Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  There were many famous river murders of the twentieth century. In the early months of 1964 the bodies of two prostitutes were found in the vicinity of Hammersmith Bridge; later victims were found on dry ground, but in the riverine neighbourhoods of Chiswick and Brentford. In 2001 the remains of a human torso were found in the water; it turned out to be the body of a young African boy who was given the name of “Adam” by the police. The killers have never been found, but it is believed that the child was murdered as a result of some form of magical ritual. In the same period the police discovered seven half-burnt candles, wrapped in a white sheet, washed up on the southern bank. It is less generally known that, only nine months before, another dismembered torso had been found in the river; it was that of a young woman named Cathy Dennis. The intestines and leg of another victim were found in the river by Silvertown. On another occasion in very recent years the head and limbs, but not the torso, of a man were found in the Thames. On 8 July 1999, a human head was found in the mud at Lower Pool; it had been skinned to avoid identification. Other parts of the body, including the torso, were found in other parts of the river. The Thames has always harboured an affection for severed heads.

  There are other forms of death within the river. There are the accidental drownings. In the parish register of Henley Church, beside the river, are records of such incidents: “8 April 1563. Ignotus quidam viator. Sepultus…24 May 1601. John Smith, a stranger, drowned. Sepultus…30 April 1611. James, a bargeman, called Sweetapple, being drowned. Sepultus.” The registry of every church by the banks of the river will have similar testimony to the dangers of the Thames. At Marlow Lock in 1585 “the Streams there were so strong, and the Water had such a dismal Fall, that Four men within a short time were lost, three whereof drowned, and a Fourth had his brains dasht out.” It is a signal reminder of the sheer power and brute force of the water. The river along this stretch was so rapid that it became known as “Marlow Race,” and one poet complained that it

  …hath made many a Child to weepe.

  Their mothers begg from dore to dore

  Their ffathers drowned in the deepe.

  The river can be a ferocious, as well as a turbulent, god.

  A pamphlet of 1647 bears the long but graphic title of “Sad and deplorable news from Oxfordsheir and Barksheir, being a true and lamentable relation of the drowning of about sixty persons, men, women and children, in the lock near Goring in Oxfordsheir, as they were passing by water from Goring feats to Stately [Streatley] in Barksheir.” It seems the waterman took his crowded boat too close to a weir where, by the force of the water, it was drawn in and overturned. Even by the standards of the river this was a sizeable loss of life. One of those eventually rescued from the waters reported that some of the drowning creatures were “sprawling about like frogs” on the river-bed. Other victims of drowning seem to have put up no struggle at all, and are found lying upon their backs as if they had fallen asleep.

  In 1763

  a Boat, with ten people in it, going through London-Bridge, in order to go down the river, overset, and three People were drowned…On Tuesday night a Barge, heavily loaded with Timber, coming through London-Bridge, ran against one of the Starlings, and by the shock John Herbert, one of the Bargemen, unfortunately fell overboard and was drowned.

  Four years later “On Monday night, a little before ten o’clock, a boat with three women and two men going through London-Bridge overset, and all perished.” And so it goes on. It was estimated in the eighteenth century that some fifty people were drowned, on average, each year beneath the bridge. This was largely, or wholly, the result of “shooting” upon the departing tide. There was some interest in compiling these early statistics not least because, as A. J. Church put it in Isis and Tamesis (1886), “The Englishman dearly loves to spice his pleasures with the sense of danger…and the river fascinates him most when he can discern a prospect of being drowned.” This consorts well with the belief that the English were a nation of putative suicides, and suggests the somewhat macabre presence of the Thames in the national life. It has been celebrated by limericks as well as by poems and songs, like this of Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense (1846):

  There was an old person of Ems,

  Who casually fell in the Thames,

  And when he was found,

  They said he was drowned,

  That unlucky old person of Ems

  There were many other deaths by drowning in the nineteenth century, when boating for sport and for recreation became the most popular of all pastimes. The long dresses of the ladies made them particularly susceptible to the currents of the water if they fell in. Some people out punting thrust their poles into ballast holes, while others had drunk too much to keep a safe footing. Some ate too well, and were caught by cramp while swimming. Others were fatally captivated by the pleasures of the river; they stayed out too late, when the fog and the evening closed down upon them; they were capsized or overturned in moments of unusual jollity, or they were simply not accustomed to the dangers of the apparently peaceful Thames. The Daily Mail of June 1896 interviewed one lock-keeper who had in the course of his service seen a dozen drownings, including “a whole boatful upset by moonlight and their bodies come up one after another and float about in the lock.”

  Even the professionals of the river were unsafe. The ferryman at Cookham overbalanced in a rain-storm of 1881, and in 1893 the ferryman and his wife at Shillingford were also drowned. The lock-keepers at Hurley, at Whitchurch, at Pinkhill, at Abingdon, at Caversham, at Shiplake and at Hambleden were all drowned in the period from 1871 to 1890. This is a large loss of life among those who were in essence the guardians of the Thames. We are reminded of the words of Isaiah, “Watchman, what of the night?” Yet it is perhaps not so extraordinary that the people who worked and lived by the river also made up a large proportion of those found drowned; sheer propinquity to the water must increase the risks of being caught within it. The frequency of mortality, however, does suggest the treachery and the unanticipated dangers of the river. The area of Temple Lock and Temple Mills seems to have been peculiarly fated; two small daughters of lock-keepers, as well as a son of twenty, were drowned in the waters here.

  The worst Thames disaster of that century took place on 3 September 1878. A pleasure paddle steamer, the Princess Alice, was returning from Gravesend to London in the early evening of that day. As the steamer turned the bend between Crossness and Margaret Ness, in the area downriver at Galleons’ Reach now known as Thamesmead, she encountered a steam-collier, the Bywell Castle, proceeding in the opposite direction. There seems to have been some confusion over signals, and “right of way,” since the vessels collided. The captain of the Princess Alice was heard to call out: “Ease her! Stop her! Where are you coming to? Good God, where are you coming to?” The collier ploughed into the paddle steamer and broke her apart. One surviving passenger said that it was “like the side of a warehouse” crashing down upon the much smaller ship.

  As the stern and bows rose into the air, the Princess Alice began to sink. She was beneath the water within four minutes, drowning all but a few of the crew and passengers. A diver sent down to survey the condition of the wreck reported that the doors to the saloon were jammed with the bodies of passengers, most of them still erect and packed closely together. The master of a ship close to the scene stated that “I can compare the people to nothing else than a flock of sheep in the water” the Princess Alice herself was “nothing else than a cloud. One moment she was there, and the next moment clean gone. The river seemed full of drowning people.” It was reported that the Thames was “like a sarcophagus,” not for the first time in its history.

  Some of those who might have been able to swim to shore were in fact overcome by the pollution of the Thames. An hour before the collision, the outfalls of the sewage pumping stations that Joseph Bazalgette had recently built at Crossness and Barking discharged 75 million gallons (341 million l) of waste. According to a chemist writing in The Times after the
collision, this effluent consisted of “two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda water with baneful gases so black that the water stained for miles, and discharging a corrupt charnel house odour.” There had also been a fire in Thames Street that afternoon, sending oil, turpentine and petroleum into the water. It was noted that the bodies retrieved from the river were covered with a kind of slime. When it was washed off, it simply reappeared. Clothing was discoloured, and rapidly began to rot. The corpses of the victims were unnaturally bloated, requiring especially constructed coffins, and they decomposed too quickly. Some survivors died later from unknown causes. Two weeks later it was reported that sixteen of the rescued “have since expired and many more…in a precarious state.”

  It was later estimated that approximately seven hundred people were killed, representing the largest peacetime disaster upon the river. Some 160 bodies were never claimed, and they were eventually buried in a mass grave in Woolwich Cemetery. One of the few apparent survivors was a young woman named Elizabeth Stride, who later claimed (perhaps falsely) that she lost her husband and three children in the accident. Hers in any case was not to be a death by water. She became the third victim of “Jack the Ripper.” It was said that she took to prostitution as a direct result of the family’s tragedy.

  The only comparable event in recent times was the sinking of the pleasure boat, the Marchioness, between Southwark Bridge and Cannon Street Bridge on 20 August 1989. She had collided with a dredger, the Bowbelle, of 1,457 tons (1,498 tonnes) against the 90 tons (91 tonnes) of the pleasure boat. On that occasion fifty-one people drowned. The Attorney General of the time, Lord Williams, asked at the inquiry into the disaster, “How is it that if so many people had known for so long of the risk of a serious collision on the Thames, such a thing could still happen?”

  The writers of the nineteenth century, unlike their counterparts in the twentieth century, seemed to linger over descriptions of death and mortality. G. D. Leslie, in Our River (1881), was one of the many riparian travellers who could not resist the narration of a good drowning. He recounts an incident, at which he was present, when the son of a Baptist minister was caught in the “back suck” of a weir. Leslie relates how “the poor father, half-dressed, kept walking around the edge of the weir, calling to his child, at times bursting into prayer.” When the corpse of the child was eventually brought to the surface in a fisherman’s drag it seemed to Leslie to be “quite beautiful in death, not being marred or injured in any way.” So the child looked “beautiful” in death; he had retained his purity, not being marred, and indeed that purity had been reinforced by his premature demise in the river.

  There is in fact a noticeable association in Victorian texts between child and Thames and death, as if this trinity of concerns was an emblem of the ambiguous attitude of the Victorians towards childhood and innocence. They were lamenting the loss of children even as they were consigning them to death in the manufactories and unhealthy streets of the cities. There is the curious story at the opening of The Book of the Thames (1859), by Mr. and Mrs. Hall, concerning young Emily who in their hearing refused to cross a simple wooden bridge between Kemble and Ewen. She screamed out that she was afraid. It transpires that she and her grandmother had been crossing this bridge when they both fell into the water. Emily was rescued but “Nanny”—“a fat, merry little thing” according to the family—was never recovered. If Emily ever looked into the Thames, “everything she sees bright on the water she says is Nanny’s face—Nanny’s face looking up at her.” Innocence is threatened, even stained, by the bloated visage of the corpse and by the insidious menace of the river. It is a curious prelude to a book on the Thames, perhaps, and is followed a few pages later by the drowning of Jabez Lloyd, a boatman, who fell face down into a bed of lilies and died before he could be extricated from “the meshes of the golden-chaliced flowers and their broad leaves.” Death can emerge in beauty. In Victorian literature concerning the Thames there is always a moral to be drawn, even if it is preserved quietly beneath the surface of the writing.

  There is a strange mural monument in Cookham Church to Sir Isaac Pocock, carved in the early nineteenth century; he is seen being caught by an angel while falling into the Thames from a punt, with an inscription that he was “suddenly called from this world to a better state, whilst on the Thames near his own house.” Perhaps he is one of those to be seen rising from the dead in Stanley Spencer’s painting of Cookham Churchyard.

  There is that curious phrase, “to set the Thames on fire.” One explanation has to do with a sieve, or “temse,” that was used for sieving flour. It was believed that a vigorous workman could make it ignite with constant friction against the flour-bin, and of an inefficient workman it was said that “he will never set the temse on fire.” It is so prosaic a theory that it has the ring of truth. But the Thames has also been associated with deaths by lightning, and along the upper reaches of the river it is possible to see lightning-blasted trees. There is one on the summit of Sinodun Hill. Such trees were commonly considered to be sacred. Ash-trees, in particular, were believed to attract fire. In The Book of the Thames, there is the story of a fisherman who sat patiently by the riverside “until a flash of lightning deprived him of his sight.” In the seventeenth century Dr. Robert Plot recalled a great lightning storm over the river at Oxford when two scholars of Wadham College were struck into the water from their boat, “the one of them stark Dead, and the other stuck fast in the Mud like a Post, with his Feet downward.” Just downstream of Radcot, there is another lightning-blasted tree on the very bank of the river. Fire and water are not necessarily antagonistic.

  PART XV

  The River’s End

  Thames and Medway

  CHAPTER 45

  Downriver

  It is a mysterious, and an ambiguous, place. Where does the river end and the sea begin? The estuary is the brackish zone, combining salt water and fresh water in equal or unequal quantities. It remains largely unknown and unvisited. The river has changed its nature. It is coming ever closer to the sea, which is always hostile to mankind. There is an area of the estuary, used for the dumping of London’s waste, that is still known as the “Black Deep.” The waters can be treacherous here, and the waves of the estuary have been known to reach a height of 7 feet. It is a deeper and darker river. Joseph Conrad believed that it appealed strongly “to an adventurous imagination.”

  The estuary is some 250 miles square and has a length of 30 miles, reaching from Gravesend to the Nore where the Thames becomes the North Sea. At that point of transition, its width is 10 miles. There are three principal approach channels, one of which is the Black Deep, and a score of subsidiary channels or “swatchways” with names like “the Warp” and “the Wallet.” The light-ships that dip and swing in the tide are called Mouse and Tongue and Girdler. This is the poetry of the river. The sands and shoals are given names such as “Shingles” and “Shivering Sand,” “the Spell” and “the Oven.” “Sunk Sand” runs between the Black Deep and the Barrow Deep. But the names are in one sense deceptive. The “sands” are part clay and part black viscous mud.

  The estuarial marshes beside the river are liminal areas; they are neither water nor dry land. They partake of two realities, and in that sense they are blessed. That is why the Thames estuary has always been considered a place of mystery and of enchantment. At times of low tide the sands and shoals become islands, with the false promise of a haven. In the poems of the Anglo-Saxons it is a landscape of nightmare. The “flats” form a dull and monotonous expanse, low ground crossed by paths. The sky seems larger, and closer, here. The tide-washed mud-flats reflect the changing light. For many centuries this land was largely uninhabited and uninhabitable. As such it exerts a primitive and still menacing force, all the more eerie and lonely because of its proximity to the great city.

  There is a sense of strangeness and melancholy here at dusk. Charles Dickens understood it very well, and in Great Expectations described ho
w “the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the lower leaden line beyond which the wind was rushing, was the sea.” Magwitch could hide here, making his secret way along the network of hidden planks that used to traverse the mud-flats and moving sands. This is all land that has been saved from the sea, and thus has an ambiguous status. Parts of its territory, in both the lower and upper reaches, have often been deemed to be wild and inhospitable. Strangers were not welcomed. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, walking alone by the shores of the estuary, it is possible to feel great fear—fear of the solitude, fear of being abandoned, fear of what is alien represented by the river itself. It may be a fear of the primaeval Thames.