Now where were we, on our Docklands road trip? Ah yes, we’d come a long way in time – around 1,500 years, but only around a mile or two in terms of distance covered. My last post finished just as it was all kicking off in Tudor London. The quays and wharves along the Thames’ north bank, between Blackfriars and the Tower, were bustling with activity. Trade was lively thanks to swashbuckling entrepreneurs. They were back from discovering new territories and forging new markets, away from the baleful eye and dominant influence of the crafty Germanic traders of the Hanseatic league.
Bursting at the seams
In fact, trade was booming rather too much, and the London quays were bursting at the seams. Before the Tudors, there were fewer than a dozen quays doing business along our little stretch of river. But then….have a look at this survey of the working quays, commissioned in the 1550s (I’ve copied excerpts, with the original spellings).
It records now getting on for almost 30 quays and wharves, and makes for interesting reading. (I read about it in Fiona Rule’s great book: London’s Docklands: A History of the Lost Quarter. I can’t recommend it enough, such brilliant research).
Our oldest ally
You can almost hear the sniff of dislike, when the writer describes the stand-offish Hanseatic merchants I described in my previous post. They were still operating from The Stilyard. There were also two quays specialising in goods from Portingale, or Portugal, as we’d say nowadays. It reflects the world’s oldest and still-continuing political mutual alliance. England and Portugal first signed a treaty in 1373 – in the reign of Edward III. Those medieval monarchs really loved their port wine, although the treaty covered mutual cooperation in politics, as well as trade.
Incidentally, that’s why England became involved in the Peninsula war in the 1700s, in defence of Portugal, when Napoleon was flexing his French (or Corsican) muscles. Any watcher of Sean Bean, playing Sharpe, or any reader of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, will tell you as much. Britain and Portugal have never been to war against each other, which, for a bellicose nation such as the Brits, is a minor miracle.
Make it legal
But I digress, so, back to our busy surveyor on the banks of the Thames. You may well ask: why commission such a survey? Of course it was all about money. Or more specifically – tax revenues. The Tudor monarchs badly wanted to cash in on that healthy increase in trade. Somehow, many goods arriving and departing by ship in London seemed to bypass the payment of taxes and of duty (which is a specific tax on imports and exports). Fraud and smuggling were rife: no-one liked paying taxes.
So the government surveyed the river bank, identified the enterprises – and then passed legislation to sew up the revenue source. In 1559, Legal Quays were established by law. Imports and exports of goods could only happen at the Legal Quays, and then during the hours of daylight only, when the government officials were around. And of course, only after paying the appropriate taxes and duties. Each transaction then had to be recorded by two separate officials. Readers from the world of banking will instantly recognise this as an early example of the anti-collusion, anti-fraud four eyes principle.
South of the River
It wasn’t only the import and export trades that took off under the Tudors. You need ships to actually carry the goods. Anyway, England needed to build up its navy, in the face of an increasingly hostile Europe, following Henry’s break with Rome. So shipyards started to mushroom throughout England, building ships for both trade and war. Henry established two royal dockyards in London, at Woolwich and Deptford. They included dry docks, which made a shipwright’s job much easier.
No doubt, like a modern day black cab driver, Tudor Londoners gasped with horror at the thought of venturing south of the river. But it made sense – both shipyards were a short pull upstream from the royal palace at Greenwich, making it easy for Henry to keep an eye on things. Also, the water was deeper on that side of the river, allowing building of larger ships.
Come on you Gunners!
There had been shipbuilding at Woolwich since at least the 1300s. Edward I exempted Woolwich men from paying taxes, because they made their ships available for the king’s use. But Henry commissioned his own dockyard at Woolwich in 1512. The first ship built there was The Henry Grace a Dieu, otherwise known as The Great Harry, Henry’s flagship. His other great naval project, The Mary Rose, was fitted out at his new Woolwich dockyard.
Henry also started the development of ordnance at the dockyard, making the cannons and guns that were fitted into the ships of war. Over the course of a few hundred years, the enterprise morphed into the Woolwich Arsenal Armaments Factory. In 1886 its factory workers decided to set up a football team, to play in the newly formed local amateur league…and the rest is history!
Come on you Irons!
Incidentally, a bit later in time in the 1830s, another shipyard and ironworks was built a bit further downstream, at Blackwall, where the river Lea empties into the greater river. It was known as The Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, and one of its claims to fame was that in 1860 it built HMS Warrior. Just another naval ship? Not quite, it was the first warship in the world constructed entirely from iron. The workers at the ironworks also fancied their chances in the local amateur football league… and again, made history.
“No-one likes us, we don’t care”
I can’t leave our football-themed conversation, without a mention of that third great dockyard-based London team…Millwall of course. Millwall docks were located on the Isle of Dogs, trading primarily in timber and importantly, grain. McDougall’s flour mill stood next to the docks, processing said grain. You can still buy McDougall’s flour today, but sadly it’s no longer milled on the Isle. In the shadow of the dock walls stood JT Morton’s canning factory. Its workers also decided to join in with the local football league fun. And the rest is…
By the way, workers at the Millwall docks used to wear rags over their footwear, to prevent the grain becoming contaminated. This led, so some believe, to the derogatory London expression, still used today, of “toerags”. I would counsel against using the expression with any keen Millwall supporter, however.
Friendly rivalry
You may ask why there’s such rivalry, even today, between supporters of West Ham and Millwall. It’s because their supporters were predominantly from the same community of dock workers. So there was intense competition to secure the services of the best local players. Dirty dealings no doubt led to fisticuffs in the local pubs. Some things don’t change.
Deptford ships
But let’s get back to our Tudors. In 1587, the very first Ark Royal was built in the Deptford yard, commissioned by Sir Walter Raleigh. He sold her to Queen Elizabeth, and the ship became the flagship of the English navy during the Armada. She was the first of five navy ships with this illustrious name, the last only being decommissioned in 2011.
The Golden Hinde, the flagship of Sir Francis Drake was actually built in Plymouth, but she sailed into Deptford dockyard in 1580 and moored up, so that visitors, including Elizabeth the queen, could board the ship that had just circumnavigated the world. Early London tourism! The original has long since decayed, but there’s now a lovely replica, 4 miles upstream from Deptford, at Southwark.
You’ll come across that replica if you wander along the south bank Thames path between Waterloo Bridge and Borough Market. And there must be London kids, other than myself, who fondly remember the Golden Hinde replica moored at Southend-on-Sea for many years, which was always a must-see on our regular outings to the Essex seaside.
Notice to quit
Life in Tudor England moved on, with England’s ever increasing exploration and trade rubbing the rival Spanish up the wrong way. It all came to a head, when Spain declared war on England, officially because of the religious differences between the two countries. It culminated, of course, in the Spanish Armada. During the heightened Spanish aggression, our favourite baddies, the Hanseatic merchants, tried to exploit the situation to their advantage.
They encouraged an embargo of English grain exports to ports in the Low Countries, now called Holland and Belgium, which were then under Spanish rule. Elizabeth’s patience had run its course. Do you recall the Merchant Adventurers in my last post? They were, of course, in fierce competition with the Hanse traders. Spurred by the disinterested, and of course unbiased, encouragement of the Adventurers, Elizabeth snapped, and gave the Hanseatic traders just two weeks’ notice to vacate the Steelyard.
Elizabeth’s successor, James I, invited them back, but their absence had allowed English companies to gain the toehold they needed. The returning Hanse merchants never quite regained their towering influence over London’s import and export businesses.
Something’s Gotta Give!
Meanwhile, trade continued to boom. And with that boom, the traffic jams on the Thames worsened. Bottlenecks, caused by the growth in shipping competing for the limited number of legal quays, increased. Anecdotal tales told of crossing the Thames without getting your feet wet, by hopping from ship to ship. Incoming ships had to moor downstream, and wait patiently for a berth. Sometimes, they waited for months for a slot to be free so they could land or load their goods. And throughout that waiting time, their cargoes were ripe for the taking.
Crime and Punishment
In his magical book: Thames, Sacred River, 
Peter Ackroyd describes the criminality every law-abiding vessel was subject to, when moored within the port of London. Smuggling was rife, often with the collusion of the crews. River pirates, or night plunderers cut the lines of ships after dark, waiting for them to drift ashore, where the goods were forcibly appropriated. Scuffle hunters and long apron men focused on pinching goods already landed on the quayside. There was heavy corruption within the workforces onshore. We are speaking of the light horsemen – dodgy revenue officers, and the heavy horsemen, the porters and labourers supplementing their income.
Many masters and captains, exasperated by the wait, worried by the risk of theft or worse, and increasingly out of pocket, took a chance and offloaded downstream at illegal wharves around Wapping. This of course, also had the advantage of evading the government taxes, but capture had dire consequences. Smuggling convictions often resulted in the death penalty.
Execution Dock
I’ve told of the grisly goings-on at Execution Dock at Wapping in an earlier post. The authorities hanged smugglers and pirates and left their bodies on the river bank, until three tides had covered them. If they were really unlucky, their bodies then ended up in the gibbet. It was a high price to pay for breaking the law.
Nevertheless, the pilfering and smuggling and piracy and general thievery continued unabated. A study in 1800 estimated the cost of lost revenue to be in the region of £800,000 per annum. That’s around a staggering £8 billion per annum in today’s money. But, of course, you have to consider that as a mere pinprick compared to the total value of London’s shipping enterprise. It’s hard now for us to grasp just how immensely the amount of imported goods grew, as Britain acquired an Empire and channeled the commodities it gathered home. And, despite the emerging docks in other cities such as Liverpool and Bristol and Southampton, London ruled the trade.
Hiding in plain sight
You can visit the ghosts of Henry’s great dockyards. Some skeletal remains of the Deptford and Woolwich yards remain, but it does require a lively imagination, to conjure up their former glories. You can take a walking tour of the Thames Ironworks complex at Canning Town, if you’re a West Ham fan, or spend a day out at Royal Arsenal in Woolwich if you’re a Gunner.
Following the Thames Path around the Isle of Dogs takes you past Millwall Docks. And Wapping High Street marks the spot of the former Execution Dock, although two rival pubs – The Town of Ramsgate and the Prospect of Whitby – dispute its exact location. The latter has staked its claim boldly, with a suspiciously modern-looking noose on a gibbet, set up on the foreshore behind the pub.
So, we leave the shipowners tearing their be-wigged hair out, as the traffic jams on the upstream Thames made business unbearable in so many ways. But, the legal quays were the only game in town for landing and shipping, if you didn’t want to risk smuggling goods ashore further downstream. And then: a game-changing idea from the ship owners! What if we build our own protected docks, kept under lock and key, with their own security forces?
We are entering the final chapter of our docklands journey. See you next time.
