The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  The local authorities of both Bermondsey and Southwark, and also of the LCC, bear a heavy responsibility for the cavalier way in which they treated the venerable districts under their charge, but the collapse of water-borne trade along the river was not mainly their fault. The root of the matter was the decline, and then the closure, of London’s extensive dock system.

  The docks had seemed, superficially, to recover well from the blasting they had had in the Second World War. In an illustrated book called London Perceived, published in 1962, V. S. Pritchett, who had known Thames-side life intimately as a young man, could still write about the docks and wharves all along the Thames in the pride-of-our-great-City way that had been traditional for the last hundred years: ‘We have passed miles of cranes, forty-six miles of them to be exact, if we reckon both banks of the river. They are thickest in the Pool, like an infestation of grass-hoppers sticking an articulated limb, with an insect’s unknowable intention, into the sky … to drop a bale into a lighter, dead straight and suddenly, like a spit … At London Bridge they suddenly thin out. By Blackfriars, they have vanished. Trading London ends, ruling London begins.’

  The last stretch described is, of course, Bankside, with the cranes stopping logically at the new Power Station that did not need them. But there must have been some warning voices by then, for Pritchett wrote on the same page, ‘Some say that in fifty years half the area will revert to what it once was: a pleasure ground.’ But ‘fifty years’ in prospect is a misty vista. There is little sign that he realised he was describing a riverscape that was, even then, barely intact, and on the point of passing into history. Down on the river’s estuary at Tilbury a port was being built for huge new container ships which did not need unloading in the traditional way. This had its effect on the docks, this in turn affected the Pool of London, and this affected the function of the riverside above London Bridge.

  Whether the coming of containerisation was the single, overwhelming reason that London’s docks were put out of business is a huge subject in its own right. Some would say that the failure to construct better road and rail links to dockland in the post-war period played a part. Others would also point to the dockers’ own intransigent refusal to adapt their working practices. All one can say is that it happened, and that no one, laying visionary plans in 1945, seems to have foreseen it, any more than they foresaw the arrival of the jet plane, or cheap mass travel, or the growth in car ownership, or indeed many of the other social changes of the 1950s and ’60s.

  The first dock to close, in 1967, was the East India Dock. Built for sailing ships in 1806, it had no space to accommodate the container trade. St Katharine’s Dock, by the Tower, and the London Dock at Wapping, which had both been losing money hand over fist, followed two years later. The others went the same way in the 1970s. About half of the trade went to Tilbury, but the rest went to other coastal ports in the United Kingdom or indeed to Rotterdam in Holland. London’s long history as a leading world port came to an ignominious end.

  Along with the docks and the Pool, the lighterage and river-wharf trade, which depended on these sources of work, declined sharply also. In the 1930s there had been some 9000 lighters on the Thames at London, often moored many deep in the centre of the river waiting for tugs and the tide. ‘They are ubiquitous,’ wrote a journalist in The Evening News2 in the approved telling-readers-in-Kensington-about-working-London style of the times: ‘They are as plentiful as lorries in the streets of dockland; indeed, they are the lorries of the river, which is the biggest street of all.’ By 1963, already, the number of lighters had been halved to 4600 and was going down all the time.3 In 1974 an Evening Standard journalist interviewed a group of lightermen at length and quoted one of them as saying: ‘Only six years ago the few wharves at Bankside that remained from the original thirty-two were moving 150,000 tons of cargo a year. And now this great God-given east–west highway has been allowed to die.’ The journalist described the empty warehouses rising ‘sheer and bleakly deserted from the river … only the names remain emblazoned proudly, like that of Ozymandias.’4

  By 1983, when the last dock, at Millwall, had been closed and the Isle of Dogs was beginning to be turned into a district of glass office towers, there were under a thousand lightermen left. By then, the identity crisis being suffered in riverside boroughs had well and truly come home even to the most bone-headed local authority. Already, six years before, the Borough of Southwark had had to admit that it had more than a million square feet of warehouse and manufacturing space standing empty. And, to add to the problem, a programme of office-building had been undertaken, there as in several other boroughs, which bore no relation to actual demand.

  The closure of businesses on or near Bankside was piecemeal, and not always directly or obviously related to the ending of water-borne trade, but it was inexorably part of the same general change. Post-war LCC plans had promoted these closures, but when the Greater London Council took over in the mid-’60s some attempts were made to revive the riverfront, with talk of ‘rebuilding the past’. In practice, this led to a narrow, local focus on light industry, often of a rather transient and uncertain kind, with old, large works being pulled down and replaced by smaller, flimsier constructions. Jobs were ‘created’ in the 1970s and early ’80s, none of which existed by the following decade. Because of this belated preoccupation with shoring up a way of life that had been allowed to collapse, ironically, planning permission was refused at this time to convert industrial buildings into offices, that is, into businesses of another kind. Handsome, solid Victorian manufactories and warehouses were thus destroyed without another use being sought for them, sometimes even in the teeth of well-informed and influential opposition. Neither the local MP nor John Betjeman was able to save the finest building at Mary Overie’s Dock.

  The centuries-old hat trade collapsed because people stopped wearing hats, but it would have been driven out of Southwark anyway by post-war restrictions on noxious industries, as was the equally ancient tanning trade. Many printing firms moved elsewhere, reputedly because printers were now a well-paid lot who tended to want to live in green suburbs. A worse loss to Southwark’s economy, and one that might well have been avoided, was that of the flourishing hop trade which had, for hundreds of years, linked Southwark with a rural heartland. After the war the traders found the local authority was making it too difficult for them to rebuild their warehouses, and so they relocated to a vast new structure in Kent. Fortunately the splendid Hop Exchange in Southwark Street just managed to escape demolition and now houses offices and a restaurant. The great Anchor Brewery, with its dray-horses and its yeasty smell, that had been such a feature of Bankside since the early eighteenth century, shut down in stages after Barclay Perkins merged with Courage in the 1950s. It became merely a bottling plant in the next decade, with some of its buildings let off for other uses. Someone who was a trainee engineer then at the Power Station recalls that there was ‘an egg-breaking plant’ there (which smelt just as much as the brewery had) and was staffed entirely by women. No doubt that too shut when the great food-distribution wharves folded below London Bridge, as did the Sainsbury food-processing works above Blackfriars Bridge. In the 1980s the whole large brewery area was cleared, for what was supposed to be new ‘workshops’ but which became a housing estate and offices. Fortunately, by that time, the Anchor pub, which had been scheduled to be demolished as ‘slum clearance’ after the war, was prized as a relic and was allowed to remain.

  Nearer to 49 Bankside, the City Lead Works by Southwark Bridge, with its tall chimney, had been derelict for years when it was finally demolished in 1981. Blue Circle Cement went too. The London Hydraulic Power works, next to the Power Station, shut in 1977. Blocks of unremarkable flats were built on the site and were named ‘Falcon Point’. As to the Power Station itself, for all its impressive presence and its much-advertised modernity, it turned out to be a white elephant of major proportions. It had to be built in stages so that the old one could be gradually p
hased out, and was not complete till well into the 1950s. Finally modifications were made in 1963, by which time Gilbert Scott’s ‘brick cathedral’ approach already seemed out of date. Ten years later the oil crisis drove up the international costs of petroleum, and an oil-fired power station became uneconomic: from then on it was doomed. In 1981 the plant was shut down. The Electricity Generating Board proposed selling the site for redevelopment, but no firm plans were made.

  For twelve more years it stood empty, its machinery rusting inside the great turbine hall, visible through the huge but dirty mullioned windows. Rain found ways to infiltrate and left puddles on the floor, birds got in too and colonised the interior, depositing their droppings and flying about as if in an enormous, dim aviary. It looked as if the place were only awaiting its end, just as the equally huge and unwanted hulk of the Albion Flour Mills had stood near by for eighteen years before finally being demolished, almost two centuries before.

  *

  By the 1970s, when Bankside was reaching its lowest ebb, derelict, silent and largely unfrequented, the Black family were no longer at number 49.

  They had flourished there for many years. Dan had suffered from asthma (one wonders if the Cement Company was partly to blame?) and spent some time in the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children, on the site of the mid-Victorian workhouse that St Saviour’s parish had shared with St George’s. But he remembers his childhood as happy. What would have been their nearest primary school, in Emerson Street,5 had been bombed during the war, along with St Peter’s church to which it was attached, so the boys went to St Saviour’s Parochial School. Now on the opposite corner of Union Street from the Cross Bones site, it was essentially the same school of which Edward Perronet Sells had been Treasurer over a hundred years before. Their mother went there too, as a teacher, for a number of years. Their father’s career advanced. The Blacks were a sociable couple, in the effervescent 1960s. Once more, as in the Stevensons’ day, the old house resounded with parties to which ‘everyone came. Tony Armstrong-Jones came.’ But at the end of the decade the marriage was more or less over. By 1971 the whole family, including their confidant, the ‘permanent uncle’ Geoffrey Davidson, had moved out of Bankside.

  Davidson went to teach dancing in Turkey. Three years later Mrs Black flew out there to see him to ‘give herself the strength to get a divorce’. On the return journey the Turkish DC10 airliner stopped off at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. When it took off again it was to crash into nearby woods, killing all on board.

  Dan Black, living elsewhere in south London, used to check up on his childhood home through the years. Every so often he would ring the bell, and talk to whoever answered it. But the place was to go, initially, through a very bad time.

  The general abandonment of Bankside seemed to mean that even the house at Cardinal’s Wharf, which had been rescued and admired, and photographed for posterity by a local antiquarian, was temporarily abandoned also. Even though GLC plans were afoot for the ‘Jubilee Walkway’, which would make its way gradually along the south bank of the river from Hungerford Bridge over the next twenty-five years and would eventually be extremely popular, for the time being Bankside seemed to be off nearly everyone’s mental map, disregarded and vulnerable.

  Malcolm Munthe had by then impoverished himself trying to maintain his various houses around Europe, and 49 Bankside had been placed in a Trust. One letter that has finished up in the bundle of Deeds, written by a Trustee to the Town Clerk of Southwark in 1970, suggests that the lease (presumably then still in the name of Dr Black) might be given up at the end of the year. The Trustee was enquiring about the possibility of a local authority grant for ‘redecorating those parts of the house that are of historic interest’. Not only were Wren and Catherine of Aragon offered as reasons, but Henry VIII himself and also Shakespeare were added to the optimistic list of former occupants. It was also hoped that money might be forthcoming to ‘mount exhibitions’ and ‘to open certain parts of the house to small parties of students and historians for whom the interior of the property would be of considerable interest … Without proper and interested care, this property might fall into an even worse state of repair than it has already.’

  There is no record of a satisfactory reply to this letter. Given the attitude of mind that prevailed in Southwark Council at that period, and the fact that Rennie’s London Bridge was even then being removed in favour of a pre-stressed concrete replacement, the Trust’s quest probably had no chance of succeeding.

  At all events, the house fell empty. It was then squatted – this was also the time of triumphalist and destructive student sit-ins – and vandalised. Some of the original panelling was destroyed, cannibalised as fuel in the house’s own fireplaces, and so were most of the doors and the barley-sugar banisters. Their removal, and that of some of the stairwell panelling, left the staircase effectively floating, anchored only to the remaining newel posts. By the time the intruders had been evicted for the third time late in 1972, the Munthe family felt desperate for a solution. It was Guy Munthe, Malcolm’s son and Axel’s grandson, who took the place on.

  Many years later, Guy was described by a journalist writing an article about the house as ‘sometime merchant banker, waiter, poet, actor, film director and Afghan mujahidin’. The last term apparently referred to a fleeting role, in disguise, as an Afghan war-correspondent. Guy always claimed to have received a ‘war wound’ there which had damaged his health, though those who knew him well thought that his declining health was due to a quite other cause. An eventual obituarist wrote: ‘He was a frequent escort of Princess Margaret and sex-change model April Ashley, as well as being the lover of gay mass-murderer Michael Lupo … A virtuoso on the musical saw, Munthe occasionally dressed as a tramp and made £40 or so a day, with his renditions of Vivaldi, Chopin and the Beatles … [He used] to be found circumnavigating Chelsea on his ancient motor cycle with pet parrot Augusta gripping the handle bars …’6

  But it is clear from the skill with which he rescued the house (its third rescue in forty years) that he had a core of taste and determination not apparent from the above description. It was, he recollected later, ‘in a ghastly condition … the curtains were so revolting I had to take them down with tongs’. His first action was ‘to clear the decks, paint everything French grey, and then start piecing the house together again’. He scoured London for replacement doors and for old pine packing cases he could use ‘faked up’ to replace the missing panelling. He salvaged some suitable banisters from another old house. By and by he hung hand-blocked wall-paper and reassembled a collection of fine furniture. Over the years he installed another bathroom, in the first-floor closet beside the lavatory; and re-organised the attic to create a separate flat there which eventually harboured a man-servant. He extended the back of the house slightly, putting in new ‘Queen Anne’ windows in the first- floor back room. He barred the old door into the alley and removed the corridor partition, restoring to its full dimensions the front room that had been the Blacks’ kitchen, which he opened up to the lobby by the stairs through an archway. He tackled the cellars, moving the kitchen down there as it had been in the nineteenth century. The part that had been the Pooles’ hidden sitting room in the Stevensons’ time became a display place for his collection of skulls. This included a begging bowl made out of the cranium of a Tibetan monk (according to him) and also some Maori shrunken heads. In the same idiom, he had the ground-floor dining room (which had in any case had to be largely rebuilt after the war) re-decorated by a French painter, André Dubreuil. Flaking Father Thames disappeared: instead were trompe I’oeil effects of ruined, vaguely Pompeian walls, broken pediments, urns, a guttering candle or two, creepers, and a very realistic key on a hook. Guy’s own comment on all this was “I’m not real. At least, not in everyday terms.”

  A good many visitors, chiefly male, passed through the house during Guy’s time there. Dan Black called once, when he happened to be on Bankside, and was hospitably invited to stay the night,
an invitation he declined.

  Guy left some time in the 1980s. It is not quite clear when, since for a while he seems to have alternated between London and Italy, where he wanted to breed Welsh ponies. He said that he was sick of London, which now had ‘no society … [just] millions of bloody people’. He told a journalist then that a house was ‘like a self-portrait; when you’ve finished it, you can hang it on the wall and look at it, or you can flog it and get on with the next’. He also claimed that he’d ‘never achieved a thing in life’.

  On the contrary, the repair and preservation of 49 Bankside after the ravages it had suffered was a considerable achievement, and monument enough. When he finally succumbed to his ‘war wound’, in Italy, the obituarist quoted above remarked, ‘Society will be the poorer for his passing.’ The obituary appeared under the title ‘The Death of the Good Guy’.

  *

  While Guy Munthe was living in his self-created world, things were at last stirring on Bankside.

  The Jubilee Walkway was being constructed bit by bit. A replica of the Golden Hind, the dauntingly small ship in which Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the world, was installed as a tourist attraction in Mary Overie’s Dock. But a much bigger initiative was the plan to rebuild a ‘Globe’ theatre on Bankside. The idea had long been cherished by the actor and director Sam Wanamaker. An American, who left the United States in the repressive McCarthy era, he became passionately attached to things British. The artist Geoffrey Fletcher, who was publishing books in the 1960s with drawings of buildings and corners that were soon to be extinguished (an invaluable record), was dismissive of Wanamaker’s dream. ‘I had a fear,’ he wrote in 1966, ‘that someone would build a replica of the Globe to mark the Shakespeare celebrations of 1964, a fear fortunately not realised.’