Thames
Page 25
The mists and fogs were reported from earliest times. Tacitus mentions them in his account of Caesar’s invasion, and they were commonly described in all succeeding centuries as the natural companions of the river. Many riverine areas, such as Westminster and Lambeth, were built upon swamp land; here the exhalation of damp and mist is more palpable than on the hills of London. The fogs of Westminster were once well known. During certain winters the riverine trees of London distilled pools of water from the circumambient atmosphere. The fogs were particularly thick along the estuarial waters, and a traveller of 1807 in Essex complained of “the thick and stinking fogs” that lurked there. But these were the fogs of nature, created by marshland and swamp, rather than the fogs of industry and waste.
However, that mist, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did indeed become the surly and sulphurous fog. At the turn of the nineteenth century the Port of London was well known for the veil of fog that often covered it, swallowing up the docks and wharves, obscuring the traffic of the great waterway; the sounds of the river were muffled, too, with the call of sirens or of bells or of voices somehow lost in the immensity. There were many examples of pedestrians—even horses and carriages—falling into the river for the very good reason that they could no longer see it; it had been obscured by the swirling grey or grey-green vapours. This was the fog invoked by Dickens at the beginning of Bleak House:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it floats among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes; fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
This is the Thames as fog. It does not flow; it drifts like fog. It settles in the valley of London like thick mist in a hollow. It is comprised of fog, and all the vessels upon it are fashioned out of fog. This is the real phantom of the nineteenth-century river. And it persisted longer than anyone could reasonably have expected. As late as the 1960s there were on average about 237 hours of dense fog in, and upon, and about, the Thames each year.
There is a particular wind that scuds across the river. The prevailing wind of London is westerly, and on Waterloo Bridge there seems to be a perpetual westerly wind. Yet the wind of the river seems to be mainly south-westerly. That is one of the reasons why it is faster to travel downriver. A German traveller in 1710, Z. C. von Uffenbach, noted the continuous wind upon the water at London that, as he said, made sad work of men’s wigs. The “South-west” can be known for its force, and for its iron cold, although in the winter months there is another particularly cold wind that comes in from the north-east. Everything is restless in the wind—the rushes, the weeds, the water, the swans, even the cows in the neighbouring pastures. The winds can endure, and in November 1703 a storm of winds continued for several days and wreaked havoc upon the river. The ships were blown from the water and lay upon one another in heaps between Shadwell and Limehouse; every other vessel was thrown upon the shore. Five hundred wherries were lost, some sunk and some dashed to pieces against each other; sixty barges were destroyed, and another sixty were sunk. It was impossible to estimate the loss of life upon the river, but some eighteen thousand men perished while on board ship. It has been estimated that the amount of energy released by a summer thunderstorm is equal to that of a 110-kiloton nuclear bomb, and its effect is magnified when it is set loose upon the river.
And with the wind there comes the rain. There is something particularly soothing about water falling within water. To look at rain falling into the river is like watching flames within a general fire; it is the delectation of observing an elemental force mingling with itself, even when the Thames seems distracted and turbulent with what was once known as the “rage of rain.” The turbulence may have other causes. In the third century BC Theophrastus made the observation that “the rising of bubbles in large numbers on the surface is a sign of abundant rain.” The lowering of the atmosphere releases the vital gases held by the river. And there is also the curious phenomenon of the “water-whirls,” described by one Thames inhabitant as “slender sprites that danced across the face of the broad and rippling Thames.” They might indeed have come out of the mythology of the river, but they are essentially whirlpools above the surface of the river or slender whirlwinds made out of water. Extensive investigation has yielded no clue to their nature or their origin.
The rain is vital for the replenishment of the river. The average annual rainfall of the Thames Valley varies from 29 inches in the Lower Thames to 25 inches in the Upper Thames, making it one of the driest regions of the United Kingdom. But such is the power of the natural world that this relative paucity of rain creates a vast average of some 4,350 million gallons of water each day. Half of this supply is exhausted by evaporation or by the absorption of vegetable life; the rest becomes what is known as “residual rainfall” or the “natural flow” that passes into the river itself.
The rain is one of the phenomena that contribute to the sudden emergence of floods, although it should be observed that rain coming from the east and north-west is less likely to cause flood conditions than rain from the south and south-west. Floods are a permanent condition of the river. The first recorded flood along the Thames occurred in AD 9, although of course there were myriad floods and deluges that find no place in the recorded history of our ancestors. Then in AD 38 another great flood is believed to have killed some ten thousand people. Archaeologists have reported a decline of human activity in London, and in the London region, in the 360s; the evidence suggests that this decade of decay was the result of massive floodings.
It is a story of continual encroachment by the non-tidal as well as the tidal Thames. In 1332 Taplow was all but destroyed. In 1768 the water at Reading rose 21/2 feet in half an hour. In 1774 the bridge at Henley was washed away. In 1821 the roads beside the Thames became impassable, and in 1841 the high street of Eton was under water. There were great floods in 1852 and in 1874, on both occasions occurring on 17 November. The heaviest flood on the non-tidal stretch of the river was in 1894, when one-third of the annual rainfall fell in less than a month. The river cannot contain so much water, as we have observed, and so it spills out in all directions creating havoc and confusion wherever the water goes. In 1947 the river below Chertsey was 3 miles wide, and Maidenhead was 6 feet (1.8 m) under water. The area around Maidenhead has in fact always been susceptible to flooding, and at the beginning of this century a flood-relief channel was brought into operation.
It was hoped, at times of flood, that the river would subside gradually rather than suddenly, otherwise the floods would reappear again, and there is an apparently ancient maxim saying “soon down, soon up.” A flood in winter was once not of great consequence, unless it reached the ploughed fields and the cottages close to the river. In the flat and marshy districts of the Upper Thames it was not unknown, in the winter months, for the inhabitants to be practically imprisoned for several weeks at a time. That is why the dwellings in these upper regions tended to be constructed out of stoutly built walls and thick stone. Now the proliferation of new homes in low-lying areas, and the pleasant prospect of owning a property near the river, have put thousands of households at risk. In farming areas, too, a flood in summer can create great damage among the grass and crops of the low-lying lands.
The curious nature of the phenomenon, however, is that flooding always seems to be unexpected. Floods are forgotten, until the next one occurs. There is a strange assumption that the Thames Barrier will somehow now prevent the depredations of the river. Leaving aside the obvious point that it will have no impact upon the river below the barrier itself, or on the miles of estuarial shore, the installation will have no effect upon the non-tidal stretches of the river that will be as liable to flood as at any other time in their history. At the beginning of 2003, for example, 5
50 houses were flooded; the level of water at Mapledurham Lock was only 12 inches lower than that at the time of the disastrous floods of 1947.
Let us assume that the average daily flow of water over Teddington Weir is approximately 4,500 million gallons; on one or two occasions each year it reaches 5,500 million gallons which is considered to be “bank-full” or within the margin of flooding. At the time of the floods of 1947 the daily flow of water surging over Teddington Weir reached 13,572 million gallons. In 1968 it reached 11,404 million gallons, and in 1988 7,650 million gallons. These large volumes of water represent the power, and the destructive potential, of the Thames.
The worst floods are reserved, however, for the tidal river where unnatural weather conditions and tidal surges can coalesce to form mighty walls of water. In 1090 London Bridge was destroyed and carried away by the Thames in tumult, and then nine years later the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that “on the festival of St. Martin, the sea flood sprung up to such a height and did so much harm as no man remembered that it ever did before.” This flood of 1099 had one other unexpected consequence. The estate belonging to Earl Goodwin was quite submerged by the overflowing of the Thames, to the extent that it could never afterwards be drained. It became a sandbank, and from that time forward became known as the “Goodwin Sands,” still an object of fear to fishermen and mariners. In 1236 the flood waters rose to such a level that Woolwich was “all on a sea,” according to Stow, and wherries were rowed in the middle of Westminster Hall. Matthew Parris recorded that this flood “deprived all ports of ships, tearing away their anchors, drowned a multitude of men, destroyed flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, plucked out trees by the roots, overturned dwellings, dispersed beaches.” By curious chance this flood occurred on 2 November, or the feast day of St. Martin, as it had done 137 years previously. In 1242 the river overflowed its banks at Lambeth, and the inundation spread for 6 miles around. In 1251 the tides rolling up the Thames were 6 feet (1.8 m) higher than usual. In 1294 extra defences were ordered and the banks were raised by 4 feet (1.2 m) “in respect of the raging of the sea.” Then in 1313 Edward II declared in a charter that “the violence of the sea in those parts has grown greater than it had wont to be.” In 1324 100,000 acres of land, between St. Katharine’s and Shadwell, were under water.
There have been “freak” tides causing devastation in every century. On 4 February 1641, there were, according to a contemporary pamphlet, “flowing Two Tydes at London Bridge, within the space of an houre and a halfe, the last comming with such violence and hideous noyse” that even the watermen were “affrighted.” Between the two abnormal tides the Thames stopped moving for an hour and a half, so that it seemed “asleepe or dead.” Then the second tide began “tumbling, roaring and foaming in that furious manner, that it was a horror unto all that beheld it.” It was “a wonder, that—all things considered—the oldest man never saw or heard of the like.” This was a slight exaggeration, however, since eighteen years before, on 19 January 1623, there were three tides in the space of five hours. On 7 December 1663, Pepys wrote in his diary that “there was last night the greatest tide that ever was remembered in England to have been in this river; all Whitehall having been drowned.” There was a famous “breach” along the river, just by the village of Dagenham; it had opened in 1707, 100 feet (30 m) long, and was not closed for seven years. On 14 September 1716, a great and persistent wind prevented the flood tide from reaching its destination; the Thames became so shallow that, according to Strype’s revision of Stow’s Survey of London and Westminster (1720), “many thousands of people passed it on foot, both above and below the Bridge.”
In 1762 the waters of the Thames were raised so high that “the like had never been known in the memory of man.” In less than five hours the water rose 12 feet (3.6 m) in height, and people were drowned in the principal thoroughfares of the city. In the nineteenth century there were six major floods—in 1809, 1823, 1849, 1852, 1877 and 1894—causing much destruction of life and property. The familiar cry from those who lived by the river was “Water’s over!” In 1881 the tide reached 17 feet 6 inches at Westminster when, according to The Times, “the most heartrending scenes were witnessed.”
In December 1927 the tide reached 17 feet 3 inches, but in the following year it peaked to 18 feet 3 inches. The river-banks at Millbank were breached, and fourteen people drowned. On 6 January 1928 a storm in the North Sea created a tidal surge that raised the waters of the river to their highest recorded level. The defensive walls of the Embankment were breached at Hammersmith and at Millbank. Fourteen people were drowned in the basements of Westminster. The other great flood was of March 1947, and in most locks the two high markers commemorate the floods of 1894 and 1947.
The greatest destruction of all occurred on the night of 31 January 1953, when a great tide coming from the North Sea flooded the Thames estuary. It was a cold night, with a howling gale, and at 2 a.m. a vast cliff of water moved steadily forward. The deaths of more than three hundred people were reported, as well as the loss of twenty-four thousand homes and the inundation of 160,000 acres of farmland. Twelve gas-works and two power stations were crippled by the deluge. The island of Canvey was drowned; many of the islanders were evacuated, but eighty-three of them lost their lives. It was the largest disaster since the Second World War. If the water had not spilled into the farmlands of Essex and of Kent, where the earth banks failed, the devastation would have reached London with unimaginable consequences.
The menace of such high tides and high flows meant that the danger to London itself had been growing. Some 60 square miles (155 sq km) of the capital lie below high tide level, and the depth of water throughout the capital could rise to 10 feet (3 m). With that volume of water pouring into the Underground system, for example, the transport of the city would be paralysed for a very long time indeed. The potential loss of life would also be very large.
The Thames Barrier Act was passed in 1972, and the Thames Flood Barrier itself was completed some eleven years later. It was generally anticipated that it would close three times each year, to mitigate the effects of unfortunate weather, but in the first four months of 2001 it closed on fourteen occasions. In the first month of 2003 it closed eighteen times to counteract the effects of the tide. In that period it was drawn up to protect against the encroachment of fourteen consecutive tides, sure evidence of how dangerous and destructive the Thames can become.
The barrier can hold back fifty thousand tons of water moving forward each second, but this defence will not be enough for the river of the future. It is believed that it will be for all practical purposes redundant or inadequate by 2030. The tides increase in height by approximately 2 feet (0.6 m) every century and, as the ice-caps melt and London itself sinks at a rate of 8 inches per century, new and more sophisticated defences will soon be necessary. A scheme has been proposed to build a barrier 10 miles long from Sheerness in Kent to Southend, for example, with a number of gates that would allow unimpeded access to the normal tides.
There was an unusual condition of the weather that materially affected the life and nature of the Thames in previous centuries. The river had a propensity to freeze at the bottom while the water above continued to flow. The watermen called this ground-ice the “ice-meer,” a cake of ice that would often rise to the surface bringing gravel and stone with it. In times of extreme cold, before the building of the bridges, the surface of the river would also entirely freeze. It was a matter of celebration rather than of wonder, however, and the Thames was transformed into the home of an extravagant market and entertainment known as “frost fair.” The first “fair” was reported as taking place in AD 695, when booths were erected and a market was held upon the ice. Between the seventh and seventeenth centuries the river froze on eleven separate occasions, the worst being the winter of 1434–5 when it was immobile from 24 November to 10 February and when pedestrians could walk from London Bridge to within a mile of Gravesend. Holinshed recorded that, in 1565, “some played at
foot-ball there as boldly as if it had been on the dry land; diverse of the court shot daily at pricks set up on the Thames.”
Then in 1683 an anonymous pamphleteer spoke of the “unheard of rendezvous” kept upon the frozen river, with rows of tents and booths and shops, with sledges and caravans and coaches and wagons sliding over the ice, with bull-baiting and bear-baiting being instigated in makeshift arenas, with coffee and ale and brandy and wine for sale together with baked, boiled and roasted meats. There were bakers and cooks and butchers and barbers and prostitutes. There were hawkers with their news, costermongers with their fruit, and fishwives with their oysters. There were also “several amours, intrigues, cheats and humours”: honest men were robbed and rogues profited. Hackney coaches continued a handsome trade, and a coach and six horses was driven on “the white path” from Whitehall to London Bridge. There was even a fox hunt. It was a little city on ice estimated to be 18 inches (45 cm) thick. It was considered to be a second Bartholomew’s Fair, and was called “Freezeland Fair” or “Blanket Fair.” The meat sold was called “Lapland Mutton.” Verses were written to commemorate it:
Behold the wonder of this present age,
A famous river now become a stage:
Question not what I now declare to you.
The Thames is now both fair and market too.
The waters had become the land, and a flood had become a road. Fish could be seen suspended in the ice. The hilarity derived from the sensation of unaccustomed liberty—to walk upon water was a truly miraculous event, and to be able to cross the mighty Thames was in itself a feat worthy of celebration. All the characteristics that have been deemed intrinsic to the Thames—the spirit of egalitarianism and the spirit of licence—were here lent extreme form.