CHAPTER 21

The Criminal Element

There has always been crime on the river. In an account of 13 July 1752, the “Ordinary,” or chaplain, of Newgate prison states of one inmate that “he did work upon the River, this is a very suspicious Way of Life, such People being generally looked upon as getting more Money by the bye than by their Labour.” His remark confirms the reputation of the Thames for lawlessness. The life of the river for many centuries was quarrelsome and on occasions highly dangerous, boatmen pitched against lock-keepers and millers organised against fishermen. The seamen fought against the Customs, and the wherrymen fought against the sailors, in an environment where land law was not recognised.

Theft was of course the most immediate and obvious transgression. It was estimated by Patrick Colquhoun that there were almost eleven thousand people who earned their living by dishonest activity on the Thames. In his Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames (1800) he described the river as the peculiar territory for “acts of peculation, fraud, embezzlement, pillage and depredation.” The Thames had helped to create “a species of systematic delinquency, which in its different ramifications, exhibits a degree of turpitude as singular as it is unparalleled.”

While hundreds of ships lay at anchor, waiting for the tide or for a suitable wharf, they were pestered by thieves and wreckers who were intent upon acquiring their cargo. There were smugglers all the way down the estuary, taking on consignments of wool or other merchandise; there were “river pirates,” armed thieves who at night cut the mooring ropes of lighters carrying goods and waited for them to drift upon the banks or foreshore. There were “night plunderers,” watermen who worked under cover of darkness, and “scuffle hunters” or “long apron men” who specialised in stealing the goods left on the quaysides. There were “light horsemen,” who were the renegade mates of ships and revenue officers, and “heavy horsemen,” the porters and labourers earning a second living. Some threw over goods at high tide, to be recovered by accomplices when the tide had ebbed.

The “copemen” were those who received the stolen goods, and their operations could be found down any of the myriad alleys and highways of the river city. There was so much life below, in a thousand cellars that were often no more than holes in the ground, that concealment was easy. King David Lane in Shadwell was well known for its receivers. Some of them lived further from the river: a tobacconist in the St. Ann parish of Soho, Mr. Cooper, was a well-known receiver of snuff and tobacco.

Downriver, closer to the mouth of the open sea, there were also “wreckers” who with false lights lured unsuspecting pilots onto the mud-banks. Much of the estuary, with its streams and marshes, was ideal ground for the concealment and carriage of contraband. “Owlers,” for example, were those who smuggled packs of fleeces through the marshy terrain. For many centuries smuggling was endemic to the estuary, where watermen would find their route through the waterways or along the tributaries. The beaches under the cliffs at Reculver, or at Whitstable, were perfect havens for their trade. Other smugglers would slip into the river Swale, or the river Medway, or Yantlet Creek, in order to escape the attentions of the revenue men. Pubs and churches were used as convenient storage, and some goods were suspended in the pools and rivulets of the marshes. Of Faversham Defoe wrote, in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–7), that “I know nothing else this town is remarkable for, except the most notorious smuggling trade.” It was rumoured that, in Essex, gin was in such large supply that the inhabitants cleaned their windows with it. A parliamentary report noted that, as soon as vessels from the East Indies had entered their moorings along the Thames, “the place which they lie becomes the resort of smugglers, and resembles a public fair.” There were also illegal transporters of people as well as of goods, the direct descendants of the human traders who would smuggle renegade Jesuit priests into and out of England in the early sixteenth century.

The amount of goods entering the Port of London was so vast, and so various, that all forms of theft were practised. Before the building of the defended docks at the beginning of the nineteenth century the loss of revenue was estimated at approximately £800,000 per annum. It was supposed that one-third of those engaged in dock labour were practising some form of felony. But, since most of the money found its way into the pockets of Londoners, it was considered by the perpetrators to be a version of fair trade. It was familiar; it was customary. The mud-larks and the scuffle hunters believed themselves to be earning a living from the river with as much right as the mariners and the pilots. To the coopers and lightermen the theft of tobacco from hogsheads was known as “socking,” and was preserved as an “old Custom.” It is a matter of common sense, too, that many of the merchants and clerks involved in the river traffic were also complicit with the felons. There were “game ships” and “game officers” who were corruptible. It could be said, in fact, that the Thames materially helped to create crime within the metropolis.

The river has been connected with punishment as well as crime. That is why it has been described as angry or even savage. The Thames, composed of immense volumes of water, is itself inherently destructive. When it floods, it wreaks havoc. It can seem harsh, and cruel. Shelley once professed to Thomas Love Peacock that “it runs with the blood and bones of a thousand heroes and villains, and no doubt the water is sour with tainting.” The entire history of the river strengthens and confirms his opinion. As a popular ballad, on the flight of King James II’s wife in 1688, put it:

Away they went, through driving sleet,

Across the angry Thames…

The Thames was for many centuries part of the fierce ritual of “ducking.” It was a common penalty, dating at least from the early medieval period, but was only infrequently mentioned in the public prints. It was too familiar to need extended description. It was generally inflicted upon women or “scolds” the term was applied to mature females who used foul language, who nagged their husbands, or who slandered other members of the community. A scold would be strapped in a chair, or upon a stool, and then lowered into the river three times. At Kingston, for example, a beam for that purpose jutted out from the central arch of the bridge. It was first deployed in the summer of 1572, when the wife of the grave-maker, Mrs. Downing, was ducked three times “over hed and eres,” and it must have been constantly in demand, since a new stool was ordered by the churchwardens that same year. The last use of this stool at Kingston occurred in the spring of 1745. The Evening Post of 27 April reported that “last week, a woman that keeps the King’s Head alehouse, Kingston, in Surrey was ordered by the court to be ducked for scolding, and was accordingly placed in the chair and ducked in the river Thames under Kingston Bridge, in the presence of two or three thousand people.” That particular stool of punishment had been in place for 173 years.

This penitential, and often fatal, ceremony was connected with the idea of river water as the medium for ritual cleansing. In the early third century a Church Father, Tertullian, recorded the incidence of votaries who were baptised in springs or rivers “as they presumed to think unto redemption and exemption from the guilt of their perjuries.” He added that “among the ancients anyone who had stained himself with homicide went in search of waters that could purge him of his guilt.” There seems no reason to doubt that similar purgative rituals occurred on the island of Britain. It was a belief that survived for many hundreds of years. The Thames may also have been used as a test for guilt or innocence in another sense. There was a tradition of making suspected persons drink from a well or river; for the guilty the water became contaminated, typically causing dropsy.

If the river was the original home of the gods, it was the source of all justice. In 1646 Cromwell ordered the decapitation of the royalist soldiers who had defended the castle at Wallingford. “Let the river have them,” he is reported as saying, “before they corrupt the land as the king corrupted England.”

The accounts of life in the villages of the Upper Thames contain many stories of witches and their craft, and indeed more witches were recorded in the Thames region than in any other part of the country. They have names like Bet Hyde and Poll Packer, Minty Frewin and Mother Dutton, Old Margaret and Elizabeth Stile, Urania Boswell and Mother Hibblemeer, Brickie Jane and Granny Pantin. But the fables of these women have more distant roots than the presence of some “wise women” in the immediate neighbourhood of the river. The association of witches and the Thames may in fact be an echo of the belief that female spirits and nymphs were wreathed within the waters, and that the river itself was to be worshipped as the “Great Mother.” If female deities were connected with the Thames, then it was perhaps only natural that female demons or female malevolence would form part of the cluster of associations.

There were strong witch traditions in Henley, in Reading and in Wallingford. A fungus growing upon elm trees in the Thames Valley was known in the nineteenth century as “witches’ butter,” and was said to be caused by the churning stick of a witch. It has been claimed that many of the stiles along the path of the Upper Thames are made of iron, to keep the witches from “crossing over.” It was the custom, too, to wear the herb vervain as an antidote to the “owl blast”—the sickness caused by a witch’s curse. It is reported that, as late as 1946, some of the older inhabitants of Cricklade carried the foot of a goose in a small linen bag to ward off the attentions of witches. In the late twentieth century there were reports of witchcraft at Kemble, at Appleton and at Reading. The prolonged presence of such customs and beliefs is easy to dismiss as mere hearsay, or historical sensationalism, but the weight and body of tradition cannot be denied so easily.

Trials of witches were generally held by the river itself. One venue was the neighbourhood of “Shrew Ash” in Richmond Park. And of course the trial by ordeal is well known. The suspected witch, with her hands tied, was thrown into the Thames. If she floated the river was rejecting her, and she was deemed to be guilty. If she sank her innocence was proved. But there were more certain punishments. The first occasion on which London Bridge is mentioned in the official records occurs in the Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici for AD 984. It is narrated that a witch was taken up and condemned for creating the wooden image of a man. Thereupon “they took that woman and drowned her at London Bridge.” The river was the appropriate form of punishment for supernatural transgression. It is mentioned so much as a matter of course, in the Codex, that it may have been the conventional death for those accused of witchcraft. In the thirteenth century two women, with their arms and legs tied together, were thrown into a pool called Bikepool (near the present town of Croydon) that communicated with the Thames. There is some intimate association between the river and what we call “paganism.” Something has settled there.

The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment. It is perhaps not coincidental that the two major sites of execution on land, Tyburn and Smithfield, were adjacent to the Thames tributaries of the Tyburn and the Fleet. But there is a more direct association. There was a gallows set up by the riverside at Dagenham, and it was in use as late as 1780. There were gibbet posts stretching along the foreshore at Millwall, to be seen in one of Hogarth’s engravings from the series on the fate of the idle apprentice. There was a gallows near Greenwich, at a place now known as Bugsby’s Causeway; the name may derive from “bug” or evil spirit, which suggests that it was known to be tainted ground. There was another gallows in the neighbourhood of Blackwall Point, and a place by the river (site now unknown) called Hanging Ditch. There is a famous Hanging Ditch in Manchester, which once connected the rivers Irk and Irwell; the connection between execution and running water is not exclusively one for the Thames. Just by Butler’s Wharf, close to Tower Bridge, was the mouth of one of London’s lost rivers called the Neckinger; the word means “devil’s neck-cloth,” which is a term for the hangman’s rope. We may justifiably speculate, then, that this also was a place of hanging.

The most famous site of riverine execution, however, was Execution Dock. It was never a true dock, of course, except in the sense that the dead were harboured here. The gallows was originally situated by the river at St. Katharine’s Dock, but in the sixteenth century it was removed downstream to Wapping. It was then moved from the western to the eastern end of Wapping when the defensive wall was erected. Hence there has been some confusion about its exact location, with at least two public houses claiming that honour. The condemned—who were by tradition customarily those accused of piracy—were taken from Newgate or the Marshalsea and, following a silver oar, were marched to the river. Here they were despatched or, in the words of the river people, they “danced the hempen jig.” Their bodies were then tarred and placed in a gibbet by the water. At a later date they were bound with an iron chain, their wrists similarly fastened, and then shackled to a wooden post near the low water mark; here they hung until three tides had passed over their bodies, just as the scolds suffered from three duckings. The hangings at Execution Dock continued until 1834.

Then there were the hulks, a baleful sight upon the Thames for almost a hundred years. These were the prison ships, otherwise disused vessels that were refitted to contain a captive crew; they had been established in 1776, and the last of them did not burn until the summer of 1857. Ships such as the Discovery, the Retribution, and the Belliqueux were used to hold convicts who, as a result of the War of Independence, were unfortunately deprived of the opportunity of being taken to America. Many thousands of them served their sentences at Deptford, at Woolwich, at Chatham and elsewhere, where they were forced to labour on shore-works. They returned to their ships each night, where they were kept in chains. They inhabited the lower decks, some five or six hundred prisoners confined on each—the new prisoners were consigned to the lowest deck of all—where “the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin” are better imagined than described. One prisoner explained that “of all the shocking scenes I had ever beheld, this was the most distressing…Nothing short of a descent to the infernal regions can be at all worthy of a comparison with it.” The river had become a hell. The wharf at Deptford was popularly known as Deadman’s Dock. When the inmates died, their bodies were taken to the marshes and perfunctorily buried there. There is a red-flowering nettle that grows along the marshes at Plumstead and the Arsenal; it was once known as “the convicts’ flower.”

There were other prisons beside the river. The Clink was next to the water at Southwark, while the Fleet prison was erected less than 100 yards (90 m) from the Thames shore. Tilbury Fort was employed as a prison, and the Millbank penitentiary (now the site of the Tate Gallery) was a famous “modern” prison organised on Benthamite principles. The octagonal shape of the gaol is still visible from the air; a sculpture by Henry Moore, “The Locking Piece,” marks the point where the prisoners boarded the ships that would take them down the Thames on their way to Australia. The river would be one of their last views of England.