Talk by Malcolm Eady
For the first talk of 2022 after the long Covid-induced break President-Elect, Malcolm Eady, treated us to the fruits of his comprehensive research into the history of the Thames as a working river. Commencing with a couple of disparaging quotes from unimpressed river users of the past and supported by a wealth of illustrations, transition of the Thames from plain and purely functional means of transporting goods to the mix of leisure and residential usage we are more familiar with today was covered in detail.
His family having moved from London to South Yorkshire when he was five, Malcolm’s early memories of our area are of visits to grandparents living not far from the river at Woolwich, trips being taken to Gravesend in the late 1950s to see tugs lined up waiting to take ships into the docks along with journeys across the Woolwich free ferry which was then a paddle steamer, its engines viewable in all their polished copper and brass glory.
We were to learn how London grew to become the biggest city in the world, at one point overtaking Amsterdam as Europe’s biggest port with incredible population growth sucking in more industries resulting in more river traffic. We were to hear about the growth of the docks and how the old medieval wharfs were built up to take ocean going ships and supply large riverside factories.
Geographically, London was the first place upriver from the coast that could be crossed at low tide, was far enough inland to be safe from most seaborne attackers, and the Thames valley further upriver was good arable land which could be used to feed a town’s growing population. We were taken back to pre-Roman iron age Britain at which time the Thames was not a special river at all but just a boundary between tribes, each with a large hill fort at the centre of their area. The Romans had arrived by AD 43 and, by AD 61, Roman historian Tacitus reported that they had created a thriving market & port called Londinium. At high tide the river could be up to 1km wide, with marshes and mudflats appearing at low tide on the south side; The Romans made use of these islands to minimise the length of bridging required. At that time the northern water front was about 100 metres from the present bank.
Colchester was initially established by the Romans as their capital of Britannia but by the end of the first century Londinium expanded rapidly, becoming Britannia’s largest city and, by about 150 AD, had become the capital. From 200 AD however its importance reduced as Roman Britain became split into a number of provinces.
Models in the Museum of London show how the Romans built a sophisticated harbour structure with wooden quay sides and warehouses but, towards the end of their occupation, the harbour began to fail. Saxon raiders were coming up-river and, as sea levels fell, it was no longer tidal and therefore ships could not get to the quay side. The Romans dismantled some of their prestige buildings and used the material to build a defensive wall which, 500 years later, Alfred the Great repaired to keep the Danes at bay.
We were shown a map indicating routes used by the Saxons when they in turn invaded England. They came to settle an area, not to control an empire and therefore had no need for a port / communications hub with easy connections to France and Southern Europe as the Romans did. If the Romans had not previously invaded, the Saxons would have come to Britain much earlier and, as their trading and communications links were across the North Sea, perhaps either York or Kings Lynn may have been developed as their major port. There would have been no road system with London as the hub and no fortified city for Alfred the Great to use in his defeat of the Danes. Our major city might have developed elsewhere and London would have remained simply a port,
The Saxons did not in fact use the old Roman city, but moved a short way up river to what is now The Strand / Trafalgar Square, naming the area Lundenwic with the shore line being about where the National Gallery and adjacent top of Trafalgar Square are now. A trading market operating from their beached boats was set up and this became the location for a major Anglo Saxon Kingdom trading port. The Venerable Bede writing in 732 described a Lundenwic of 604 as being “The mart of many nations resorting to it by sea and land”, so London was back up and running at this time as a major port,
Moving on in time, King Alfred drove off invading Danes and, needing a defensive site, restored the walls of the Roman City which was then named Lundenburg. The original Lundenwic was largely abandoned and in time gained the name of Ealdwic, ‘old settlement’, a name which survives today as Aldwych. Alfred and subsequent Anglo Saxon Kings built up an impressive naval fleet based in London.
London’s first medieval bridge was built during the reign of Ethelred-the-Unready. Created as a defensive structure, it formed an artificial but effective limit of navigation for ships. The area became the centre for sea-borne traffic below the bridge, river-borne traffic above it, and road traffic over it, so increasing London’s role as a trading hub.
In 1016 the Danes led by King Canute finally managed to reconquer England. One of the significant battles was at Brentford, which the English won, but we lost the war. Canute encouraged Danish traders to come and settle in the city. Danish rule in England ended in 1042 after the death of Canute’s son Harthacnut.
Ethelred’s son Edward the Confessor became King and because of his French upbringing he encouraged French traders to London. He founded Westminster Abbey on Thorney Island just upstream of medieval London to provide himself with a royal burial church, the island forming a royal city with a royal palace and a royal abbey.
After 1066, under the Norman rule, the defensive riverside wall, originally having been built by the Romans, was removed and a port with masonry warehouses developed, resulting in a move from the old beach market to the medieval merchant port. Thus, after about 800 years we were back to where the Romans left us and en route to becoming a European medieval city. There was originally no official capital, the court and political power accompanying the King wherever he was, but by the 12th century the institutions of power were becoming fixed in London and by the 13th century London became the permanent location of the Royal court in Westminster, Thus it was a political capital and therefore capital of England.
By the beginning of the 17th century, London was still mainly contained within its walls, beyond which expansion was limited by royal decree. By the beginning of the 18th C it had overtaken Paris as the largest city of Western Europe and 100 years later it was vying with Peking & Edo (then capital of Japan) to be the largest city in the world. In 1700 London’s population was half a million, the next two largest cities in the UK boasting only 30, 000 and by 1800 the population of London was 1 million.
The next century saw fantastic population growth with London increasing by 6½ times over that period. It was this 19C city of docks large riverside warehouses, and riverside factories which were still there in 1950s London, and have subsequently gone in our lifetime. In Elizabethan times, when exports were mainly to Europe, London had 80% of the trade. It was 70% by 1700 and even at the beginning of the 20th century when other ports had become established, London still had 66% of all of UK’s foreign trade.
Links were made very early on to the coal fields of the north east and these were to last well into the 20th century. Once the corn laws, which were a good example of protective practices between the landowners and the Tory party, were repealed in 1845, London became a large grain importing port. London was also the port for high value items from India and the West Indies such as spices. In present times, London is still very much a major port, the docks having just moved further along to the Thames Estuary. In terms of weight, London is our largest UK port; in terms of containers it is number three.
One of Malcolm’s surprising discoveries during his research was how long London lagged behind similar cities in the number of bridges it had. There had been a successful lobby of vested interests with watermen and their allies campaigning against the building of new bridges, and so bridge building in London did not get underway until the middle of the 18th century. Initially they were toll bridges, becoming nationalised in 1873.
Rivers and canals feeding the Thames with goods and carrying products arriving in the docks were then addressed. Water transport was key to London surviving and, by 1789 once the industrial revolution got under way, connections to the Midlands where established. Although easier than road transport it was a long way round via Oxford requiring off-loading of goods from river barges to canal barges and a more direct route via the Grand Union Canal was opened fully in 1800.
A local clergyman recorded what was being carried as primarily coal followed by grain and the resultant flour. Other routes to Bristol via the Kennet and Avon, to Basingstoke and via the Wey and Arun Canal down to the south coast were created, but none ever carried the volume of traffic that was hoped for and all were insignificant compared to the Grand Union. It met the Thames at Brentford, which then became a major freight interchange town. A large interchange facility was located just out of sight of Kew Gardens but no sign remains of it today. By 1810 a total of 343,560 tons of goods per year were being carried to and from London via Brentford.
The canal was the making of Brentford. Bricks, cement and lime were arriving from Kent, with boats carrying household refuse and ashes on their return journey. Exotic fruit came up from the Port of London to Brentford Market. By-products from the gas works had to be carried away, unless they could be turned into locally-used breeze blocks, and coal was brought in. Factories grew up along the canal and along the river side. Today, no sign of the sidings and warehouses remains, which are replaced by marinas for small leisure boats.
An early industrial area taking and feeding Thames traffic was the Wandle valley. The Wandle was a fast flowing river and a number of mills grew up along its length, supporting a wide range of industries but the river but did not have enough water however to meet the conflicting demands from mill owners and canal traffic so a horse drawn railway was built, the first which was not built for private use.
London’s primary role as a port was exploited by its rulers in the form of taxation on imports and a customs house was duly built not too far away from the current one. In 1559, a year after Elizabeth the First became queen, fifteen quays were designated as those through which goods could be landed. A map of three hundred years later showed that many of the old quays were still operating and had the same names.
We were shown an early map of the Pool of London area with the legal quays on the north bank and the new extra quays called Sufferance Wharfs on the south. The Howland great dock was initially a repair dock and Blackwall was a fitting out dock for the adjacent shipyard. The first group of ship owners to use the Howland dock for non-repair work were those dealing with Arctic countries, especially those engaged in whaling. A further map from the late 18th century showed the marshes which lined the banks of the Thames. Excepting Woolwich and Greenwich, most of the land was poor quality liable to flooding and intersected with drainage dykes, just the place to build docks for an expanding port.
As a number of contemporary paintings confirm, the river eventually became congested with ships trying to load and unload. London not only received bulk goods such as coal & grain from other UK ports, but was the main distribution centre for imported goods, such as sugar, tea & linens. Ship owners and merchants finally got their act together, bought up land on the marshes on the north bank of the Thames and started building docks, ultimately in fact building too many. Despite low wages for dockers due to an oversupply of labour, but with no money to spend on mechanisation, many of the docks eventually went bankrupt and all became nationalised by the government in 1908.
A pre-war photograph of the docks looking upriver from Woolwich showed the Royal Group of Docks. with the West India docks in the middle distance. Both banks were lined with industries including the Arsenal armaments factory which occupied about four miles of river bank. In a short stretch on the south bank was Siemens the cable and telephone business, later AEI, plus Stones who made ships propellers, along with numerous smaller companies. On the north side wasthe very large Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, the Silvertown India Rubber works making submarine cable insulation alongside a range of products from rubber bands to waterproof clothing plus John Knight Ltd making soap – Knight’s Castile. Further down river was GEC at Erith producing industrial turbines and the large Ford car plant at Dagenham. The Thames valley used to be a hive of industry, in stark contrast to the comparatively empty river and proliferation of riverside apartments with which we are familiar today.
Malcolm was thanked at the end of his talk by President John Turner and we look forward to learning of other aspects of this famous river from Malcolm in due course.