LIMEHOUSE REACH
Drawn by L. Walker
The Grapes Inn is a place to visit. If one can choose a fine summer’s evening to sit under “the corpulent windows” on the “crazy wooden verandah” and watch the busy river with its myriads of craft floating by, one can enjoy the view and atmosphere much as did Whistler, Napier Hemy, and Dickens himself.
In J. Ashby Sterry’s “A River Rhymer,” is a set of verses entitled “Down Limehouse Way,” two of which may be appropriately quoted here:
Close by I mind an inn you’ll find,
Where you will not refuse
To rest a bit, as there you sit,
And gaze on river views—
’Tis very old—with windows bold,
That bulges o’er the tide;
Whence you can spy ships passing by
Or watch the waters glide!
You can sit in the red-curtained bay
And think, while you’re puffing a clay,
’Tis no indecorum
To drink sangarorum—
While musing down Lime’us way!
You’ll find this spot—now does it not
Recall and keep alive
The varied crew Charles Dickens drew
In eighteen sixty-five?
Here Hexam plied his trade and died,
And Riderhood conspired;
While things they’d pop at Pleasant’s shop,
When cash might be required!
Here under Miss Abbey’s firm sway,
Who made all her clients obey,
Was ruled with discretion
And rare self-possession
The “Porters” down Lime’us way!
The name of the Fellowship-Porters which Dickens adopted for the sign of Miss Abbey Potterson’s public-house was that of one of the old City Guilds. For over 800 years the City of London successfully claimed and exercised the sole right to unload grain vessels arriving in the Thames, and realised enormous revenues from the privilege. In 1155, the Guild or Brotherhood of Fellowship-Porters was incorporated and a charter was granted. It was reincorporated in 1613, and appointed by the City to carry or store corn, salt, coals, fish, and fruit of all kinds.
The Fellowship-Porters at one time numbered 3,000 members, and the Guild had the power granted by act of Council in 1646 to choose twelve rulers, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen reserving the right to appoint one of the number. The company had a hall of its own which stood near to the Waterman’s Hall in St. Mary’s Hill, Billingsgate, but had no livery or arms, and ranked the nineteenth in the order of procedure. Membership carried with it the freedom of the City by payment of £2 18s. 6d., and five guineas to Fellowship Hall—these fees being demanded before they could work as dock labourers. When Millwall Docks were built, the City challenged the docks on the matter of their privilege, and the case went to the Law Courts. It was then discovered that the Charter could not be produced, it having been destroyed by the Great Fire of London, so it was supposed. This blow ruined the Guild, and some thirty years ago the organization was wound up, the then present members being deprived of work, pensions, and everything else their Charter entitled them to as Freemen of the City.
Another notable tavern in Our Mutual Friend is the Ship, at Greenwich, where two memorable little dinners were given. The first was the occasion when, Bella Wilfer having been presented with a purse and a fifty-pound bank-note by Mr. Boffin, took her dear old father, the cherub, to Greenwich by boat on a secret expedition, as she called it, and entertained him to dinner there.
First calling for her father at his City office, where the messenger described her to her father as “a slap-up gal in a bang-up chariot,” she handed him the purse with instructions, not to be disregarded, to “go to the nearest place where they keep everything of the very very best, ready made; you buy and put on the most beautiful suit of clothes, the most beautiful hat, and the most beautiful pair of bright boots (patent leather, Pa, mind!) that are to be got for money; and you come back to me.” After half an hour he came back “so brilliantly transformed that Bella was obliged to walk round him in ecstatic admiration twenty times before she could draw her arm through his and delightfully squeeze it.”
She then ordered him to “take this lovely woman out to dinner.” The question came, “Where shall we go, my dear?” “Greenwich!” said Bella valiantly. “And be sure you treat this lovely woman with everything of the best.” And off they went in quest of the boat to take them down the river, and eventually arrived at the Ship Tavern. The little expedition down the river to reach it, we are told, “was delightful, and the little room overlooking the river into which they were shown for dinner was delightful. Everything was delightful. The park was delightful, the lunch was delightful, the dishes of fish were delightful, the wine was delightful. Bella was more delightful than any other item in the festival.” And, as they sat together looking at the ships and steamboats making their way to the sea with the tide that was running down, “the lovely woman imagined all sorts of voyages for herself and Pa.” So enchanted did Pa become that he was as willing “to put his head into the Sultan’s tub of water as the beggar-boys below the window were to put theirs in the mud”; and so the happy moments flew by and the time came to ring the bell, and pay the waiter, and return to London.