Even in the twenty-first century, the Thames cannot entirely disavow its immediate past. There is still a regular stream of untreated sewage entering the Thames after even moderate rainfalls, and in wet weather many thousands of tonnes of sewage and storm water are discharged from pumping stations at Chelsea, Hammersmith and Lots Road. On one day in the summer of 2004 freak storms meant that a million tonnes of raw sewage were discharged into the river, causing the death of more than ten thousand fish. Rowers on the Thames were advised not to venture onto the water for four days, and after that time they were asked to cover up all cuts and grazes in advance of their outings. In the month of August, in that year, five million tonnes of sewage were released into the upper reaches of the Thames. From the beginning of 2001 to the end of 2004, some 240 million cubic metres of raw sewage were emptied into the river. As a result there have been calls for the construction of a new “interceptor tunnel” to complement the arrangement of London’s existing sewers. The river will never be pure.
CHAPTER 34
“All Alive! Alive! Alive, O!”
For most of its human history, the river has been a primary source of nourishment. In the medieval period the Thames was a great reservoir of fish, the home of “barbille, fflounders, Roches, dace, pykes, Tenches and other.” Clams, “otherwise called wormes pranes,” were collected in great numbers. Eels were perhaps the major food, and there were names for six species from the pimpern-eel to the stubble-eel. But there were also gudgeon and mullet, salmon and smelt, cod and bass, plaice and sole and whiting. All of these are still to be found. Other medieval varieties of Thames fish, including lamprey and sturgeon, turbot and mackerel, are now quite rare.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there was a fish-processing site on Canvey Island. In the sixteenth century William Harrison asked
What should I speake of the fat and sweet salmons, dailie taken in this streame, and that in such plenty (after the time of the smelt be past) as no river in Europa is able to exceed it. What store also of barbells, trouts, cheuins, pearches, smelts, breams, roches, daces, gudgings, flounders, shrimps etc. are commonlie to be had therein…this famous riuer complaineth commonlie of no want, but the more it looseth at one time, the more it yeeldeth at another.
He deplores “the insatiable auarice of the fishermen,” however, and exclaims: “Oh that this riuer might be spared euen one yeare from nets etcetera! But alas then should manie a poore man be undoone.”
In the eighteenth century William Maitland expatiated on the worth of the fish
which this River only nourishes and supports. How remarkably good is its Salmon! What fine large Flounders, Smelts, Shoals, Trout, Graylin [there then follows an extensive list]…(too many to mention), are there caught above London Bridge…And, withal, how many other Kinds of Salt-water Fish…with several sorts of Shell-fish…are there caught below Bridge, even within the Jurisdiction of the City of London!
A water-bailiff wrote in an essay of 1746 that “though some of our northern counties have as fat and large Salmon as the River Thames, yet none are of so exquisite taste.”
The fishermen of the medieval period tended to live and work on the river-banks by Charing Cross but, as that neighbourhood became more select and selective, they migrated across the river to Lambeth which in the eighteenth century had the reputation (and atmosphere) of a particularly squalid fishing village. By that time, too, the fishermen had colonised most parts of the river-bank in the immediate vicinity of the markets of London; by 1798 it is reported that some four hundred earned their living between Deptford and London Bridge.
The principal market was of course Billingsgate, the most ancient of all London markets. The earliest recorded tolls for the vessels there can be dated to 1016, with a halfpenny being charged upon a “small” ship, and a penny for a greater one “with sails.” There was, however, a market on the site long before that time. It seems very likely that eel and herring were brought ashore in the earliest periods of human occupation; one of the salient characteristics of the river, even within its urban fastness, is the continuity or persistence of certain chosen locations. The name itself may be derived from Belinus, a Celtic god, which would in turn suggest that there was a market here for fish and other goods in the Iron Age. The “gate” refers to one of the two within the Roman defensive wall, the other being Dowgate. It became a “free” market, without tolls, at the end of the seventeenth century. Indeed it flourished for many centuries largely because of its favourable position below London Bridge, and was not finally moved from its ancient site until 1982; its central position, for more than a millennium, testifies to the importance of Thames fish in the London diet and the London economy. For many hundreds of years it remained an open space by the river, dotted with booths and sheds as well as a row of wooden houses with a piazza on their western end. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century was a wharf built here for the fishermen and the merchants; before that time they were obliged to manoeuvre two gangways linking the boats and the shore.
In the nineteenth century the average volume of fish sold in the market, each day, was some 500 tons (over 500 tonnes). The market was permitted to operate even on Sundays, when mackerel were allowed to be put on sale before the hours of divine service. There are innumerable reports, from that period, of the confusion and bustle of the market immediately after its opening at five in the morning. The porters, and costers, and merchants, and fishermen—together with all the vehicles and carriers of their trade—clustered around this small spot off Thames Street and Fish Street Hill, crying out for custom and trade. Henry Mayhew transcribed some of their calls that might have been replicated at any period in a thousand years—“Ha–a–an’ some cod! Best in the market!,” “Yeo, ye–e–o, here’s your fine bloaters,” “Here you are—here you are—splendid whiting,” “Turbot, turbot! All alive, turbot!,” “Fine soles, oy, oy oy!,” “Hullo, hullo here! Beautiful lobsters, good and cheap!,” “Who’ll buy brill, O, brill, O!,” “Fine flounders! O ho! O ho!” The most famous cry was one that was taken up by Londoners themselves as a catchphrase, “All alive! Alive! Alive, O!” These were the sounds of the Thames at work.
The “fish-fags,” or “fish-wives,” were native to this site; they carried the produce in straw baskets balanced on their heads. They wore strong “stuff” gowns and quilted petticoats, smoked clay pipes and took snuff. There were the fish porters, who wore helmets of hide. And there were fish salesmen, who wore straw hats in even the most inclement weather.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were productive fisheries at Chelsea and at Fulham, at Chiswick and at Petersham, where salmon could be caught in season. At Blackwall the fishermen took away many dozens of fine smelt. Anglers fished from London Bridge for perch and roach, and such was the interest that at Crooked Lane by the bridge there were a number of fishing-tackle makers. Roach were also caught near a bed of rushes by Temple Gardens, and at another spot by Westminster Bridge. The docks were also a favoured haunt for fishermen. London was swarming with fish. There was also a phenomenon known as “eel fair,” when the river was bordered with a dark line of eel fry; people came down to the banks with sieves or nets, and caught these small creatures for an especial kind of fish cake. In the nineteenth century the “peter-boat men,” one of the most ancient trades on the river, would “gravel” for eels buried in the mud and sell them at the eel-market of Blackfriars Stairs on Sunday morning. There were so many lobsters to be found in the Thames that regulations were introduced for their capture.
Then everything changed. In the latter half of the nineteenth century fishing in the tidal river—that is, the river below Teddington—came almost to an end, with the only catches being those of whitebait and shrimp. The middle and upper waters retained their population of perch and roach, carp and chub and barbel and bream and the other species of freshwater fish that had always flourished in the river. But then the tidal river died in a flood of pollution. The salmon vanished. The l
obsters disappeared. The flounder was extinct. The shad and the smelt were no longer to be seen. At the height of the river’s pollution in the late nineteenth century there was a sad warning in Richard Jefferies’s novel, After London (1885), that the Thames would become
a vast stagnant swamp, which no man dare enter, since death would be his inevitable fate. There exhales from this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom…There are no fishes, neither can eels exist in the mud, nor even newts. It is dead.
In fact the prophecy, to all intents and purposes, was fulfilled by the middle of the twentieth century. No fish could live in the river, and no birds came.
The river remained in this dreadful condition for more than a hundred years. In the 1950s it was reported that there were no fish in the Thames from Gravesend to Kew, a distance of some 48 miles. But then, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a manifest drop in the level of pollution as a result of more efficient means of neutralising or purifying waste. In 1976 a salmon was found beyond Teddington Weir, the first in the non-tidal Thames for 140 years. In the following year a salmon was seen at Shepperton, and then at Boulter’s Lock where the last salmon had been caught in 1824. These are small and local examples, but they signify a giant transition. The Thames was returning to life once more. Since the early 1970s, too, smelt have returned to the river in large numbers. Flounders reappeared then after an absence of fifty years; the first flounder was caught at Strand-on-the-Green in late October 1972. Eels and sea-trout are also to be found in great quantities. The Thames estuary is now the largest spawning ground for sole in England. One of the most curious new arrivals in the river was the minatory piranha, many thousands of miles from its home in the Amazon. It had apparently been dropped, recently dead, by a seagull. It is not known how it arrived in the relatively cold waters of the Thames, but it is suspected that it was released by a nervous owner. No other sightings have been reported.
The Chinese mitten crab became established in the Thames in the early 1970s, but now its numbers have greatly increased until it has become a threat to the native flora and fauna. The crabs damage embankments with their habit of burrowing, consume the eggs of other fish and are in direct competition with the native crayfish. They are now so common that the juvenile crabs can be picked up along the Thames Embankment in London. But the history of the Thames is the history of assimilation and accommodation. There seems to be no way of stopping the growth of the mitten, unless quantities are harvested as the ingredients of Chinese cooking. Then it may compete with its enemy, the crayfish, as a river delicacy.
There are in fact now 118 species of fish that are native to the river, with roach over clean gravel and carp in the deeps, chub in the shadows, gudgeon on the bottom, trout and reed mace in the weir pools, perch and pike in the backwaters. Bottlenose dolphins have been seen at Blackfriars, and porpoises at Wapping; grey seals have been observed at Greenwich and at Rotherhithe, and long-finned whales at Southend. Even the shy sea horse has returned to the estuary. Their presence is of course complemented by the return of wildfowl and other birds, creating what can once more be considered a living river. It is now also a cleaner river than at any time in its history. It is claimed, in fact, that the Thames is the cleanest metropolitan river in the world. It is a miracle of rejuvenation. What had been dead, has once more come alive. That regeneration has sometimes taken unexpected form. There is much more vegetation along the banks of the Thames. A study of Turner’s sketches, for example, will reveal that in the artist’s lifetime there were far fewer trees in the river landscape. Now the tow-paths are often obscured by trees and bushes, and in recent years there are stretches that have become impenetrable through the sheer volume of greenery.
There is another kind of fishing, as ancient and as venerable as that of the professional fisherman. It is the pleasure of the individual upon the bank, the solitary figure with rod and net who is to be found on every stretch of the Thames as if in implicit communion with the water. He or she (and, despite popular belief, there are female anglers) understands the river in a different sense. In its essential state it must be the simplest and oldest form of food-gathering that still exists in the industrialised world, and its techniques have not altered beyond recognition over the millennia. It is a token of ancientness or, rather, the fact that ancient customs still persist without fundamental change. It is somehow appropriate that they should also be connected with the river. In the Christian eras the eating of fish was associated with penance and with purification; hence its prevalence in the time of Lenten fasting. The creatures of the Thames share the ritual purity of the flowing waters.
It is likely that the earliest settlers along the Thames, going back at least twelve thousand years to the Mesolithic era, used hooks and lines and nets to trap the fish in the river. There must also have been the very early construction of weirs, or fences placed across the flow of the stream to catch or guide fish into small pools or nets. At a later date these were known as “kidells,” “hedges” or “stops” and were sporadically outlawed by the sovereign. Thus in the eleventh century they were deemed to cause a hindrance to river traffic—which indeed they did—and Edward the Confessor ordered their destruction. At a slightly later date Edward I established a number of regulations to protect young salmon from being taken up. The size of the nets and the mesh was ordained by law. By 1558 the minimum size at which a salmon could be captured was 16 inches. There were a variety of other fishing devices that had their origin in remotest antiquity, among them the eel baskets or “bucks,” the fishpots, and the eelpots or “grigpots”—the “grig” being the Thames name for the eel itself.
There have been many stories concerning the fishes of the river. There existed a strange aversion to the eel among certain Thames people. Some believed it to spring from mud, or from the decomposed remains of any animal. Others believed that it was created when a horse-hair was suspended in the water. Yet it remained the staple food of Londoners for many centuries. It is now not often consumed. The barbel was primarily sold to the Jewish population of London, for reasons now impossible to discover. Roach were believed to congregate around the Thames at Marlow, and to be most easily caught in autumn when the water of the river was “coloured” by rain. It was said in the early nineteenth century that you could take up haddock by hand, at London Bridge, because the fish were so blinded by the spray and spume of the fast water that “they cannot see whither they swimme.” The tench was believed to be excessively tenacious of life. Perch were considered to be sociable so that, when one was caught, others were sure to follow. According to Izaak Walton, in The Compleat Angler (1653), “they are like the wicked of the world, not afraid, though their fellows and companions perish in their sight.” The carp was believed to have been imported from China, but this may only have been the inference from their golden scales. They were easily tamed, and could distinguish between an acquaintance and a stranger.
The angler must be in deep sympathy with the fish and with the water. There is a kind of intimacy at work. That is why Thames anglers will tend to go back to the same spot at which they fished before. They are the votaries of the Thames, the guardians of its quietness and peacefulness. In her Treatyse perteynynge to Hawkynge, Huntynge, Fysshynge and Coote Armiris (1496) the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell, Dame Juliana Berners, praised the avocation of the Thames angler since “at the leest, he hath his holsom walk, and mery at ease, a sweey ayre of the swete savoure of the mede floures that makyth him hungry; he hereth the melodious armony of fowles; he seeth the yonge swannes, herons, duckes, cotes, and many other fowles, with their brodes.” This is the Thames as locus amoenus, the privileged place, the pastoral setting of natural seclusion complete with bird-song and running water and, of course, fish.
There is a charming work, A. E. Hobbs’s Trout of the Thames (1947), that exemplifies such easy familiarity with the riv
er and its sometimes elusive occupants. The narrative is filled with the stories and memories of the fishers of the Thames, who form a community as tangible as that of the fishermen downriver. “We knew that a big trout had his home in a very deep spot of the pool,” Hobbs writes, “and we had seen him a few times when he was after a large dace or roach, but had never an opportunity to get in touch with him.” These anglers knew the fish as individuals. “He or she—for convenience we will say he—was unmistakable, for he had a wall eye.”
The prime of the angling clubs was undoubtedly the last decades of the nineteenth century, when it was estimated that some thirty thousand Londoners had become members. A great many of these Cockney sportsmen, as they were derisively known by the more traditional anglers, came up by Great Western trains to their favourite stretch of the Thames. Some of them, according to the Lock to Lock Times, “are very liable to become abusive when disturbed, as they generally have heavy bets on the weight of fish they catch…generally lavish with slang abuse, which if you have ladies with you is by no means pleasant.” This was known as water language.
But there were also clubs in the major riverside settlements such as Marlow and Henley where local competitions were held. Night-fishing, and netting, were disallowed. But eel bucks, woven of osier rods, were a common aspect of the river. Anglers were almost single-handedly responsible for the temporary demise of the otter. Otters were considered great pests and fish-eaters; they were shot on sight as a nuisance, and in the late nineteenth century a reward of 10 shillings was offered for every dead otter proved to have been killed beside the river.
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