CHAPTER 44
The River of Death
In the spring of 2004 an exhibition was held on the south bank of the Thames, in London, that excited much public attention. It was entitled “Missing,” and it contained the photographs of some eighty people who had simply disappeared. No more appropriate spot could have been chosen for such an exhibition. The Thames is a river of the disappeared. In the registers of the National Missing Persons bureau, out of the first eighty unidentified bodies noted, some fourteen had been found in or beside the Thames: “found in the Thames near Erith…found in the Thames near the Millennium Wheel…found in the Thames at Rotherhithe…found in the River Thames near Hammersmith Bridge.” And so the litany goes on. It is not at all unusual in the history of the river.
There is some force, perhaps what Dickens called the attraction of repulsion, that still calls many people to the river. There have always been vagrants and beggars sleeping or living beneath the bridges, or huddled in the “pulpits” or passing ways on the bridges themselves. The poorest outcasts of both sexes are known to have employed the seats of the Victoria Embankment, from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge, almost as soon as it was constructed. Their enduring fascination with the river is a matter of speculation. Has it to do with the prospect of time, thankfully, passing? Has it to do with the possibility of immersion? Or does it represent the more mundane desire to be near others suffering the same distress and discomfort? The Thames may call out to the forlorn and to the neglected because it has always been touched by sweat, and labour, and poverty, and tears. The solitaries and vagrants are moved by the same need and loneliness. The river is a great vortex of suffering.
Its darkness has meant that it has been associated with the devil. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were men in the pageants who dressed themselves as demons, and spouted red and blue fire from their mouths across the waters of the Thames. “Terrible and monstrous wild men they were,” Stow wrote, “and made a hideous noise.” There was a river-front building on the marshes near Barking, close to the foreshore at Galleons Reach, that was known at the end of the eighteenth century as “the Devil’s House” it was long in a ruinous condition, and was used as a shelter for cattle. Just above Radcot there was a stretch of the river that was known as “Hell’s Turn,” the meaning of which remains unclear.
The Thames is in many respects the river of the dead. It has the power to hurt and to kill. The figure of the Thames wherryman, and that of the ferryman crossing the river at Lambeth and Gravesend and other localities, seems ultimately to derive from Charon. There were steps known as Dead Man’s Stairs at Wapping where, by some accident of tide and current, the corpses of the recently drowned tended to congregate. There is a U-bend between the Isle of Dogs and Deptford, where the drowned may be delayed in their course towards the sea. It was once known as Deadman’s Dock, the name given because of the number of corpses that were found there when the dock was being constructed. If the body missed these fatal junctions, and drifted down in its decomposing state past Lower Hope Reach, then there was no hope. It would disappear for ever. There was also Dead Man’s Island, lying near Tailness Marsh in the estuary, so called because the corpses of cholera victims were buried there; the bodies came from the prison ships, or “hulks,” that were moored in the vicinity during the Napoleonic Wars. Bodies from more recent periods have also been found there; one of them, according to a local waterman, “had shrimps coming out of his eyes, his mouth, his nose….”
It has always been a treacherous river, with its hidden tides and dangerous currents silently working beneath the calm surface. It is extraordinary how quickly a person can go under, sucked down as if grabbed by unseen hands. In the areas beside the old docksides the water would sometimes simply appear, without steps or wharves, and the unwary pedestrian would have to start back violently to escape falling into its depths.
The river has always possessed an attraction for suicides, but certain stretches seem most favoured. In the late eighteenth century a French writer, Pierre Jean Grosley, explained that the banks of the Thames were crowded with wharves and manufactories in order to shield the river from the population considering “the natural bent of the English, and in particular the people of London, to suicide.” There is a recent example of one young woman who travelled from Paris in order to drown herself in the Thames.
Water is indeed the melancholy element, with its appearance of transitoriness. The water dissolves and passes. It is the material out of which the house of despair might be constructed. There is always the sense in which the flowing water induces repose and forgetfulness, but what if that repose and forgetfulness were to be indefinite? What if the charm of isolation and withdrawal were to attach itself to the swirling dark water itself? This is the way of the suicide.
From the medieval period there are several accounts of suicide in the river, despite the fact that it was considered to be a mortal sin deserving hell. That is why the suicides were always considered to be insane. Alice de Wanewyck, for example, “drowned herself in the port of Dowgate, being non compos mentis.” Other Thames suicides were “in a mind other than their rightful mind.” There were of course many medieval citizens who found their quietus in the river for other reasons: many were simply killed, and thrown into the water. There are also accounts of drunken Londoners slipping down the water-stairs and falling into the river.
Most of the suicides in the Thames have remained anonymous and unlamented—it was perhaps for that reason that they chose the river in the first place—but the historical records have documented a few individual cases. In his diary for 24 February 1666, Pepys records that “going thro’ bridge by water, my waterman told me how the mistress of the ‘Beare’ tavern, at the Bridge-foot, did lately fling herself into the Thames, and drown herself…it seems she has had long melancholy upon her and hath endeavoured to make away with herself often.” In the 1680s the son of Sir William Temple, then Secretary of War, hired a waterman “to shoot the bridge” in other words, to go beneath London Bridge at the time when the tide downriver turned into a torrent through the arches. Just as his boat was crossing beneath a narrow arch, Temple flung himself into the water and immediately sank. It was discovered later that his pockets were filled with stones, but they were hardly necessary. Hundreds of tons of water drove his body to the bottom where it rotated, rose and was then beaten down again. If he had survived the fall he would no doubt have become enmired in the mud at the bottom of the river which acts as a kind of quagmire for those who land upon it. If that did not kill him, then the cold of the water would have destroyed him within six or seven minutes. In the history of London crime there is not one recorded example of a criminal swimming across the river to escape from his pursuers. It is too daunting a barrier.
The water itself is black; even modern divers can be disoriented by the fact that there is no visibility. At the point where Temple jumped, the waters were known as the “maelstrom,” especially in the vicinity of the middle arch, which according to George Borrow in Lavengro (1851) was “a grisly pool which, with its superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have leapt into its depths—I have heard of such things…” The darkness and the turbulence of the river exercise a fascination over the unwary, so that you might as it were commit suicide out of instinct rather than determination. If the water in London were clear, and delightful, then it would be much more difficult to jump.
It is also often suggested that deep and silent water provides a potent source of fascination for those who intend to take their own lives. In earlier ages of the world still or stagnant water was considered to be the abode of evil spirits, and perhaps enough of them linger in the quiet stretches of the Thames to lure the unwary to their deaths. Suicides do not normally wish to be seen, or to be found. They wish to make their exit. It is a way of disappearing, perhaps without trace and even without pain. It is possible to imagine the discomfort, but not the pain, of drowning. There are some who claim that it is a peaceful death; but how would they know? It was said that women floated face up, and the men floated face down, but this was no doubt a myth of the river-men.
In 1756 Stephen Duck, a country poet who became a target of ridicule, flung himself into the Thames behind the Black Inn at Reading; perhaps his surname had drawn him towards the river. Another eighteenth-century poet, William Cowper, had chosen the same path to oblivion. He confided later that
not knowing whether to poison myself, I resolved upon drowning. For that purpose I took a coach, and ordered the man to drive to Tower Wharf, intending to throw myself into the river from the Custom House quay. I left the coach upon the Tower Wharf, intending never to return to it; but upon coming to the quay I found the water low, and a porter seated upon some goods there, as if on purpose to prevent me. This passage to the bottomless pit being mercifully shut against me, I returned back to the coach.
The “bottomless pit” is itself a good phrase for that stretch of the Thames in London.
The nineteenth century was, however, the most fruitful for suicides. A young footman at Hurley became depressed after the death of his own brother by drowning; before he threw himself into the river he dressed in a bathing costume, so that his clothes might be left to his relations. He sought companionship with his brother through a similar death, as if the water were the harbour of lost souls. In another suicide at Hurley, a young man tied a 56-pound (25-kg) weight around his neck before plunging into the water. There are times when the simplest token is the emblem of death. When the hat of a retired stationer was found floating down the river at Bray, the worst was feared; his corpse was later reported to be “comfortable” at a public house. The cap of a baker’s boy was found in Bray weir, but his body was not recovered until three weeks later.
Newspaper reports from the nineteenth century furnish a number of similar stories. There was a brewer’s labourer who, owing his employers £13, stood in the winter river at Marlow until he died of exposure. Another labourer, having lost his child, somehow managed to bind his own hands and feet before throwing himself into the river. There were two suicides recorded at the Thames in Windsor within a short time of each other; one was the former manager of a theatre, and the other was a butler. The director of a London laundry, before jumping into the river near Windsor (his body was later retrieved by a Windsor eyot known as Monkey Island), had said to his daughter, “Look into my eyes, you can see death there.” There is some sense here of the reflections in the river—you can perhaps look into the water and see death there.
Windsor was in fact a favoured spot for those who wished to die. A young woman was witnessed running towards the Thames at Windsor shouting out “William!” and “God help me!” The phrases of other suicides have also been recorded—“Leave me alone. I want to die. I am mad!” “Let me die! Let me die! No one wants me. I would be better out of the way!” “Take a look at my face. You will never see this face again!” Many putative suicides have been dismayed by their rescue, and have tried to enter the water again at once. It exerts a profound fascination for those who wish for death. There are others who will jump again and again, having been retrieved on each previous occasion. There are watermen’s songs about drowning, particularly when they concern the fate of star-crossed or betrayed lovers. These tend to be local in sentiment and in inspiration.
The paradigmatic death of Ophelia has emphasised the poetical nature of suicide by drowning, and those who rush to their deaths in the Thames seem to have been in part guided by tradition. It may be that there is comfort to be found in joining the legion of other Thames suicides, and that somehow the awful oblivion of an individual death is sanctified or hallowed by association. Even in the comic narrative of Thames voyaging, Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome cannot help reciting the story of one who was then known variously as a “wronged woman” or a “fallen woman,” and describes her eventual death in the Thames.
She had wandered about the woods by the river’s brink all day, and then, when evening fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river that had known her sorrow and her joy. And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.
There is for Jerome something devoutly to be wished about this fate, as if the prospect of death within the Thames offers comfort and consolation. And that may be so. We suspect that for many thousands of years it was used as a gateway for the dead to their final destination. Who knows but that we are simply following our ancestors?
To the “dead houses” along the banks of the Thames were brought the bodies which, in the words of the ubiquitous posters, had been “found drowned.” It is estimated that three or four corpses were recovered each week, although it is an open question whether some deaths were accidental or induced, rather than deliberate. There was a swing bridge by Old Gravel Lane, in the London Docks and close to St. Peter’s Church, which was also known as the “Bridge of Sighs” because of the suicides there. There is no apparent reason for the incidence of self-slaughter on this spot, unless it be the sheer weight of example. After Waterloo Bridge was opened, in the summer of 1817, it was known variously as “Lover’s Leap,” “Arch of Suicide,” “Bridge of Sighs” or “Bridge of Sorrow.” It was at times a relatively isolated place; the penny toll, issued at either end of the bridge, deterred many pedestrians. In the middle of the nineteenth century the average number of suicides each year from this vantage was thirty. In the latter part of the century there was an especially designed “jumpers’ boat,” moored by the bridge, with a roller across its stern to help the recovery of the subject in the water. This was a necessary precaution since the act of retrieval could itself be dangerous; the putative suicide, struggling, may pull the rescuer into the water. This boat was succeeded by a floating police station.
It has been suggested, in fact, that there is a quality in the immediate neighbourhood or in the local atmosphere of Waterloo Bridge that encourages suicide. When the German poet, Heinrich Heine, came here one late afternoon in 1827 he recorded later “the black mood which once came over me as toward evening I stood on Waterloo Bridge, and looked down on the water of the Thames…At the same time the most sorrowful tales came into my memory.” This is perhaps a testimony to the power of the dark Thames. He went on to declare that “I was so sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes. They fell down into the Thames and swam forth into the mighty sea, which has already swallowed up such floods of human tears without giving them a thought.”
Charles Dickens was fascinated by the suicides along the river and by this bridge in particular. In one of his essays as an “uncommercial traveller” or wanderer, “Night Walks” (1860), he crossed Waterloo Bridge from where
the river had an awful look, the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the water.
For Dickens the river was inextricably bound up with the consciousness of death.
Curiously enough the eldest son of Charles Dickens was also intrigued by the nature and extent of Thames suicides, and interviewed the toll-keepers on Waterloo Bridge as the experts upon the subject:
This is the best place! If people jump off straight forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they don’t kill themselves drowning, but are smashed, poor blighters, that’s what they are…But you jump awf from the side of the bay, and you’ll tumble true into the stream under the arch…what you’ve got to do is mind how you jump in.
As the opening scenes of Our Mutual Friend (1865) testify, there was also a thriving trade in retrieving the corpses of the dead. Gaffer Hexam goes out at night in his small boat to find anything “which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form” and to pick up what spoils he can from the bodies and clothing of those who were sufficiently buoyant to be found floating in the dark water around Limehouse. There is, as is always the case with Dickens’s urban scenes, more than an element of truth in this account. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the authorities on the Surrey side of the river paid 5 shillings (a crown) for every body recovered while those on the Middlesex side paid only half a crown. That is why most of the corpses were taken to Surrey. Here they were photographed and removed to the parish “dead house” rather than to the police station. When the unclaimed corpses were eventually buried, on the order of the coroner, their clothes were preserved to assist any later identification.
Just a few yards away from Dead Man’s Stairs, at the headquarters of the river police in Wapping, can be found the Book of the Dead, or “Occurrence Book,” the registry of those whose bodies have been taken out of the river. In the entry for 2 July 1966, for example, there is a report that witnesses
noticed an elderly, respectably dressed man on the pier…A few seconds later they looked again and were in time to see the man splash into the water, where he drifted down with the ebb-tide…During the time the man was in the water he was in constant view of the rescuers who did not see him struggle or hear him call out.
On 26 May 1948, under the heading of “Suicide Alleged,” is a report of a witness: “I heard someone shout ‘Goodbye!’ I looked around and saw a man’s legs disappearing over the port side aft.” A river policeman added that: “I launched the dinghy and rowed out to try and save him but, as I was holding him, he struggled so violently that he pulled himself free from my grasp and before I could catch hold of him again he sank.” He did not wish to be rescued. A little while later a “gent’s brown soft felt hat was found floating by.”
There are certain days that prompt suicide. Thus on the last day of 1986 there were two suicides within hours of each other. At 8:34 a.m. the police “recovered the dead body of a female from south foreshore” then at 13:15 they “recovered the lifeless body of a male at Battersea Reach off Falcon Wharf.”
So there was no diminution of numbers in the twentieth century. They had become known as “jumpers,” a slight word for so momentous an act, or in the mid-twentieth century as “stiffs.” In the long period of river pollution, however, those who jumped were as likely to be poisoned as to be drowned; a stomach pump was part of the routine panoply of rescue equipment. In 2002 the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was joined with the River Police and HM Coast-Guard in order to deal with those who had jumped or fallen into the Thames. Within the space of one year there were almost four hundred incidents. There are more suicides in winter than in summer. It is a curious fact, perhaps, that the majority of those found dead in the Thames—and that could be identified—came from beyond the borders of the capital itself. The mother of one young suicide, living in Streatham, told a Guardian journalist in December 2004, “There was no reason for him to be there. The river is haunted—it draws people in.”
Some other examples of suicide in the last century are no less unusual. One man was found with £3,000 strapped to his chest, so that he could pay for his own funeral. In another incident the body of a man was found weighed down with a dictionary, and almost £200’s worth of coins. On another occasion a man who had weighed himself down left a series of claw-marks upon the mud on the bankside; he had attempted to change his mind. Two young girls—two sisters—tied themselves together before throwing themselves into the water. The explanation for their conduct is not known. Some young men were struggling in fun beside the bank of the Thames, and threw one of their number into the river; the man in the water grabbed hold of the first solid object he could find. It was a corpse. I am indebted for these fatal details to one of the most interesting books on the Thames published in recent years, Another Water (2000) by Roni Horn.
Bodies decompose more quickly out of the water, when the hair and skin become particularly fragile. But they are exposed to assaults within the tidal river, also, where they can be buffeted by boats and attacked by seagulls. Dickens noted that the bodies of the drowned are seared and discoloured as if they had been the victims of fire rather than of water.
The coroner, when asked to pronounce judgement upon the drowned, will tend to deliver an “open” verdict; there can never be any certainty, in such cases, that the deceased had intended to take his or her own life. It is in any case a wise precaution, since there are not only the bodies of suicides in the river. It has always carried traffic in the victims of murder. There were the mass slaughters of ancient battles when, according to one fourteenth-century chronicler, the river was dyed red with blood. But from the earliest times the Thames was the most convenient and expeditious way of depositing corpses. The medieval city records contain many cases of persons discovered dead in the water. In the sixteenth century it was reported that “there were robberies and murders done nigh Radynge [Reading], and divers men found slain and drowned in the Thames.” The highwaymen and footpads who frequented the high road from Hounslow Heath to Colnbrook, in the seventeenth century, used the river near Datchet as a convenient dumping ground for the corpses of those whom they had robbed and murdered; these were placed in sacks, weighted down and deposited in the water. As a result this stretch of the river became known locally as “Colnbrook churchyard.”
In the eighteenth century the Thames and its London tributaries became notorious as a means of dispatch. There was a tavern overlooking the Fleet river, or Fleet ditch as it had essentially become, where the criminal fraternity gathered. Here, in a cellar room, was a trap-door that opened immediately above the water; it was used as a refuse disposal point for the corpses of those who had been inveigled to this place and met their death. In the early nineteenth century the bodies of rival gang members were often found in the river, too, and thirteen of their number were recovered from the Thames in one year.
The vast majority of these crimes remained unsolved, no doubt because the Thames itself acted as a great dissolvent of motive and locality. The fact that few murderers were caught, however, might lead to the irrational suspicion that the river was itself somehow responsible. There can be no doubt that in the newspaper reports of the nineteenth century, the Thames itself was often depicted as a baleful presence in the sagas of guilt and crime. There were popular catchpenny volumes with titles such as The Secret Thames and The Mysterious Thames Murders that capitalised upon the somewhat eerie reputation of the Thames in the mid-Victorian and late Victorian periods. In one later volume, Elliott O’Donnell’s Great Thames Mysteries (1928), there is a report of three cases of dismemberment in the neighbourhood of Putney; the author then goes on to suggest that “the murderer had some particular attachment to the neighbourhood” of another stretch of the river, near Dagenham, he records that “cries of murder from the waterside were of frequent occurrence after dusk, and those who heard them, if alone, merely shivered and hastened on.”
The history of Thames murders is embellished, too, by the fact that many of the victims found floating in its waters had been dismembered. There are reports from 1828 of a head found at Shadwell; in 1873 a dismembered body was found at Battersea, and in the succeeding year two bodies in a similar condition were partly retrieved at Putney and Vauxhall Bridge, leading many citizens to think the worst of their river. As O’Donnell puts it, “no mystery associated with the Thames up to that time gave it a more sinister reputation or made it more dreaded, and it was long ere the horror of it faded from men’s minds.” The killer or killers were deemed to manifest “a hideous fascination for the Thames.” The familiar river, the silver-streaming Thames of previous centuries, had become the object of dread and superstitious fear. It may have been reviving its ancient powers.
One of the most famous cases, or series of cases, were the torso murders that occurred in 1887, 1888, 1889 (two bodies were found in that year), and finally in 1902. The first body was found by the river wall at Rainham, in Essex, with the dismembered head and limbs wrapped in a piece of coarse sacking. Other parts of the same body were found at Temple Pier, and at Battersea. According to the Essex Times of 8 June 1887, “great excitement was caused on the Victoria Embankment.” Murders on the river do in fact create “excitement,” if only because there seems to be some instinctive link between death and flowing water. In the following year a woman’s arm was found in the river mud near Pimlico; the discovery of other parts followed, leading one newspaper to describe “a carnival of blood.” In 1889 the various parts of two bodies were found at St. George’s Stairs, Albert Bridge, Battersea, Wandsworth and Limehouse; a “small liver” was discovered at Wapping. Only one of the victims was ever identified. It was rumoured at the time that these crimes were the work of the killer known as “Jack the Ripper,” but the claim was never substantiated. It was also counteracted with the report that “the Ripper” had in fact been drowned in the Thames—another indication, perhaps, how the river was instinctively associated with the darker forms of crime. In the opening shots of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Frenzy (1972), the body of a strangled young woman is seen floating down the Thames.
There were many famous river murders of the twentieth century. In the early months of 1964 the bodies of two prostitutes were found in the vicinity of Hammersmith Bridge; later victims were found on dry ground, but in the riverine neighbourhoods of Chiswick and Brentford. In 2001 the remains of a human torso were found in the water; it turned out to be the body of a young African boy who was given the name of “Adam” by the police. The killers have never been found, but it is believed that the child was murdered as a result of some form of magical ritual. In the same period the police discovered seven half-burnt candles, wrapped in a white sheet, washed up on the southern bank. It is less generally known that, only nine months before, another dismembered torso had been found in the river; it was that of a young woman named Cathy Dennis. The intestines and leg of another victim were found in the river by Silvertown. On another occasion in very recent years the head and limbs, but not the torso, of a man were found in the Thames. On 8 July 1999, a human head was found in the mud at Lower Pool; it had been skinned to avoid identification. Other parts of the body, including the torso, were found in other parts of the river. The Thames has always harboured an affection for severed heads.
There are other forms of death within the river. There are the accidental drownings. In the parish register of Henley Church, beside the river, are records of such incidents: “8 April 1563. Ignotus quidam viator. Sepultus…24 May 1601. John Smith, a stranger, drowned. Sepultus…30 April 1611. James, a bargeman, called Sweetapple, being drowned. Sepultus.” The registry of every church by the banks of the river will have similar testimony to the dangers of the Thames. At Marlow Lock in 1585 “the Streams there were so strong, and the Water had such a dismal Fall, that Four men within a short time were lost, three whereof drowned, and a Fourth had his brains dasht out.” It is a signal reminder of the sheer power and brute force of the water. The river along this stretch was so rapid that it became known as “Marlow Race,” and one poet complained that it
…hath made many a Child to weepe.
Their mothers begg from dore to dore
Their ffathers drowned in the deepe.
The river can be a ferocious, as well as a turbulent, god.
A pamphlet of 1647 bears the long but graphic title of “Sad and deplorable news from Oxfordsheir and Barksheir, being a true and lamentable relation of the drowning of about sixty persons, men, women and children, in the lock near Goring in Oxfordsheir, as they were passing by water from Goring feats to Stately [Streatley] in Barksheir.” It seems the waterman took his crowded boat too close to a weir where, by the force of the water, it was drawn in and overturned. Even by the standards of the river this was a sizeable loss of life. One of those eventually rescued from the waters reported that some of the drowning creatures were “sprawling about like frogs” on the river-bed. Other victims of drowning seem to have put up no struggle at all, and are found lying upon their backs as if they had fallen asleep.
In 1763
a Boat, with ten people in it, going through London-Bridge, in order to go down the river, overset, and three People were drowned…On Tuesday night a Barge, heavily loaded with Timber, coming through London-Bridge, ran against one of the Starlings, and by the shock John Herbert, one of the Bargemen, unfortunately fell overboard and was drowned.
Four years later “On Monday night, a little before ten o’clock, a boat with three women and two men going through London-Bridge overset, and all perished.” And so it goes on. It was estimated in the eighteenth century that some fifty people were drowned, on average, each year beneath the bridge. This was largely, or wholly, the result of “shooting” upon the departing tide. There was some interest in compiling these early statistics not least because, as A. J. Church put it in Isis and Tamesis (1886), “The Englishman dearly loves to spice his pleasures with the sense of danger…and the river fascinates him most when he can discern a prospect of being drowned.” This consorts well with the belief that the English were a nation of putative suicides, and suggests the somewhat macabre presence of the Thames in the national life. It has been celebrated by limericks as well as by poems and songs, like this of Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense (1846):
There was an old person of Ems,
Who casually fell in the Thames,
And when he was found,
They said he was drowned,
That unlucky old person of Ems
There were many other deaths by drowning in the nineteenth century, when boating for sport and for recreation became the most popular of all pastimes. The long dresses of the ladies made them particularly susceptible to the currents of the water if they fell in. Some people out punting thrust their poles into ballast holes, while others had drunk too much to keep a safe footing. Some ate too well, and were caught by cramp while swimming. Others were fatally captivated by the pleasures of the river; they stayed out too late, when the fog and the evening closed down upon them; they were capsized or overturned in moments of unusual jollity, or they were simply not accustomed to the dangers of the apparently peaceful Thames. The Daily Mail of June 1896 interviewed one lock-keeper who had in the course of his service seen a dozen drownings, including “a whole boatful upset by moonlight and their bodies come up one after another and float about in the lock.”
Even the professionals of the river were unsafe. The ferryman at Cookham overbalanced in a rain-storm of 1881, and in 1893 the ferryman and his wife at Shillingford were also drowned. The lock-keepers at Hurley, at Whitchurch, at Pinkhill, at Abingdon, at Caversham, at Shiplake and at Hambleden were all drowned in the period from 1871 to 1890. This is a large loss of life among those who were in essence the guardians of the Thames. We are reminded of the words of Isaiah, “Watchman, what of the night?” Yet it is perhaps not so extraordinary that the people who worked and lived by the river also made up a large proportion of those found drowned; sheer propinquity to the water must increase the risks of being caught within it. The frequency of mortality, however, does suggest the treachery and the unanticipated dangers of the river. The area of Temple Lock and Temple Mills seems to have been peculiarly fated; two small daughters of lock-keepers, as well as a son of twenty, were drowned in the waters here.
The worst Thames disaster of that century took place on 3 September 1878. A pleasure paddle steamer, the Princess Alice, was returning from Gravesend to London in the early evening of that day. As the steamer turned the bend between Crossness and Margaret Ness, in the area downriver at Galleons’ Reach now known as Thamesmead, she encountered a steam-collier, the Bywell Castle, proceeding in the opposite direction. There seems to have been some confusion over signals, and “right of way,” since the vessels collided. The captain of the Princess Alice was heard to call out: “Ease her! Stop her! Where are you coming to? Good God, where are you coming to?” The collier ploughed into the paddle steamer and broke her apart. One surviving passenger said that it was “like the side of a warehouse” crashing down upon the much smaller ship.
As the stern and bows rose into the air, the Princess Alice began to sink. She was beneath the water within four minutes, drowning all but a few of the crew and passengers. A diver sent down to survey the condition of the wreck reported that the doors to the saloon were jammed with the bodies of passengers, most of them still erect and packed closely together. The master of a ship close to the scene stated that “I can compare the people to nothing else than a flock of sheep in the water” the Princess Alice herself was “nothing else than a cloud. One moment she was there, and the next moment clean gone. The river seemed full of drowning people.” It was reported that the Thames was “like a sarcophagus,” not for the first time in its history.
Some of those who might have been able to swim to shore were in fact overcome by the pollution of the Thames. An hour before the collision, the outfalls of the sewage pumping stations that Joseph Bazalgette had recently built at Crossness and Barking discharged 75 million gallons (341 million l) of waste. According to a chemist writing in The Times after the collision, this effluent consisted of “two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda water with baneful gases so black that the water stained for miles, and discharging a corrupt charnel house odour.” There had also been a fire in Thames Street that afternoon, sending oil, turpentine and petroleum into the water. It was noted that the bodies retrieved from the river were covered with a kind of slime. When it was washed off, it simply reappeared. Clothing was discoloured, and rapidly began to rot. The corpses of the victims were unnaturally bloated, requiring especially constructed coffins, and they decomposed too quickly. Some survivors died later from unknown causes. Two weeks later it was reported that sixteen of the rescued “have since expired and many more…in a precarious state.”
It was later estimated that approximately seven hundred people were killed, representing the largest peacetime disaster upon the river. Some 160 bodies were never claimed, and they were eventually buried in a mass grave in Woolwich Cemetery. One of the few apparent survivors was a young woman named Elizabeth Stride, who later claimed (perhaps falsely) that she lost her husband and three children in the accident. Hers in any case was not to be a death by water. She became the third victim of “Jack the Ripper.” It was said that she took to prostitution as a direct result of the family’s tragedy.
The only comparable event in recent times was the sinking of the pleasure boat, the Marchioness, between Southwark Bridge and Cannon Street Bridge on 20 August 1989. She had collided with a dredger, the Bowbelle, of 1,457 tons (1,498 tonnes) against the 90 tons (91 tonnes) of the pleasure boat. On that occasion fifty-one people drowned. The Attorney General of the time, Lord Williams, asked at the inquiry into the disaster, “How is it that if so many people had known for so long of the risk of a serious collision on the Thames, such a thing could still happen?”
The writers of the nineteenth century, unlike their counterparts in the twentieth century, seemed to linger over descriptions of death and mortality. G. D. Leslie, in Our River (1881), was one of the many riparian travellers who could not resist the narration of a good drowning. He recounts an incident, at which he was present, when the son of a Baptist minister was caught in the “back suck” of a weir. Leslie relates how “the poor father, half-dressed, kept walking around the edge of the weir, calling to his child, at times bursting into prayer.” When the corpse of the child was eventually brought to the surface in a fisherman’s drag it seemed to Leslie to be “quite beautiful in death, not being marred or injured in any way.” So the child looked “beautiful” in death; he had retained his purity, not being marred, and indeed that purity had been reinforced by his premature demise in the river.
There is in fact a noticeable association in Victorian texts between child and Thames and death, as if this trinity of concerns was an emblem of the ambiguous attitude of the Victorians towards childhood and innocence. They were lamenting the loss of children even as they were consigning them to death in the manufactories and unhealthy streets of the cities. There is the curious story at the opening of The Book of the Thames (1859), by Mr. and Mrs. Hall, concerning young Emily who in their hearing refused to cross a simple wooden bridge between Kemble and Ewen. She screamed out that she was afraid. It transpires that she and her grandmother had been crossing this bridge when they both fell into the water. Emily was rescued but “Nanny”—“a fat, merry little thing” according to the family—was never recovered. If Emily ever looked into the Thames, “everything she sees bright on the water she says is Nanny’s face—Nanny’s face looking up at her.” Innocence is threatened, even stained, by the bloated visage of the corpse and by the insidious menace of the river. It is a curious prelude to a book on the Thames, perhaps, and is followed a few pages later by the drowning of Jabez Lloyd, a boatman, who fell face down into a bed of lilies and died before he could be extricated from “the meshes of the golden-chaliced flowers and their broad leaves.” Death can emerge in beauty. In Victorian literature concerning the Thames there is always a moral to be drawn, even if it is preserved quietly beneath the surface of the writing.
There is a strange mural monument in Cookham Church to Sir Isaac Pocock, carved in the early nineteenth century; he is seen being caught by an angel while falling into the Thames from a punt, with an inscription that he was “suddenly called from this world to a better state, whilst on the Thames near his own house.” Perhaps he is one of those to be seen rising from the dead in Stanley Spencer’s painting of Cookham Churchyard.
There is that curious phrase, “to set the Thames on fire.” One explanation has to do with a sieve, or “temse,” that was used for sieving flour. It was believed that a vigorous workman could make it ignite with constant friction against the flour-bin, and of an inefficient workman it was said that “he will never set the temse on fire.” It is so prosaic a theory that it has the ring of truth. But the Thames has also been associated with deaths by lightning, and along the upper reaches of the river it is possible to see lightning-blasted trees. There is one on the summit of Sinodun Hill. Such trees were commonly considered to be sacred. Ash-trees, in particular, were believed to attract fire. In The Book of the Thames, there is the story of a fisherman who sat patiently by the riverside “until a flash of lightning deprived him of his sight.” In the seventeenth century Dr. Robert Plot recalled a great lightning storm over the river at Oxford when two scholars of Wadham College were struck into the water from their boat, “the one of them stark Dead, and the other stuck fast in the Mud like a Post, with his Feet downward.” Just downstream of Radcot, there is another lightning-blasted tree on the very bank of the river. Fire and water are not necessarily antagonistic.