How about a river trip, without getting your feet wet ? An expedition along the banks of the River Thames, heading east out of the city, and following the river to sea, takes you through multiple historic docklands. They allow a glimpse of old London’s working life like no other road trip.
I have to admit a personal bias with this post. My family history’s full of long-departed workers and artisans who laboured around London’s river. Great-grandad Frederick Phillips was a casual stevedore in the Royal Docks. (Casual, you ask ? That’s a trade with no guaranteed employment. You had to be at the dock gates early on, hoping to be chosen for work that day. But it helped if you knew the ropes- and the people in charge).
Many-times great-grandfather John Barnard lived in Limehouse, working as a ship’s caulker – a responsible, well-paid job, ensuring that sea-going vessels were watertight. This was in the period covered by the TV series Taboo, starring the estimable Tom Hardy, set in London’s docklands around the 1820s – well worth a watch.
Family Fortunes
I sadly recall the tale of my poor ancestor Thomas Tompkins, a ‘coal whipper’, who died in 1866 of phthisis, aka pulmonary tuberculosis, aged only 53. His job? To shovel coal from the depths of the barges that had sailed down to the London docks from Newcastle, laden with the fuel that kept the Empire running. Not every Victorian benefited and thrived with the huge explosion in imperial trade.
Another ancestor, the son of a London mariner, hit the jackpot in the 1700s and secured a place at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, learning seamanship in readiness for a watery career. Then there was Robert Atkins, a seaman who almost perished in a shipwreck in the 1880s off Japan. He later swore to his daughter, my great-grandmother, the truth that, on the point of drowning, your whole life does flash before you. But that’s another story…
I have a friend, a fellow Londoner, but from south of the river, who also had watery ancestors. Her great-great-grandfather was a Thames lighterman, whose job was to steer the barges, or ‘lighters’, that moved cargoes from the larger ships to smaller craft, or to onshore. She told me that she learned as a child she’d never have a problem with her liver, because she had Thames blood in her veins!
Watery Roman Londinium…
Let’s start at the beginning, with the usual suspects. “What did the Romans ever do for us?”, as Monty Python so infamously demanded. Well, they built a large working port in their newly established fortified town of Londinium. It was situated on the Thames’ north bank between London Bridge and The Strand. In your imagination though, move the present-day London Bridge half a mile upstream to the west. That’s where the Roman bridge spanned the river, just down from where the Monument now stands, at the bottom of Fish Street Hill.
If you’re down that way, venture into the church of St. Magnus the Martyr, hard by the river. It’s worth a visit inside, just for the magnificent statue of Magnus himself, wearing his horned Viking helmet. Just outside the church door you will find a humble wooden post, easy to overlook. It’s actually the remains of Roman piling from the original London bridge, which crossed at this very spot.
Moving upstream
This Roman port was modest by our standards. There were no embankments, just a wooden quay alongside the bridge. The Thames was shallow with dangerous shifting mud banks, so large ships moored further downstream in deeper waters. They then transferred their cargoes to smaller, flatter bottomed boats that could navigate the shallower reaches. An old Roman wreck found at Blackfriars in the 1960s demonstrates this. It sported side rudders rather than a keel rudder, to skim over the mudflats.
We know from archaeological ‘digs’ the sort of goods the Romans imported into their storehouses around the current Lower Thames Street area. There were plenty of foodstuffs, including green olives, ‘garum’ – the Romans’ version of Lea & Perrins – and even native British oysters, maybe from nearby Camulodunum. Other materials arrived at the quay from all over Britain to build the new Roman town. Tiles and bricks from Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire, ragstone from Kent and even Purbeck marble from Dorset. But the storehouses also contained goods for export out to the wider Roman world, including strong waterproof woollen cloth, most likely woven by celtic slaves.
With ship arrivals being very unpredictable, Roman merchants probably relied on the services of “casual” labour, who would only have been summoned when news arrived of an incoming vessel. Fred Phillips would likely have been most amused to be considered a member of a two thousand years old working practice.
…and Watery Saxon Londonwic
The Romans retreated, the Saxons arrived, everything changed. The Saxons docks moved further upstream, between where Aldwych and Whitehall stand now, in their new enclave of Londonwic, our current city of Westminster. Old Roman Londinium was abandoned and the Roman docks fell into disrepair.
But the move up-stream didn’t last. Marauding Danes continually attacked Londonwic, so eventually the Saxons moved east again and retreated behind the still-standing walls of the old Londinium fortress. King Alfred, the acclaimed Saxon king, re-developed the docks, benefitting from the protection of the old Roman wall behind them. He named his new dock Ethelredshithe, a hithe or hythe being the Anglo-Saxon term for a landing place. A few hundred years later Henry I renamed it Queenshithe, in honour of his queen, Matilda.
The Queenshithe dock inlet is still there – the only Anglo-Saxon dock still in existence in the world. There’s not an awful lot on view, unless you’re a sharp-eyed archaeologist, as you can see from my photograph…
But you can view a wonderful mosaic, outlining the history of this area of the Thames foreshore. Here is a taster…
Norman wisdom
Then along came William of Normandy and his henchmen. William worked on the principle, in London at least, of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. He allowed the merchants of London to carry on much as before, with their Etheredshithe-based import and export businesses. In fact, he sanctioned the building of brand new dock facilities. This time, they expanded eastwards to deeper water, to where Billingsgate stands now. Development stretched from here right up to his newly built defensive outpost on the old city walls – the White Tower, within the Tower of London.
Over the next few hundred years the London docks thrived. Huge chunks of Treasury revenues came from taxes on the import and export of goods. And as the docks grew, they diversified. The old Saxon wharf at Ethelredshithe – now Queenshithe – started to specialise in cargoes of fish and salt from the Baltic. Salted fish was an important food staple in medieval cuisine, especially during hard winters, with not much else to eat. Next door, Dowgate dock unloaded hay, for all those hungry London horses. Each of the other docks between Queenshithe and the new London Bridge, by now re-built on its current site, concentrated on single commodities, whether oysters, coal or corn, wool or wine.
Steelyard blues
Of course, with commercial success comes competition. First from the Dutch Flemings who had (ahem) ‘sewn up’ the English overseas wool market, then from the canny merchants of the Hanseatic League. These were a group of German traders who clubbed together to grease the wheels of trade and to spread risks. The league started when fish traders from Lubeck made ‘sweetheart deals’ with salt traders from Hamburg. Salted fish being a big thing, as mentioned earlier. Cooperation led to bold joint enterprises. For example, members of the league might spread their cargoes across the multiple ships owned by its members, to minimise any losses should a ship be attacked by pirates.
Deciding to ‘go global”, they set up overseas offices in many foreign ports. In England they had kontors or offices in London, Boston, Yarmouth and Ipswich. Their London kontor was called “The Steelyard”, and its remains are now buried under Cannon Street Station, right by the old medieval docks. You can still see its echoes in street names around Cannon Street, like Steelyard Passage and Hanseatic Walk .
Hanse Down
Where did the Steelyard name come from? One likely theory is that it’s because all wool inspected for quality prior to export was tagged with a stalen, or seal. So, a stalen yard.
The Hanseatic merchants were a formidable outfit. They dominated the London import and export business for hundreds of years, to the anger, irritation and, it has to be said, admiration of the native-born Lonodn traders. Making canny deals with greedy English kings, they often dodged customs duties and taxes on many goods.
The English gave the Hanse traders the nickname Easterlings, and some historians surmise that our currency, Sterling, is named for them: in an age of uncertainty, a merchant could rest easy if they were being paid in Easterling pounds.
By the 1600s, the League’s influence had faded, as traders found other markets. Nothing much remains now, in London at least, except for those few street names. But in King’s Lynn, on the Norfolk coast, Hanse House still stands. It’s the last building in England that commemorates the League’s once vast enterprise.
New World Order
One of the reasons that the League diminished in importance was that English eyes started to wander away from the European ports and markets that the league dominated, and look elsewhere. In 1498, the seventh King Henry commissioned Italian Giovanni Caboto (or rather, John Cabot, in the no-nonsense manner of the monoglot English) to try and find a northern passage to the far East. Henry wanted to access the lucrative far-eastern spice markets. Although he failed to find the elusive north-west passage, Cabot made landfall in the “new found land” on the east coast of modern-day Canada, and claimed it for England. Other ventures followed, funded by the London-based merchant guilds. They were no doubt growing weary of jostling commercially with the all-powerful Hanseatic Easterlings.
You may have heard of the names of these three swash-buckling Elizabethan entrepreneurs: Sebastien Cabot (John’s son), Richard Chancellor and Sir Hugh Willoughby. In 1551, they founded “Mystery and Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places unknown”. Otherwise known as The Merchant Adventurers. Their aim – to try and find a northern route to China, this time going eastwards rather than westwards. It was all about trade. Historians and political commentators have often used the adage “trade follows the flag”, to describe the close relationship between colonisation and later trading enterprises. But maybe it’s the other way round, and the flag follows trade.
Moscow rules
In 1553 three of their ships sailed northwards. Chancellor fetched up in Muscovy, near the modern day city of Archangel in Russia. He slogged the 500 or so miles overland to Moscow, and there he pulled off an audacious trade deal with the Tsar, exchanging English wool for Russian furs. The Merchant Adventurers thrived, expanded, diversified, and morphed into The Muscovy Company, the world’s first chartered joint-stock company. It still thrives although nowadays as a charity. Other adventurous traders eagerly copied the enterprise, eager to expand their markets, and escape the baleful influence of the Hanse bullies…and the rest is history.
As a sad aside, poor Hugh Willoughby didn’t fare so well. His ship went missing, along with one other, blown off course by a storm off the coast of Russia. The ice-bound ships were found the following year, with all the crew dead inside. Careful scrutiny of Hugh’s diary gave modern historians clues to the probable cause of their deaths. Not starvation or cold, but carbon monoxide poisoning. In order to retain warmth, they insulated the ships’ cabins, and blocked up the flues of their stoves, with fatal consequences.
The trio are commemorated today in that great historic maritime trading hub, Canary Wharf, where you can find Willoughby Passage, Chancellor Passage, and of course, Cabot Square.
They opened up new worlds, new possibilities. But of course, new opportunities bring new challenges. With the explosion in global trade, kick-started by the Tudors, the old London docks were busting at the seams. Something had to give…
Hiding in plain sight
Yes, I admit, there’s not yet much to see from the earliest history of London’s docks, unless you’re a very keen archaeologist. The shade of a dock here, the whisper of old ghosts in a modern street name there. But, we now move into the period when British trade and imperialism took off and the development of the London docks became turbo-charged, so there’s much more to see. See you next time…
