CHAPTER 18

River Boat

There have been wherries and clinkers, hoys and onkers, houseboats and skiffs, yachts and motor-boats, tilt-boats and shallops, peterboats and eel-boats, punts and lighters, funnies and cutters, barges and steamships, coracles and canoes, scullers and colliers, barques and schooners, gigs and dinghies, whiffs and randans, rowing boats and dhows and narrow boats. They used to be made out of oak, mahogany and spruce; the fastenings were made with copper, and the bands with iron. They have sailed on the Thames out of ancient times.

When coracles were launched, on certain rivers in India, a sheep was sacrificed and blood sprinkled upon the new vessel. In Madras a pumpkin was placed under the keel of a new boat and squashed upon its entry into the water; the pumpkin was the substitute for a human head. The Solomon Islanders were accustomed to place the head of a slaughtered enemy in the prow of any newly built canoe. We will soon have cause to notice the connection between heads and the Thames, so that some domestic version of this custom cannot wholly be ruled out. This may not be a very long way from the ritual breaking of a bottle of champagne—the “neck” of the bottle is said to be broken—and there is some ceremony still to be observed in the launching of new craft upon the river. Boats are blessed and venerated, in advance of their journeys upon the waters.

The flat-bottomed barge became over many centuries the model for most of the vessels that negotiated the Thames, but there were modifications of the essential structure. The Vikings, for example, introduced a version of “clinker-built” vessels that have been in use on the river ever since; the “clinker boat” is one in which the external planks are overlapping. Large log-boats, or “dug-outs,” have been dated to the Saxon period. It is possible that some of them were employed as ferries. The shallow draught of such vessels was important; the log-boat became the punt, which in turn was enlarged to become the familiar “Western barge” with square-cut hull that sailed over the Thames waters. The simple “punt” or “flat,” now celebrated as the transport of Oxford and Cambridge, was thus originally a working boat of great antiquity. The “peter-boat” can also claim to be of hallowed age; it is a fishing boat, named after the patron saint of fishermen.

Medieval ships, of approximately the same design, have been reclaimed from the river-bed. One large boat, and a smaller “lighter,” were found in close proximity. The larger boat was carrying cereals and other produce; the lighter was transporting stone. It seems likely that they were involved in a collision. The ships of medieval merchants have also been recovered—some of them galleys with masts and oarsmen, and others known as “cogs” with a single square sail and very high sides. There were some twenty-eight types of medieval boat upon the Thames, according to Laura Wright’s Sources of London English (1996). There was the “skumer” or light ship and the “cock,” a workboat sometimes known as “the masons Cokke” or “the Carpenters Cokke.” The “farcost” or “varecost” was employed to transport stone, while the “mangboat” was used by fishermen. A “flune” was a small ship, and a “cog” went back and forth across the Channel. There was the “crayer” or “croier” or trading vessel, and there was the “shout” or “showte,” a flat-bottomed craft for the transporting of goods. The name itself probably derives from that of the Dutch eel-boat or “schuyt” known from the middle of the fourteenth century; the name persisted until the 1930s, in fact, and is some indication of the Dutch influence on Thames craft.

So the boats of the Thames flowed down from these originals. A statute of 1514 declared that “it had been a laudable custome and usage tyme out of mind to use the River in Barge or Whery Boate.” “Tyme out of mind” was a ritual phrase, meaning further back than anyone could remember. The barge was the most familiar craft upon the river, being a variant upon the prehistoric vessels that had sailed along the Thames. It was also synonymous with “lighter,” and a parliamentary Act of 1859 classified the lighterman as “any person working or navigating for hire, a lighter, barge, boat, or other like craft.” Barges were the work-horses of the river, sturdy, dependable and capacious. It was said of their draught that they could sail anywhere after a heavy dew or anywhere a duck could swim. Certainly, in the upper stretches of the Thames, they needed to negotiate the shallowest waters. They even reached as high as Eynsham, near the source.

They carried every conceivable cargo from stone and wheat to butter and manure and gunpowder. They even carried letters. They had a crew of two men and a boy, and the largest of them could carry cargoes of almost 200 tons (203 tonnes). The average load, however, was between 60 and 80 tons (61 and 81 tonnes). The barges on the middle and upper reaches of the Thames were known by their diminishing size as the “western barges,” “trows” or “worsers” the lighters were known as “dumb barges,” perhaps because they had no sails. There were “stumpies,” with no top mast, and “stackies” or hay barges. There were also estuary barges known as “hoys,” but the name was predominantly associated with Margate. The “Margate hoy” became famous as a conveyance, and is popularly supposed to be based upon the design of the Norman vessels that crossed to Hastings. They were not universally appreciated, however. A report of 1637 remarks that “the hoy, like the grave, confounds all distinctions; high and low, rich and poor, sick and sound, are indiscriminately blended together…I would not recommend it to ladies of great delicacy.”

There are engravings of barges being towed by ropes through empty riverscapes. The rope was fastened to the top of the mast, to keep it clear from obstructions on the river-bank, and two horses were generally used for the journey upriver. There are also engravings of barges complete with small iron funnels, which might suggest that they had bowed to progress and converted to steam. In fact the funnels were used for the smoke of the fire where the bargemen cooked their food.

There were a variety of barges, of all sizes, designed to cope with the riverine conditions in their particular neighbourhoods. The sails of all of them, however, were a distinct reddish-brown. The exact hue was created with a judicious mixture of cod oil, red ochre, horse fat and sea water. It became the colour of the Thames, to be seen in a thousand paintings. The barges were often gaily painted, with a variety of colour and ornament to accentuate their singularity. They endured for a thousand years, but then, like their sails, slowly mixed with the sunset. At the end of the nineteenth century there were some 2,500 barges still plying their trade upon the river; now there are approximately twenty of them left.

The other familiar and popular craft through the centuries was the wherry, which was noticeable for its shallowness, its broad stern and its sharp stem. It was “clinker”-built with overlapping planks, and was generally equipped with a wooden back-rest on which the boat’s name was emblazoned. It was technically a “ran-dan” ferry, because it allowed room for three people rowing at the same time, but it became the sole prerogative of the sometimes surly waterman. It was approximately 26 feet (8 m) in length, with a beam of over 5¹/² feet (1.6 m), and could hold between six and eight passengers—although there were many occasions when it was overloaded. “To take a pair of sculls” was to be rowed by a single waterman, while “to take a pair of oars” was to be rowed by two. They were employed for carrying light freight as well as passengers, and were often in use as ferries at various points across the river. They could move very quickly indeed, and in 1618 the secretary to the Venetian Ambassador wrote that “the wherries shoot along so lightly as to surprise everyone.” There are few, if any, wherries now operating on the river.

The oldest way across the river is by means of ferry. There were “accommodation ferries,” intended only for passengers, and “navigation ferries,” for livestock and goods as well as people. One of the oldest ferries carried animals and travellers from the north bank at Vauxhall to Lambeth; it is still enshrined in the name of Horseferry Road. There is also a Horseferry Place in Greenwich, from where the ferryman took his passengers to East Ferry Road on the Isle of Dogs. The ferry between Erith in Kent and the north bank of the Thames is first recorded at the beginning of the eleventh century; the route was eventually taken up by the Ford Motor Car Company in 1933 for the ferry between Erith and the Dagenham car works. There was a ferry between Dowgate, in the City, and Southwark on the opposite shore; it survived until London Bridge was constructed out of stone at the beginning of the thirteenth century. There were no less than four ferry services operating at Cookham, and the ferry at Twickenham was celebrated in song:

Ahoy! And Oho, and it’s who’s for the ferry?

(The briar’s in bud and the sun going down),

And I’ll row ye so quick, and I’ll row ye so steady,

And ’tis but a penny to Twickenham Town.

A penny can go a long way. It was reported, in the London Daily Advertiser of 23 October 1751, that “yesterday a coach and four being taken over in a boat at Twickenham Ferry, the horses took fright and leapt into the water drawing the coach after them.”

The ferry between Tilbury and the opposite shore remains still, with a history of many thousands of years; the remains of a causeway over Higham Marshes suggest that the Romans improved what was already an ancient crossing used by the prehistoric peoples of the region. The ferry from Higham to East Tilbury was instituted by the emperor Claudius, in AD 48, for the convenience of foot passengers and for cattle. This was succeeded in the sixteenth century by a ferry from Gravesend to Tilbury Fort. This was known as the “Short Ferry,” while the “Long Ferry” was essentially the journey from Gravesend to Billingsgate.

There is still a free ferry service at Woolwich, established in 1889. There is a ferry at Hampton, and another at Twickenham. The ferry at Bablock Hythe has been in existence for more than seven hundred years, and is first mentioned as “the ferry of Babbelak” in 1279.

The ferrymen were often appealing or reassuring figures. Many seem to have been old. In 1605 there is a record of Henry Dible, “an Antient fferry man” at Kew. In Fred S. Thacker’s study of the river, The Thames Highway (1914 and 1920), there are some 135 ferrymen listed with names like Linteboy and Scopeham, Pither and Tibble. Theirs was a profitable trade, and it was generally kept in the family for many generations. But their ancientness may be in part a reflection of the veneration in which they were once held. The ferryman is a figure of myth. In the legends of Mesopotamia, for example, the ferryman named Arad-Ea took the human souls across the river of death. In Egyptian myth the ferryman across the lake of lilies had to be placated if the human souls were to reach the island of life. In Greek myth Charon, the ferryman, was the son of Nyx or the night; he rowed the souls of the dead across the river Styx, and for his services the Greeks left a small coin in the mouth of the corpse. He was generally represented as an old man, with a scowl upon his face. He is the guardian of the mystery, the porter of hell, the guide who conducts us through death. It may be that the figure of Charon is indeed some metamorphosis of an ancient rite, when the bodies of the dead were lowered into the river. The ferrymen of the Thames have a powerful inheritance.