All this was very different in Ned Ward’s time, when that lively writer was collecting materials for his London Spy; very different, indeed, when men who are only now middle-aged were in the bloom of their youth. “Sometimes we met in the streets with a boat’s-crew,” says Ward, “just come on shore in search of those land debaucheries which the sea denies them; looking like such wild, staring, gamesome, uncouth animals, that a litter of squab rhinoceroses, dressed up in human apparel, could not have made a more ungainly appearance.... Every post they came to was in danger of having its head broken.... The very dogs in the street shunned them.... I could not forbear reflecting on the ‘prudence’ of those persons who send their unlucky children away to sea to tame and reform them.” And well he might wonder at that same prudence now, if he saw how miserable and forlorn the British tar can look when his money is spent, and how little his appearance is suggestive of those high spirits which a life on the ocean wave is supposed to engender.
From Wapping, to which Ratcliff Highway will bring us, you may pass, through the famous Thames Tunnel, under the river to Rotherhithe. Not, however, as formerly, when the tunnel was reached by sets of circular stairs, and toyshop keepers drove a meagre business under a dripping and gigantic arch. At that period, the tunnel contained a central arcade lighted by gas; nowadays, it is so dark that no man can discern when he enters and when he leaves; for it has been absorbed into the great railway system, and instead of traversing it on foot one is whirled through it in a train, so that the traveller might be carried underneath the Thames, at a depth of more than seventy feet below the surface, without knowing that he had been on anything else but an ordinary underground railway. The Tunnel cost nearly half a million of money to construct, and twenty years elapsed—from 1823 to 1843—from the time when it was designed by Brunel and the day when it was opened to the public. As a place of resort for sight-seers it proved a gigantic failure; as a railway tunnel, it is a means of communication between the two most populous and busy districts of London.
Not that there are many signs of business to be encountered when one leaves the tunnel by means of the railway station at Rotherhithe. At the first glance the district round about seems quiet and sleepy and secluded. Mr. Walter Besant came upon it unexpectedly and with great joy, for here he found a world altogether in contrast with that which he had left a little higher up the Thames—houses of quiet old sailors, little churches and chapels, rows of small dwellings with flowers blooming on the window-sills, timber-yards and lagoons and canals, and a general air of retirement and repose. It is a narrow strip of shore, Rotherhithe. On one side it is washed by the Thames; on the other, it is hemmed in by the Surrey Commercial Docks. Sailor life in its better aspects is to be encountered here, for the neighbourhood has been haunted by seamen from Saxon times downwards, and the influence of the quaint older world has not yet passed away. It was through being a “sailor’s haven,” say the antiquaries, that Rotherhithe came by its name. Here Canute cut deep trenches, which, according to one of the friends of Samuel Pepys, who saw the remains of them in the course of a walk from Rotherhithe to Lambeth, were intended to divert the course of the Thames. At Rotherhithe Edward III. fitted out one of his fleets, and close upon its borders, in Bermondsey, lived some of our early kings.
The signs of the Rotherhithe inns—the “Swallow Galley,” and the “Ship Argo”—seem to carry us back to “the stately times of great Elizabeth;” and though the place itself must have altered greatly since then, the manner of life of some of its inhabitants is much like that of their predecessors must have been when stout, high-decked ships sailed by on their way to the Spanish main, and Rotherhithe sent out its contingent of vessels and men to fight against the Invincible Armada.
All but completely cut off from the rest of the world for many generations, Rotherhithe has naturally made the river its highway, and so, leading off from its quiet, old-world streets, there are everywhere passages which end in boat-landings and stairs. The names of many of these latter recall memories of a bygone time. There are King and Queen Stairs, Globe Stairs, Shepherd and Dog Stairs, Redriff Stairs—Redriff being the name under which, at one time, Rotherhithe was known—and others that must have received their designations when most of the land beyond Rotherhithe was marsh and wilderness. When the tide is out the stairs are left high and dry, and the river becomes a narrow channel between muddy flats, on which barges lie grounded, and the ribs of old wrecks are to be seen, and a steamer heels carelessly over, one side of its keel washed by the lapping tide.
On the opposite side of the river lies Wapping; the unique spire of Limehouse Church is visible, rising high above masts, and roofs, and chimneys, a landmark for miles; Stepney stands proudly dominant on its elevated banks; and Ratcliff, half enveloped in thick atmosphere, proclaims itself by the gleaming sunlight on its multitudinous roofs. Of Wapping one cannot think without recalling one of the tenderest of English popular songs:—
“Your Molly has never been false, she declares,
Since the last time we parted at Wapping Old Stairs;
When I swore that I still would continue the same,
And gave you the ’bacca-box, marked with my name.”