East London

by Walter Besant

The steamers are not the great liners; they are much smaller craft. They run between London and Hamburg, London and Antwerp, London and Dieppe. The ships which bring the treasures of the world to London port are all in the docks where they are out of sight; there is no evidence to this group of spectators from the bridge of their presence at all, or of the rich argosies they bear within them.

You should have seen this place a hundred years ago. Try to carry your imagination so far back. Before you lie the vessels in long lines moored side by side; they form regular streets, with broad waterways between; as each ship comes up-stream it is assigned its place. There are no docks; the ships receive or discharge their cargo by means of barges or lighters, of which there are thousands on the river; there are certain quays at which everything is landed, in the presence of custom-house officers, landing surveyors, and landing masters. All day long and all the year round, except on Sunday, the barges are going backward and forward, lying alongside, loading and unloading; all day long you will hear the never-ending shouting, ordering, quarreling, of the bargees and the sailors; the Pool is as full of noise as it is full of movement. Every trade and every country are represented in the Pool; the rig, the lines, the masts of every ship proclaim her nationality and the nature of her trade. There are the stately East and West Indiamen, the black collier, the brig and the brigantine and the schooner, the Dutch galliot, the three-masted Norwegian, the coaster, and the multitudinous smaller craft—the sailing barge, the oyster boat, the smack, the pinnace, the snow, the yacht, the lugger, the hog boat, the ketch, the hoy, the lighter, and the wherries, and always ships dropping down the river with the ebb, or making their slow way up the river with the flow.

Steam is a leveller by sea as well as on land; on the latter it has destroyed the picturesque stage-coach and the post-chaise and the Berlin and the family coach; by sea it banishes the old sailing craft of all kinds; one after the other they disappear; how many landsmen are there who at the present day know how to distinguish between brig and brigantine, between ketch and snow?

I said that there is no history to speak of in East London. The Pool and the port must be excepted; they are full of history, could we stop for some of it—the history of shipbuilding, the expansion of trade, the pirates of the German Ocean; when one begins to look back the things of the past arise in the mind one after the other and are acted again before one’s eyes. For instance, you have seen the Pool in 1800. Look again in 1400. The Pool is again filled with ships, but they are of strange build and mysterious rig; they are short and broad and solidly built; they are not built for speed; they are high in the poop, low in the waist, and broad in the bow; they roll before the wind, with their single mast and single sail; they are coasters laden with provisions; they are heavily built craft from Bordeaux, deep down in the water with casks of wine; they are weather-beaten ships bringing turpentine, tallow, firs, skins, from the Baltic. And see, even while we look, there come sweeping up the river the long and stately Venetian galleys, rowed by Turkish slaves, with gilded masts and painted bows. They come every year—a whole fleet of them; they put in first at Southampton; they go on to Antwerp; they cross the German Ocean again to London. Mark the pious custom of the time. It is not only the Venetian custom, but that of every country; when the ship has reached her moorings, when the anchor is dropped and the galley swings into place, the whole ship’s company gather together before the mainmast—slaves and all—and so, bareheaded, sing the Kyrielle, the hymn of praise to the Virgin, who has brought them safe to port.

Of history, indeed, there is no end. Below us is the custom house. It has always stood near the same spot. We shall see Geoffrey Chaucer, if we are lucky, walking about engaged in the duty of his office. And here we may see, perhaps, Dick Whittington, the ’prentice lad newly arrived from the country; he looks wistfully at the ships; they represent the world that he must conquer—so much he understands already; they are to become, somehow, his own ships; they are to bring home his treasures—cloth of gold and of silver, velvet, silk, spices, perfumes, choice weapons, fragrant woods; they are to make him the richest merchant in all the City; they are to enable him to entertain in his own house the King and the Queen, and to tear up the King’s bonds, amounting to a princely fortune. You may see, two hundred years later on, one Shakspere loitering about the quays; he is a young fellow, with a rustic ruddiness of countenance, like David; he is quiet and walks about by himself; he looks on and listens, but says nothing. He learns everything, the talk of sailors, soldiers, working-men—all, and he forgets nothing. Later on, again, you may see Daniel Defoe, notebook in hand, questioning the sailors from every port, but especially from the plantations of Virginia. He, too, observes everything, notes everything, and reproduces everything. As to the Pool and the port and their history one could go on forever. But the tale of London Town contains it all, and that must be told in another place.

Come back to the Pool of the eighteenth century, because it is there that we get the first glimpse of the people who lived by the shipping and the port. They were, first, the sailors themselves; next, the lightermen, stevedores, and porters; then the boat builders, barge builders, rope-makers, block-makers, ships’ carpenters, mast- and yard-makers, shipwrights, keepers of taverns and ale-houses, dealers in ships’ stores, and many others. Now, in the eighteenth century, the shipping of London port increased by leaps and bounds; in 1709 there were only five hundred and sixty ships belonging to this port; in 1740 the number was multiplied by three; this number does not include those ships which came from other British ports or from foreign ports. With this increase there was, naturally, a corresponding increase of the riverside population. Their homes were beyond and outside the jurisdiction of the City; they outgrew the inefficient county machinery for the enforcement of order and the prevention and punishment of crime. As years went on the riverside became more densely populated, and the people, left to themselves, grew year by year more lawless, more ignorant, more drunken, more savage; there never was a time, there was no other place, unless it might have been some short-lived pirate settlement on a West Indian islet, where there was so much savagery as on the riverside of London—those “hamlets” marked on my map—toward the close of the eighteenth century. When one thinks of it, when one realizes the real nature of the situation and its perils, one is amazed that we got through without a rising and a massacre.

The Bank of “The Pool.” Looking Toward Tower Bridge.

The whole of the riverside population, including not only the bargemen and porters, but the people ashore, the dealers in drink, the shopkeepers, the dealers in marine stores, were joined and banded together in an organized system of plunder and robbery. They robbed the ships of their cargoes as they unloaded them; they robbed them of their cargoes as they brought them in the barge from the wharf to the ship. They were all concerned in it—man, woman, and child; they all looked upon the shipping as a legitimate object of plunder; there was no longer any question of conscience; there was no conscience left at all; how could there be any conscience where there was no education, no religion, not even any superstition? Of course the greatest robbers were the lightermen themselves; but the boys were sent out in light boats which pulled under the stern of the vessels, out of sight, and received small parcels of value tossed to them from the men in the ships. These men wore leathern aprons which were contrived as water-tight bags, which they could fill with rum or brandy, and they had huge pockets concealed behind the aprons which they crammed with stuff. On shore every other house was a drinking-shop and a “fence” or receiving-shop; the evenings were spent in selling the day’s robberies and drinking the proceeds. Silk, velvets, spices, rum, brandy, tobacco—everything that was brought from over the sea became the spoil of this vermin. They divided the work, they took different branches under different names, they shielded each other; if the custom-house people or the wharfingers tried to arrest one, he was protected by his companions. It was estimated in 1798 that goods to the value of £250,000 were stolen every year from the ships in the Pool by the men who worked at discharging cargo. The people grew no richer, because they sold their plunder for a song and drank up the money every day. But they had, at least, as much as they could drink.

Imagine, then, the consternation and disgust of this honest folk when they found that the ships were in future going to receive cargo and to discharge, not in the open river, but in dock, the new wet docks, capable of receiving all; that the only entrance and exit for the workmen was by a gate, at which stood half a dozen stalwart warders; that the good old leathern apron was suspected and handled; that pockets were also regarded with suspicion and were searched; and that dockers who showed bulginess in any portion of their figures were ignominiously set aside and strictly examined. No more confidence between man and man; no more respect for the dignity of the working-man. The joy, the pride, the prizes of the profession, all went out as if at one stroke. I am sorry that we have no record of the popular feeling on the riverside when it became at last understood that there was no longer any hope, that honesty had actually become compulsory. What is the worth of virtue if it is no longer voluntary? For the first time these poor injured people felt the true curse of labor. Did they hold public meetings? Did they demonstrate? Did they make processions with flags and drums? Did they call upon their fellow-workmen to turn out in their millions and protest against enforced honesty? If they did, we hear nothing of it. The riverside was unfortunately considered at that time beneath the notice of the press. After a few unfortunates had been taken at the dock gates with their aprons full of rum up to the chin; after these captives had been hauled before the magistrate, tried at the Old Bailey, without the least sympathy for old established custom, and then imprisoned and flogged with the utmost barbarity, I think that a general depression of spirits, a hitherto unknown dejection, fell upon the quarter and remained, a cloud that nothing could dispel; that the traders all became bankrupt, and that the demand for drink went down until it really seemed as if from Wapping to Blackwall the riverside was becoming sober.