One of the most enduring of riverine festivities, until it was transferred to dry land, was the Lord Mayor’s Pageant. It was a way for London to proclaim its dominance over the river. The first recorded pageant took place in 1422, but there must have been earlier rituals of a similar nature. On that particular occasion the new Lord Mayor, Sir William Walderne, was taken by water from Blackfriars to Westminster, where he was to make obeisance to the dead king Henry V. It was decreed that “the Alderman and Crafts should go to Westminster with him to take his charges in barges without minstrels.” But over the next thirty years the City companies erected and fitted out their own barges—together with minstrels—in as sumptuous a fashion as possible.
In 1453 the new mayor, Sir John Norman, equipped a barge at his own expense complete with flags and streamers. He was “rowed in this barge to Westminster, with silver oars, at his own cost and charge.” According to the Harleian MSS, “this yere the riding to Westminster was foredone and goying thider by barge bigonne.” Out of this event arose a famous wherrymen’s song, “Row thy boat, Norman.” A civic rite became a spectacle, and the “cost and charge” soon rose as the companies vied with one another over the extravagance of their ceremonial barges. In 1624 the merchant tailors, for example, spent the unparalleled sum of £1,000 upon their boat.
An observer of the procession in 1660, John Tatham in The Royal Cake, described “the barges adorned with streamers and banners, and fitted with hoe-boys, cornets, drums, and trumpets…and by the way his lordship is saluted with twenty pieces of ordnance, as peals of entertainment and joy.” He also notes the presence of various allegorical and mythological figures such as Oceanus “who is said to be God of Seas and the Father of Rivers.” This reverence for the water god suggests atavistic worship of some kind, as if the earliest rites had not wholly been forgotten in the early modern era. Why should not ancient beliefs, and ancient festivals, reappear at different periods of human history?
The Lord Mayor’s Procession on water survived for more than four hundred years, until in 1857 the Thames Conservancy took over authority on all matters concerning the river. The barges were either “laid up” or sold to the boating fraternities of Oxford colleges. The public house known as the City Barge, at Chiswick, is named after the winter mooring here of the last of the barges. Yet to this day the mayor is accompanied during his annual procession, on land, by a liveried waterman, in honour of the fact that he retains the title of Admiral of the Port of London.
There were other fêtes and fairs customarily held upon the river or by the riverside; in the latter years of the nineteenth century, for example, there was a passion for illuminated vessels of every kind. It was a taste that emerged from nowhere, and lapsed just as swiftly. At Marlow there were processions of brightly lit boats and “coloured fires” passing slowly down the river, with the town band also in attendance. At Bray a fully equipped schooner of fairy lights or “cardinal lamps” sailed upon the water, while at Ditton an “Eiffel Tower” was carried downstream. At Datchet an illuminated Chinese pagoda proceeded down the Thames, and at Bourne End a launch was disguised as the Man in the Moon. This was the river as Proteus, conjuring forth a thousand different shapes. It was also a celebration of the meeting of water and fire, the primal elements in ecstatic harmony at a time of festival. In Cookham the local fire brigade carried blazing torches on an enormous punt, together with their manual fire engine and wooden horses. There were musical evenings, too, with a pianoforte placed on a barge moored in the middle of the river while the audiences on either bank could listen to the voices of the tenor or the soprano. By the Thames was heard “Alice, Where Art Thou?,” “Oh Dry Those Tears” or “The Lost Chord.” There were often performances of dance, too, with terpsichorean routines such as “The Tired Swan.”
Fairs were celebrated by the Thames, with various “wakes” and “revels” held in the riverside villages of Berkshire and Oxfordshire. One of the most celebrated of them, Greenwich Fair, was held on Easter Monday and at Whitsuntide. It was the most famous fair in the vicinity of the Thames, and a favoured resort of Londoners. It was considered to be a great “Saturnalia” in which all the freedom and the licence associated with the river spilled over onto the hills and banks overlooking the water. It was frequented by more than a hundred thousand people, arriving by wagon or by steamboat. In one of his early sketches, Dickens records that “the balcony of every public-house is crowded with people, smoking and drinking, half the private houses are turned into tea-shops, fiddles are in great request.” There was also a favourite pastime of young men and young women, which involved rolling down One Tree Hill at Greenwich and ending up in a tangle of promiscuous arms and legs. The one tree on One Tree Hill was blown down in the summer of 1848, but that did not stop the festivities.
The river has always been associated with sexual licence. In the neighbourhood of Southwark alone, there were streets named Slut’s Hole and Whore’s Nest as well as the more euphemistic Maiden Lane and Love Lane. The riverside village of Chiswick was once known as Slut’s Hole, and Maidenhead was described as the “hymen of London” as a result of the number of unmarried couples who congregated there. Henry Wallington Wack, in Thamesland (1906) depicted the “love dalliances afloat, these lispings and kissings and spoonings” in the backwaters of the river. It was often reported that male bathers would strip naked, in the presence of ladies, and then disport themselves in the water. One contemporary wrote of “a whirlpool of Charybdis with fifty demons in their birthday suits floundering about and yelling red language with fiendish delight.” Sexual aggression, and sexual display, are encouraged by the river.
There was one well-known sexual festival by the Thames, centred on a site known as Cuckold’s Point by Rotherhithe. Until the middle decades of the nineteenth century it was marked by a pole, a pair of horns affixed to the top of it; the horns were an ancient symbol of a husband who has been wronged or “cuckolded” by his errant wife. The legend or story used to explain this symbol of unfaithfulness concerned the amatory career of King John, who violated the wife of a Greenwich miller; in recompense he offered the miller all the land he could see in one direction, on the understanding that each year he would walk to the boundary with a pair of buck’s-horns upon his head. The clear-sighted miller saw as far as Charlton Hill.
The festivities emerging from this pretty fiction, dating from the thirteenth century, had their destination at the aptly named Horn Fair. It was a place of strange tumult and wild mirth, according to observers, where instruments such as saucepans and vessels of horn could be purchased. Such instruments were the usual components of the “charivari,” the uncouth serenade used to greet newly weds. So the sexual associations are evident.
The procession to Horn Fair was formed at Cuckold’s Point, winding through Deptford and Greenwich before making its way to a fair at Charlton; the male participants wore pairs of branching antlers, and considered themselves free to make advances upon any females in their path. There is an account by a participant in 1700 who recorded that “at Cuckolds-Point we went into the House, where the Troop of Merry Cuckolds us’d to Rendesvous; Arm’d with Shovel, Spade or Pick-Ax, their Heads adorn’d with Horned Helmets; and from there to march in Order, for Horn-Fair.” At the fair itself men would dress as women, wear horns upon their heads, carry horns with them or blow them. It became what the authorities described as an “intolerable nuisance” and was suppressed in 1768; but the site, and the pole, remained. The fair was eventually revived, until once more it was closed by official edict in 1872. Yet all is not lost. The fair has been reinstituted annually at Hornfair Park in Charlton. There is still a pillar, representing Cuckold’s Point, overlooking the stretch of river at Limehouse Reach.
There are also the less well advertised pleasures of swimming in the Thames. In the seventeenth century it was the common sport of noblemen who lived by the river, along the Strand, and on one occasion a letter was addressed to “the Earl of Pembroke, in the Thames, over against
Whitehall.” But the ordinary citizens of London were less likely to follow, having no particular fondness for water as an element. The Thames was considered primarily as a highway and as a source of food. The idea of swimming in it voluntarily was not taken very seriously. In the early nineteenth century Byron swam from Lambeth through the two bridges, Westminster and Blackfriars, comprising a distance of some 3 miles. He, too, was something of an exception; he may in any case have been helped by the tide.
A. P. Herbert, an aficionado of the Thames in the middle of the twentieth century, used to swim in the river; but he remarked in The Thames (1966) that he found its “muddy waters” very tiring. He noticed that at Waterloo, for example, the water “has no buoyancy at all and, so far from supporting the swimmer, seems all the time to be dragging him down to the extremely muddy floor of the river.” This is indeed one of the characteristics of the Thames, treacherous and dangerous as it is within the stretches of London. Herbert recalled, as he approached his destination at Westminster Bridge, that his whole frame “seemed subject to some magnetic force relentlessly pulling it towards the bed.” This is the experience of the suicide as well, this appetite of the Thames for drawing the human down into its depths. Herbert also noticed that “it tasted very strongly of I know not what.” So the Thames has never really been considered a friend of the swimmer. But it is more than the danger of pollution that acts as a deterrent. It is some deep fear of its nature that seems to prevent its use.
CHAPTER 32
Gardens of Delight
The pleasure gardens of Vauxhall, and of Ranelagh, and of Cremorne, sprang up by the side of the river in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their charm and popularity were in large part the consequence of their riverine location. Once more the Thames created the atmosphere, or setting, for the deliberate licence of the populace. The first of them, Cuper’s Gardens, was beside the river in the area then known as Lambeth Marsh but what is more recognisable now as the southern approach to Waterloo Bridge. It was opened in the 1630s, with gardens and bowling greens and serpentine walks as well as the attendant pleasures of a tavern and a supper room. In 1708 the author of A New View of London, Edward Hatton, described the venue as that to which “many of the westerly part of the town resort for diversion during the summer season.” A musical pavilion was opened in the 1730s, and concerts were performed in front of large audiences. There were also firework displays. These are the constituents of riverside pleasure: food and drink, music and fireworks. Yet Cuper’s Gardens also became a haunt of thieves and pick-pockets, to the extent that it was refused a licence in 1753 and was closed down seven years later.
The New Spring Garden was close to Battersea and, before the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750, could only be reached from the more fashionable side of the river by wherry. It had been established just before the Restoration of 1660, in anticipation of happy times, and changed its name to Vauxhall Gardens in 1785. In the seventeenth century it was known for its alcoves, its bands, its comic singers, its illuminated lamps hanging on the boughs of adjacent trees, its greedy waiters and its expensive drinks. Pepys visited the Garden in 1667, and in his diary remarked that “to hear the nightingale and other birds, and here fiddles and there a harp, and here a Jew’s trump and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is very diverting.” He was not so pleased, however, with the riotous behaviour of the young men who flocked to the gardens for female company. Or as a ballad put it:
Women squeak and men drunk fall,
Sweet enjoyment of Vauxhall.
Another contemporary song was rather more discreet about the London citizens who have
Sail’d triumphant in the liquid way,
To hear the fiddlers of Spring Garden play.
In the eighteenth century the Gardens were refurbished with supper rooms, artificial ruins, water spectacles and an orchestra large enough to hold fifty musicians. Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” was performed here in front of an audience of twelve thousand people. A statue of the composer was later placed beside the entrance. A rotunda was built, 70 feet (21.3 m) in diameter, with a picture room attached. It has been conjectured that the domes of Vauxhall in fact materially influenced the architecture of the Festival Gardens, erected in Battersea Park in 1951; the scenery of the Thames might then be seen to regenerate itself.
Rowlandson completed an aquatint of the Gardens in 1784, with the unmistakable figure of Samuel Johnson disporting himself in a supper box close to the orchestra. When Goldsmith described the variegated scene as one uniting “rural beauty with courtly magnificence,” he might have been remarking upon the influence of the river itself that contains both elements within its progress. Vauxhall was not frequented for its cultural pleasures alone, however, and there were events concerning tightrope walkers, fireworks and the new craze of “ballooning.” Fire and air were therefore being celebrated by water. The portions of food served here were considered to be exiguous, however, and it was claimed that a competent waiter could cover the 11 acres (4.4 ha) of the grounds with the slices from one ham.
There were two celebrated pleasure gardens to the north of the Thames, in the neighbourhood of Chelsea, known as Cremorne Gardens and Ranelagh Gardens. Ranelagh was situated in the eastern section of what is now Chelsea Hospital Gardens. It became a commercial pleasure garden in 1742, and survived for sixty-one years on the customary riverine diet of music, balloons, fireworks, food and drink. A rotunda, bigger than the Pantheon in Rome, was erected in its grounds and was subsequently painted by Canaletto; this was a resort, with a great fireplace at its centre, for anybody who “loves eating, drinking, staring and crowding.” There was also a Chinese pavilion, and an orchestra where the young Mozart once played. It out-Vauxhalled Vauxhall, and in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) Lydia Melford described it as “the enchanted palace of a genio, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps that emulate the noonday sun.” It was one of the many pleasure domes of the Thames. Its charms have not entirely deserted it, however, and it is now the setting for the annual Chelsea Flower Show.
Cremorne Gardens was a little further upriver, on the bankside site now largely covered by Lots Road Power Station. It was opened in the 1840s, almost half a century after the demise of Ranelagh, complete with a theatre, a banqueting hall, a dancing platform and a bowling saloon together with various “arbours” and “bowers” and grottoes without which no riverside resort was complete. In 1848 it was the site for the first flight of a “steam-powered aeroplane,” which flew some 40 metres (131 feet) before hitting a canvas barrier. There were fireworks and balloon ascents, once more, as well as more dubious pleasures. In The Seven Curses of London (1869) James Greenwood described Cremorne Gardens in the “season”:
By about ten o’clock age and innocence—of whom there had been much in the place that day—had retired, weary of amusement, leaving the massive elms, the grass-plots, and the geranium-beds, the kiosks, temples, “monster platforms,” and “crystal circle” of Cremorne to flicker in the thousand gaslights there for the gratification of the dancing public only. On and around that platform waltzed, strolled, and fed some thousand souls, perhaps seven hundred of them men of the upper and middle class, the remainder prostitutes more or less prononcées.
The Gardens were condemned by the minister of the local Baptist chapel as “the nursery of every kind of vice” the proprietor sued, but received only a farthing in damages. In 1877, in a fit of mid-Victorian rectitude, the place was closed down. All that is left is a small patch of green, still called by the same name. There were also smaller resorts, such as the seventeenth-century Cherry Gardens at Rotherhithe; Cherry Gardens was then succeeded by tea-gardens, but they were closed down by the end of the nineteenth century. Cherry trees, however, are now being grown upon the site.
There were pleasure gardens, of a kind, upon the water itself. In the nineteenth century an island in the river, known as
Walnut Tree Ait for the prevalence of its osiers, was transformed into an island of entertainment by the erection of a hotel and a concert hall. It was purchased by the theatrical impresario, Fred Karno, and renamed the Karsino. Karno then described it as “the hub of the universe for river people,” but it did not survive the First World War. The island was then granted another life as the Thames Riviera, with a ferry service from the southern bank, but still it did not succeed.
The first floating restaurant was envisaged in the seventeenth century, when in 1636 John Rookes petitioned the king for the opening of a boat on the Thames that would serve “such provisions and necessaries as are vendible in the Tavernes and Victuallinge houses especially in the summer season.” The fate of this venture is not known, but the history of floating inns or restaurants on the river is not a particularly successful one.
There was another ship of pleasure upon the Thames, a large barge or houseboat anchored in the river on the bend where “Cleopatra’s Needle” is now to be found, known appositely as “The Folly.” It was formally opened in the seventeenth century, and there is an engraving of it moored in the middle of the river with all the appearance of stateliness and respectability. Built of timber and divided into many separate rooms for the pleasures of the day or the night, it was surmounted by a large platform and balustrade, where its patrons could also take the air. It was at first frequented by the men and women of fashion who, dressed in silk and crinoline, would wait on the bank to be wherried across. It was described by one contemporary moralist as “a musical summer house for the entertainment of quality where they might meet and ogle one another.” Pepys visited the place on 13 April 1688, where he recorded spending a shilling. But, like most riverside locations, it eventually acquired a reputation for vice and “low” company who seemed to specialise in what was called “promiscuous dancing.” Tom D’Urfey wrote a song in 1719, entitled “A Touch of the Thames,” in which he recorded how
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