Dissenters’ Festival.
The first of August, as the anniversary of the death of queen Anne, and the accession of George I., seems to have been kept with rejoicing by the dissenters. In the year 1733, they held a great meeting in London, and several other parts of the kingdom to celebrate the day, it being that whereon the “schism bill” was to have taken place if the death of the queen had not prevented it. If this bill had passed into a law, dissenters would have been debarred the liberty of educating their own children.[282]
Dogget’s Coat and Badge.
Also in honour of this day there is a rowing match on the river Thames, instituted by Thomas Dogget an old actor of celebrity, who was so attached to the Brunswick family, that sir Richard Steele called him “a whig up to the head and ears.”
In the year after George I. came to the throne, Dogget gave a waterman’s coat and silver badge to be rowed for by six watermen on the first day of August, being the anniversary of that king’s accession to the throne. This he continued till his death, when it was found that he had bequeathed a certain sum of money, the interest of which was to be appropriated annually, for ever, to the purchase of a like coat and badge, to be rowed for in honour of the day by six young watermen whose apprenticeships had expired the year before. This ceremony is every year performed on the first of August, the claimants setting out, at a signal given, at that time of the tide when the current is strongest against them, and rowing from the Old Swan, near London-bridge, to the White Swan at Chelsea.[283]
Broughton, who was a waterman, before he was a prize-fighter, won the first coat and badge.
This annual rowing-match is the subject of a ballad-opera, by Charles Dibdin, first performed at the Haymarket, in 1774, called “The Waterman, or the First of August.” In this piece Tom Tugg, a candidate for Dogget’s coat and badge, sings the following, which was long a popular
SONG.