CHAPTER 29

“And After Many a Summer Dies the Swan”

Swans exist in many other places, and can be found in locations as far apart as New Zealand and Kazakhstan, but their true territory might be that of the Thames. Here they have been celebrated and commemorated for hundreds of years. The mute swan or Cygnus olor has been evoked by Milton and by Wordsworth, by Browning and by Keats. This is the swan that floats in double form, swan and reflection, compounding the visionary poetry of the river; this is the swan whose arched neck is a token of its strength and superiority, the swan who is environed with majesty as it glides upon the waters of the Thames. The most renowned paean to the bird must be Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion (1596), which has as its refrain “Sweete Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song.” Here the birds float towards the river from one of its then graceful tributaries:

With that, I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe,

Come softly swimming downe along the Lee;

Two fairer Birds I yet did never see:

The snow, which doth the top of Pindus strew,

Did never whiter shew…

So purely white they were,

That even the gentle streame, the which them beare,

Seem’d foule to them, and bad his billowes spare

To wet their silken feathers, least they might

Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre.

The swan here is an image of purity and of innocence, which consorts well with the ancient concept of the river as a baptismal and cleansing force. That Spenser’s was not entirely a poetic vision is demonstrated by an earlier report in 1496 from the secretary of the Venetian ambassador in London: “It is a truly beautiful thing to behold one or two thousand tame swans upon the river Thames as I, and also your magnificence, have seen.”

Swans are not exactly “tame,” nor can they really be designated as “wild” birds. They can on occasions be ferocious, particularly in defence of their brood or of their territory, but the popular legend that one can break a man’s arm with its wings is surely apocryphal. They can actually be frightened away by the simple expedient of sprinkling water on them, as if it were not truly their element.

By some power of association, the fact that they are proclaimed by statute to be royal birds may derive from their majestic appearance. By 1295 the monarch had appointed a Swan-master or Royal Swan Keeper whose duty was to protect and conserve the swans upon the river. It was his responsibility to register every one of them; hence the festival known as “swan-upping” or “swan-hopping” which is still celebrated in the third week of July. It must count as one of the most ancient rituals upon the Thames. The royal birds in fact remain unmarked, but those that are marked are deemed to be the property of the Dyers’ and the Vintners’ Companies; the two guilds were granted that privilege by an unusually generous sovereign. The mark of the Vintners’ Company is two “nicks,” one on each side of the beak; this is the explanation for the once popular tavern sign, “The Swan with Two Necks” or Two Nicks.

In the time of Elizabeth there were what William Harrison described in The Description of Britaine (1587) as “the infinit number of swans dailie to be seene vpon this riuer.” In that period there were no less than nine hundred individuals or corporations who owned certain swans, most of the birds being employed for culinary purposes. Or, as Chaucer put it in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, “a fat swan lov’d he best of any rost.” They are now rarely eaten, the turkey on English tables having replaced the swan as a savoury dish, and are cherished rather than devoured. In a rectory garden at Remenham, near Henley, there is a simple grave with the inscription:

IN LOVING MEMORY

Died April 26

1956

CLAUDINE

A SWAN

A group of swans is known as a “game” of swans or, in Latin, “deductus cygnorum.” They have been surrounded by prescriptions and regulations ever since their first appearance on the river—in one story of their origin, it is said that Richard I brought them from Cyprus on one of his periodic returns from the Holy Land. In these earliest days only those who held property to the value of 5 marks were allowed to keep a swan. There was a strange penalty for stealing them. The ill-gotten bird was hung in a house by the beak “and he who stole it shall, in recompense thereof, give to the owner so much wheat as may cover all the swan.”

They make their nests in the eyots or aits of the Thames but, curiously enough, they do not necessarily court seclusion. They seem to be aware of their privileged status upon the river. It has often been attested that the birds, in advance of any flood, will invariably move their nests higher above the level of the encroaching stream. They are intensely territorial, and will defend their district with the utmost ferocity. Once they were said to live for three hundred years but, in a more empirical age, that calculated span has been reduced to thirty.

There is a curious story about the swans that must have the status of legend rather than of historical description. One Italian, Ulysses Aldrovandus, wrote in the sixteenth century that “nothing is more common in England than to hear swans sing…every fleet of ships that returned from their voyages to distant countries are met by swans that come joyfully out to welcome their return and salute them with a loud and cheerful singing.” It is a beautiful story but does not seem to accord with the general habits of the mute swan. But then there is the testimony of John Dickenson’s Arisbas, Euphues Amidst His Slumbers (1594), in which he describes “louely THAMESIS” as the “happy harbour of so many Swans, APOLLOS musicall birds, which warble wonders of worth, and chaunt pleasures choice in severall sounds of sweetnesse, pleasant, passionate, loftie, louely….” Could whooper swans, or, more likely, Bewick swanshave been identified here? But the sound of mute swans, in the formation of flight, their wings beating in unison, is very thrilling.

The swan in literature is also an image of the nude woman, and the nude woman bathing is in turn one of the fundamental representations of the river established upon the worship of the water goddess. For alchemists the swan was the emblem of mercury. The bird is thus associated with shifting elements and compounds such as the water of the river.

Swans are also associated with light, and with the properties of light. They contribute to the particular luminescence of the river and, as Ruskin put it, “if the reader would obtain perfect ideas respecting loveliness of luminous surface, let him closely observe a swan with its wings expanded in full light five minutes before sunset.” In that phrase, the “loveliness of luminous surface,” Ruskin has evoked something of the iridescent momentary enchantment of the river itself, so that the swan can truly be said to partake of its being.

The swan is usually joined by the other birds of the river, even though it seems to ignore them. In the area of Dorchester alone two hundred different species of bird have been identified and recorded. In the sixteenth century England was known as a nest of singing birds, but that phrase might more plausibly be attached to the Thames itself. There are, for example, the abundant sedge-warblers and also the less common reed-warblers. In the late eighteenth century the passages beside London Bridge were almost dammed by thousands of dead starlings, which for many years had made the bridge their home. In the nineteenth century, however, carrion crows were the most ubiquitous birds upon the river, where they crowded along the Oxfordshire and Berkshire banks. There is an observation to be made here. The birds of the sea do not sing. Many of the birds of the river do sing. It may be that they imitate the flowing sound of the river. Perhaps they are singing to the river. Perhaps gulls do not sing to the sea.

The humble duck or the common duck otherwise known as the mallard (Anas boschas), like the London sparrow, seems to be an inalienable part of its native landscape. On the Thames there are sub-breeds such as the Aylesbury Duck, the Rouen Duck, the Tufted Duck, and the Labrador or Canadian Duck, but they have also been joined by other species. Mandarin ducks have escaped from captivity, and are now to be seen along the river. Ducks are raucous, energetic and volatile in temperament. They seem to be the children of the river and, in the early twentieth century, they were believed to be under the special protection of the children of any Thames family.

There are more exotic breeds. In recent years flocks of green parrots have been seen along the banks of the Thames, particularly in the areas of Kew and Teddington, but their origin is quite unknown. A glossy ibis has been observed off Swanscombe Point, and a bittern seen in the Lea Valley. Certain birds have returned to the river after an absence of forty years, encouraged by the recent and relative purity of its waters. For some years there were no birds at all along the Inner Thames—except for the various species of gull that fed upon the sewage floating in the water. Within ten years, roughly between 1960 and 1970, the river was cleaned; after that period there returned some ten thousand wildfowl and twelve thousand waders. By the end of 1968 there were flocks of pochard observed at Woolwich; they had been unknown in these waters since the beginning of the twentieth century. The Thames within London, like the city itself, is capable of rejuvenation. The fish-eating cormorant has also returned, now that the Thames once more contains suitable nourishment. A programme to reintroduce red kites in the Chilterns has been successful; now kites drift in the sky above Henley.

It is a matter of dispute how far from the sea seagulls venture. It has been said in the past that swans and ducks give way to them at Twickenham, but in fact seagulls can be seen further upriver at Chertsey and Penton Hook. They have been steadily moving upwards, having made their first appearance beside the London bridges in 1891. They arrived in the severe winter of that year, and it soon became a Sunday recreation for Londoners to feed them with bits of bread or sprats purchased at a penny per box. So the gulls returned and multiplied and flew inland.

In 1658 a large whale was taken on the south bank near Greenwich. The phenomenon was recorded in the same year by John Dryden in “Heroique Stanzas, Consecrated to…Oliver Lord Protector”:

…first the Ocean as a tribute sent

That Gyant Prince of all her watery Heard.

A newsletter of that year reported that “it was said to be faeminine, & about 58 foot long and about 12 in thicknesse; She was first discovered neare Blacke-wall, pursued by hideous cries of watermen, strucke first by a fisher man’s anchor, throwne from a bold hand….” In his diary for 3 June John Evelyn observed that “It appeared first below Greenwich at low water, for at high water it would have destroyed all the boats, but lying now in shallow water encompassed with boats, after a long conflict, it was killed with a harping iron…and, after a horrid groan, it ran quite on shore, and died.” A more sentimental age witnessed a subsequent arrival. In January 2006, a northern bottle-nosed whale was seen in the Thames; it swam upstream as far as Chelsea, but attempts to retrieve it and return it to the open sea were frustrated by its sudden death from shock. Its skeleton was exhibited in 2007.

There have been other exotic creatures associated with the river. Richard I returned from the Holy Land with a crocodile, which on its arrival at the Tower promptly escaped into the Thames. Royal bears were also once granted access to the river; they were tied with a chain, and permitted to fish in its waters. In the nineteenth century polecats were observed. Seals have been seen as far upriver as Richmond and Twickenham, where they rest upon the river-banks. A porpoise has leaped beside the Houses of Parliament. In the summer of 2004 a sea horse was discovered in the estuary.

Where mammoths and giant bears, boars and wolves, once roamed, there are now the fox, the bat, the water vole, the otter, the mink and the deer. Otters are increasing in number once more. The beaver has gone altogether, however, despite the fact that Wiltshire was once known as the county of beavers. But the larger change in the species of the river has a further significance. It is the story of how a once grand and majestic river—sometimes tropical, sometimes moving through plains of ice—became subdued into the narrow bounds of its now familiar enchantment. What had been minatory, or overwhelming, has become sinuous and secluded.