CHAPTER 45

Downriver

It is a mysterious, and an ambiguous, place. Where does the river end and the sea begin? The estuary is the brackish zone, combining salt water and fresh water in equal or unequal quantities. It remains largely unknown and unvisited. The river has changed its nature. It is coming ever closer to the sea, which is always hostile to mankind. There is an area of the estuary, used for the dumping of London’s waste, that is still known as the “Black Deep.” The waters can be treacherous here, and the waves of the estuary have been known to reach a height of 7 feet. It is a deeper and darker river. Joseph Conrad believed that it appealed strongly “to an adventurous imagination.”

The estuary is some 250 miles square and has a length of 30 miles, reaching from Gravesend to the Nore where the Thames becomes the North Sea. At that point of transition, its width is 10 miles. There are three principal approach channels, one of which is the Black Deep, and a score of subsidiary channels or “swatchways” with names like “the Warp” and “the Wallet.” The light-ships that dip and swing in the tide are called Mouse and Tongue and Girdler. This is the poetry of the river. The sands and shoals are given names such as “Shingles” and “Shivering Sand,” “the Spell” and “the Oven.” “Sunk Sand” runs between the Black Deep and the Barrow Deep. But the names are in one sense deceptive. The “sands” are part clay and part black viscous mud.

The estuarial marshes beside the river are liminal areas; they are neither water nor dry land. They partake of two realities, and in that sense they are blessed. That is why the Thames estuary has always been considered a place of mystery and of enchantment. At times of low tide the sands and shoals become islands, with the false promise of a haven. In the poems of the Anglo-Saxons it is a landscape of nightmare. The “flats” form a dull and monotonous expanse, low ground crossed by paths. The sky seems larger, and closer, here. The tide-washed mud-flats reflect the changing light. For many centuries this land was largely uninhabited and uninhabitable. As such it exerts a primitive and still menacing force, all the more eerie and lonely because of its proximity to the great city.

There is a sense of strangeness and melancholy here at dusk. Charles Dickens understood it very well, and in Great Expectations described how “the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the lower leaden line beyond which the wind was rushing, was the sea.” Magwitch could hide here, making his secret way along the network of hidden planks that used to traverse the mud-flats and moving sands. This is all land that has been saved from the sea, and thus has an ambiguous status. Parts of its territory, in both the lower and upper reaches, have often been deemed to be wild and inhospitable. Strangers were not welcomed. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, walking alone by the shores of the estuary, it is possible to feel great fear—fear of the solitude, fear of being abandoned, fear of what is alien represented by the river itself. It may be a fear of the primaeval Thames.

There are the Whalebone Marshes and the Halstow Marshes, Dagnam Saltings and the Grain and Allhallows Marshes, lying low and flat across the horizon. There are salt-marshes and brackish fresh-water marshes, the latter used for grazing. Some of these grazing marshes, however, are now being turned to cereals. There are no trees, because no deeply rooting plant can grow in marshland. It is hard to imagine a more desolate landscape. Yet, with its constantly changing light, it has its own beauty. It is the home of sea-lavender and golden samphire, and of the flowing salt-marsh grasses; its creeks and pools are fringed with sea-aster. And there are the endless birds, the ducks and heron and geese and curlews, the sandpipers and plovers and redshanks, that love the loneliness of the marshes.

The communities of the marshes have always been smaller, and more isolated, than those upon firmer ground. Of the Hundred of Hoo, the area of territory between the Thames and the river Medway, it has been said that “it is the last place God made—and never finished.” A clergyman of the neighbourhood once wrote that “it was understood to be an out-of-the-way, wild sort of place in which, unless obliged to do so, people did not live.” And it is wild—or, rather, it has traces of wildness about it. This is not the wildness of nature, but the wildness of desolation. It is not a human place. You can walk along the river wall of the Hundred of Hoo for miles, between the river and the grass, without encountering anyone at all. It was notorious as the place for smugglers. The hamlet of Allhallows was, according to the eighteenth-century antiquarian, Edward Hasted, in “a most unfrequented and dreary situation.” In the nineteenth century few people visited the Isle of Grain or the Isle of Sheppey. The inhabitants of Grain—the Pannells and the Willsons and the Frys—considered themselves to be a race apart. The population of St. Mary’s Hoo increased by four people over the entire course of the nineteenth century. The peninsula of East Tilbury, and the remote Canvey Island, were once entirely estranged from the ordinary current of life. The inhabitants of the estuary were known as “Stackies” or “Stiffies.” The towns that persisted, such as Gravesend and Greenhithe, Grays and Erith, managed to survive because they were built upon the few patches of firm ground in the vicinity. There is chalk beneath Greenhithe, and gravel beneath Erith.

There are other names here which seem like some form of atavistic remembrance, some token of an ancient and now forgotten past. The names of the villages, Fobbing and Corringham, Mucking and Thurrock, have survived for a thousand years. From the entry of the Medway Canal to Shorne a stretch of water was known as “the Priveys” from Shorne to Higham the name of the river was “Down the hole.” From Gravesend to Tilbury the water was called “the Blockhouse” or “the Jerkhouse,” the derivations of which are uncertain. But the meanings of some names are clear enough. The wide reach of the river from Gravesend and Tilbury seawards is known as “the Hope.” The submerged forest near West Thurrock, dating from the primaeval past, was known as “the Roots.” In a place where there were once few signs of change, old names linger. Havengore comes from the Anglo-Saxon root of “gore,” meaning a triangular tract of land. The name of Maplin derives from the twigs, known as “mapples,” from which brooms were once made. Holy Haven has become, over the centuries, Hole Haven.

It has always been an area of sickness. It has been estimated that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost half of the population suffered from malaria or what was then known as the “ague.” Thus William Lambarde, in The Perambulation of Kent (1576), noted that “Hooh is taken from ‘Hoh’ in Old English which means Sorrowe or Sicknesse, a suitable name for this unwholesome Hundred.” In his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6) Defoe noted that in the marshes it was not uncommon for the men to have had “from five to six, to fourteen or fifteen wives,” but this was the consequence of mortality rather than profligacy. The men of the marshes had grown up in that unhealthy locality and were “season’d to the place” but the women, from the “uplands,” were not so fortunate. “When they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, then they presently changed their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year.” The two rows of thirteen little tombstones in Cooling Churchyard, the inspiration for the gloomy scene at the beginning of Great Expectations, are no doubt the tokens of infantine malaria. The inhabitants of this feverish territory were described in the eighteenth century as of a “dingy yellow colour,” and it was reported that “it is not unusual to see a poor man, his wife, and whole family of five or six children hovering over their fire in the hovel, shaking with an ague all at the same time.” The children were given opium to keep them from harm, so that they became “wasted” and “wizened like monkeys,” while the adults indulged excessively in what were called “spirituous liquors.”

There were many who came to the estuary for the sport of shooting wildfowl, but they “often return with an Essex ague on their backs, which they find a heavier load than the fowls they have shot.” In the nineteenth century the common question among local people was “Have you had your ague this spring?” A parliamentary committee, established in 1864, established that the cause of the infection was the ubiquitous anopheles mosquito that bred in the stagnant waters of the marshlands. The parasite it carried has now been identified as Plasmodium vivax. This may be no more comprehensible than the earlier descriptions of “spirituous miasma” emanating from the vaporous marshland.

By some form of melancholy parallel the estuarial river was also the home of the plague ships and the quarantine ships. In the seventeenth century those suffering from the plague or yellow fever were placed on vessels anchored off Dead Man’s Island, just north of Chetney on the North Kent Marshes. The island received its name, of course, from the bodies that were buried there; in The Thames Transformed (1976) Jeffery Harrison and Peter Grant reported that “to this day one has only to wade across Shepherd’s Creek to Dead Man’s to be able to find human bones with no effort, a surprising number showing signs of osteomyelitis, a chronic bone infection.” A plague hospital was to be established upon the shore, at Chetney Hill, but construction work was abandoned when the land was found to be unstable. This has been one of the dark places of the earth. But where there are cares, there are also cures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doctors frequented the marshes to collect specimens from the abundant beds of leeches in the neighbourhood.

For many centuries the area between Barking and Gravesend was deserted except for some odd cottages, churches, farms and riverside inns for travellers along the Thames. There were trackways through the marshes, and pasture land. It was a good place to rear the beasts of the field; the marshes were known to be “kind to cattle,” and the dearest meat was known as “marsh mutton.” Now the north side of the estuary is lined with oil refineries, gas plants and sewage treatment plants; there are cement works and petrochemical works. Here is industrial architecture on a giant scale, like Nineveh or Babylon emerging on the banks of the river. And this, too, is now part of its history. The Thames estuary was the cradle of the electric power station, when at the end of the nineteenth century Sebastian de Ferranti built the first long-distance transmission station at Deptford. There will come a time when these installations, if they are allowed to survive, will be defined by their ancientness like the earthworks of the region.

There are communities on either shore; there have always been settlers, but now they come in larger waves as part of the new “Thames corridor” spreading out towards Europe. There are developments in place for towns such as Thurrock and Gravesend. The region of the lower river has been taken up in the general regeneration of the Thames. Yet there are still areas of dereliction; ancient jetties, quays and harbours have been left to decay. There are the hulks of scuppered or lost ships. It is still a place of slimy stones emerging from the mud, of old landing stages and ancient roofless buildings slowly merging with the water and the sand. And the marshlands still exude the same ancient air of desolation.

But then there is the sea. The Thames, now wide and exultant, has been conceived as rushing into its embrace. The mark of their meeting is the Crow Stone, placed on the foreshore at Chalkwell a mile west of Southend; it connects in an imaginary line with the London Stone at the entrance to the Yantlet Channel. This is the official point where the Thames must end and become the sea. From London Stone the ships set their course for the Nore lightship and the waves of the ocean. The song of the Thames has ended.