Yet the hilarity was not shared by all Londoners. Those whose livelihoods depended on the river were reduced to the last extremity of want; the fishermen were in particular distress, although the watermen seemed to take advantage of the situation by charging people for the privilege of entrance to the fair. There was no employment for the vast army of labourers who worked in the wharves or docks and, since they and their families could not afford the lavish meats being cooked on the ice, no sustenance. Coal had become too dear to be afforded by the poor. Many perished of famine or of cold.
In the winter of 1715–16 another great ice stopped the Thames in its path, and a city of canvas soon emerged upon its frozen surface. A “great cook’s-shop was erected,” according to Dawkes’ News Letter of 14 January, “and gentlemen were as frequently to dine there as at any ordinary.” A party of four young men determined to walk up the middle of the river as far as they could, not using any paths hitherto marked out; the London Post recorded that “they still boldly went on, and none of them have ever since been heard of.” It was not clear whether the cold, or the river, killed them.
Between 1620 and 1814, in fact, the Thames came to a halt on twenty-three separate occasions. But when the thaws came, they came very suddenly. The ice broke up within a matter of hours; when the mass gave way it swept down the Thames, destroying any vessels in its path and severely damaging the bridges that impeded its descent. Some unfortunate people were reduced to lying upon the ice-floes as they careered along the river, while others jumped into barges that were still fastened within the ice.
The Frost Fair of 1814, when a thoroughfare was marked out on the ice and called City Road, was the last. The demolition of the old London Bridge in 1831 marked the demise of the freezing carnival. The removal of its piers, and all the obstructions that had accrued to them, helped to facilitate the tides and the general motion of the river so that it could no longer be rendered immobile. The building of the embankments also increased the flow of the Thames. It is supposed that the tidal river will never freeze again.
CHAPTER 28
The Ancient Trees
When the East India Docks were constructed in 1790, the remains of a great subterranean forest were found in a state of preservation; the trees were not scattered or dispersed but lay in regular order. Curiously enough, however, the tops of the trees were all turned southward as if they had been swept by some great convulsion of nature coming from the north. Other drowned forests, dating from the end of the last period of glaciation, have also been discovered at Grays, at West Thurrock and at Sheerness. Pepys noted in September 1665 that at Blackwall “in digging the late docke, they did twelve feet underground find perfect trees over-covered with earth, nut trees with branches and the very nuts upon them.” The stretch of river by Stoneness Lighthouse is known as “The Roots” because of the submerged forest within it. At Southwark have been found yew and alder that flourished some five thousand years ago. The workmen at Sheerness had to “burn” their way through trunks and thickets in direct contact with prehistory.
The Thames is a river of trees. They are part of every river panorama, an integral aspect of the riverscape. They are a token of its ancientness, and also of its sacredness. There is an ancient yew beside the river by Runnymede in Berkshire, known as the Ankerwycke Yew, which has been estimated to be over two thousand years old; it was more than 27 feet (8 m) in diameter when George Strutt measured it for his Sylva Britannica in 1826, and now measures some 31 feet (9.4 m). The yew by Iffley Church is believed to be older than the Norman edifice itself, and to have been planted in approximately AD 700 when there may have been a Saxon church on the same site above the river. There is also an ancient yew to the north side of Holy Trinity Church in Cookham. On top of the burial mound at Taplow, by the river, there was a yew some 29 feet (8.8 m) in diameter. It may have been planted by the Saxon warriors who mourned the passing of the king who lay buried there. Certain of the oaks of Windsor are believed to be a thousand years old.
Photo Insert Three
Howland Great Wet Dock, Rotherhithe, shown from an aerial perspective. A large artificial lake set among fields and marshes, with trees planted as windbreaks, it was 10 acres in extent and could hold 120 ships.
Perry’s Dock at Blackwall.
The East India Docks, in use from 1790 to 1967, were constructed on the site of a great subterranean forest of drowned trees.
The docks at Wapping. The tobacco warehouse at Wapping was celebrated for “covering more ground, under one roof, than any public building, or undertaking, except the pyramids of Egypt.”
Inside the Docks by Gustave Doré.
The Thames docks of the nineteenth century represented the greatest architectural and engineering enterprise of the period. They were the size of small cities. They housed great inland lakes. They were celebrated by poets and artists as well as by merchants and mariners.
Billingsgate is the most ancient of all London markets. The earliest recorded tolls for the vessels there can be dated to 1016, but undoubtedly there was a fish market on that site long before that date.
The Thames Tunnel was the first underwater tunnel in the world, begun in 1823 but not completed for twenty years as accidents and deaths marred the project at every stage. In 1870 it was converted into a tunnel for the underground system of the East London Railway Company, and now connects the “tube” from Wapping to Rotherhithe.
The Fleet sewer.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century all the detritus of London flowed into the Thames. The stench was dreadful. It was the centre of contagion and epidemic illness.
The building of the Embankment in the 1860s, at the instigation of Joseph Bazalgette, changed the natural health of the Thames. Beneath the great stone promenades he devised a vast and intricate sewage network that carried the filth out of London.
The supply of endless running water attracted many industries to the banks of the Thames. There were, in particular, hundreds of breweries beside the river. In riverine Reading alone, there were 21 breweries as well as 104 pubs. Above: a smock mill on the Thames; below: Lambeth, showing Goding’s New Lion Ale Brewery, Fowler’s Iron Works and Walker’s Shot Manufactory.
The trade of the London docks was the largest in the world. It was said that there was enough rum to inebriate the whole of England, and enough sugar to sweeten the entire Thames. Above: unloading barrels in the 1930s. Below: the river symbolises power in every sense. Lots Road power station was still in operation in 2002. This photograph was taken by George Woodbine on 26 November 1931.
The Thames Barrier Act was passed in 1972, and the barrier itself was completed some eleven years later. But despite its massiveness, it is not enough. The waters are growing ever higher, and a new barrier will soon have to be constructed to withstand them.
Canary Wharf has become a symbol of the regeneration of the riverside. It stands as a beacon or lighthouse on the borders of the East End, showing the way forward.
They are not ancient by the standards of the river, of course, but anyone who has walked through a primaeval forest will be aware of their power. That is why the trees and the river are inseparable. The woods of Cliveden Reach, rising in wave after wave above the river, are the descendants of the primaeval woods that once covered much of the riverine landscape. Biological analysis has proved the existence in the Thames Valley, in prehistoric times, of the oak and the alder, the hawthorn and the ash, the yew and the willow, and many other species. The remains of alder and yew, dating back some five thousand years, have been found in Southwark.
In the gardens along the Thames, sharing the fruitfulness of the terrain, are the weeping willow and the weeping beech, the horse chestnut and the acacia. In the woods and copses of the surrounding countryside are the oak and the plane, the lombardy poplar and the elm. The chalk hills and cliffs are covered with beech. The pollard willows, their tops lightly clad in silvery leaves, cluster along the river-banks. The pine and the cedar, the ash and the alder,
also flourish. The luxuriant elms seem ready to break with the weight of their foliage. In May the hawthorn spreads its blossom everywhere. The green islands, also called eyots, or aits (a name that may spring from islet), harbour willow and hawthorn, elm and sycamore.
The poplar has become one of the most typical of the Thames trees. It lends a formal touch to the natural surroundings, as at Bray where poplars stand in a row all of the same height and all equidistant from one another. They are of relatively recent growth, and the lombardy poplars below Henley are supposed to have been the first of their kind ever to be planted in England. They derive from the middle of the eighteenth century. Oaks are so plentiful on certain stretches of the river that in the nineteenth century they gained the title of the “Berkshire weed.”
The tree most often associated with the Thames, however, must be the willow. They are ancient trees, among the oldest of all, and appear with ferns among fossil remains. The Salix repens or creeping willow, flourished in the Thames Valley during the interglacial periods; the Salix herbacea and the Salix reticulata, the dwarf willow and the net-leaved willow, grew in the Thames region during the Pleistocene period. The weeping willow, Salix babylonica, is in fact of more recent origin. It was taken from China, not from Babylon, and was planted by the Thames at Twickenham in 1730. The story that Alexander Pope first introduced the weeping willow into the Thames soil, when he planted a twig found in a Spanish hamper, is apocryphal. It serves, however, to continue the connection of that poet with the river. One of William Morris’s most celebrated wallpapers, “Willow Bough,” came from his direct observation of the trees by the river close to his house at Kelmscot.
The white willow loves the river-bank. So do the weeping willow and the crack willow, which hang over it like Narcissus gazing upon his reflection in the water. The weeping willow in particular seems to be an image of the river’s fluidity and flow. In the book of Job these trees are described as the “willows of brook,” and in Isaiah as the “willows by the water-courses.” They have an especial affinity with water. A large willow will take from the river approximately 1,500 gallons a day (6,820 l), and can evaporate into the air more than 5,000 gallons (22,800 l) per day. Before Ophelia drowns herself in the brook she sings a song of the willow-tree, “sing all a green willow must be my garland,” and so the tree has been associated with mournfulness and death by water. Its branches seem to droop in sorrow and pity. It is said to weep. It is a watery tree, but it is like water persistent.
The willow known as the cane osier, or Salix viminalis, was cultivated on the islands of the Thames in order to provide the willow rods, or osier rods, that were harvested by the osier-cutters for the manufacture of fish and eel traps, for fencing, for baskets and containers of all kinds, and even for the defences of the river-bank. The osiers were cut in March, having been grown in beds known as bolts or hams, and then placed in trenches of water; when the sap rises in spring they bud and blossom, and in May they start fresh roots. At that point the osier-cutters began to peel their bark, and to draw forth the pliable rods. The lake dwellers of the Iron Age wove baskets out of osiers before the arrival of the Romans, and there is no reason to doubt that the early settlers by the river made use of the same skills. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it became one of the most important items of commerce upon the Thames, but the trade has now left the area.
It is still possible to see the innate harmony between the river and its trees; they flow and bend, they are both moved by the wind. The sombre green of the yew and the brightness of the beech are reflected in the moving water. The trees take their life and moisture from the water, and in turn afford shade and coolness. It is impossible to imagine the Thames without trees. There is not one river painting by Turner, with the exception of those that depict the estuarial waters, that does not contain trees. They often provide the life and focus of his riverine compositions, with their bright masses reflected in the water, their boughs and branches drenched in variegated green from the light ash to the deep oak. The foliage of the poplar and the willow are green on the upper side, pale on the reverse, lending a shimmer to the surface of his colours. In his paintings, too, they are sometimes dappled with light and with a succession of colours that induces a sense of elation. In his drawings, the fluidity and motion of the trees are evoked in his vibrant pencil or pen. The trunks, the boughs, the foliage have an exquisite flowing line as if they are in communion with the flow of the river itself. In Ruskin’s phrase Turner understood the language of the Thames and its surrounding landscape. The trees become the presiding spirits of the river, the guardians of the Thames who stand sentinel by its banks.
Their shade seems to have an especial property of coolness and of seclusion, as if the trees were the sanctuaries as well as the guardians of the river. They help to express that atmosphere of remoteness, and of seclusion, that the river itself induces. In particular Shelley, another poet of the river, celebrated the vast quietness and separateness to be found beneath the boughs of the riverine trees. In a poem he wrote at Marlow on the Thames, The Revolt of Islam (1818), he describes those hallowed spots:
…where the woods to frame a bower
With interlaced branches mix and meet.
Robert Bridges, in a poem that opens “There is a hill beside the river Thames” (1890), also depicts the riverscape where:
Straight trees in every place
Their thick tops interlace,
And pendant branches trail their foliage fine
Upon his watery face.
The idea here is of shadowy retreat, where the wood and the water are in harmony, helping to create an enclave of peace and stillness. It can be a place of secrecy, or of isolation. It can represent a kind of escape. For some people, too, the presence of the trees and water can induce a sense of some earlier and forgotten time before the encroachment of the human world, some sylvan and primaeval state that can never truly be found.
For the ancient people of the Thames region the tree shared the sacredness of water. An early Christian text declared that “No one shall go to trees, or wells…or anywhere else except to God’s church, and there make vows or release himself from them.” The “Shrew Ash” in Richmond Park, close to the Thames, was the place where witches were tried, but it was also venerated for its efficacy in cures. Until at least the middle of the nineteenth century, mothers with sick infants would come to this tree before dawn, and there wait beneath its branches until the sun rose.
There were also sacred woods beside the Thames. There was a grove or wood beside the church at Kemble; it is mentioned in the early Anglo-Saxon charters, and was believed to have been a place of human sacrifice. An ancient cross was placed at the intersection of roads in this vicinity, perhaps as a way of erasing the power of the old rituals. There are woods named the Hockett, Fultness Wood and Inkydown Wood. Quarry Wood, bordering on the river at Cookham Dean, is the original of Kenneth Grahame’s “Wild Wood” in The Wind in the Willows. Even the title of the book suggests its origin in the music of the ancient trees. In Grahame’s story this wood had once been the site of a great city that had been built to last for ever; but it had fallen, slowly subdued by the wind and the rain, until all of its traces had been lost in a wildness of forest trees and bramble and fern. Like the river, the wood erases the traces of human time.
Above the Thames at Dorchester, among a cluster of trees known as the Wittenham Clumps, stands the trunk of a beech-tree known as “the poem tree.” On its bark in 1844 was inscribed a poem that, over the passage of almost two centuries, has become indecipherable. It celebrated the ancientness of the riverine landscape and the disappearance of its human settlers:
Such is the course of time, the wreck which fate
And awful doom award the earthly great.
It may not be expert verse but it has become part of the literature as well as the landscape of the Thames; the words of the poem are equivalent to the marks that the ancient shamans made in the barks of trees to share th
eir sacredness.
Some trees remained landmarks for generations of river people. Their names and locations survive in designations such as Nine Elms, Pear Tree Wharf, Crab Tree Dock, Orchard Stairs, Willow Wharf and Cherry Garden Pier. The names of several riverside villages also derive from the presence of the trees. Bampton, for example, comes from the Saxon beam-tun or “tree enclosure.” Curiously enough, in the early twentieth century, it was still called “tree town.” Thus do old associations survive even through changes of language. There was an old elm by the river-bank at Teddington; it was known as “One Tree,” and stood upon a mound just where the river curved towards the town. There was a lofty clump of trees upon a mound on the south side of the river, beyond Lechlade, known as “Faringdon Folly” here, it is said, King Alfred left this life.
They are landmarks because they are deemed to be perpetual, with a life as prolonged as that of the river itself. But this is in part an illusion. The destruction of trees has always been the object of complaint in the literature of the Thames. It is as if all of nature were affronted by their precipitate removal. One of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s most famous poems, “Binsey Poplars,” suggests this theme:
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
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