CHAPTER 3
The Time of the River
It is history, the river of history, along which most of the significant English events of the last two thousand years have taken place; but it is also the river as history.
The closer the Thames advances towards London, the more historical it becomes. That is its underlying nature. It has reflected the moving pageant of the ages. Its history is of course that of England or, rather, of the Britons and the Romans, the Saxons and the Danes and the Normans and the other migrating groups who decided to settle somewhere along its banks. Art and civilisation have flourished alongside it. Each generation has a different understanding of it, so that it has accumulated meaning over the centuries. In that process it has become a token of national character. The destiny of England is intimately linked with the destiny of the river. In mythic accounts it gives the island energy. It gives it fertility.
No one would deny the central importance of the Thames to London. It brought its trade, and in so doing lent beauty, squalor, wealth, misery and dignity to the city. London could never have existed without the Thames. That is why the river has always been central to English life, and can fairly claim to be the most historic (and certainly the most eventful) river in the world. You can learn more about the human condition in a voyage along the Thames than on any long journey over the oceans of the world. But water reflects. It has no form of its own. It has no meaning. So we may say that the Thames is in essence a reflection of circumstances—a reflection of geology, or of economics.
Yet there are continuities that suggest some deep inspiring life. There have been settlements of one kind or another in almost every spot. It has been the focus of human life ever since the first humans entered the region. So from the river we acquire an idea of human community. That is one of its most salutary features, so deeply imbued that we scarcely notice it. Along its banks the same methods of farming were used from the Bronze Age to the middle of the nineteenth century. The meadows were cut by long-handled scythes, and the heavy soil was ploughed; the wheat was sown and harvested, with the labourers cutting the corn with short sickles. The rushes were cut down in August, to be used for thatching; turf and brushwood were collected for the winter fire. These were ancient and persistent activities, helping to mould the landscape of the Thames while at the same time being moulded by it. Land divisions and field boundaries are a direct inheritance from our prehistoric forebears. The technique of building dry-stone walls has been preserved for some six thousand years. The river offers a deep sense of settlement and of belonging.
Time has a curious presence upon the river. The Thames does not live in human time. It lives in geological time. The figures in the earliest photographs, smudged and faint, are its human votaries already fading into invisibility. In The Historic Thames (1914) Hilaire Belloc writes that “you might put a man of the fifteenth century on the water below St. John’s Lock, and, until he came to Buscot Lock, he would hardly know that he had passed into a time other than his own.” John Betjeman described the whole river above Oxford as “medieval,” and there is a sense in which it remains a perpetual remembrance of time past. There was an old rhyme:
Ring out the bell from every steeple,
It makes no difference to boating people.
The people of the river are suspended in the river’s time, which has some deep affinity with a world that existed before the concept of time itself. Perhaps we will come to describe it as timeless. It runs in an eternal present that, according to philosophers, is the one part of time that does not really exist. But if it were to be stilled, it would lose its identity.
Yet, curiously enough, water has also been employed as a measurement of human time. The water clock or clepsydra was in use many thousands of years ago, and the first of these devices was a simple jar with a hole drilled through its bottom. But the Thames itself makes some claim to being “the place where time begins” since on its banks, at Greenwich, is the site of the prime meridian. A large red “time ball,” constructed in 1833, rises up a pole on the turret of the Observatory and falls at precisely 1 p.m. as the signal of Greenwich Mean Time. The great clocks of London are by the river. Big Ben was preceded, at Westminster, by a “tall pointed tower” in Old Palace Yard by the Thames; this was, according to Stow, “a tower of stone containing a clock which striketh every hour on a great bell…the same clock, in a calm, will be heard into the city of London.” There is the great clock on Shell Mex House. So the eternal river enters the human world.
The flow of the Thames has inspired another form of measurement. The Bridgettine convent at Syon and the Charterhouse at Sheen faced each other on opposite banks, and Henry VI declared that “immediately upon the cessation of the service at one convent it should commence at the other, and so should continue until the end of time.” These perpetually flowing orisons are a spiritual image of the water running between them. The Thames can become an emblem both of time and of eternity, the Janus-faced aspects of the river like the sculptured heads on Henley Bridge looking both upriver and downriver. In his book, The Stripling Thames (1909), Fred Thacker pronounced it thus:
Ancient river, changing never,
Symbol of eternity,
Gliding water, lapsing ever,
Mirror of inconstancy.
It is the perpetual paradox.
One stretch, in itself inconsiderable, can act as a microcosm of the national life. There is a spot at Brentford, from which the Brentford ferry once ran. It is just downriver from a patch of land on the north bank of the Thames that for several centuries was known simply as “Old England” it is now known on the maps as “Old Brentford.” Close by this spot that marks the old ferry, the Cassivellauni fought against the invading force of Caesar in 54 BC. In the same place, 834 years later, Offa held a Council of the Church with his bishops. In the same place, in AD 1016, Edmund Ironside drove Cnut and his defeated Danes across the Thames. This was also the place, in 1642, where part of the battle of Brentford was fought between the forces of Charles I and the Parliamentary army. If there are riverine locations imbued with the spirits of the past, then this is surely one of them.
That may be the reason why the course of the river has been employed as a clue to the course of history itself. The Thames summons up the ideals of the past, as they flow into the present and advance towards the future. When Turner sailed down the Thames, with his sketchbook upon his lap, he was moved to create images of Dido and Aeneas, of Pompey and Cornelia, all the symbols of the mythological and classical past congregating by the banks. It would not be too wonderful to see the mother of Moses, or the daughter of a Pharaoh, suddenly appear among the rushes on the banks of the Upper Thames. The water here shares the same antiquity.
In some of Turner’s sketches there is the sudden flourish of inspiration, the spontaneous improvisation of the moment when all the force of the riverine world breaks upon the paper; the paper is sometimes spattered with raindrops to emphasise his natural immersion in the scene before him. But then in some of the finished canvases Turner creates a vision of the Thames that can only be described as “timeless,” with figures out of pastoral mythology decorating what seems to be a classically inspired landscape. But it is still recognisably the Thames, near Richmond or near Windsor.
The Thames contains all times. At the beginning of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), the narrator swims in the Thames; but the river transports him into a distant future where he exclaims, “How clear the water is this morning!” Even in that comic sketch of river life, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), the diurnal life of the late nineteenth century “had been drawn aside” for a moment and the narrator enters the world of the early thirteenth century. There is hardly one novel or study of the river that does not create a dream-fugue of the past. It is a backward and melancholy presence even in London itself where, on a dark night by the banks of the Thames, it is possible to re-create the shapes of the older city looming beside the water. The river is the oldest thing in London, and it changes not at all.
One peer of the realm, and adorer of the river, Francis Noel Buxton decided to brave its waters on 25 March 1952. He wished to test his theory that the Romans had crossed or forded the river by what is now the Westminster embankment. He decided to cross the water on foot, with the hope or expectation that there would still be some kind of path below the swirling and muddy waters. He went at low tide, which he estimated at 5 feet 3 inches (1.5 m), while his own height was 6 feet 3 inches (1.9 m). But the river did not accord with his calculations. He went down after reaching the second pier of Westminster, and was compelled to swim the remaining distance. It was deeper and darker than he had imagined but Lord Noel Buxton described himself as a “poetical archaeologist” concerned to invoke the underlying terrain of the river around us. He had seen the marsh that lay beneath the edifices of Westminster, and enumerated the plants that had once grown there; he glimpsed in imagination the palace of Cnut and the little Saxon monastery that had once stood on the site of the great abbey. This is a form of poetic field-walking, to use another archaeological term, in which the traces of the past are there for those who have eyes to see.
That is why there is a technique of divination known as hydromancy or the “reading” of water. The thoughts of anyone, standing by the river, seem of necessity to go both forwards and backwards; they may be guided by the flow of the water itself but there is also some quality of the river that encourages such contrary motion. There is an old and continually used expression attached to the river. It is the sense of being “suspended in time,” a notion that suggests the slight sway backwards and forwards. It is the almost imperceivable motion of expectation and remembrance, poised between two worlds. And of course there are occasions when, if you gaze at one spot long enough, so that it seems to detach itself from the flow, then time stops. Is this the quality of timelessness? Or is it merely an absence, a gap, to which can be attributed no characteristic at all? It is a perplexity that presents itself on observing Turner’s The Thames at Eton, exhibited in 1808, where the dark masses of water gather light into themselves and present a darker world than any natural reflection.
It is worth considering that, when you set out upon the river, you become in some way detached from the mundane world. That world becomes more remote, as if in passing from land to water you had crossed some other boundary. The feeling is akin once more to that of being “suspended.” It may be that you have passed into a different time, or at least a different sense of time. For some, of course, the joy of entering the river is the sensation of “escaping” from time altogether. By general consent those who dwell by the Thames tend to be fatalistic, resigned to the wayward nature of the river and its sudden or occasional irruption into their lives. They, too, have become habituated to another level of time and transience.
Yet time twists. The river winds and meanders. The spirals within the current are a token of temporal turbulence, reaching from the surface to the deep water of the river-bed. The river elongates time. Those who wander by the tow-path live in a different time from those who pass in a car or train across the bridge. The river informs us that there are many zones of time. By winding so crookedly, northward and westward, it is in peril of losing itself in the labyrinth of its own making. At Penton Hook, between Chertsey and Staines, the river takes half a mile to travel a total distance of 20 yards (18 m). The watch or clock is useless here. By Blackwall the Thames crosses the meridian three times, an apt token of its waywardness.
The river is ever flowing but of course it is not eternal. It will cease, at that moment when the world itself ceases. But to human perception it is the closest imaginable approximation to everlasting process. In “The Brook”(1853) by Tennyson it is invoked in terms of eternity:
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
But this sentiment may provoke unease. The river ran before the creation of humankind, which has been endlessly contending with it from the earliest times—fording it, bridging it, riding it, harnessing it, damming it, diverting it, with the unspoken knowledge that the river will in the end persevere against any and every obstacle. It will always run.
The fourth Duke of Queensbury, known as “Old Q,” grew tired of watching the Thames from his house at Richmond. “What is there to make so much of in the Thames?” he asked. “I am quite weary of it, there it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same.” Longfellow wrote that on the broad river “the slow years sailed by and ceased to be.” Those who know the Thames well adopt a leisurely pace. The years are often said to “roll by” in implicit deference to the river. There are stretches where the water seems to move reluctantly. The Industrial Revolution passed by the Thames, and industry did not arrive upon its banks until after the First World War. There are still traces of archaic village life in the settlements beside the Upper Thames. Some villages—Lechlade and Cricklade, for example—seem to be preserved in their old age as if they were in implicit communion with the river that has always served them. Kenneth Grahame, the creator of Thames mythology in The Wind in the Willows (1908), remarked of one river village that it possessed a “holy calm” and a “natural life of somnolency” the wanderer by the river-bank is in turn a “loafer” and “through golden spaces of imagination his soul is winging her untrammelled flight.” That is for many the natural occupation of the river-wanderer, set free from the world of days and hours in order to soar among dreams. Those who dream by the river may dream of the future as well as of the past.
Yet it is hard to determine, in the life of the Thames, what is the beginning and what is the end. The concept of the hydrologic cycle, from sea to river, and from river to sea, poses a problem for those who exist in linear time. Can the Thames ever be said to really end? And, if so, where does this “ending” take place? Its end, theoretically, is the point at which it begins again. While it is continually going forward, it is also going backward. Isaac Rosenberg said of Stanley Spencer, who painted the Thames at Cookham on many occasions, that “his pictures have that sense of everlastingness, of no beginning and no end, that we get in all masterpieces.” It may be that Spencer was imbued with this quality of “everlastingness” by his life near the river. Spencer painted the images of biblical antiquity in the setting of the twentieth century. And the endless life of the Thames suggests that the nature of all things is inherently cyclical.
That is why the future of the river was often described in terms of its primordial beginning. Shelley once prophesied that “the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream.” In Richard Jefferies’s dystopic fiction, After London (1885), the future Thames is depicted as “a vast stagnant swamp.” In dreams of the future the Thames is often depicted as reverting to some primitive state, with the supposition that somehow it has always remained primitive. The river contains its beginning within its end. The historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, conjured up the spectre of a fallen world with “some traveller from New Zealand…in the midst of a vast solitude, taking his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” Here the river is a setting for some antique, almost primaeval, world of fallen stone.
If it seems to challenge the concept of time, it seems also to pose questions about the relation of time and space. Is the contingent space—the bank, the source—an aspect of the river’s flow? Can the river be said to have a spatial context at all since it is in continual free flow? Would it be possible, for example, to make a transparent sculpture of the river as it is at this precise nano-second? It would be a thing impossible. So what is its body? How do you recognise and determine its volume?
William Morris owned two houses by the river. One was called Kelmscott Hall, in Hammersmith, and its garden ran down to the Thames. The other was in the village of Kelmscot (the true spelling), near Lechlade, where the land ran down to the same river. Morris enjoyed contemplating the fact that the water which ran under his window at Hammersmith had already passed the meadows and the grey gables of his country house. Space here itself seems to become fluid, infinitely impressionable. For Morris the two spaces, more than 100 miles apart, partake of the same enchantment. That may be why the writers and dreamers on the river, such as Lewis Carroll, always have a curiously malleable attitude towards spaces and places. They make them infinitely small or infinitely large.
But was Morris really correct in believing that it was the “same” water at Hammersmith and at Lechlade? There is a case for saying that the water of the river is everlastingly new, fresh and ever renewed. There are some curious physical facts to bolster the metaphysical argument. The Thames from Lechlade to Teddington, what can be called the non-tidal Thames, contains approximately 4,500 million gallons (20,450 million litres). The amount of rainfall in that region has been calculated as 4,360 million gallons (19,820 million litres). It is new water, perpetually circulated, perpetually purified, perpetually replenished. But another curious statistical fact will cast a strange light on this “newness.” One drop of water, fallen in the Cotswolds, will have been drunk by eight different people before it reaches the sea. It is taken out, purified, and then reintroduced to the river. It can never be quite the same as it was yesterday, or last month, or a hundred million years ago. Or can it? It is the secret of its eternal renewal.
The true measure of the river may be found in the emotions that it summons up. For some who gaze upon it or wander beside it, it conjures images of their destiny, while for others it invokes the past. There are few people who do not enter some form of reverie when they sit by the flowing water, even if it lies only in the recognition of perpetual change. That is why, in books concerning the Thames, there is a continual lament about the encroachments of the present on the glories of the past. The Thames itself summons up this mood of regret.
Thomas Gray set the tone for river melancholy in his poem, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1742). Once more the recognition of endless change induces sadness. Turner’s paintings of the Thames are often concerned with embarkation, separation and withdrawal. In Dickens’s novels the Thames is often the scene of meetings and partings. Water is the melancholy element. Everything is dissolved within it. There are people who come to the banks of the river in order to experience forgetfulness. The sight of the river can obliterate thought, and kill observation. It can even erase memory. It absorbs everything. It can induce sleep and oblivion, as well as contemplation. The river Lethe still exists within the river Thames.
Yet the idea of the cycle, and of perpetual rebirth, may also be the cause for celebration. Even now it can provoke feelings of escape and of adventure. There is always something waiting to be explored around the next turn of the river. When the Thames rushes out towards the sea it seems to be filled with new life and energy.