THE TOWER, FROM THE RIVER.
Up to quite recently, to the time of Mr. Shaw-Lefevre’s occupancy of the office of Board of Works, indeed, the Tower, as seen from the river, was much disfigured by modern buildings of exceeding ugliness, which public feeling had long since condemned. Most of these have now disappeared, but one such building, bearing the appearance of a granary, still remains to break the face of the White Tower with its dull red-brown. Beyond it one catches glimpses of quaint gabled roofs, characteristic of periods as widely separated as those of Elizabeth and Queen Anne. To the left are more buildings of old red-brick, with ivy clustering over them, and beyond, home of many sad memorials, rise the walls of the Beauchamp Tower, with, beside them, a curious lumber of quaint, many-windowed, square turrets, jumbled together in different ages for diverse purposes, and now used as lodgings for the Beefeaters and the guard.
In the church of St. Peter ad Vincula, the situation of which one may guess from the river, were interred the headless bodies of Queen Catherine Howard, of Anne Boleyn, of the Countess of Shrewsbury, and of Lady Jane Grey; of Sir Thomas More, of the first Cromwell, of Seymour, Lord High Admiral, of his brother, the Protector Somerset, and of many others whose illustrious positions were the occasions of their own misfortunes. “There is no sadder spot on earth than this little cemetery,” says Macaulay. “Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny; with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.” The most ancient and illustrious building that is mirrored in the waters of the Thames is, indeed, also the home of the grimmest memories. The Tower is a sad, depressing place to visit, the concrete representative of all the darker events of our history.
The character of the Thames below London Bridge is best expressed by the normal appearance of the Pool. And let me at once explain that the Pool is the wide, curving stretch of river which extends from just above the Tower to the neighbourhood of “Wapping Old Stairs.” Here, in most abundance, you find “toil, glitter, grime, and wealth on a flowing tide.” Mr. W. L. Wyllie’s picture, purchased out of the funds of the Chantrey bequest, is a wonderfully characteristic description of the aspect which the Thames presents in this busy portion of its course. In the foreground a couple of coal-laden boats, with a little hasty steam-tug beside them, are making slow headway against the tide; beyond these, a great iron steamship rears up its vast bulk; a couple of heavily-laden Thames barges are flying along under full sail; on either side of the river there are confused masses of rigging, with here and there the hull of a ship, half visible through whirling clouds of smoke and steam. On the waterway, kept clear of all vessels at anchor for a breadth of 200 feet, the strong white sunlight gleams, making clear to the spectator what the poet Spenser had in his mind when, in his rich vocabulary, he spoke of “the silver-streaming Thames.”
Spenser’s phrase is one which has been greatly misunderstood. The Thames, even in its quietest and least corrupted days, can never have been a very pellucid stream. When Taylor, the water poet, plied his craft upon it he must have found almost as much difficulty in looking into its mysterious depths as we find to-day. Certainly, to the local colour of a swift-flowing river which brings down continuous deposits of mud from far-off meadow-lands, such a word as “silvery” could never properly be applied. Only when the sunlight struck the river, and its rippled surface tremblingly gleamed back to the sky with a reflection of its own brightness, could Spenser have been delighted by the aspect of the “silver-streaming” waters, ebbing and flowing through London’s heart, and bearing onward their heavy burden to the sea. Leaning over the rail of a steamer outward bound, one is apt to forget everything else in the contemplation of these brilliant and rapidly changing effects of light, which seem to chase one another as if in mere wantonness, and which, in no mood of wantonness, at every capricious curve of the stream cast on the thick dusky waters some new and strange glory.
The Pool is full of such life and movement as is to be encountered on no other English river, for here the crowded ships do not merely lie at anchor, waiting on wind and tide; they are busy loading and unloading freights. One hears the grating of cranes and the shouts of men; the peculiar “dumb-barges” of the Thames cluster round the hulls of screw-colliers from Newcastle, and receive from them their separate loads of coal; and excitable little steamers are running in and out as if they had lost their way among the crowded shipping. In mid-stream the traffic is almost as busy and confusing as that of a London street. Vessels are coming up with the tide; barges are slowly floating onward, their brown sails spread, tacking to the wind, their decks washed now and again by some arrowy wave from a paddle-steamer. There is, as Mr. Jefferies says, “a hum, a haste, almost a whirl,” for on the river work proceeds at a more rapid pace than in the docks, and the Thames, it must be remembered, is the busiest port on the surface of the globe.
It is hard to say whether the Pool is most beautiful and striking at moonlight or in the dawn. Turner loved it best at the hour before twilight, when the sky was robed in gold and crimson and purple, and the Thames was ablaze with the light of the setting sun. At such seasons it is indeed very glorious; yet to me it has always seemed most beautiful in the morning, when the light is slowly diffusing itself from behind a bank of purple cloud, and the face of the White Tower is touched into pale gold, and there is a glittering radiance on turret and roof, and the craft anchored in the stream are reflected to every mast and spar and half-furled sail, and the river trembles in the new radiance as if it were divided between delight and fear. Everything is very still and soft and shadowy. It is such a scene as seems appropriate to happy dreams. In another hour or two the river will be awake, the twitter of birds flitting across the waters will be drowned in the shouting of labourers and the shrieking of cranes; the stream, its brief glory departed, will be churned up by paddle-wheel and screw; the swarthy steam-colliers will come, hard and clear, out of the soft haze, and the Thames will become a workaday river again, wonderful still, but, after such a vision, too grimly prosaic and real. Yet it is well to have seen it once with the dawn upon it, if only to learn how those have libelled it who deny that it is “picturesque.”
In the seventeenth century there was, in the Upper, Lower, and Middle Pools, space for 900 vessels. Nearly that number might now be packed into the London and St. Katharine’s Docks, which lie just below the Tower, hemmed in by what was once fashionable London, now fashionable no more, but famous the world over as the accustomed haunt of the seaman on shore. Before docks were constructed along Thames-side, vessels were unloaded into barges and wherries, and river-robbery was a thriving trade. Numbers of men lived, and grew rich, on what they had contrived to steal from cargoes that were waiting to be discharged at the wharves about London Bridge. Ships were sometimes as much as six weeks in unloading, and a whole host of lightermen, carmen, porters, and nondescripts thrived on the unconscionable delay. There were good pickings in those times, and it is wonderful, when we consider with how much rascality and obstruction our commerce had to contend, that England ever became a great nation of carriers and traders.
The docks nearest to London Bridge cover the site of a church, a hospital, and a graveyard.
More than 700 years ago, or, to be precise, in 1148, Matilda, the wife of King Stephen, founded on a site just below the Tower a hospital which was dedicated to St. Katharine. It endured, in one form or another, to 1827, when the building was pulled down, and the hospital was removed to Regent’s Park. In that same year was commenced the construction of the St. Katharine’s Docks, which, by the employment of 2,500 workmen, were completed in the brief space of eighteen months. They cover an area of twenty-three acres, ten of water and thirteen of land. The docks are the most prosaic of all those which are to be found along Thames shore. To the river they present a dull heavy frontage, which suggests no connection with ships; on the land side they are shut off from observation by a prodigiously high wall. Entering through the gates you find three great basins, with ships lying close to the wharves, and you have towering above you gigantic warehouses, dull and dismal, but capable, you would suppose, of finding storage room for half the commerce of a city. The cellars of St. Katharine’s Dock are complex and amazing, but the docks themselves are going out of vogue, for many of the ships which used to frequent them are now intercepted before the lights of London come in sight, the Victoria and Albert Docks, much lower down the river, absorbing a great proportion of the traffic which was wont to make its way into the Pool.