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Chertsey Abbey and its farms in the fifteenth century. For centuries religious communities were a great presence along the Thames valley, but almost all were reduced to ruins at the time of the Reformation.
Dorchester Abbey was one of the few survivors.
The river has always been a source of power, both sacred and secular. That is why abbeys, monasteries, palaces and parliaments have been erected beside it. top: the Tower of London and Lambeth Palace.
Windsor Castle and Westminster.
The bridges of the Thames are its most enduring human feature. There are 106 pedestrian bridges now spanning the river. Traces of bridges date from the Bronze and Iron Ages, and before that large rocks were thrown into the water in order to form a path. Above: old London Bridge, c. 1630; below: the opening of new London Bridge, 1831.
There are now nine railway bridges across the Thames. The Greenwich railway viaduct at Deptford (above) dates from 1836. The millennium footbridge, completed in 2000 and opened to the public in 2002, is the most recent of the Thames bridges. It links St. Paul’s and the Tate Modern.
The various sports and races of the Thames have a long history. There are accounts in the twelfth century of jousting on the river. Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race (above, c. 1820) is the oldest competition still thriving. In 1721 Thomas Doggett, an Irish actor, established a prize of a coat and silver badge for the winner of a race from London Bridge to Chelsea. It is contested by six watermen every year.
Henley Regatta in the 1900s. The first Henley Regatta, in 1829, was in fact also the first university boat-race between Oxford and Cambridge.
In the Edwardian period the Thames became the river of pleasure and of fashion. Everyone, from earls to cockneys, liked messing about on the water. It became an egalitarian delight. Above: pleasure boats at Pangbourne; below: Goring lock.
The era of cheap transport heralded the most popular period in the long history of the Thames. “Day-trippers” became the new sovereigns of the water.
Their reputation for violence was not altogether undeserved. When a system of locks was being created near Reading one of the members of the river’s management received a threatening letter in 1725 which ended “only your men must beene all drowned so teake warning before tis too late, for Darn you for ever if you come we will do it. From wee bargemen.” They do not often enter the historical record. But then once more, in 1804, the Thames Commissioners passed a by-law concerning complaints “by gentlemen and others, navigating on the river for pleasure, or otherwise” about the threats, obstruction and abuse that they suffered from the bargees.
The labourers of the river were in fact often condemned as savages. As Jerome K. Jerome put it, “the mildest-tempered people, when on land, become violent and blood-thirsty when in a boat.” The minutes of a parliamentary committee, considering a Thames Preservation Act in 1884, are indicative of a central aspect of public perception of the Thames:
CHAIRMAN: What proportion of the public do you complain of in this way?
SIR GILBERT: That is what I have often wanted to know; whether these people were naturally savages; or whether they become savage when they come on the river.
CHAIRMAN: What proportion of the public who use the Thames in this way possess this qualification of savages of which you speak?
SIR GILBERT: I distinctly say it is not the working class…I believe that it is a class of savages born on purpose. It is getting more every year that these savages use the river.
The toll-keepers and the lock-keepers along the river were also subjects of much interest and comment. The toll-keeper on the bridge was in particular open to innumerable insults from those who did not wish to pay the fee for crossing, originally a halfpenny for weekdays and a penny on Sundays. Under the cover of night his hand might be filled with mud or pebbles. A tramp would offer his halfpenny and demand that the gate be opened; as soon as it was unfastened a hidden party of tramps would make a rush and pass through. The toll-keeper was never a popular figure. The advent of the motor-car increased his sense of beleaguerment. When a motor vehicle drove over the Maidenhead end of Maidenhead Bridge, and refused to pay the 8 pence charge, the toll-keeper grabbed a cushion from the car and subsequently sold it for 3 shillings—returning only 3 pence to the owner after deducting certain expenses. This was the final provocation. At midnight on 31 October 1913, a crowd of five hundred people assembled on the bridge and encouraged workmen from the Maidenhead Town Council to tear down the offending gate. The toll-keepers of the London bridges were known as “tipstaffs.” They survived at their posts until 1879, when most of the London bridges were finally declared “free and open to the public for ever.”
Unlike the toll-keepers, the keepers of the locks have survived into our own time. There are forty-five locks on the non-tidal river, from the source to Teddington. The first pound locks were erected (with turf sides) at Iffley, Sandford and Swift Ditch in 1635. In that century there was a new emphasis upon utility and experimental progress, especially in relation to the circulation of commerce. There was no reason at all why the Thames should not be organised under the same set of principles. So other locks followed.
Anyone who passed through the lock was obliged to pay a toll, a fee that provoked enormous discontent. It was the old argument whether God and nature provided the water free from charge. The locks subsequently became known as “Thames turnpikes.” Then from the 1770s there was a spate of building at several sites along the river, the first of the new pound locks coming into service in 1772 at Boulter’s Lock. They were said to have been designed by Humphrey Gainsborough, the brother of the painter; if this is so, then he had more effect upon the vision of the riverscape than his more famous sibling.
The pound lock was, as its name suggests, an enclosed chamber or “pound” with a gate at either end. It was sometimes known as the cistern lock. It is the system still in use, although the equipment has been thoroughly modernised. The gates themselves must be capable of holding back thousands of tons of water. Buscot is the smallest, Teddington is the largest and Boulter’s is the busiest. On the south bank of the river at Teddington, the first lock upon the non-tidal river, there are examples of the little skiff lock (otherwise known as the coffin lock), the launch lock and the barge lock. The traffic along this stretch of the navigable river is now so heavy that they are almost constantly in use.
The lock-keepers of the last two centuries, unlike their counterparts in the tolling booths, were generally considered to be cheerful and amiable characters. Their setting, with the lock cottage surrounded by friendly blossom, was highly picturesque. They were associated with the sound of the swinging gate and of the groaning winch, with the lap and gurgle of the slowly ascending or descending water. A character in Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika (1962) is posed a pertinent question. “Once he was asked, what, in his heart of hearts he most wanted to be. After some thought, Ian replied that his true ambition was to be a lock-keeper on the River Thames. ‘There I would stand amongst my phloxes and snapdragons and watch life go by in an orderly manner.’”
They are the guardians or wardens of the river, keeping it in order and chastening its bounds. There are records of them dating back to the eighteenth century, with names like Caleb Gould at Hambleden and George Cordery at Temple; there were some women among them, Widow Hewitt of Cullum ferry and Widow Walters of Whitchurch being no doubt the relicts of past lock-keepers. In March 1831 it was decreed that females could no longer take on the task of lock-keeper, but the regulation seems to have been largely ignored.
Caleb Gould was something of a river legend. He possessed a large oven behind his cottage, and would sell bread to the passing bargemen. He wore a long coat with many buttons, and ate a dish of onion porridge every night for his supper. He may be the origin of the strange phrase of Mole in the first pages of The Wind in the Willows—“‘Onion-sauce! Onion-sauce!’ he remarked jeeringly…” The keeper of Shiplake Lock in the 1880s, kno
wn only as Mr. Sadler, was a bee-master, a maker of ornamental beehives and a grower of roses. He was a poet, on the twin themes of bees and roses, who also wrote verses on the life of the river Thames. As he said of the immediate riverine landscape:
From hence the town of Reading
Is just one field across,
’Mong other things so widely known
For biscuits, seeds and sauce.
Some lock-keepers were drowned while on watch. One, at least, was eventually confined to a lunatic asylum.
There were also the keepers, or the guardians, of the weirs. There have been weirs upon the Thames ever since humankind began to use its waters. There is an old English poem with the phrase “weary as water in a weir,” suggesting the weariness of long tenure. The people of the river tended to pronounce it “wire.” The weir is intrinsically dangerous. It is essentially a dam or fence built across the course of the river to interfere with the flow of the water; it may be used to divert or regulate the current. The earliest weirs were built of timber and brushwood, creating a primitive obstruction that raised the level of the water immediately upstream. Then these obstacles were built in two parallel rows or “hedges,” with an infill of chalk or stone. Then weirs took the form of wooden bridges, with a great log of timber or “cill” on the river-bed; between the bridge and the cill were placed vertical wooden planks, so that the whole device resembled a dam. When a craft wished to pass through, the planks were removed, thus causing a “flash” or “flush” as the pent-up water poured through the opening. The keepers of these weirs also demanded a toll, from boats or barges, before they would release the flood of water needed to carry the vessels downstream. They soon became the most hated figures on the water.
There were other types of weir. The one built for the mill directed a strong head of water towards the mechanism for the turning of the wheels. There was also the weir for fish, known as a “fishery hedge,” which took the form of a trap. The weirs for the miller and fisherman were indeed the most common in the earliest phases of the river, but from the beginning they posed a threat to navigation. So weirs were condemned by succeeding kings. In the reign of Richard I a charter was granted to the City of London in which it was stated that “all weirs within the Thames be removed, wheresoever they may be.” Eighteen years later they were again prohibited in Magna Carta. In the twenty-third clause of that document, sealed alongside the Thames, it was ordered that “all weirs from henceforth shall be utterly put down by Thames and Medway, and the whole of England, except by the sea-coast.” The frequency of these edicts suggests that they were never honoured. In the reign of Richard II an order was issued demanding the removal of all weirs from the Thames, but once more the law was not obeyed. In 1405 the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Woodcock, ordered the destruction of every weir below Staines, but they soon reappeared. Their ubiquity is a token of the extent to which the livelihood of the people depended upon the damming of the waters. Henry VI issued an edict that “no man shall fasten nets to anything over rivers” and Edward IV imposed a fine of 100 marks upon the owner of any weir. The measures were not effective. There is an intense conservatism about the Thames.
In the gentler waters upstream the weir often stood alone, whereas in the lower reaches it was characteristically accompanied by a lock. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was sometimes a cottage nearby for the use of the weir-keeper, although this residence was often employed as an inn for the weary traveller waiting to pass over the water. There was also often a primitive footbridge constructed over the river at such points. Eventually they became outmoded, and many unnecessary weirs were dismantled in the course of the nineteenth century. Many of them were replaced by locks, although locks and weirs are still often found adjacent to one another. Footbridges were also built upon the ancient site of “flash weirs.”
Weirs were such a familiar presence upon the river that they were given names that endured over many centuries—Old Man’s Weir, Old Nan’s Weir, Rushy Weir, Kent’s Weir, Ten-foot Weir, Winnie Weg’s Weir, Noah’s Ark Weir, Skinner’s Weir. There was a weir at Caversham that was known as “the Clappers.” But the most famous and ferocious weir along the Thames has always been called “the Lasher.” It is located on the river at Sandford, between Oxford and Iffley, and is notorious for drownings. There is beside it a stone obelisk that commemorates some of those who have been lost in its fierce waters. In the flood and cataract can be seen the whirling remains of trees, of old bridges, of debris, even of blocks of concrete.
The millers of the river maintained another immense and vital aspect of its business. Between Oxford and Staines there were twenty-eight mills, fifteen of them being named in the Domesday Book and the rest of almost equal antiquity. It is one more example of the conserving power of the river. The watermill itself is an ancient device; the first record of its use can be dated to 85 BC, in a poem by Antipater of Thessalonica. The earliest watermill appeared in England at some point in the fifth century, as far as anyone can guess, and for almost fifteen hundred years the “merrie miller” served his local community. He was not universally popular, however, in his efforts to divert or dam the water of the Thames for his own purposes. The threat to navigation was often serious, and it was not unknown for millers to demand payment before they released the flood. There was an old Arabic saying, “How could we compel the sweet water to turn a mill?” It might therefore be deemed indecent, or immoral, of the miller to harness the pure water of the Thames. Or, as an anonymous Thames poet put it,
How can that man be counted a good liver
That for his private use will stop a river?
It has been calculated that there were some forty mills on the Thames; this seems an under-estimate, but no more reliable figure is available. The Domesday Book itself records a mill in practically every village along the Thames upriver from Windsor. There were important mills at Marlow and at Hambleden, at Mapledurham and at Hurley, at Temple and at Marsh. There were flour mills at Deptford and at Lambeth. There were also the great enterprises of Hovis at Battersea, Spiller’s in the Royal Docks and McDougall’s on the Isle of Dogs.
The craft of towing may be as old as the peoples of the river themselves. It was the custom for gangs of men to wait at the wharves and jetties for the opportunity of towing a barge or other vessel along their particular stretch or “reach” of the river. One gang would haul on the line until the tow-path ended on their bank, and at that point they would pass the burden to another gang on the opposite bank. The tow-path was known to them as the “bargewalk.” Some of these gangs comprised as many as eighty men. They went barefoot and were accustomed to sink up to their waists in the icy water of the river, bearing on their shoulders a cable that might weigh up to a ton. The cables or lines themselves could reach a length of 400 or 500 yards (365 or 455 m)—a quarter of a mile to be hauled and handled.
It was hard and uncomfortable work and the towers themselves, known as “hauliers” or “haulers” or sometimes “scufflehunters,” had an unenviable reputation. There must have been haulers ever since cargo was first carried upon the Thames, and it was not until the latter part of the eighteenth century that the men began to be replaced by teams of horses or (occasionally) of donkeys. Like so many other people of the river the towers were accused of insolence, insubordination and foul language. On many occasions they were described as a “terror” to the riverside communities through which they passed. They drank a great deal, naturally enough, and they evinced all the rougher qualities of the river.
The haulers and the river workers in general were in particular known for their foul language. Of the bargees it was said, by a French traveller of the eighteenth century, that “they use singular and quite extraordinary terms, generally very coarse and dirty ones, and I cannot possibly explain them to you.” The oaths and sexual slang of the watermen became famous from the medieval period until the end of their supremacy upon their river. It became something of a tradition. In the Oxford English D
ictionary the term “water-language” is defined as “the rough language of watermen” with an appended reference to “water-wit.” Wit had little to do with it.
Foul language has in fact always been associated with the river. One of the terms for violence and obscenity in speech used to be known simply as “Billingsgate,” after the example of the porters and “fish-wives” who worked in that riverside vicinity. The “Billingsgate fish-wife” became a proverbial figure of gross abusiveness.
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