The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  He crosses to the other side of the room and opens the top half of a divided wooden door. We look down at the river directly below. The smell of the Thames (mud, diesel vapour, salt, something animal) rises up to meet us. On the opposite side of the river London’s history basks in the sun: docks, half-renovated warehouses, office blocks, a church, a couple of disused landing stages. Launches plough a muddy path upriver, rocking the boats moored alongside the police pontoon and leaving a brief flicker of white in their wake.

  It is low tide, and directly below the doorway the shore lies exposed. All the way along the banks, the decrepit evidence of past business lies drying in the sunshine. Seeing it is a reminder of the Thames’s erstwhile significance. To the majority of Londoners now, the Thames has been reduced to a tourist attraction, a slime-grey demarcation line between north and south. The river doesn’t matter any more than Buckingham Palace or the London Eye matter; it’s just a part of the scenery. Most people could spend their whole lives in London and see no more of it than the angular blue ribbon flowing through the Underground map. But those who look beyond the water see more than just a costly stage set. The Thames provides the clue to the capital’s existence, its reason for being, its good fortune and its bad luck. It gathered up all the prizes of empire and distributed them along its shores; from here, Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen sailed out to the four corners of the world searching for trophies to bring home. It represents the history of England’s relations with the outside world, its strength as a seafaring nation and its skill for money-making. Along the banks is the evidence of all the river’s pasts; the banks and wharves and warships, the trading places, the seats of government, the places of power and of power-generation, the law courts, a couple of palaces and enough churches to satisfy a multitude of schisms.

  For many people, the Thames also represented a final resting place. Jeffries points downwards. ‘This,’ he says, with only a trace of relish, ‘was probably once the site of Execution Dock. And there, over by the bend in the river, is Cuckold’s Point.’ I look down into the mud and the soft slop of the water. For over four centuries, convicted pirates were brought here from Newgate Prison, laid down on the banks, and staked—still alive—to the foreshore at the low-water mark. When three tides had risen and fallen over the newly drowned man, he would be taken up, tarred, strapped into an iron bracing and hanged from one of the gibbets at Cuckold’s Point. Those who were lucky would be hanged before they were staked to the foreshore. The point of all this ghoulish ceremonial was not so much to avenge the state—though the state did regard the loss of revenue from piracy with particular bitterness—but to act as a deterrent. Sailors passing up and down the river were meant to see the corpses bound and tarred, and to reflect again on their choice between a brutal legality and a worse fate. In his novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s hero Marlow acknowledges the river’s ambiguous history. ‘“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth”.’

  Jeffries, meanwhile, turns back from the window and begins showing me around the room. As he pauses by a musty portrait, someone appears from downstairs to inform him of a phone call. Jeffries vanishes, and I stand there looking up at the portrait. Patrick Colquhoun appears the model of an upstanding Regency gent: calm, sober-suited, with a temperate gaze and a strong jaw. He is wearing a black frock coat, a plain stock, and a forthright look in his eye. He doesn’t look like someone who paid much attention either to clothes or to ceremony, but then nor does he look like a radical. Colquhoun looks like what he was: a man who could pass comfortably in both the upper-class law courts of London and the most degraded corners of the Victorian criminal world. He also looks recognisably Scottish.

  Born in Dumbarton in 1745, Colquhoun built a business as one of Glasgow’s tobacco lords before becoming its Lord Provost. In 1789 he moved to London to become a police magistrate. Galvanised both by the poverty he saw and by the indifference of the middle classes, he began by setting up a series of soup kitchens in Spitalfields. It did not take long for it to become evident to Colquhoun that soup kitchens were not—and never would be—enough to make a difference. Around the Thames in particular, crime had become a rich and settled way of life for a sizeable minority of the population. The rudimentary police force which existed at the time was inadequate and underfunded; Henry Fielding’s establishment of the Bow Street Runners in 1748 had provided a first step towards curbing the capital’s crime, but had made no special provision for river criminals or the particular types of low-lifes who existed round the shores of the Thames.

  As Henry Mayhew did several decades later in his book London Labour and the London Poor, Colquhoun set out to interrogate his subject in person. Instead of providing a dry second-hand polemic culled from the account books of shipping companies, he walked down to the shore in search of his subjects. The result was his treatise on ‘The Commerce and Police of the River Thames’, first published in 1800. As he noted in the introduction, the interested reader would find within its pages, ‘a species of systematic delinquency, which, in its different ramifications, exhibits a degree of turpitude as singular as it is unparalleled’.

  Colquhoun began by detailing the numbers of people then working on the river: ‘Journeymen Trunk and Box Makers—450, Working Lumpers &c—1,400, Pilots—200, Bumboatmen—155, Coal Heavers—800, Fishermen of various classes—1,250, total workforce 120,000’. Having calculated the total value of vulnerable property passing in and out of the Thames docks at around £75 million, he calculated the losses suffered by the major shipping companies to theft, fraud and embezzlement at £10 million over the course of the eighteenth century. He estimated that a quarter of London’s population depended directly or indirectly on the river for its livelihood, and that some 10 to 20 per cent of those individuals had gone to the bad. Given that there were rarely less than a thousand ships moored in the Port of London at any one moment, and that Thames trade contributed a significant percentage to Britain’s annual gross domestic product at the time, crime on such a scale was becoming a serious threat to the Empire.

  The culprits were legion. As Colquhoun acknowledged, it was the Thames’s very success as a port which made it so difficult to impose effective law and order. Existing resources—customs houses, wharves, landing places—were often strained to and beyond breaking point. Since there was only 12 foot of navigable water from Gravesend to the Pool of London, large ships—including East Indiamen carrying the most valuable cargos—were forced to moor further downriver near Deptford. Smaller vessels would often have to wait days or even weeks for a berth to become available. With so many centuries of such heavy use, the Thames itself had become a foul trickle, regarded by all as London’s open-air gutter. Its banks were pocked with grimy hiding places and smuggler’s dens, while the shoreline still held the skeletal gibbets of another age. The water itself stank. Forty years after Colquhoun paced the banks, one writer claimed that:

  Whoever swallows it, quaffs what is impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster, and charged with the contents of the great common-sewers . . . the drainings from dunghills and laystalls, the refuse of hospitals, slaughter-houses, colour, lead, and soap works, drug-mills, gas-works, the minerals and poisons used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of dogs, cats, rats, and men; and mixed with the scourings of all the wash tubs and kennels within the bills of mortality. And this is the agreeable potation extolled by the Londoners, as the finest water in the world!

  The rich might wish to make money from the Thames, but they did so partly in order to be able to afford to live as far away from it as possible. The bankers and shipowners extracted gold from mud and then got out. It was the poor who actually co-existed with the river.

  Unsurprisingly, the opportunities for lawlessness—both out on the water and onshore—were plentiful. According to Colquhoun, there were almost as many people profiting illegally from trade on the Thames as there were making an honest
living. Every individual in contact with the river was, in some sense, a wrecker, since every inch of the Thames represented one vast vessel waiting to be robbed. In fact, the river’s pickings were so rich that a complete sub-genus of wreckers had evolved. ‘It is not unlikely,’ Colquhoun speculated,

  that the disposition to pillage Commercial Property while afloat derived its origin in no inconsiderable degree from the habit of Smuggling, which has prevailed ever since Revenues were collected . . . the mind thus reconciled to the action, the offence screened by impunity, and apparently sanctioned by custom, the habits of pillage increased: others seduced by the force of example and stimulated by motives of avarice, soon pursued the same course of Criminality . . . New Converts to the System of Iniquity were rapidly made. The mass of Labourers on the River became gradually contaminated. A similar class upon the Quays and in the Warehouses caught the infection, and the evil expanded as Commerce increased.

  Whatever the reason, river crime was running out of control. But before he began proposing any solutions, Colquhoun set about detailing the different criminal species with an almost zoological exactitude, parting the waters to reveal a thriving interdependent network of organisms previously unrecognised by science.

  In addition to those with legitimate jobs who worked as criminals on the side—lightermen and game-watermen who received and transported stolen goods, and coopers, who took a cut of the contents of any barrel they were supposed to be repairing—there were also those who made a living solely from crime. Of these, Colquhoun particularly noted, ‘the river pirates—the most desperate and depraved class of the fraternity of nautical Vagabonds’. Most operated by selecting a target, reconnoitring it by day and then returning at night. After dark, they appeared armed and en masse, overpowering the captain and night-watchmen and stealing everything the ship had to offer.

  As often as not, the pirates would make straight for the anchor chains, aiming not only to disable the ship but to sell on the chains to maritime supply stores for a decent mark-up. As with more conventional forms of wrecking, the river pirates were not particularly scrupulous in their methodology. If cutting the anchor chains meant that the ship drifted aground on one of the many sandbanks or shoals of the Thames estuary, then so much the better; it simply made it easier prey. If that ship was then wrecked by storms or through collision with another vessel, then that too could prove a blessing: the wreckers would get the timbers, the rivets, the spars and the sails as well. The Thames Estuary was, and is, a fickle passage to navigate. Prone to silting up, littered with old ordnance and exposed to all the North Sea traffic on its way to the Channel, it was not a place for the inexpert or unwary. The pirates and river wreckers took advantage of captains’ naivete and of the likelihood of conditions upriver being so crowded that it made escape all but impossible. Much of the time, they had grown so bold that captains could do little but stand back and watch them loot. ‘One instance in particular occurred a few years ago,’ wrote Colquhoun, ‘where an American and a Guernsey ship were plundered . . . by the actual removal both of Anchors and Cables in the view of the Masters of the Vessels, who . . . learn[ed] the fact from the River Pirates themselves; who, as they rowed off, told them that they had got their Anchors and Cables, at the same time wishing them a good morning.’

  The pirates were not choosy about the vessels they selected, and in many cases made a speciality of cutting lighters with valuable cargos adrift, following them until the tide carried them to a suitable sandbank, and then wrecking them at leisure. Naval impressment during the Napoleonic wars had helped to diminish their numbers a little, but Colquhoun seemed confident that they would return in greater force with the outbreak of peace, ‘when so many depraved characters will . . . be discharged from the Navy and Army’.

  Next were the ‘night plunderers’—‘who prefer idleness to labour and indulge in every kind of low extravagance . . . they are in general exceedingly depraved and audacious’. Operating in much the same way as the river pirates, they would bribe their way into collusion with the night watchmen guarding the ships, before robbing their targets and passing the resulting goods on to a network of ready fences. Their methodology had, however, evolved one step further from that of the river pirates; as well as robbing ships at anchor, the night plunderers would occasionally take a crewing job on board one of the more valuable ships. When put in charge of stowing cargo in the hold, they would ensure that the most valuable items were placed closest to the hatches. On a given signal, the plunderer’s accomplices would silently board the ship, pick up the marked items and abscond over the side again without being seen. As far as Colquhoun was concerned, the particular villainy in this crime was that many of the thefts were not always discovered until the ship reached its final destination. When the unloaded cargo was checked against the original bills of lading, the discrepancies would become obvious. It was then the captain, not the criminals, who stood to lose both his reputation and his livelihood.

  Similarly, the day plunderers, or ‘heavy-horsemen’, would be contracted to work on the boats as ‘lumpers’ or loaders, and would supplement their daily income by pilfering as much as they could from the cargo. Most were not much more than petty burglars, who—if Colquhoun is to be believed—spent much of their time wandering the docks dressed as one-man supermarkets. ‘Many of them were provided with an under-dress, denominated a Jemmey, with pockets before and behind: also with long narrow bags or pouches, which, when filled, were lashed to their legs and thighs, and concealed under wide trowsers. By these means they were enabled to carry off Sugars, Coffee, Cocoa, Ginger, Pimento, and every other article which could be obtained by pillage, in considerable quantities.’

  At the bottom of this unsociable heap were another group of organisms, the human plankton of Thames life. Colquhoun lifted each specimen out with cautious verbal tweezers. There were the mudlarks—‘aquatic itinerants . . . a class of low and miserable beings who are accustomed to Grub in the River at low water for old Ropes, Metals and Coals’, and the ‘rat catchers’—who would go on board at night ostensibly in order to set traps, but actually to act as informants and accomplices to the night plunderers or the pirates. ‘They have even been accustomed to convey the Rats alive from one ship to another,’ claimed Colquhoun, ‘as a means of receiving payment for catching the same animal three or four times over.’ And lastly there were the ‘scuffle-hunters’—‘composed of that lowest class of the community who are vulgarly denominated the Tag-Rag and Bobtail . . . considered the Scum of Society . . . they generally come prepared with long aprons, not so much as a convenient habiliment to enable them the better to perform their labour, as to furnish them with the means of suddenly concealing what they pilfer.’

  In addition to those who profited directly and actively from river crime, Colquhoun detailed a sizeable group of individuals who benefited passively and indirectly. They included manufacturers of rope and twine who bought raw hemp from the night plunderers, ‘female receivers who keep houses of ill-fame’, known for seducing the men and then stripping them of their stolen money, and publicans who gave credit to lumpers in exchange for a cut of the stolen cargoes. From a total population of around 37,000 crew members and suppliers working on and around the ships in the Thames, Colquhoun calculated that around 9,600 of those were ‘delinquent’. Additionally, there were an extra 10,850 pirates, plunderers, receivers and mudlarks who had no official job or role, but who nevertheless derived their livelihoods entirely from the river.

  Unsurprisingly, the few desultory attempts to impose order along the Thames’ length had either proved futile or farcical. Night-watchmen posted on boats were often no better than animated scarecrows, since most were so decrepit, infirm and badly paid they could be bribed or overpowered with ease. Mounted watchmen were often responsible for patrolling several miles of unlit shoreline without backup or security. Customs officers were as corruptible as everyone else, and were often bought off with the promise of a well-placed commission. Many had
purchased their position, and—when they chose to work at all—could look forward to forty-five holy days and bank holidays a year, plus a working day of no more than three hours.

  Pressmen and crimps, feeding the Navy’s fathomless appetite for mariners, operated right out at the furthest edges of legality. To fulfil their quotas, most used kidnap, abduction, and the broad-minded interpretation of the phrase ‘able-bodied’. Strictly speaking, they were only supposed to take fit young men, preferably with some existing knowledge of the sea. But by the second half of the eighteenth century, the Admiralty’s demand for recruits had become so voracious that the press gangs had to employ more imaginative tactics. Instead of seizing men as they left the riverside pubs or brothels, the press men began breaking into houses, raiding the asylums, and overpowering the lawfully employed. Tailors in particular were often taken, since their habit of sitting cross-legged while sewing gave them the same landsick bandy-legged gait as true sailors.

  Protests at the press gangs’ abuses were frequent—not only from the abducted men, but also from their intended clients. In 1759, one naval captain complained that his latest batch of pressed men included an idiot, a sixty-year-old ex-soldier with a debilitating case of gout, and an assortment of landlubbers who were all either deaf, incontinent, lame, rheumatic or senile. Captains with foresight and time to spare proved cannier, and learned to use impressment’s power to their own advantage. In 1800, Lord Nelson was reputed to be searching the Kent coast, ‘to procure from among the smugglers in the neighbourhood pilots who were particularly acquainted with the French coast . . . ’