The water itself is black; even modern divers can be disoriented by the fact that there is no visibility. At the point where Temple jumped, the waters were known as the “maelstrom,” especially in the vicinity of the middle arch, which according to George Borrow in Lavengro (1851) was “a grisly pool which, with its superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have leapt into its depths—I have heard of such things…” The darkness and the turbulence of the river exercise a fascination over the unwary, so that you might as it were commit suicide out of instinct rather than determination. If the water in London were clear, and delightful, then it would be much more difficult to jump.
It is also often suggested that deep and silent water provides a potent source of fascination for those who intend to take their own lives. In earlier ages of the world still or stagnant water was considered to be the abode of evil spirits, and perhaps enough of them linger in the quiet stretches of the Thames to lure the unwary to their deaths. Suicides do not normally wish to be seen, or to be found. They wish to make their exit. It is a way of disappearing, perhaps without trace and even without pain. It is possible to imagine the discomfort, but not the pain, of drowning. There are some who claim that it is a peaceful death; but how would they know? It was said that women floated face up, and the men floated face down, but this was no doubt a myth of the river-men.
In 1756 Stephen Duck, a country poet who became a target of ridicule, flung himself into the Thames behind the Black Inn at Reading; perhaps his surname had drawn him towards the river. Another eighteenth-century poet, William Cowper, had chosen the same path to oblivion. He confided later that
not knowing whether to poison myself, I resolved upon drowning. For that purpose I took a coach, and ordered the man to drive to Tower Wharf, intending to throw myself into the river from the Custom House quay. I left the coach upon the Tower Wharf, intending never to return to it; but upon coming to the quay I found the water low, and a porter seated upon some goods there, as if on purpose to prevent me. This passage to the bottomless pit being mercifully shut against me, I returned back to the coach.
The “bottomless pit” is itself a good phrase for that stretch of the Thames in London.
The nineteenth century was, however, the most fruitful for suicides. A young footman at Hurley became depressed after the death of his own brother by drowning; before he threw himself into the river he dressed in a bathing costume, so that his clothes might be left to his relations. He sought companionship with his brother through a similar death, as if the water were the harbour of lost souls. In another suicide at Hurley, a young man tied a 56-pound (25-kg) weight around his neck before plunging into the water. There are times when the simplest token is the emblem of death. When the hat of a retired stationer was found floating down the river at Bray, the worst was feared; his corpse was later reported to be “comfortable” at a public house. The cap of a baker’s boy was found in Bray weir, but his body was not recovered until three weeks later.
Newspaper reports from the nineteenth century furnish a number of similar stories. There was a brewer’s labourer who, owing his employers £13, stood in the winter river at Marlow until he died of exposure. Another labourer, having lost his child, somehow managed to bind his own hands and feet before throwing himself into the river. There were two suicides recorded at the Thames in Windsor within a short time of each other; one was the former manager of a theatre, and the other was a butler. The director of a London laundry, before jumping into the river near Windsor (his body was later retrieved by a Windsor eyot known as Monkey Island), had said to his daughter, “Look into my eyes, you can see death there.” There is some sense here of the reflections in the river—you can perhaps look into the water and see death there.
Windsor was in fact a favoured spot for those who wished to die. A young woman was witnessed running towards the Thames at Windsor shouting out “William!” and “God help me!” The phrases of other suicides have also been recorded—“Leave me alone. I want to die. I am mad!” “Let me die! Let me die! No one wants me. I would be better out of the way!” “Take a look at my face. You will never see this face again!” Many putative suicides have been dismayed by their rescue, and have tried to enter the water again at once. It exerts a profound fascination for those who wish for death. There are others who will jump again and again, having been retrieved on each previous occasion. There are watermen’s songs about drowning, particularly when they concern the fate of star-crossed or betrayed lovers. These tend to be local in sentiment and in inspiration.
The paradigmatic death of Ophelia has emphasised the poetical nature of suicide by drowning, and those who rush to their deaths in the Thames seem to have been in part guided by tradition. It may be that there is comfort to be found in joining the legion of other Thames suicides, and that somehow the awful oblivion of an individual death is sanctified or hallowed by association. Even in the comic narrative of Thames voyaging, Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome cannot help reciting the story of one who was then known variously as a “wronged woman” or a “fallen woman,” and describes her eventual death in the Thames.
She had wandered about the woods by the river’s brink all day, and then, when evening fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river that had known her sorrow and her joy. And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.
There is for Jerome something devoutly to be wished about this fate, as if the prospect of death within the Thames offers comfort and consolation. And that may be so. We suspect that for many thousands of years it was used as a gateway for the dead to their final destination. Who knows but that we are simply following our ancestors?
To the “dead houses” along the banks of the Thames were brought the bodies which, in the words of the ubiquitous posters, had been “found drowned.” It is estimated that three or four corpses were recovered each week, although it is an open question whether some deaths were accidental or induced, rather than deliberate. There was a swing bridge by Old Gravel Lane, in the London Docks and close to St. Peter’s Church, which was also known as the “Bridge of Sighs” because of the suicides there. There is no apparent reason for the incidence of self-slaughter on this spot, unless it be the sheer weight of example. After Waterloo Bridge was opened, in the summer of 1817, it was known variously as “Lover’s Leap,” “Arch of Suicide,” “Bridge of Sighs” or “Bridge of Sorrow.” It was at times a relatively isolated place; the penny toll, issued at either end of the bridge, deterred many pedestrians. In the middle of the nineteenth century the average number of suicides each year from this vantage was thirty. In the latter part of the century there was an especially designed “jumpers’ boat,” moored by the bridge, with a roller across its stern to help the recovery of the subject in the water. This was a necessary precaution since the act of retrieval could itself be dangerous; the putative suicide, struggling, may pull the rescuer into the water. This boat was succeeded by a floating police station.
It has been suggested, in fact, that there is a quality in the immediate neighbourhood or in the local atmosphere of Waterloo Bridge that encourages suicide. When the German poet, Heinrich Heine, came here one late afternoon in 1827 he recorded later “the black mood which once came over me as toward evening I stood on Waterloo Bridge, and looked down on the water of the Thames…At the same time the most sorrowful tales came into my memory.” This is perhaps a testimony to the power of the dark Thames. He went on to declare that “I was so sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes. They fell down into the Thames and swam forth into the mighty sea, which has already swallowed up such floods of human tears without giving them a thought.”
Charles Dickens was fascinated by the suicides along the river and by this bridge in particular. In one of his essays as an “uncommercial traveller” or wanderer, “Night Walks” (1860), he crosse
d Waterloo Bridge from where
the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the water.
For Dickens the river was inextricably bound up with the consciousness of death.
Curiously enough the eldest son of Charles Dickens was also intrigued by the nature and extent of Thames suicides, and interviewed the toll-keepers on Waterloo Bridge as the experts upon the subject:
This is the best place! If people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they don’t kill themselves drowning, but are smashed, poor blighters, that’s what they are…But you jump awf from the side of the bay, and you’ll tumble true into the stream under the arch…what you’ve got to do is mind how you jump in.
As the opening scenes of Our Mutual Friend (1865) testify, there was also a thriving trade in retrieving the corpses of the dead. Gaffer Hexam goes out at night in his small boat to find anything “which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form” and to pick up what spoils he can from the bodies and clothing of those who were sufficiently buoyant to be found floating in the dark water around Limehouse. There is, as is always the case with Dickens’s urban scenes, more than an element of truth in this account. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the authorities on the Surrey side of the river paid 5 shillings (a crown) for every body recovered while those on the Middlesex side paid only half a crown. That is why most of the corpses were taken to Surrey. Here they were photographed and removed to the parish “dead house” rather than to the police station. When the unclaimed corpses were eventually buried, on the order of the coroner, their clothes were preserved to assist any later identification.
Just a few yards away from Dead Man’s Stairs, at the headquarters of the river police in Wapping, can be found the Book of the Dead, or “Occurrence Book,” the registry of those whose bodies have been taken out of the river. In the entry for 2 July 1966, for example, there is a report that witnesses
noticed an elderly, respectably dressed man on the pier…A few seconds later they looked again and were in time to see the man splash into the water, where he drifted down with the ebb-tide…During the time the man was in the water he was in constant view of the rescuers who did not see him struggle or hear him call out.
On 26 May 1948, under the heading of “Suicide Alleged,” is a report of a witness: “I heard someone shout ‘Goodbye!’ I looked around and saw a man’s legs disappearing over the port side aft.” A river policeman added that: “I launched the dinghy and rowed out to try and save him but, as I was holding him, he struggled so violently that he pulled himself free from my grasp and before I could catch hold of him again he sank.” He did not wish to be rescued. A little while later a “gent’s brown soft felt hat was found floating by.”
There are certain days that prompt suicide. Thus on the last day of 1986 there were two suicides within hours of each other. At 8:34 a.m. the police “recovered the dead body of a female from south foreshore” then at 13:15 they “recovered the lifeless body of a male at Battersea Reach off Falcon Wharf.”
So there was no diminution of numbers in the twentieth century. They had become known as “jumpers,” a slight word for so momentous an act, or in the mid-twentieth century as “stiffs.” In the long period of river pollution, however, those who jumped were as likely to be poisoned as to be drowned; a stomach pump was part of the routine panoply of rescue equipment. In 2002 the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was joined with the River Police and HM Coast-Guard in order to deal with those who had jumped or fallen into the Thames. Within the space of one year there were almost four hundred incidents. There are more suicides in winter than in summer. It is a curious fact, perhaps, that the majority of those found dead in the Thames—and that could be identified—came from beyond the borders of the capital itself. The mother of one young suicide, living in Streatham, told a Guardian journalist in December 2004, “There was no reason for him to be there. The river is haunted—it draws people in.”
Some other examples of suicide in the last century are no less unusual. One man was found with £3,000 strapped to his chest, so that he could pay for his own funeral. In another incident the body of a man was found weighed down with a dictionary, and almost £200’s worth of coins. On another occasion a man who had weighed himself down left a series of claw-marks upon the mud on the bankside; he had attempted to change his mind. Two young girls—two sisters—tied themselves together before throwing themselves into the water. The explanation for their conduct is not known. Some young men were struggling in fun beside the bank of the Thames, and threw one of their number into the river; the man in the water grabbed hold of the first solid object he could find. It was a corpse. I am indebted for these fatal details to one of the most interesting books on the Thames published in recent years, Another Water (2000) by Roni Horn.
Bodies decompose more quickly out of the water, when the hair and skin become particularly fragile. But they are exposed to assaults within the tidal river, also, where they can be buffeted by boats and attacked by seagulls. Dickens noted that the bodies of the drowned are seared and discoloured as if they had been the victims of fire rather than of water.
The coroner, when asked to pronounce judgement upon the drowned, will tend to deliver an “open” verdict; there can never be any certainty, in such cases, that the deceased had intended to take his or her own life. It is in any case a wise precaution, since there are not only the bodies of suicides in the river. It has always carried traffic in the victims of murder. There were the mass slaughters of ancient battles when, according to one fourteenth-century chronicler, the river was dyed red with blood. But from the earliest times the Thames was the most convenient and expeditious way of depositing corpses. The medieval city records contain many cases of persons discovered dead in the water. In the sixteenth century it was reported that “there were robberies and murders done nigh Radynge [Reading], and divers men found slain and drowned in the Thames.” The highwaymen and footpads who frequented the high road from Hounslow Heath to Colnbrook, in the seventeenth century, used the river near Datchet as a convenient dumping ground for the corpses of those whom they had robbed and murdered; these were placed in sacks, weighted down and deposited in the water. As a result this stretch of the river became known locally as “Colnbrook churchyard.”
In the eighteenth century the Thames and its London tributaries became notorious as a means of dispatch. There was a tavern overlooking the Fleet river, or Fleet ditch as it had essentially become, where the criminal fraternity gathered. Here, in a cellar room, was a trap-door that opened immediately above the water; it was used as a refuse disposal point for the corpses of those who had been inveigled to this place and met their death. In the early nineteenth century the bodies of rival gang members were often found in the river, too, and thirteen of their number were recovered from the Thames in one year.
The vast majority of these crimes remained unsolved, no doubt because the Thames itself acted as a great dissolvent of motive and locality. The fact that few murderers were caught, however, might lead to the irrational suspicion that the river was itself somehow responsible. There can be no doubt that in the newspaper reports of the nineteenth century, the Thames itself was often depicted as a baleful presence in the sagas of guilt and crime. There were popular catchpenny volumes with titles such as The Secret Thames and The Mysterious Thames Murders that capitalised upon the somewhat eerie reputation of the Thames in the mid-Victorian and late Victorian periods. In one later volume, Elliott O’Donnell’s Great Thames Mysteries (1928), there is a report of three cases of dismemberment in the neighbourhood of Putney; the author then goes on to suggest that “the murderer
had some particular attachment to the neighbourhood” of another stretch of the river, near Dagenham, he records that “cries of murder from the waterside were of frequent occurrence after dusk, and those who heard them, if alone, merely shivered and hastened on.”
The history of Thames murders is embellished, too, by the fact that many of the victims found floating in its waters had been dismembered. There are reports from 1828 of a head found at Shadwell; in 1873 a dismembered body was found at Battersea, and in the succeeding year two bodies in a similar condition were partly retrieved at Putney and Vauxhall Bridge, leading many citizens to think the worst of their river. As O’Donnell puts it, “no mystery associated with the Thames up to that time gave it a more sinister reputation or made it more dreaded, and it was long ere the horror of it faded from men’s minds.” The killer or killers were deemed to manifest “a hideous fascination for the Thames.” The familiar river, the silver-streaming Thames of previous centuries, had become the object of dread and superstitious fear. It may have been reviving its ancient powers.
One of the most famous cases, or series of cases, were the torso murders that occurred in 1887, 1888, 1889 (two bodies were found in that year), and finally in 1902. The first body was found by the river wall at Rainham, in Essex, with the dismembered head and limbs wrapped in a piece of coarse sacking. Other parts of the same body were found at Temple Pier, and at Battersea. According to the Essex Times of 8 June 1887, “great excitement was caused on the Victoria Embankment.” Murders on the river do in fact create “excitement,” if only because there seems to be some instinctive link between death and flowing water. In the following year a woman’s arm was found in the river mud near Pimlico; the discovery of other parts followed, leading one newspaper to describe “a carnival of blood.” In 1889 the various parts of two bodies were found at St. George’s Stairs, Albert Bridge, Battersea, Wandsworth and Limehouse; a “small liver” was discovered at Wapping. Only one of the victims was ever identified. It was rumoured at the time that these crimes were the work of the killer known as “Jack the Ripper,” but the claim was never substantiated. It was also counteracted with the report that “the Ripper” had in fact been drowned in the Thames—another indication, perhaps, how the river was instinctively associated with the darker forms of crime. In the opening shots of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Frenzy (1972), the body of a strangled young woman is seen floating down the Thames.
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