by Trow, M. J.
Across from the Isle of Dogs where the peninsula – ‘the Great Dismal Swamp’ as Dickens called it – had been made into a virtual island by the cutting of a canal, stood Deptford, the ‘deep ford’ of Henry VIII’s shipbuilders. The Raven’s Bourne enters the Thames here and the water was deep enough for ocean-going ships of the sixteenth century to be built. Martin Frobisher sailed from here in 1576 in search of a North-West Passage to Cathay (China) and his arch-nemesis Francis Drake was knighted on the deck of his own ship by the Queen here after his successful circumnavigation of the globe. The Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, stayed at John Evelyn’s house at Sayes Court in the late 1690s before taking back ideas and blueprints for his own extensive harbour and wharves at his new model city at St Petersburg. The Royal Victoria Victualling Yard ran to some 35 acres to the east, a headquarters for all supplies to the largest navy in the world by 1887. Clothing, food, tobacco and rum were all housed here, as well as slaughterhouses, sawmills, biscuit, chocolate and mustard and pepper factories, brewhouses and sail lofts. Smallpox patients were kept in isolation on two ships moored along Greenwich Reach. The distinctive funnels were black and brown to warn foreign shipping to keep away and the windows were of frosted glass.
Greenwich stood out as a shining beacon in a grubby world. The Naval College Hospital and Observatory was built on the site of the old royal palace of Placentia and Daniel Defoe wrote that the water there was ‘very sweet and fresh, especially at the ebb of the tide’.25 The historian Lord Macaulay was hugely impressed by the new building – ‘A monument, the most superb that was ever erected to any sovereign’.26 It was built by William III in memory of his wife, Mary, to a design by Christopher Wren. By the time Dickens wrote, the place was no longer home to naval veterans, but contained a naval museum, in which the coat and vest worn by Nelson on the deck of the Victory in October 1805 could be seen by a public admitted free.
Blackwall, on the sharp river bend below Greenwich, was part of the East and West India Docks and, as the Thames straightened, the Victoria and Albert Docks lay side by side to the north. Woolwich, straight ahead, still contained troubled waters in the 1880s, with sudden shallows and unexpected deeps. The water here is salt and in Dickens’s day the area was dominated by the huge arsenal and the associated officer training school known as ‘The Shop’ by generations of artillerymen and engineers. This was a high security area in 1887. Visitors had to have special tickets provided by the War Office and foreigners could only obtain these through their various embassies. Anyone could enjoy the music however, courtesy of the Royal Artillery whose band played on the common or in the Repository Grounds at five in the afternoon between May and October.
Opposite the Plumstead Marshes stood Barking Creek, another tributary river which had a long history. According to Kipling at least, ‘Norseman and Negro, Gaul and Greek, drank with the Britons in Barking Creek’. He may have been right, because a sixth-century BC water-pitcher of Greek design was found in the river mud here some years ago. There was a medieval abbey on the site and for centuries the Coe family were watermen in the area.
The village of Rainham is one of the least prepossessing we have seen. The docks have given way here to the start of the flat monotony of the Essex marshes. We steam along Halfway Road and past Frog Island, the little promontory that juts out at the creek. We have no panoramic photograph of the place – those taken by the Port Authority in 1937 end at Woolwich. Modern maps are unhelpful. But on the morning of Wednesday 11 May 1887, the day that we have sailed downstream in our virtual journey, there was a commotion on the north bank, by the river wall at Falls Point, near Mr Hempleman’s factory. There was a group of workmen standing at the water’s edge and there was a policeman with them, kneeling down, peering at something on the foreshore. It was difficult to tell at this distance what it was. It appeared to be a bundle of sacking, old, saturated.
But inside it was something white, bloodless. It was a human body, but it had no arms. It had no legs. It had no head.
Chapter 2
The River of Death
There are other ways to look at the Thames. Dickens was telling the boating public about the pleasures of the river as part of the growing Victorian leisure industry. The Port of London Authority photographs were taken with the sense of a passing era – the Docks were already in decline by 1937 before the Luftwaffe added immeasurably to the collateral damage.
But there was another side to the Thames – there still is. The body parts floating off the jetty at Rainham were not the first example of violent death that the river had thrown up. The poet Shelley said to Thomas Love Peacock that the Thames ‘runs with the blood and bones of a thousand heroes and villains and no doubt the water is sour with tainting’.1
Because the river was a natural barrier, it was likely to have been the frontier between the Celtic tribes to the north and south of it. On the upper reaches the Atrebates in what would become Surrey fought with the Catuvellauni of present-day Hertfordshire. Nearer the sea, the Trinovantes of the Essex marshes would have clashed occasionally with the Kent-based Cantiaci and the river would have run red. When the Romans landed in 54 BC, their commander, Julius Caesar, batted aside the Cantiaci and made for the only safe river crossing on the Thames at a time when it was wider and shallower than today. He crossed the river with ten cohorts and 300 cavalry, the equivalent of a legion, and clashed immediately with the able Celtic chief Cassivelaunus, who was almost certainly waiting for him. How many died, and where, we do not know.
The second Roman invasion in AD 43, led by Aulus Plautius, was altogether larger and would mark the beginning of a permanent occupation. Marching west from Thanet, then an island created by the Wantsum river, Plautius’ legions crossed the Medway and fought an epic battle there before driving the Celts back to the Thames somewhere in the region of the Higham Marshes opposite Tilbury. The Batavian auxiliaries with the Roman forces were particularly adept at river crossings and the historian Dio Cassius wrote:
some others got over by a bridge a little way upstream after which they assailed the barbarians [Celts] from several sides at once and cut down many of them. But they were incautious in their pursuit of the rest, got themselves entrapped in impossible marshes and lost many men.2
London itself was only a village then and the legions made next for Camulodunum (Colchester) as the largest town, which they probably assumed was a capital city on the lines of Rome.
Thirty years later, the Roman grip on Britain was seriously challenged by Boudicca, the warrior queen of the Iceni whose lands lay in Norfolk and Suffolk. Having burned Camulodunum to the ground, her next target was the rapidly expanding ‘frontier town’ of Londinium, a symbol of the aggressive mercantilism for which the Romans were famous. The traders, metalworkers and spinners who comprised most of Londinium’s workforce were put to the sword by Boudicca. Dio Cassius, writing over a century later and with inevitable bias, said:
Those who were taken captive by the Britons were subjected to every known form of outrage … They hung up naked the noblest and most distinguished women and cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, in order to make the victim appear to be eating them; afterwards they impaled the women on sharp skewers run lengthwise through the bodies.3
Almost the only tangible evidence of Boudicca’s attack is three skulls, carbon-dated to the period (AD 60) which were found in the Walbrook, a tributary of the Thames. Boudicca’s entire campaign was written up years later by the Romans – the Celts had no written language – and the Romans are notorious for exaggeration. The assumption that these skulls are Boudiccan can be challenged. They are of young males and scraping marks on the bone surface indicate that the flesh was deliberately removed. This has an altogether more sinister connotation and may account for thousands of bodies that, at various early times, were dumped into the Thames.
Peter Ackroyd makes the point that ‘there is a curious connection between the Thames and severed heads’.4 Over 300 skulls have been discover
ed in the river silt, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age period. In 1857, less than twenty years before the first of the torso murders that form the heart of this book, a paper was produced called ‘On the discovery of Celtic crania in the vicinity of London’. Battersea Reach, where body parts would be found in September 1873, was referred to in various archaeological journals by Henry Cuming as a ‘Celtic Golgotha’ (the place of the skull). Kew and Hammersmith have produced heads, as have Mortlake and Richmond. The cult of the severed head was important to the Celts. Warriors decapitated their battlefield enemies and tied their heads to their saddles or chariots. In peacetime, they placed them on poles outside their homes. And the Celts held water to be sacred. A river like the Thames had a persona of its own. It was a god and votive offerings must be made to it. Coins, weapons and above all, human heads, were deliberately placed in the Thames to keep the river safe, to keep the water sweet. What is odd about the eight torso victims is that not one of them had a head.
The novelist Charles Dickens, no stranger to the police or sudden death, wrote of the Thames in Night Walks (1860):
The river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds and the reflected light seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres [of the dead] 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.5
The river claimed a number of souls through sheer accident. Most affected, naturally, were the ferrymen, weir-keepers and locksmen who were at the mercy of the fastest-flowing, most turbulent stretches. The lock at Great Marlow was one of the most lethal, known as Marlow Race for the speed of the current. Sixty people died in 1647 near Goring in Berkshire when the weir dragged their boat down. The most dangerous section of the Thames before the opening of the new one in 1817 was the old London Bridge, but the increase in boating for leisure seventy years later led to more drowning than ever. There were more amateurs, on punts and skiffs, unused to boats or water. Many of them wore unsuitable clothing, especially the women whose heavy dresses held them under the surface. Others were drunk. Sometimes the fog got them, hiding the water’s edge until it was too late. ‘Fog everywhere,’ wrote Charles Dickens in Bleak House, ‘Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city.’
The worst accident on the Thames took place on 3 September 1878. The Princess Alice was a pleasure steamer returning from a day trip to Gravesend. It was evening and she was negotiating the bend by Galleon’s Reach, between Crossness and Margaret Ness. when she was hit amidships by a steam-collier, the Bywell Castle. There seems to have been confusion over signalling and the Alice sank in less than four minutes. ‘I can compare the people,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘to nothing else than a flock of sheep in the water … The river seemed full of drowning people.’6 A diver sent down into the murky depths the next day found bodies still upright, jammed against the saloon doors where they had tried to get out. An estimated 700 people died, but not all by drowning. Only an hour before the boats collided 75 million gallons of sewage and toxic waste had been pumped out of the Barking and Crossness stations. It was this that the frantically swimming survivors gulped in as they made for the shore. Bodies, alive and dead, were covered in a slime which could not be washed off; the smell was horrendous. Because the corpses bloated so quickly, specially large coffins had to be made for them. They were buried in a mass grave at Woolwich cemetery. Perhaps the most peculiar thing about the Princess Alice disaster and one that puts the torso murders into a kind of context, is that 160 of the dead were never claimed.
If war, sacrifice and fate have left corpses in the Thames, so has crime. One of the first recorded pleasure trips on the river took place in October 1555 when an enterprising trader from Abingdon took passengers upriver to Oxford to see the public burning of Bishops Ridley and Latimer in the city square. It was a damp day and the men took an estimated two hours to die. Their ‘crime’ of course, was belonging to the wrong religious denomination, Protestants in a Catholic land. In some ways, the Abingdon trader was playing the part of Charon, the ferryman of Greek legend, whose role it was to carry the souls of the departed into Hades across the waters of the Styx. For several centuries, it was the custom to place coins in a dead man’s hand, on his eyes or even in his mouth to pay the ferryman.
Religion and murder went hand in hand too in the death of Aelfheah, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1012. A group of drunken Vikings led by a man named Thrym assaulted the Archbishop at their camp at Greenwich and beat him to death on the river bank with ox bones and an axe-head, ‘so that with the blow he sank down and his holy blood fell on the earth and sent forth his holy soul to God’s kingdom’.7 A shrine was built in his memory which is now Nicholas Hawksmoor’s seventeenth-century church.
If the river itself did not provide the watery grave of murder victims, it was certainly the way to death. Thomas More was probably the most famous official victim of the Reformation and he entered the Tower, where he was beheaded in 1535, via Traitor’s Gate, the river entrance to the castle. In one variant of the legend of the Princes in the same Tower, the bodies of the boys murdered in 1483 were taken from the castle by their assassins and dumped downriver in a place called the ‘Black Deepes’.
London Bridge, with its shopping precinct and its rapids, was also a necropolis. As the entrance point to London for most people coming from the south, it was the obvious place to make a statement. ‘ To encourage the others’8 the heads or even other body parts of traitors were skewered on poles and left to rot, a perpetual reminder to behave in a volatile society. William Wallace may have been a nationalist hero to the Scots, but the English hanged, drew and quartered him as a murderer and rebel. His head was spiked for the public’s delight on 23 August 1305. The renegade Jack Cade followed a similar fate in 1450. Appalled at the government of the usurper-king Henry IV, Cade led an estimated 40,000 men on London, but they were dispersed and he himself was caught and killed on the Sussex coast. A German visitor in 1598 counted thirty heads on the bridge, along with so many arms and legs that the place looked like a butcher’s shambles. Like most of the public demonstrations for deterrent purposes, there is no evidence that the ghastly sights had any effect and the body parts were probably regarded as part of the street furniture.
Witchcraft was linked with the Thames too. In 984 the Codes Diplomatias Aevi Saxonici refers to a woman condemned for making a wooden effigy of a man. Such ‘poppets’ emerge with some frequency by the sixteenth century and are associated with sympathetic magic, the idea of causing harm to a living individual by damaging a likeness of that individual. She was drowned at London Bridge. At Kingston in the summer of 1572, a ducking stool was set up. This was not the traditional ‘swimming’ test for a witch, but a punishment meted out to scolds, a crime which still exists, but carries no penalty! Two or three thousand people turned out in 1745 to watch the female keeper of the King’s Head get her comeuppance.
Places of execution were deliberately built close to the river, as though there was an ancient link between death and the Thames. Both Smithfield and Tyburn were execution sites and they are tributaries of the Thames. Smithfield was the open ground used for tournaments and fairs that straddled the Fleet. Martyrs were burned here for their faith under Mary Tudor. The ‘triple tree’ at Tyburn marked London’s most famous hanging ground, long after the old tree itself had fallen down. The gallows at Dagenham on the Thames itself was still in use in 1780 and gibbets – iron cages in which rotting corpses were suspended – stood at intervals on both sides of the banks. Peter Ackroyd speculates that the ‘lost river’, one of the Thames’s tributaries, known as the Neckinger means the devil’s neck-cloth, a euphemism for the rope. The Neckinger ran into the mother-river at Butler’s Wharf near Tower Bridge.
; Deptford was associated with death for two reasons. Called for a time Deadman’s Dock, it was the burial place for the prisoners who died in large numbers aboard the hulks, the ex-warships that served as floating gaols along the river. Over a century earlier, it had been the murder site of the playwright Christopher Marlowe. In May 1593 he visited an ‘ordinary’, an eating house belonging to Eleanor Bull somewhere on Deptford Strand near the shipyards. By nightfall he was dead, a dagger thrust into his eyesocket and brain. Most accounts write off the episode as a tavern brawl but, considering Marlowe’s lifestyle and that of at least one man in the murder room with him – they were both spies – it seems much more likely that this was a political assassination.9 Execution Dock stood at the entrance to what became St Katherine’s Dock in 1829. It moved further downstream to Wapping in the sixteenth century and was traditionally the place of execution for sailors or sea-related criminals. The buccaneer Henry Morgan narrowly escaped being sent there in the 1670s. Criminals were hanged by the riverside, then their bodies were covered in pitch or tar and they were lowered by chains shackled to posts into the swirling water. They were left here until three tides had washed over them, although some remained for far longer.
Take her up tenderly
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly
Young, and so fair!
Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements;
Whilst the wave constantly
Drips from her clothing.
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing …10
So wrote Thomas Hood, one of the most sentimental of the Victorian poets. He is describing the removal of a prostitute’s body from the Thames – Waterloo Bridge was a favourite spot – and he is talking about suicide. Despite the fact that, in London, the Serpentine and the canals accounted for more suicides in the Victorian period, it was the Thames that had the older tradition. ‘Found in the Thames’ was a staple conclusion to coroners’ reports and inquests as though something drew the poor, the oppressed, the desperate to its embankments, its bridges, its wharves and jetties. ‘The Thames’, writes Peter Ackroyd, ‘is a river of the disappeared … a great vortex of suffering.’11 Dead Man’s Steps at Wapping was so called because the peculiarities of the tide and current washed up so many corpses there. Dead Man’s Island in the river’s estuary was the last resting place of cholera victims in the mid-nineteenth century. When they built Tower Bridge in 1894, they included, near the entrance to the Tower itself, Dead Man’s Hole, a temporary mortuary for bodies fished out of the water.
