London River

by H. M. Tomlinson

For my outlook is more than the centre of Dockland. I call it the centre of the world. Our high road is part of the main thoroughfare from Kensington to Valparaiso. Every wanderer must come this way at least once in his life. We are the hub whence all roads go to the circumference. A ship does not go down but we hear the cry of distress, and the house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and is lost, casting its people adrift on the blind tides.

Think of some of our street names—Malabar Street, Amoy Place, Nankin Street, Pekin Street, Canton Street. And John Company has left its marks. You pick up hints of the sea here as you pick old shells out of dunes. We have, still nourishing in a garden, John Company's Chapel of St. Matthias, a fragment of a time that was, where now the vigorous commercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of its previous urgent importance. Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for antiquaries. So little do men really change. They always leave their temples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh. Only the names of their gods change. The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when this shipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over the fields to Stepney. Our vessels then lay in the river. We got our first dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of last century. A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company. Then another phase began to reshape Dockland. There came a time when the Americans looked in a fair way, sailing ahead fast with the wonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us a tow rope. The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, and the Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipper which should beat them. This really was the last effort of sails, for steamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually making heroic efforts to smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of Poplar, worried over those Boston craft, declared we must be first again, and first we were. But both Boston and Poplar, in their efforts to perfect an old idea, did not see a crude but conquering notion taking form to magnify and hasten both commerce and war.

But they were worth doing, those clippers, and worth remembering. They sail clear into our day as imperishable memories. They still live, for they did far more than carry merchandise. When an old mariner speaks of the days of studding sails it is not the precious freight, the real purpose of his ships, which animates his face. What we always remember afterwards is not the thing we did, or tried to do, but the friends who were about us at the time. But our stately ships themselves, with our River their home, which gave Poplar's name, wherever they went, a ring on the counter like a sound guinea, at the most they are now but planks bearded with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted only by the albatross.

Long ago nearly every home in Dockland treasured a lithographic portrait of one of the beauties, framed and hung where visitors could see it as soon as they entered the door. Each of us knew one of them, her runs and her records, the skipper and his fads, the owner and his prejudice about the last pennyworth of tar. She was not a transporter to us, an earner of freights, something to which was attached a profit and loss account and an insurance policy. She had a name. She was a sentient being, perhaps noble, perhaps wilful; she might have any quality of character, even malice. I have seen hands laid on her with affection in dock, when those who knew her were telling me of her ways.

To few of the newer homes among the later streets of Dockland is that beautiful lady's portrait known. Here and there it survives, part of the flotsam which has drifted through the years with grandmother's sandalwood chest, the last of the rush-bottomed chairs, and the lacquered tea-caddy. I well remember a room from which such survivals were saved when the household ship ran on a coffin, and foundered. It was a front parlour in one of the streets with an Oriental name; which, I cannot be expected to remember, for when last I was in that room I was lifted to sit on one of its horsehair chairs, its seat like a hedgehog, and I was cautioned to sit still. It was rather a long drop to the floor from a chair for me in those days, and though sitting still was hard, sliding part of the way would have been much worse. That was a room for holy days, too, a place for good behaviour, and boots profaned it. Its door was nearly always shut and locked, and only the chance formal visit of respect-worthy strangers brought down its key from the top shelf of the kitchen dresser. That key was seldom used for relatives, except at Christmas, or when one was dead. The room was always sombre. Light filtered into it through curtains of wire gauze, fixed in the window by mahogany frames. Over the door by which you entered was the picture of an uncle, too young and jolly for that serious position, I thought then, with his careless neckcloth, and his cap pulled down over one eye. The gilt moulding was gone from a corner of the picture—the only flaw in the prim apartment—for once that portrait fell to the floor, and on the very day, it was guessed, that his ship must have foundered.

A round table set on a central thick leg having a three-clawed foot was in that chamber, covered with a cloth on which was worked a picture from the story of Ruth. But only puzzling bits of the latter were to be seen, for on the circumference of the table-cover were books, placed at precise distances apart, and in the centre was a huge Bible, with a brass clasp. With many others my name was in the Bible, and my birthday, and a space left blank for the day of my death. Reflected in the pier-glass which doubled the room were the portraits in oils of my grandparents, looking wonderfully young, as you may have noticed is often the case in people belonging to ancient history, as though, strangely enough, people were the same in those remote days, except that they wore different clothes.

I have often sat on the chair, and when patience had inured me to the spines of the area I occupied, looked at the reflections in the mirror of those portraits, for they seemed more distant so, and in a perspective according to their age, and became really my grandparents, in a room, properly, of another world, which could be seen, but was not. A room no one could enter any more. I remember a black sofa, which smelt of dust, an antimacassar over its head. That sofa would wake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect the model of a ship in yellow ivory, resting on a wall-bracket above. There were many old shells in the polished brass fender, some with thick orange lips and spotted backs; others were spirals of mother-o'-pearl, which took different colours for every way you held them. You could get the only sound in the room by putting the shells to your ear. Like the people of the portraits, it was impossible to believe the shells had ever lived. The inside of the grate was filled with white paper, and the trickles of fine black dust which rested in its crevices would start and run stealthily when people walked in the next room. Over the looking-glass there hung a pair of immense buffalo horns, with a piece of curly black hair dividing them which looked like the skin of our retriever dog. Above the horns was the picture of "The Famous Tea Clipper Oberon, setting her Studding Sails off the Lizard"; but so high was the print, and so faint—for the picture, too, was old—that some one grown up had to tell me all about it.

The clipper Oberon long since sailed to the Isle-of-No-Land-at-All, and the room in which her picture hung has gone also, like old Dockland, and is now no more than something remembered. The clipper's picture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expect in that house today there is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels.

Nothing conjures back that room so well as the recollection of a strange odour which fell from it when its door opened, as though something bodiless passed as we entered. There was never anything in the room which alone could account for the smell, for it had in it something of the sofa, which was old and black, and of the lacquered tea-caddy, within the lid of which was the faint ghost of a principle indefinably ancient and rare; and there was in it, too, something of the shells. But you could never find where the smell really came from. I have tried, and know. A recollection of that strange dusky fragrance brings back the old room on a summer afternoon, so sombre that the mahogany sideboard had its own reddish light, so quiet that the clock could be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, going leisurely. There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atoms swimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten a patch of carpet. Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling. Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place. I used to wonder what they lived on. You felt secure there, knowing it was old, but seeing things did not alter, as though the world were established and content, desiring no new thing. I did not know that the old house, even then, quiet and still as it seemed, was actually rocking on the flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, sick with anxiety and bewilderment in guiding his home in the years he did not understand, which his experience had never charted, was sinking nerveless at his helm. For he heard, when his children did not, the premonition of breakers in seas having no landmark that he knew; felt the trend and push of new and inimical forces, and currents that carried him helpless, whither he would not go, but must, heartbroken, into the uproar and welter of the modern.

I have been told that London east of the Tower has no history worth mentioning, and it is true that sixteenth-century prints show the town to finish just where the Dock of St. Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian seaboard. Once it serpentined as far as the upper Pool, disappearing as the wharves and docks were built to accommodate London's increasing commerce. There is no doubt, then, that the Lower Thames parishes are really young; but, when we are reminded that they have no history worth mentioning, it may be understood that the historian is simply not interested enough to mention it.