At the end of 1582 a Dutchman, Peter Morice, constructed an elaborate water-wheels or mills by the most northern arch of London Bridge, by means of which he was able to pump the river’s water into the dwellings of the City. Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) reports that the authorities of the City erected a “standard” or pump at Leadenhall “divided there into foure severall spouts ranne foure waies, plentifullie seruing to the vse of the inhabitants neere adioning” the supply of water “also clensed the chanels of the streets.” Already, however, the supply had provoked complaints. It was “a great commoditie” but “would be farre greater, if the said water were maintained to run continuallie.”
London Bridge Waterworks remained in operation until the Great Fire, when its wheels were caught in the general conflagration; but it was rebuilt and by the eighteenth century its four wheels, by each of the four arches nearest the City, were pumping approximately 1 million gallons (4.5 million l) each day. It survived well into the nineteenth century, when it was responsible for conveying some 4 million gallons (18 million l) of river water each day. It only finished its operations when the old bridge was itself demolished in the 1830s. By that time there were many other water companies vying for the trade in Thames water, among them the East London Waterworks and the West Middlesex Waterworks. Other water companies also took their supplies directly from the Thames, including the York works by Charing Cross.
There were perpetual complaints about the salubriousness and safety of the water, but the managers of the various enterprises repeated the claims—made by certain apothecaries at an earlier date—that somehow the water of the Thames had the gift of self-purification. It was “foul” when freshly drawn but, when allowed to stand, it became perfectly clear and “finer than any other water that could be produced.” This seems to have been little more than a convenient fallacy, designed to placate customers. There seems to have been some residual belief, however, in the sacredness of Thames water. One of its promoters declared, in 1805, that “Thames water being kept in wooden vessels, after a few months, often becomes putrid…and produces a disagreeable smell. But even when drunk in this state, it never produces sickness; therefore it is evident no harm or ill occurs to persons whose resolution, notwithstanding its offensive smell, induces them to drink it.” This was mere myth-making—or, rather, a restatement of earlier myth. A paper for Philosophical Transactions (1829), however, claimed that during a long voyage the foul water drawn from the Thames was “cleansed” by the fermentation induced by its own impurities. The association between contaminated water and cholera was to be made later in the same century.
Although half of London’s supply of water came from the Thames, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, its distribution was fitful and sporadic. It was drawn off by means of wooden pipes, and various regions of the City were given “water-days” when their supply would be turned on. It went into the basements of private homes, and the rest was pumped into public cisterns around which the citizens and citizens’ wives gathered with their leathern buckets. The introduction of steam-power, and of cast-iron pipes, materially assisted the process; but it remained notoriously inefficient until the last decades of the nineteenth century.
The quality of Thames water steadily deteriorated in the nineteenth century, too, as the sewage and effluent discharged into the river increased proportionately to the size of the population. There is a famous cartoon of 1827, entitled “MONSTER SOUP commonly called THAMES WATER” it shows a drop of that water as seen through a microscope, with a full range of “hydras and gorgons and chimeras dire” swimming within it. It was found by customers to be of a “brownish” colour, and quite insalubrious as well as unpalatable in its natural (or rather unnatural) state. The water was in fact a killer, as the diseases of the nineteenth century testify. It helped to spread the epidemic fevers that were so common in Whitechapel, Shadwell, Limehouse and elsewhere. The river once more replicated the condition of the city through which it ran. While the old edifice of London Bridge survived, its numerous arches acted as a form of barrier or cordon sanitaire; the fresh water upriver contrasted strongly with the odours and effluent of the tidal river. When in 1855 it was declared illegal to take river water “from any part of the River Thames below Teddington,” the health of the whole capital was improved.
The establishment of the Metropolitan Water Board in 1902 also instituted a regime of cleanliness and efficiency. The building of vast reservoirs was begun, most notably the Queen Mary Reservoir erected in 1928. It was capable of holding some 6,700 million gallons of water pumped directly from the Thames, from an intake at Laleham, and had an area of water surface covering 707 acres (286 ha). It was the largest water reservoir in the world. There began in 1991 the construction of the Thames Water Tunnel Ring Main; it forms a circle around London at a depth of 40 metres (131 feet), punctuated by sixteen great vertical “shafts” from Holland Park to Surbiton. It provides an average of 284 million gallons of water each day to almost six million citizens or “consumers.” This would suggest that each person uses approximately 47 gallons (213.6 l) of the precious substance. All of this water is taken directly from the Thames. The river is still the protector and nourisher of the city.
CHAPTER 31
Going Up the River
In 1555 a trader in Abingdon organised boating expeditions to Oxford, so that his passengers might see the burning of Bishops Latimer and Ridley at the stake; this is one of the first recorded instances of the “pleasure trip” on the river. In the seventeenth century women and girls used to scull downriver to Rotherhithe on each Trinity Monday; they took with them cannon and trumpets, in order to celebrate the services of the river pilots to the general community. The river offered freedom from the world of dry land, and has always been associated with pleasure and entertainment.
In particular the rising population of London throughout the nineteenth century helped to turn the Thames into a river of pastime and exercise. The upper parts of the river had been almost deserted at the beginning of the century, when the only traffic was that of the commercial barge, but a few decades later the life of the Thames was fundamentally altered. The Thames Preservation Act of 1855 recognised the new situation of the river, when it declared that the Thames “has largely come to be used as a place of public recreation and resort; and it is expedient that provision should be made that it should be preserved as a place of regulated public recreation.” If the river was “free” to everyone, then the enjoyment of its quietude was open to all.
The change can be dated with reasonable precision. It occurred in 1878 and in 1879. By the mid-1880s the river had become a “holiday” destination besieged by thousands of “trippers” who took advantage of cheap railway travel to journey to Henley or Richmond or Teddington Reach. This was the era of the amateur boater, and of the amateur angler who hired a fishing punt for his favourite stretch of the Thames. The decades of the 1880s and 1890s represented the most popular periods in the Thames’s long history.
On an average summer day in 1888, 6,768 people travelled from London to Henley on the Great Western Railway for a return fare of 3 shillings and 6 pence. A Thames observer of the time noted that the river was in a continual state of unrest and disturbance “from the wash and hurry and turmoil caused by hundreds of steam launches and the endless procession of every description of floating craft” from the light dinghy to the canoe and even the ubiquitous “houseboat.” It seemed that everyone wanted to be on the river, an atavistic movement that has had no parallel. It must in large part be connected with the transformation of the city itself into the first metropolis of the world, with a concomitant need among its citizens to escape into some presumed natural retreat. The phrase, “going up the river,” became part of the popular repertoire in music-hall songs and sketches.
This was the age of the regatta and the fête, the river picnic and the river carnival. There were firework displays, and concerts, and processions of every description. Photographs of Henley, t
aken in the 1890s, record a river so covered by small boats that the broad highway of the water bears more than a passing resemblance to Piccadilly at “rush hour.” In one boat are two ladies with parasols, being punted by a gentleman wearing a naval shirt; in another is a man with a pipe, and his dog; in a third is a sculler in the vest and trousers associated with that sport. At times of drought, the river was still employed as a place of entertainment; during one particularly dry spring and summer, in 1885, cricket matches were played on the bed of the Thames at Twickenham.
There were also river fashions observed with rigorous conformity by everyone for whom such things mattered. Gentlemen only appeared on the river if they were wearing white trousers with white flannel shirt, straw hat and striped flannel coat. For the Victorian lady, a dress or skirt of serge was essential; navy and black were deemed the most appropriate colours, complete with long suede gloves and the most elaborate hats. It was also considered advisable to wear woollen combinations, drawers, corset, chemise and bustle of whalebone. It is interesting, however, that jewellery was not approved. It was considered the height of bad taste to wear diamonds in a boat, perhaps on the supposition that the artificiality of sparkling gems did not consort well with the presumed naturalness of a day on the river. In the same spirit profuse flowers were considered to be an essential part of the décor of the Victorian houseboat; the Thames Tide and Fashionable River Gazette of 25 June 1892 recommended three rows of plants around the deck as well as hanging baskets of foliage, window-boxes, and large pots as an alternative to “costly furniture or valuable bric-à-brac.” The vestiges of civilisation were to be banished in favour of the natural touch of floral decoration. As a result some of the houseboats resembled floating gardens, which was precisely the effect intended.
This embrace of the natural world, however willed and theoretical, was also the context for the universal abhorrence of the steamboat among the ordinary enthusiasts of the river. Dickens’s son condemned them as the “curse of the river,” and in Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome declared that “I do hate steam-launches; I suppose every rowing man does. I never see a steam-launch but I feel I should like to lure it to a lonely part of the river, and there, in the silence and solitude, strangle it.” The new boats were called “river fiends” and “smoking devils.” They brought hordes of unwashed cockneys to the relatively sylvan setting of the Thames. They were denounced for their noise, created by the bands and revellers as much as by the engines, and for the continual churning of their “wash” that distracted anglers and wreaked havoc upon the banks. But the principal dislike was for the entrance of the nineteenth-century world of engine and machinery into the ancient landscape of the river; the steam-launch was, if anything, an emissary of the metropolis in regions that the city had not yet reached. It brought “the Smoke,” one of the catchphrases for London, in a literal sense. That was why it was unwelcome.
The festivals of the river were once its defining feature. In earlier periods, beyond historical reckoning, there were no doubt water festivals in honour of the gods of the rivers and the sea. In the modern period these ancient rituals have been turned into pageants and regattas and boating races of every kind. The first formal regatta upon the Thames took place on 23 June 1775, just in front of Ranelagh Gardens beside the river at Chelsea. A report in the Annual Register noted that
early in the afternoon, the whole river from London Bridge to the Ship tavern, Milbank, was covered with vessels of pleasure…Vessels were moored in the river, for the sale of liquors, and other refreshments…The avenues to Westminster Bridge were covered with gambling tables…Soon after six, drums, fifes, horns, trumpets etcetera formed several little concerts under the several arches of the bridge.
It seems, then, to have been something of a bacchanalia—which is the nature of the principal river festivities.
The first regatta was followed two weeks later by a second at Oatlands, near Weybridge, at which members of the royal family presided. These early regattas then became the principal summer festivals in many riverside settlements, such as Molesey and Cookham, and included punting and dinghy races, and competitive sports on boats such as tug-of-war and walking-the-pole. In the evening there were generally fireworks and musical entertainments. Visitors mixed with villagers, amateurs with professionals, and barrow-boy fruiterers travelled up from London with their hampers. The regattas were believed to have been copied from the Venetians, but the derivation is uncertain. It seems more probable that these river festivals of the eighteenth century, and later, represented a renewal or resurgence of water pageants and festivities that had fallen into disuse during the Puritan Commonwealth.
There have always been sports upon the water. Fitzstephen’s account of London, written in the twelfth century, records what was already an ancient game of tilting on the Thames. A target was attached to the trunk of a tree, fixed in the middle of the river, and in the prow of a boat stood a young man with lance at the ready; he was rowed to the point by several oarsmen at high speed, helped by the current, and then launched his lance at the target. If he succeeded in hitting it and breaking his lance, he was cheered. If he failed, and his lance was unbroken, he was thrown into the water to the laughter of the spectators who crowded upon London Bridge and the neighbouring banks. Since the tide here could be strong, two boats were at hand to rescue the unsuccessful contestants. There was also a tilting match between boatmen. Two wherries were rowed towards one another, with a contestant standing upright in the prow of each; they bore staves, flat at the fore-end, which they drove against each other. One, or both, would end up in the water. It was a contest that endured for at least five hundred years.
There were other contests. The University Boat Race, between Oxford and Cambridge, is sufficiently well known. But its popularity among the general population has perhaps been forgotten. It had been initiated in 1829 as a race from Hambleden Lock to Henley, and this first race led to the establishment of the Henley Regatta. The course was then moved to the stretch of river from Westminster to Putney, but within a few years the crowds at Westminster became too large; the course was in 1845 moved upriver, from Putney to Mortlake, and this venue guaranteed its success. By the middle of the nineteenth century it had become something of a cockney festival, perhaps surprising for a race essentially between what were known as “toffs.” On an early April morning every Londoner, and certainly every young cockney, seemed to be involved with the “light blues” (Cambridge) or the “dark blues” (Oxford). The day became a public holiday and the ribbons of variegated blue were fastened around the necks of costermongers’ donkeys, tied around dust-carts, fastened to the whips of cab-men, or worn as scarves by match-boys and other “gutter children.” It was called the blue fever.
The river was filled with steamers and barges and launches, packed with enthusiastic spectators, and the tow-paths pullulated with mechanics, shop-keepers, street-sellers and the whole panoply of London life. There are drawings and paintings of the railway and pedestrian bridges, packed to the point of danger, with the more courageous spectators perched high above the water on the parapets and arches. It had become a great popular ritual, and the combativeness of the medieval tilt-matches upon the river had been transferred to this university pursuit. It was part of what in the nineteenth century was known as “the battle of life,” and there was no reason why it should not be conducted on the Thames.
There is also a race that proceeds in the opposite direction, the 41/2 miles from Mortlake to Putney, known as the “Head of the River” race. It is conducted at the beginning of March each year, and comprises more than four hundred “eights” leaving the starting line at 10-second intervals. The course is generally completed in about two hours. It is in fact the largest rowing event in the world, although one still little known to Londoners themselves. With the hundreds of craft resting on the water, the Thames recovers its ancient life for a brief interval.
Four months later the Doggett’s Coat and Badge Race continues a tr
adition of racing inaugurated by the Irish actor, Thomas Doggett, in 1715 in commemoration of the accession of George I. Doggett himself was used to the services of the watermen, ferrying him from the theatres on either side of the river. It is the oldest as well as the longest racing competition in the world, re-emphasising the lines of continuity that mark the Thames of the twenty-first century. Six waterboatmen, members of the Watermen’s Company, race with the tide for the 5 miles from London Bridge to Albert Bridge; their prize is the scarlet livery of the company itself, together with a silver badge.
There are individual achievements also. In the summer of 1822 Lord Newry and five of his servants rowed without a break from Oxford to London in eighteen hours. In the summer of 1880 there was a race between a man and a dog. The course was set from London Bridge to Woolwich and the Illustrated London News reported that “man and dog plunged into the river at half-past three, cheered by a great crowd of spectators, and went down with the stream; they were eagerly watched by thousands of spectators.” The dog, known as “Now Then,” soon pulled ahead; the man himself gave up the race at Limehouse, with the animal some half a mile ahead of him. Its owner won the wager of £250.
Blood sports used to be associated with the river. Shooting parties were a regular feature of Thames life, for example, in the nineteenth century when any creature that moved was liable to be killed. There were human victims, too. Bare-fisted knuckle fights were frequently held on the banks of the Thames. There was a notorious spot by Thames Ditton, a common called Moulsey Hurst, where there were on occasion fatalities among the boxers. Bull-baiting and cock-fighting were the sports of Cricklade. Jousting was performed on London Bridge.
Thames Page 28
