Improvement came slowly. In 1797, the West India Company established a pilot police scheme; a security force paid for by the government and initially designed to combat theft and wrecking in the West India Company alone. The force was an unexpected success, Colquhoun claiming that in a single year the losses from West India ships were cut to one fiftieth of their previous level. Certainly, the scheme was successful enough to rouse many of the lumpers and ‘lower orders of revenue officers’ to a state close to insurrection. Having complained to the shipowners that the new force would put them out of business, they then tried violence. Despite the insurgents’ best efforts, however, the system worked. A year later, fifty-one grateful shipowners signed a letter expressing ‘our approbation and satisfaction of the Marine Police Institution, as a system which appears to us from actual observation to be of the greatest advantage to the Mercantile Interest as well as the Revenue, both of which have suffered beyond conception by the excessive pillage and plunder which formerly prevailed’.
Three things were ultimately to make a difference to crime on the Thames. Firstly, the publication of Colquhoun’s treatise, and the case he made for the establishment of a coherent River Police Force, stirred the government to action, if not to outlay. Estimating the annual cost of a marine police force at £5,000, the Exchequer offered just under £1,000 of that, while the West India Company committed the rest. In line with many of Colquhoun’s recommendations, the force initially consisted of a superintendent, a group of ship surveyors to patrol and inspect the river twenty-four hours a day, police watermen, and a small group of ship constables to supervise the dock gangs. In addition, there was also a surveyor of quays and thirty police quay guards to protect cargoes waiting on shore. That initial investment brought many of the worst excesses under control.
Secondly, the reduction both in the number and the cost of customs tariffs knocked the bottom out of the smuggling trade. By the 1850s, the number of articles eligible for duty had been cut from 1,400 to 30. By raising the penalties and lowering the incentives for crime, Colquhoun and his riverside descendents brought much of the Thames under control for the first time in centuries. And thirdly, the original Thames police worked by using the time-honoured law-enforcement principle of sending a thief to catch a thief. The first recruits to the force were drawn mainly from the ranks of dispossessed naval and merchant seamen, many of whom were almost as villainous as the criminals they were ostensibly combating. If the shore-going law did not permit them to wound or even kill their targets, then they bent that law until it did. If the law did not allow them to steal the property of criminals, or pay informants, or intimidate witnesses into giving evidence, then that law was insufficient. Even allowing for the River Police’s exceptional independence, the force as it then stood was not powerful enough to gain the respect of the criminal classes. The first river recruits therefore made sure they earned their awe by more imaginative means.
Not, of course, that crime on the river stopped outright. Most criminals went underground; some found more ingenious ways to deceive, and some simply slipped below official sightlines. Fifty years after Colquhoun first described the mudlarks, they reappeared in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Since the turn of the century, their condition and circumstances had, if anything, got worse. Most spent their days picking through the river mud for coal, wood, rope, and old iron, selling them on either to people within their local neighbourhoods or at rag-and-bone shops. At the fall of each successive tide, they would rush out, distribute themselves along the banks and begin scavenging for as long as the light or low-water lasted. Average earnings came to around threepence a day, and Mayhew calculated that by 1850, there were around 550 mudlarks earning a total of about £2,000 a year. ‘These poor creatures,’ wrote Mayhew,
are certainly about the most deplorable in their appearance of any I have met with in the course of my inquiries. They may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive decrepitude, crawling among the barges at the various wharfs along the river; it cannot be said that they are clad in rags, for they are scarcely half covered by the tattered indescribable things that serve them for clothing; their bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description . . . The men and women may be passed and repassed, but they notice no-one; they never speak, but with a stolid look of wretchedness they plash their way through the mire, their bodies bent down while they peer anxiously about, and occasionally stoop to pick up some paltry treasure that falls in their way.
The children, he reported,
were either the children of the very poor, who, by their own improvidence or some overwhelming calamity, had been reduced to the extremity of distress, or else they were orphans, and compelled from utter destitution to seek for the means of appeasing their hunger in the mud of the river.
Even now, there are still mudlarks on the Thames, though they are no longer the abject specimens Colquhoun and Mayhew examined. The Society of Thames Mudlarks are permitted to use metal detectors to search the foreshore on licence by the Port of London Authority on the condition that they give up any valuable finds to science or archaeology. From being a desperate community of river-grubbers, mudlarking has become the sport of hobbyists and historians, its transformation proof both of the social changes in the capital since Mayhew’s day, and of London’s waning interest in the Thames.
In fact, as Bob Jeffries points out when he returns to the museum room, there’s only one real use which Londoners still have for the river. He places a file named ‘High-Risk Mispers’ down on the table. A body has just been recovered from the river, and—as with all other suicides—the River Police are responsible for establishing identity and for dealing with the consequences. The body is the tenth so far this year. In an average year, between 80 and 100 people are known to die each year in the Thames, and 80 per cent of those are suicides. The file contains names and details of all Britain’s missing persons: name, age, last known address, identifying characteristics, place where last seen. The body in the river will be checked against the names in the file and on the police database; if it turns out to be one of the lost thousands, then it becomes one more name for the police to cross off their list.
‘Jumpers’—the unofficial name for Thames suicides—have always been the River Police’s responsibility. Ostensibly, that responsibility is an odd one, since suicides have committed no crime and—if successful—can hardly be brought to court. The police’s involvement dates back to an era when suicide was defined by Samuel Johnson as ‘self-murder; the horrid crime of destroying one’s self’, and regarded as a contravention of God’s will. Well into the eighteenth century, suicides would be posthumously convicted by the courts; most had their goods confiscated by the state. In some cases, the cadavers would then be ‘executed’ before having their twice-killed corpses buried under the high road with a stake driven through their chest—presumably as a way of hastening their descent to the fires of Hell. Most suicides were simply declared mad; those who did not succeed were hauled off to prisons or asylums. Astoundingly, it took until 1961 before suicide in Britain was officially decriminalised; even now, coroners will often return either a verdict of accidental death or an open verdict in order to spare surviving family members the stigma associated with suicide.
Given such a history, the River Police’s involvement in fishing ‘jumpers’ out of the river is less surprising. In 1887, Charles Dickens, son of the more famous author, noted in his Dictionary of the Thames that, ‘An important portion of the duties of the Thames division consists in searching for and dealing with the bodies of suicides, murdered persons and persons accidentally drowned. The dragging process is only carried on for one tide, after which it is considered that the missing body will pretty certainly have been carried out of reach, and it occasionally happens that a corpse will drift into a hole and be covered over before it becomes sufficiently buoyant to rise.’ Then as now, the ju
mpers usually choose either Blackfriars or Waterloo Bridge; between 1817—when Waterloo Bridge was completed—and 1840, an average of forty people a year hurled themselves from its stone parapets.
Since January 2002, responsibility for dealing with people who either fall or jump into the Thames has been shared by the River Police—or the Marine Support Unit, as it is now known—with the RNLI and HM Coastguard, both of whom recently established stations on the Thames as a result of the Marchioness Enquiry. The Coastguard is now responsible for co-ordinating all search and rescue on the Thames, a move which has alleviated some of the pressure on the police. In 2002, the RNLI’s first full year on the Thames, the lifeboat volunteers were stunned to discover that they were called out 800 times in a single year, and that between 40 per cent and 50 per cent of those call-outs were to deal with those who had jumped or fallen into the river.
But, as Jeffries points out, the numbers of suicides have actually fallen in recent years. ‘One of the reasons why the number has dropped, I suspect, is the advent of mobile phones. Previously, people who saw persons acting suspiciously on bridges would have had to find a functioning public phone and then phone the police. Nowadays, people press a button and they’re through in seconds.’ How do the different organisations work out their duties? Jeffries shrugs. ‘It’s just a question of who gets there first.’ As he notes, ‘Those who get into the water don’t last for long. Even in summer, that river is dangerous. It’s cold, it’s fast, there are eddies and currents created by the bulwarks of the bridges . . . The police know from experience that we don’t have to search longer than an hour, because no-one who gets into the water would last that long.’
Perhaps reassuringly, it tends not to be the natives who get tired both of London and of life. ‘Most of the people who end up in the river originate from outside the capital and so may not actually be Londoners as such. As for their reasons, who knows? I think it’s fair to say that many of them are suffering from a variety of mental health problems, and that it’s inevitable that the sheer pressure of day to day living on many of them will just be too severe. Why they choose to drown themselves? That’s anyone’s guess. I am told that once the initial panic subsides and the victim has actually inhaled the water instead of air, then the process is almost peaceful. Unfortunately, I don’t know of too many ways that we can easily test the theory.’
The bulk of the Marine Support Unit’s work, however, is more concerned with keeping Londoners alive than dealing with their dead. According to Jeffries, ‘These days, post-9/11, the unit is primarily concerned with anti-terrorist work.’ All vessels coming into central London are now liable to be stopped and searched under the terms of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. ‘The police may well have intelligence that a vessel is due into port and arrange to visit the ship during its stay,’ Jeffries continues. ‘Most of the stop-and-searches will be “satisfactory”, and the boat owners and ship captains are more than happy for the police to conduct their work in this way, but there are the occasional finds of drugs, firearms and so on.’
As Andy Roberts working the Channel also noted, asylum seekers and stowaways can often be a problem. ‘There are occasionally vessels which report unauthorised passengers who have concealed themselves aboard ships bound for the Thames, and there have been occasions when police have been called to suspected illegal stowaways. These people have been arrested and taken to police stations and the relevant authorities alerted.’ But, as Jeffries points out, there are as many holes in the immigration laws on water as there are on land. ‘It’s been suggested that the police don’t have the facilities to deal with these people. The usual advice seems to be that the police should release the suspects and direct them to attend the [immigration] centre at Lunar House, Croydon. Strangely, many of the suspects fail to make it to the centre and are often never heard of again.’
And finally, what about Royal Fish? Does the Marine Support Unit ever find itself having to deal with dead dolphins or unexploded whales in the centre of London? Some immature part of me rather likes the image of helmeted squads of Met officers pondering the best use for a sperm whale’s eyeballs. Sadly, Bob Jeffries does not oblige. Though he does remember the dolphin which died upriver a few years ago, ‘I have never heard of any of them being referred to as “Royal”. Swans, yes. But fish, no. So I feel I can safely say that the Marine Support Unit does not deal with Royal Fish in any way whatsoever.’
Cornwall
SEVEN
Cornwall
There’s a ship on the rocks at Land’s End, and by the look of her she’s not going anywhere soon. The RMS Mülheim lies at the base of a high cliff, her stern aground and her bow pointing a straight course towards the Scilly Isles. By international shipping standards she is a small vessel, 70 metres and 1,840 tonnes unladen, but she slots into the rocky cleft between Land’s End and Sennen Cove as if she was made for the space. In line with Cornish tradition, she appears to have arranged her final resting place with some forethought. The cove in which she lies is sheltered, sunny, and—most crucially—provides excellent access for both spectators and salvors. And, on a mild morning in mid-April, there are plenty of witnesses to her indignity.
All along the cliff pathways surrounding the cove stand families with rucksacks and thermoses, making the Mülheim into a proper day out. Elderly coach trippers advance with caution over the rocks, holding themselves at a 15-degree angle to the path. Parties of French and Spanish schoolchildren chatter in the bright spring air, most of them looking at the ground, or at each other, or at each other’s mobiles, but never out to sea. Couples in their sixties with the air of people who have had plenty of practise with shipwrecks tramp round the headland in mountain boots, pausing once in a while to stop and point. Down on the Mülheim herself, men in fluorescent jackets are manoeuvring large claw-handed grabbers slowly in and out of her hold. Each time the grabber goes in, it brings out a handful of what looks like thick black weed and then deposits it somewhere to her seaward side. The Mülheim was loaded with 2,000 tonnes of shredded automotive plastic—obsolete dashboard fascias, half-melted car tyres—and every fragment of it has to be removed before both cargo and fuel can become a threat to the local marine environment. The men on the ship and the headland work on, apparently oblivious to the audience they’ve gathered around them.
There’s something inelegant in seeing a big ugly ship caught in flagrante with the land, her backside levered up higher than her front and the sun beaming down on her humiliation. Even looking at the underparts of her hull—with its naked steel plates and its unwashed paintwork—feels like glimpsing something intended to remain private. But walking round the cliffside, it becomes evident that it is not going to be easy to restore the Mülheim’s dignity. All along her length there are deep black bite marks where the rocks have gnawed away at her hull. The rise and fall of every tide widens the gaps in the steel further, impaling her more firmly on the rocks. Once the salvage teams have retrieved all that they can of her cargo and fuel, she will be left for the Cornish winter to break. When the weather shifts, the sea will pound her up and down on the rocks until her backbone gives way and she begins to fall apart. It probably won’t take much more than two or three major storms before she finally dissolves back into her native element. By next summer, there won’t be anything here to see except a few scraps of unrecognisable metal.
The story of how the RMS Mülheim got here is almost as ignominious as her current position. In March 2003, she was heading from Cork with her car plastics cargo destined for a landfill site in Lübeck, Germany. As she rounded the far west coast of Cornwall on her way toward the Channel, the only person on the bridge was the chief officer. Standing up to check the ship’s position, the end of his trouser leg caught in the footplate control lever. He stumbled, fell, and blacked out. By the time he regained consciousness, the ship was heading for the rocks. The captain and bosun, alerted by the change in engine noise, arrived too late to prevent the Mülheim colliding with Land’s End. T
he chief officer—and his trousers—were later reported to be fine; the ship was not. There have been plenty of other shipwrecks in this area, many of which have been far more catastrophic than the Mülheim. But there undoubtedly hasn’t been a wreck as silly as this for a very long time.
The tourists, though, see a shipwreck as no more than their due. People swirl around the entrance to the Land’s End visitor centre while a small child begins a lengthy and passionate dispute with her mother over the use of a see-saw in the ‘Wreckreation’ adventure play area. Men stand with their hands in their pockets, waiting for their wives to return empty-eyed from ‘The Relentless Sea’ exhibition. In the toilets, mothers burdened with many bags debate the algebra of family life with their teenage daughters: one trip to the cinema in return for two hours walking round the coast; one trip to the pub plus one trip to the beach plus one unchaperoned night out equals one hour’s walk from here to Sennen.
Outside, the seagulls mew with unsatisfied avarice. It is mid-April, and already Cornwall is full—full of day-trippers, families and tourists on coach tours. They are here not just to see the end of England, but to fulfil an old tradition. They want to see what their ancestors probably saw: an authentic wreck. Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that the Mülheim should be no more than a short shuffle from a toilet, a car park and the ‘Smugglers’ Burger Bar’. Land’s End has excellent en-suite facilities and a splendid view of the Longships light; surely it should have a shipwreck too? Admittedly, the Mülheim falls down on a couple of details: she isn’t particularly attractive, she wasn’t carrying an interesting cargo, and she can’t currently be seen against a Force-12 backdrop; but there’s still an unquestioned thrill at the sight of a real live dead ship on the rocks. This is how it should be; this is what people expect.
The Wreckers Page 23