ships between London Bridge and Gravesend, “to which are added the other smaller ships and boats, almost without number, which are passing and repassing incessantly, and with which the river is covered.” He had been told that “more than six hundred thousand persons sleep upon the water,” which would have made it the largest riverine population in Europe. Yet not all goods began and ended their travels at London. There were shallow draughted vessels that took merchandise upriver to Oxford, and even beyond; the “Western Barges,” as they were known, worked between London and Oxford throughout the year.

  In the Carriers Cosmographie of 1637, by the water poet John Taylor, it is stated that “to Bull Wharfe (neere Queenhithe) there doth come & goe great boats twice or thrice every weeke betwixt London & Kingston: also thither doth often come a Boat from Colebrooke…the Redding Boat is to be had at Queenhith weekly.” A Lechlade boat-master has left an inventory of goods that he took down the river in 1793, among them “iron, copper, tin, brass, spelter, cannon, cheese, nails…and bomb shells.” The channel of the Thames between Abingdon and Cricklade was scoured and cleaned out in order to make room for the boats and barges to pass freely upriver. It is estimated that 3,000 tons (over 3,000 tonnes) of cheese each year were transported from Oxford to London. There was of course also the vast amount of hay for the horses of London; they provided the true energy of the city.

  The trade of the river altered the appearance of its river-banks. Durham House was torn down and replaced by an exchange and by arcades of shops. Salisbury House was demolished to make way for houses. Arundel House suffered the same fate. Essex House, the possession of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was purchased by the property speculator Nicholas Barbon in 1674; it was largely demolished, and its stone used for the houses that Barbon built upon the site. It was Barbon who exploited the desire for standardised houses after the Fire. As a direct result of his influence the area between Strand and the river became a network of narrow streets and houses, with the occasional cookshop or tavern in attendance. The waterfront itself was rebuilt in the service of profit and of commerce; where once the gardens of the noblemen had sloped down to the river, there were constructed wharves and jetties for the use of brewers and wood merchants. It was the sign of transition in the river’s life.

  One foreign observer, J. H. Meister,
noted in his Letters (1791) that the port had become “an object of bewilderment and admiration to all.” In his account he also urged the traveller to “take boat to go down the Thames, and see the bosom of that noble river bearing thousands and thousands of vessels…you will then confess that you have beheld nothing that can give you a stronger idea of the noble and happy effects of human industry.” If the eighteenth century was the era of expanded and heavily financed trade, it is by no means coincidental that it was also the age in which the first London newspapers emerged. The Daily Courant began publication in 1702 and, from the beginning, its purpose was to bring news of overseas trade—and of events that might affect trade—to the merchants of the city. Fleet Street itself was conveniently close to the river. Lloyds List, founded in 1734, was primarily concerned with the movement of ships into London and elsewhere. The Daily Universal Register of 1785 (now transmogrified as The Times) was, as its name suggests, primarily a digest of overseas news. The Rialto of Venice was no busier, or better informed, than the riverside of the Thames.

  In his Tour Defoe emphasised the vast quantities of timber, of malt and of meal that were carried along the river into the city. The Thames was for him the life-blood of the nation, and the wharves of London “a kind of infinite, and the parts to be separated from one another in such a description, are so many, that it is hard to know where to begin.” Further downriver he noted three wet docks, twenty-two dry docks and more than thirty ship-building yards. The river was now so crowded with ships that it was possible to walk from one bank to the other on their decks. Defoe himself was part of the commercial river, and owned a tile manufactory beside the Thames near Grays. The eighteenth-century river no longer inspired the poetry of nymphs, but the poetry of trade. Thus James Thomson, the author of The Seasons (1726–30), celebrated the fact that the Thames had stirred

  The busy merchant; the big Warehouse built;

  Rais’d the strong crane; choak’d up the loaded street

  With foreign plenty; and thy stream, O THAMES,

  Large, gentle, deep, majestic, king of Floods!

  The river created other forms of trade. Along its banks rose mills and manufactories, as well as the infamous “stink industries” that were sited away from the centres of population but were within easy reach of the flowing energy (and disposal outlet) of the Thames. There was a range of potteries in the areas of Lambeth and of Fulham; there were porcelain factories in Chelsea, Bow and Limehouse; there were glass-makers in Vauxhall and Southwark; there were paint, ink and dye manufactories in Shadwell and Deptford; there were sugar refineries at Ratcliff and at Whitechapel. Bermondsey was well known for its leather-tanning and for its vinegar-making, both of them ill-smelling trades that gave the locale a noxious reputation well into the early twentieth century. And of course there were the breweries, carrying on one of the oldest of all trades upon the Thames. The makers of gin and beer could be found at Pimlico and at Southwark; there were breweries at Rotherhithe and at Lambeth, at Limehouse and at Mile End, and then further upriver at Wandsworth and Chiswick and Mortlake. The Hop Exchange was erected in Southwark, where it can still be seen.

  The craft carrying hops joined the barges that had been bringing sea-coal into the capital from the north-east of England for five centuries. These barges were in themselves as capacious as great ships, many of them with a capacity of 200 tons (over 200 tonnes). In the words of Thomson once more, “the sooty hulk steer’d sluggish on.” Coal was in fact the most important item of merchandise upon the Thames. At any one time some seven hundred colliers were on the river, providing fuel for a million homes. It was the tax upon coal imports that paid for the new churches built in London after the Great Fire, so in a real sense the river trade was responsible for the design of the city, and the coal dust hanging over the port in a permanent cloud was a visible token of the city’s dependency.

  CHAPTER 25

  The River of Immensity

  One of the wonders of the Thames world was its system of docks.

  The first “purpose-built” dock for cargo in London, the Brunswick Dock, was opened in 1789. Beside it rose a great mast-house, some 120 feet (36.5 m) in height, which for many years overlooked and dominated the area as a token of maritime trade and power. It was the maypole of the commercial deities that had now claimed the Thames as their own. That first dock had a river lineage, of course, deriving from the ancient sites of Billingsgate and Queenhithe. There was a port here in Roman, and in Saxon, times. The warehouses of the Roman period were sturdily built with stone walls and timber floors, the buildings often divided into “units” for ease of storage. The dry land to which the docks gave access was known for many centuries as “Romeland,” although the origin of the word is not clear.

  The medieval port comprised the principal deep-water harbours of Billingsgate and Queenhithe, then joined by Dowgate a little further upriver. By 1170 the German merchants had their own hall, or place of residence, beside Dowgate; it was known as the Steelyard after the beam used for weighing the merchandise. It seems likely that the Fleet river (otherwise known as Bridewell) was developed in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Most of the vessels entering London would have been moored midstream, however, and their merchandise taken by barge to the shore.

  There had been one principal change that altered the nature of the port. Fitzstephen reports that by the end of the twelfth century the riverside wall, separating the city from the Thames, had fallen into ruin and disrepair; this opened out the area immediately adjoining the banks, where new arcades and warehouses created the conditions of a flourishing market. It grew and grew, in unanticipated and unsupervised ways, for the next five centuries. Gradually the trade became so large that it began to spread downriver and away from the twenty so-called “legal quays” set up, in the reign of Elizabeth I, between London Bridge and the Tower of London, all of them on the north bank of the river. Quays denote those places where ships could be legally discharged and loaded. Wharves were designed to pass goods to and from barges only, but they were eventually being used for merchant ships also. Ratcliff and Poplar became new mooring sites for shipping, known as “sufferance wharves,” and the East India Company began to make use of Blackwall. The “sufferance wharves” constructed at Bermondsey were in fact on the site of medieval granaries; so there was a continuity. Another Elizabethan ordinance forbade the construction of private houses beside the banks of the Thames, so that the river could be saved for commerce. It is an indication of the pre-eminence of trade in the river’s history.

  Docks were essentially small open harbours that were cut into the bank, and could be used by every type of vessel. The first mention of a dock upon the Thames, at least in the guise with which we are familiar, occurred during the reign of Charles II. In his diary of 15 January 1661, Pepys noted that he travelled by boat to Blackwall where he saw a new dock and wet dock holding “a brave new merchantman which is to be launched shortly.” Five years after Pepys made his entry, the Great Fire might have put at risk all the achievement and enterprise of the city’s port. That Fire in fact began within the precincts of the port, at Pudding Lane, and the contents of the warehouses—including such combustible materials as brandy and sulphur, pitch and resin—materially helped to increase the conflagration. As happened in the Second World War, the marine trade of London helped to bring on the city’s destruction. Yet the commerce of the river, already thousands of years old, was not to be thwarted. It increased after the Fire, and continued to do so. In 1696 a parliamentary Bill was passed to create what became known as the Howland Great Wet Dock at Rotherhithe. It was 10 acres (4 ha) in extent, and held some 288,712 tons (over 292,700 tonnes) of water; it could hold without discomfort 120 of the largest merchant ships then sailing, and it helped to consolidate the possibilities of the area downriver from the Port. It was eventually renamed the Commercial Dock.

  Then at the very beginning of the nineteenth century the West India Dock Company Act was passed, and the whole landscape of t
he Thames at London was changed. The problem was, in part, one of congestion. It has been calculated that by 1800 there were 1,775 vessels using a stretch of water suitable for only 545 ships, and that there were also some 3,500 barges moored in the immediate vicinity. The result was of course the prospect of severe delays. Vessels could wait a week, or even a fortnight, before finding a vacant berth. But there was also the problem of security. With so many valuable cargoes lying upon the river, the vessels were obvious targets for the host of “river pirates,” “scuffle hunters” and others who could steal, smuggle or offload merchandise almost at will. There was the additional problem of inadequate storage. The warehouse accommodation for sugar amounted to some 32,000 hogsheads to meet an annual import of 120,000 hogsheads; under favourable circumstances this might be deemed sufficient, but in fact all of the sugar arrived within the same three months.

  The merchants and the ship-owners were united in their complaints, and in their desire to seek secure haven for their vessels while in London’s waters. Eight schemes were put before a parliamentary committee, with plans for the deepening of the river and for the building of a canal network. There were of course objections from those who had a vested interest in the existing arrangements. There were protests from the porters and the car-men who worked by the bankside; there were protests from the “lightermen” who discharged cargo from the ships moored midstream; there were protests from the owners of the “legal quays” and “sufferance wharves” who would lose much of their business; there was even protest from the Corporation of the City of London, which claimed that any cut into urban territory for the building of a dock would be an infringement of the city’s ancient rights and privileges.