Rivers of Great Britain. The Thames, from Source to Sea. / Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial

by Various

The attendance of the London coster is regulated by the supply of fish. Sometimes only a few scores of these itinerant dealers are to be encountered in Old Thames Street; sometimes they are present by hundreds and thousands. It has never yet been discovered how the intelligence of a profuse and cheap fish supply is diffused over London; but it invariably occurs that when the market is overstocked every costermonger in town has knowledge of the fact long before noon. It is much as if the street-dealers were connected with Billingsgate by electric wires. “Barrows” come racing by dozens over London Bridge; Covent Garden Market is suddenly deserted by the most numerous class of its customers; from Shadwell, from Kentish Town, from more remote Hammersmith, the costermonger rushes off to Billingsgate as if for bare life, and by mid-day cheap fish is being cried all through the London streets and far off at the doors of “Villadom” in the suburbs.

The late Henry Mayhew has striven to give an idea of the confused cries of Billingsgate in his wonderful and painstaking work on “London Labour and the London Poor,” where the sounds heard above the general din are represented thus:—“Ha—a—ansome cod! best in the market! All alive! alive! alive, O!” “Yeo, ye—e—o! Here’s your fine Yarmouth bloaters! Who’s the buyer?” “Here you are, guv’ner; splendid whiting.” “Turbot, turbot! All alive, turbot!” “Glass of nice peppermint this cold morning, a ha’penny a glass, a ha’penny a glass!” “Fine soles, oy, oy, oy!” “Hullo, hullo, here! beautiful lobsters, good and cheap!” “Hot soup, nice pea-soup! a—all hot, hot!” “Who’ll buy brill, O, brill, O?” “Fine flounders, a shilling a lot! O ho! O ho! this way—this way—this way! Fish alive! alive! alive O!” And in such fashion is business carried on at Billingsgate every morning, amid a turbulence not to be described.

It is a prosaic, evil-smelling business, this of fish dealing, relieved by no such spectacles as were to be witnessed in the time of Stowe, when, “on St. Magnus’ Day the fishmongers, with solemn procession, paraded through the streets, having, among other pageants and shows, four sturgeons, gilt, carried on four horses; and after, six-and-forty knights armed, riding on horses, made ‘like luces of the sea;’ and then St. Magnus, the patron saint of the day, with a thousand horsemen.” The salesmen reserve their solemn rites in these days for the dinners in Fishmongers’ Hall, and the only “Knights” they can boast of are those ludicrous “men in armour” who make a part of the Lord Mayor’s Show.

Close by Billingsgate lies the long frontage of the Custom House, conspicuous no less by reason of its bulk and position than for that leprous whiteness which, on certain kinds of stone, is one of the effects of the biting and crumbling atmosphere of London. The site is one that should be dear to lovers of English poetry. Here Geoffrey Chaucer officiated as Controller of Customs, the stipulation being that he should write the rolls of his office with his own hand, and perform his duties personally, and not by deputy. It may be that whilst his pen was thus unpoetically employed, his mind wandered off to the “Tabard” Inn, by the end of London Bridge, to its jolly landlord, “bold of his speech, and wise and well-i-taught,” and to the curiously compounded bands of pilgrims who gathered there on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Here, also, came William Cowper, in one of his fits of insanity, intent on suicide. The water was low, exposing the foreshore, and there was a careless porter sitting on a bale of goods. It seemed to the poor stricken poet as if the man were waiting there to prevent the execution of his purpose, “and so,” he says, “this passage to the bottomless pit being mercifully closed against me, I returned to the coach,” which was really the only sensible thing he could do.

The present Custom House, built in 1825, contains one of the longest and the most dingy-looking rooms in England. Here may be encountered strings of British merchants and rough ship-captains waiting to transact business relating to their cargoes. At one counter is kept a record of vessels and their owners, at another the clearance of ships outward is the subject of concern; at a third the skipper must hand in a list of every article on board his vessel, and thence proceed from counter to counter until he has satisfied all the requirements of the law. In one corner of the building there is a Custom House Museum, containing many quaint official documents, detailing how John Doe, being a Papist, did not receive his quarter’s salary, and how some other servant of the Customs has been docked of his wages because of the indiscretion of somebody else’s wife; containing, also, curious articles which have been employed in small acts of smuggling—a stewardess’s crinoline that has been puffed out with a bottle of right good Hollands, a book which has been made to do duty as a brandy-flask, quantities of snuff that have been shipped as oilcake, and many other curious examples of unexpected failure to evade the law. Those whose business it is to detect cheats of this description love to retain some memorial of their prowess, and in this manner it happens that the Custom House Museum is valuable chiefly to those who care to study human ingenuity in connection with dishonest purposes.

There is in existence a curious record concerning the Custom House and Queen Bess. “About this time (1590),” writes the quaint author of “The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that famous Princesse Elizabeth,” “the commodity of the Custom House amounted to an unexpected value; for the Queen, being made acquainted by the means of a subtle fellow, named Caermardine, with the mystery of their gaines, so enhanced the rate that Sir Thomas Smith, master of the Custom House, who heretofore farmed it of the Queen for £14,000 yearly, was now mounted to £42,000, and afterwards to £50,000, which, notwithstanding, was valued but as an ordinary sum for such oppressing gaine. The Lord Treasurer, the Earls of Leicester and Walsingham, much opposed themselves against this Caermardine ... but the Queen answered them that all princes ought to be, if not as favourable, yet as just, to the lowest as to the highest, desiring that they who falsely accused her Privy Council of sloth or indiscretion should be severely punished; but they who justly accused them should be heard. That she was Queen as well to the poorest as to the proudest, and that therefore she would never be deaf to their just complaints. Likewise that she would not suffer that these toll-takers, like horse-leeches, should glut themselves with the riches of the realm, and starve her Exchequer; which, as she will not bear it to be docked, so hateth she to enrich it with the poverty of her people.” From which lion-like speech it appears that Queen Elizabeth more than suspected her Privy Councillors of having intercepted moneys which should have found their way to the Exchequer of the Crown.

After the Billingsgate fever is over, everything round about the Custom House seems quiet and sleepy and still; yet an almost inconceivable amount of business is transacted within its walls. Every merchant receiving a cargo, every shipmaster going out or coming in, has unavoidable business here. There is a series of counters, distinguished by the various letters of the alphabet, and from one to another the visitors to the Custom House continue to circulate, engaging in one sort of transaction at one counter, and in some other sort at a second, and third, and fourth. It is a long and wearisome process, the discharge of the various duties appertaining to the entry and the clearing out of ships—a process which, be it said, seems much less trying to the clerks than to those on whom they are called upon to attend.

In front of the Custom House there is a broad quay, used as a public promenade, a true haven of rest to him who has lost heart and energy in the almost vain attempt to escape from the crowd and the bustle of Thames Street. At this spot, on New Year’s Morning, the Jews of London were wont to assemble to offer up prayers in remembrance of that sad captivity when their people sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept. The custom has been discouraged of late years, but there are still some professors of the ancient faith who follow the rule of their forefathers, and offer up the time-worn prayers on the spot which was consecrated by them in “the days that are no more.”

It is difficult to break away from that portion of the river on which we seem already to have lingered too long. The Thames is here full of interest and of crowding associations. Over the water, behind the great, grim warehouses, slopes downward into Bermondsey that Tooley Street which the three tailors—“we, the people of England”—have made famous throughout the world. From amid grimy roofs and grey-brown walls rises the tower of St. Olave’s Church, half-buried and lost amid a London of which its builders never dreamed. Down here, in narrow street and dim entry, the bewildered stranger begins to feel that, after all, man is too small for the planet on which he lives. Great walls—of granary, and store, and manufactory—reach over and above him, and dwarf him into extreme littleness. He seems to be walking beneath high cliffs by the sea. The whole air trembles and throbs with noise and travail. Here and there, through some unexpected narrow opening, may be discerned a thin strip of river, with ships and boats. At intervals of every two or three hundred yards these openings occur, and they lead down to old-fashioned Thames stairs, where the waterman plies his trade. Lingering about the landing-places, or the streets and alleys adjacent thereto, one meets occasional blear-eyed, evil-countenanced, ill-clad men, who approach with a sinuous stoop of the shoulders, a deferential ducking of the head, and a dirty thumb raised to the brim of a greasy hat. These men will do anything for money except work. If you employ one of them to conduct you to the stairs and to call a boat he will pretend to hurry forward, but, without progressing much, will look furtively behind, seem to measure your size and estimate your running powers, and then proceed slowly in front, his evil-looking thumb continually beckoning, and his croaking voice ejaculating, “This way, sir; this way; this way, if you please.” He means no mischief probably, but as you walk through these parts of London in such company you are thankful it is daylight, and that even the alleys and courts of the Surrey side are not absolutely impervious to the sun.