At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  The waterman at his long oar reminds us that at one time the Thames was London’s only convenient or safe road from one end of the city to the other. The whole population used it. Kings and queens went up by river to the palaces at the Tower of London or at Greenwich, for royal and naval London lay east not west until the eighteenth century. The royal barges, graceful gondolas in green and red with golden canopies, lie in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. The present queen has twice made a royal river progress—at the end of the last war and again at her coronation. Shakespeare’s Globe Theater was on the South Bank between London Bridge and Blackfriars; the actors and the theater crowds, who mostly lived on the north side, had to go “over the water”—a phrase still used in London life. The wherries were the taxicabs of those years: indeed when the roads became safe and coaches and carriages came in, the London watermen were powerful enough to prevent these interlopers from getting licenses for more than a generation. The Thames was marked by “stairs” and “gates,” where the wherries picked up their passengers. Many still exist: Wapping Old Stairs, for example, and the stairs at London Bridge where Nancy took the boat in Oliver Twist. The old trick was not to tell the passenger his fare until he was in the middle of the river and at the wherryman’s mercy. These rows and quarrels and blusterings were, and are, perpetual in British life; British liberty seems to be based on bloody-minded acrimony; this mild race has a talent for digging its toes in. The old Watermen’s and Lightermen’s Company, founded in 1555 to stop these arguments about fares, still licenses the apprentice lightermen under the Port of London Authority. The pretty Georgian building of the Watermen’s and Lightermen’s Company, crammed between fish warehouses down in Billingsgate—London’s treasures are often stuck away in terrible places—has a portrait of one of its Masters whose lonely distinction it was to be called “The Honest Waterman.” Honesty was a matter for astonishment, till the River Police were started at the end of the eighteenth century: they claimed to be the oldest police force in the world.

  Shakespeare’s actors were a particular thorn in the flesh of the watermen, but in fact the uneasy alliance between stage and wherry was eventually celebrated in a happy fashion in 1715, when an actor called Thomas Doggett founded a prize called Doggett’s Coat and Badge for an annual rowing race of Thames Watermen. The race has been held every year since then, although wherries are no longer used: it is now rowed in gigs, from the site of the Old Swan public house near London Bridge to Cadogan Pier at Chelsea, and it is claimed to be the oldest and longest rowing race in the world, the course being four miles, seven furlongs. One of the early winners was the old prizefighter John Broughton, known as the Father of British Boxing and the first to introduce the gloves. The prize is a brilliant red coat of the period, with a large silver badge on the arm bearing the white horse of the house of Hanover. This glorious piece of apparel can be seen in the hall of the Watermen’s and Lightermen’s Company at the bottom of St. Mary-at-Hill in Billingsgate and there, drinking your glass of sherry at eleven with the courteous gentlemen who are up to their necks in the Thames shipping trades, you can also consider the portraits of past Masters going back centuries, the lovely Adam ceiling and chimney piece of the Court (all City companies are administered by a “Court”), the remarkable clock that was once stolen, and other treasures of the ancient Thames from days when it was not as respectable as it has become. There is even a large painting of the ceremony, with the latest Doggett winner in the foreground and, among the crowd of notables, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

  But I am not drinking sherry down at Watermen’s Hall. I am still freezing on the bridge of the tug Sun, as we lead the Florian into Millwall Dock.

  The skipper was more silent than his prototype in the old stories of W. W. Jacobs, the great writer of comedies of Thames-side life. The Scottish engineer, who had been up all night, was having a sleep in the wheelhouse, and the cabin boy brought up those huge white mugs of tea which you can always see being carried about on tugs as they pass by. Working England runs on strong, very hot tea, and would die without it.

  It was when we had the Florian in tow again at the dock entrance, waiting for the drawbridge to go up, that I saw the beauty of the maneuver, and why there is all that delicate waltzing, pulling and slacking off this way and that. The tug had to persuade fifteen thousand tons to do a series of sharp right-angle turns into lock and dock basin, without touching a quay or any other craft by so much as a graze. The skipper was playing a game of chess with wind tide, current and traffic, a matter he described as being partly instinct and partly the art of somehow seeing two moves ahead. When he nipped down the ladder to bolt a chop in the galley and said the job upsets the digestion, I could believe him: it is the malady of artists.

  The docks break up east London into grimy little Venices. How do you imagine the Isle of Dogs? It is about three miles down the river from Tower Bridge—a collection of high black prison walls and streets without feature. Over one of these walls will appear, perhaps, in huge white letters the startling single word Philosopher, or some other just as strange: you are looking at the name of a ship whose black bow overhangs the wall of the graving dock, dwarfing trains, buses, houses, everything. The funnels and the masts stand up between the new blocks of flats that have gone up since dockland was burned out during the Blitz. It is exciting to see ships, lightly domesticated, careless looking, gay and trim, rising with the clean paint of the sea among London’s dirty brick.

  There are havens on the Isle of Dogs—such as The Gun, one of the few remaining public houses with a terrace on the river—where on summer nights you can look at the water and its hard reflected lights, listening to the clatter of the chains and conveyors of industry, and wait, with a glass of beer, for that peremptory, half-melancholy, half-majestic sound of a ship blowing as she silently glides out fast into the night, almost through the pub yard.

  “Nice boys. Very nice fellers they were. And spent a lot of money,” says the woman at the bar, looking toward the sound of the ship she cannot see. There will be no more singsong at the piano in the river room with that lot now. They have gone.

  The destruction on the Isle of Dogs during the war was terrible, but no one could get the inhabitants to move. This was true of all the other dockland neighborhoods—Stepney, Limehouse, Poplar, Wapping, Deptford, Woolwich and Rotherhithe: the river people are as tenacious and as closed to the outside world as villagers. They have grown out of a rich and picaresque past, in which honest work went on beside the piracy and pilfering enjoyed by gangs who were subtly divided into river pirates, night-plunderers, light-horsemen, heavy-horsemen, scuffle-hunters and mudlarks.

  The amount of thieving on the Thames in the days before the docks were built in the nineteenth century was due to the enormous congestion in the Pool below London Bridge: the docks and the River Police brought it slowly to an end, or nearly so. You hear tales today of ambitious rogues making off with a lighter of copper, or modest ones collaring a few cans of rabbit. But the bloodcurdling tales of the Ratcliff Highway and Limehouse Causeway; the general atmosphere of robbery, murder and brothels; the story of Execution Dock, where pirates were left for three tides to pass over them—all this is history now. The Town of Ramsgate pub, where criminals were given a good feed the night before their execution, still stands snugly at Wapping Old Stairs, and still does a good lunch. Limehouse Causeway has no opium dens: it is a collection of modern flats—one, I believe, is called Bethlehem House. There is still a Chinese quarter in the West India Dock Road. It still has the best Chinese restaurant in London.

  Wapping High School is a mile or more of wharves and warehouses, where you duck under the cranes, and hear the warehouseman’s old chant: “Lower. Lower a bit,” and see him bring out his double hook to catch the bales. But if there is hardly a dwelling house in the street, there is a handsome region of apartment houses just off it. The Turks Head was bombed; the pretty Prospect of Whitby has become modish. It is the same over the river in Bill Sike�
�s Rotherhithe. Paradise Street is still an alley but I don’t suppose they ever sing there now:

  You robbed every tailor and you’ve

  skinned every sailor

  But you won’t be walking down

  Paradise Street no more.

  —which I have heard London sailors sing in Liverpool, but have never seen printed. And The Angel in Cherry Garden Street, where Pepys used to gather cherries when all this dock area was countryside, has been modernized. The New Jolly Caulkers by the Surrey Commercial Docks commemorates the site if not the actual house of Dickens’s Three Jolly Fellowship Porters. The past of the whole region lives on in street names, with their whiff of sea life: Dockhead, Muscovy Street, Cathay Street, Pickle Herring Street and Shad Thames. There is Free Trade Wharf, dating back to the battles fought by the river folk against an old monopoly; there is New Fresh Wharf, where the banana boats unload in the middle of the city, just as the bacon and butter and hide trades are unloading on the southern side opposite. Down near London Bridge is the site of the Old Clink prison. The approach road to old London Bridge—Pepys described the houses burning on it in the Fire—goes through the churchyard of Wren’s beautiful St. Magnus the Martyr, and anyone on a tug or a police launch will show you how the water breaks a little, a few yards east of London Bridge, over the site of the old piers.

  This “absurd old bridge,” as it was called, with its four-story houses, stood unsteadily for 650 years. If things are unsteady enough, they last. It was deadly to navigators and some of its arches used to be jammed with the bodies of dead starlings. Starlings have nowadays moved westward with civilization to Trafalgar Square. The old houses came down in 1750; the present London Bridge, packed tight with City clerks ten abreast at eight-thirty in the morning when the suburban trains get in, was finished in 1831. T. S. Eliot recorded these clerks in The Waste Land:

  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

  Kipling was sardonic also:

  Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew

  Wanted to know what the River knew.

  Tower Bridge, that strange Victorian Gothic contraption in stone and steel—fake fortress, part cathedral, part machine, which suits well with the Tower of London nearby, is the first bridge you meet as you come upriver. Below this point, the Thames is crossed by tunnel or by ferry. There is an old foot tunnel in a sad little garden in the Isle of Dogs, which comes up at Greenwich, near the spot where the veteran sailing ship, the Cutty Sark, stands in dry dock to show us what “sail” was like. The builders of the Tower Bridge must have had their doubts about the river pilots, for a tug with steam up stands beside the bridge, ready to go to the rescue of ships. It has been standing there by statute for sixty-five years, and only three times has it been called upon. The mugs of tea that must have been brewed aboard in that time!

  This corner by the Tower is the most intense point of the river, the Pool; intense because the river work is thickest here, but also because the Tower exists as a lasting image in the minds of all who have been children in London. Those school visits with the history teacher. Your armor period; your Crown Jewels period; your spy and prisoner period; your almost traumatic preoccupation with smothered children, executioners’ axes and heroes unjustly passing to doom under Traitor’s Gate. Somehow the Thames looks sinister and greenish under the low arch of Traitor’s Gate and one winces at the half-sly smile which the wobbling reflection of the water makes on the stone archway. A good part of the bloody history of England is contained in this fortress, and I confess to getting a nasty thrill out of the thought that spies have been sent here in the last two wars.

  But it is not until the Londoner has grown out of childhood and got over the boredom of guidebook history, that he wakes up to the fact that the Tower is one of the marvels of Europe. Every time you see it, it seems to have got larger, and its walls, curtains, screens, towers and ramparts, built of a stone as gray and cruel as frost, give you the fright of something impregnable and of enormous weight. It is said to be the largest and most complete surviving medieval fortress in Europe. A king’s palace and court in flushed royal red brick, are at the center where the ravens walk like dilapidated Tudors on the lawns; a belt of medieval town is set about the court; and then the outer belt of fortress with its screens and moats. In its hollow, the Tower is dwarfed by office buildings; but how many such modern steel things were blown up or burned out eighteen years ago, while the Tower stood ?

  And as you stare at the Tower, as your eye catches the speckled river running toward the sea beyond it, as you think of what is going on in the world beyond the Thames estuary, this old building ceases to be simply something out of a child’s tale, and becomes a part of modern life. We have returned to the age of judicial murder, traitors real or false, political imprisonments, banishments, tortures, executions and the slow wasting away of unlucky men…. The Tower has become disagreeable and actual, and a whole lot of Beefeaters, looking like geraniums, do not keep alive its innocence for me anymore.

  My temperament is the trader’s. I keep a glance for the Tower, but thousands of hours I must have passed staring at the Pool. I always have to take one more look down the river at the cranes: twenty-four miles of cranes—forty-eight if you reckon both banks—from Gravesend to London Bridge, and they are thickest in the Pool, like a nation of grasshoppers sticking up against the sky. I wait, in a stupor, for one of these insects to move a leg or alter the angle of its antennae; and then for it to drop a bale into a ship’s hold, as dead straight and sudden as a die. Pernickety, pedantic, doctoral things these machines are; I worked in one or two of the hide wharves in Pickle Herring Street when I was a youth, and the hiss of these insects put a touch of excitement into the hot, smelly hours I spent in wharfingers’ offices. Ceilings are low, light is poor in these rooms, and the trucks rumble all day long on the floor above like trains. And by smell, I mean something between the aromatic and the outright stinking: sharp camphor, hides and wools like meat “going off,” pleasant barks, soaps, bacons; nutmeg and pepper to relieve the nose; or that faintly dungy smell—rather childishly agreeable—of leather.

  These river work places have not the sacerdotal calm of banks or the dry, light chatter of computers and typewriters, all nerves, of “modern” offices; wharf clerks are jammed in with draymen, dockers and watermen, who barge in breathing beer, cursing about their delivery orders and arguing about short weight, water damage, and stuff that has heated in the holds, while some hooting tug outside drowns the conversation. Certain river men I remember: Ben who never made a mistake and was always giving his notice; Bill who never got anything right; Jack the foreman with the fancy writing who could quote us half of Boswell and who went out on a three-day drunk once a month; sexy ’Arry Atterbury—his name sticks—with his fourteen children and his annual remark: “Nother nice little present from the missus, this morning.”

  But whether you have spent the morning in the wharf or standing in the modern offices of the Port of London Authority or some tug company, it seems natural in the lunch hour to hang round the open-air meetings on Tower Hill and listen to the political speakers haranguing about the state of India, China, Israel, Africa or the Indies.

  The last time I was there, some bowler hat in the crowd asked about the situation in Fiji. A very natural, urgent question. They were talking about the bread and butter which the river brings. And if the speeches get too mercantile or worldly there is the ancient church of All Hallows, close to Tower Hill, a spick-and-span church, burned out in the war, with its seventeenth-century memorials, but now rebuilt. It is not altogether an unworldly shrine—none of the City churches is; there is a notice in the doorway saying: “Not all have been converted who enter this Church. Mind your handbags.”

  They take ships up to ten thousand tons into the Pool below London Bridge, but as we move on above the bridge commerce thins out, the State and the Law impose their Portland stone. Modern architecture is leveling
the Victorian skyline of low-built cities, but the Thames has St. Paul’s on its hill and all Wren’s pigeon-gray spires. We pass Wren’s little house squeezed behind wharves near Blackfriars. It has a bright red door now. We pass under the bridges at Waterloo, get one more salute from a passing police launch, and look at the noble façade of Somerset House in the Strand, once a duke’s mansion, now a mixture of university, Record Office and the home of those sad, dedicated mathematicians, the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, the stateliest building on the Thames, indeed I would say the finest in London. This curving reach of the Thames to Westminster impresses, though the South Bank is mostly an industrial mess. On the north bank the Victorian outline, the Victorian statues and monuments predominate; there is something heavily Londonish and official about the Embankment. In this stretch the Thames lacks the grace and lightness of the Seine, but the flowers in the Embankment Gardens and the lawns, like all southern English flowers and lawns, are beautiful. Coal lighters go up past Westminster to Chelsea, and even far beyond, and there the river sweeps beautifully, often silver, to encourage painters, and there is green on the banks. We go on to the rowing and sailing clubs at Putney and Chiswick, and the Thames of sport and pleasure has begun at last.

  We are in the waters of the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race course, where in March the crowds climb on the walls, run shouting along the tow-paths, and spit down from the bridges, as people do—by some peculiar human impulse—from all the bridges in the world. We round the big bend to Kew and Richmond, and it is well to go ashore here and climb Richmond Hill, for there we have the finest of all the views of a silver river curving with elegance through the parkland and sumptuous woods of its valley. And so to Hampton Court, Magna Carta Island, the mass of Windsor Castle, and Eton College. The associations are overpowering. We are looking at the “sweete Themmes” of Spenser’s poem at last.