There are Board-schools and church schools; there are no places of
amusement, but posters indicate that theaters and music-halls are within
reach. On the south of the island the London County Council has erected
a most lovely garden. It is four or five acres in extent; there are
lawns, trees, and flower-beds; there is a stately terrace running along
the river; there are seats dotted about, and on certain evenings in the
summer a band plays. Above all, there is the view across the river. All
day long that pageant, of which we have already spoken, goes up and
down, never ending; the ships follow each other—great ships, small
ships, splendid ships, mean ships; the noisy little tugs plow their way,
pulling after them a long string of lighters heavily laden; the
children, peeping through the iron railings, know all the ships, where
they come from and to what “line” they belong. Beyond the river is
Greenwich Hospital, once a splendid monument of the nation’s gratitude
to her old sailors, now a shameful monument of the nation’s
thanklessness. Would any other country so trample upon sentiment as to
take away their hospital from the old sailors, to whom it belonged and
to whom it had been given? The old pensioners are gone, and the people
have lost the education in patriotism which the sight and discourse of
these veterans once afforded them.
It is needless to say that there is not a single book-shop in the Isle
of Dogs; we do not expect a book-shop anywhere in East London; there are
also very few news-agents. I saw one, the whole of whose window was
tastefully decorated with pictures from the “Illustrated Police Budget.”
These illustrations are blood-curdling: a lady bites another lady, such
is the extremity of her wrath; a burglar enters a bedroom at night; a
man with a revolver shows what revenge and jealousy can dare and do, and
so on. I am sure that the people read other things; the “Police Budget”
is not their only paper, but I confess that this was the only evidence
of their favorite reading which I was able to discover when I was last
on the island. There are no slums, I believe, on the Isle of Dogs. I
have never seen any Hooligans, Larrikins, or any of that tribe—perhaps
because they were all engaged in work, the harder the better. You will
not see any drunken men, as a rule, nor any beggars, nor any signs of
misery. We may conclude that the Isle of Dogs contains an industrious
and prosperous population; the air that they breathe, when the fresh
breeze that comes up with the tide has dropped, is perhaps too heavily
charged with the varied fragrance of the multitudinous works, with the
noise of various industries: as for the hammering of hammers, the
grinding and blowing and whirring of engines, to these one gets
accustomed. It is a place where one might deliberately choose to be
born, because, apart from the general well-being of the people and the
healthfulness of the air, there is a spirit of enterprise imbibed by
every boy who grows up in this admirable island. It is engendered by the
universal presence of the sailor and the ship; wherever the sailor and
the ship are found there springs up naturally in every child the spirit
of adventure.
A large part of the island is occupied by docks—the West India docks,
the Blackwall Basin, and the Millwall Dock. We need not enter into the
statistics of the tonnage and the trade; it is sufficient to remember
that the docks are always receiving ships, and that the sailors are
always getting leave to go ashore, and that some of them have their
wives and families living in the Isle of Dogs. That would be in itself
sufficient to give this suburb a marine flavor; but think what it means
for a boy to live in a place where at every point his eyes rest upon a
forest of masts, where he is always watching the great ships as they
work out of dock or creep slowly in; think what it means when, in
addition to living beside these great receiving docks, he can look
through doors half open and see the old-fashioned repairing dock, with
the wooden sailing ship shored up and the men working at her ribs, while
her battered old figurehead and her bowsprit stick out over the wall of
the dock and over the street itself. The Tritons and the Oceanides, the
spirits of the rolling sea, open their arms with invitation to such a
boy. “Come,” they say, “thou too shalt be a sailor, it is thy happy
fate; come with a joyful heart; we know the place, deep down among the
tiny shells of ocean, where thou shalt lie, but not till after many
years. Come. It is the sweetest life of any; there is no care or cark
for money; there is no struggle on the waves for casual work and for
bare food; no foul diseases lurk on the broad Atlantic; the wind of the
sea is pure and healthy, the fo’c’sle is cheerful, and the wage is
good.” And so he goes, this favorite of fortune.
For some strange reason the gates of the docks are always bright and
green in spring and summer with trees and Virginia creepers, which are
planted at the entrance and grow over the lodge. Within, flower-beds are
visible. Outside, the cottages for the dock people also have bright and
pleasant little front gardens. To the forest of masts, to the bowsprit
sticking out over the street, to the ships that are warped in and out
the dock, add the pleasing touch of the trees and flowers and the
creepers before we leave the Isle of Dogs—that “unlucky” isle, as Pepys
called it.
[Illustration: Greenwich Hospital.]
The last of the East London riverside hamlets is Blackwall. Where
Blackwall begins no one knows. Poplar Station is in the middle of the
place, included in the map within the letters which spell Blackwall. And
where are the houses of Blackwall? It is covered entirely with docks.
There are the East India docks and the Poplar docks and the basin. There
are also half a dozen of the little old repairing docks left, and there
is a railway station with a terrace looking out upon the river; there is
a street running east, and another running north. Both streets are
stopped by Bow Creek; the aspect of both causes the visitor to glance
nervously about him for a protecting policeman. And here, as regards the
riverside, we may stop. Beyond Bow Creek we are outside the limits of
London. There follow many more former hamlets—West Ham, East Ham,
Canning Town, Silverton, and others—now towns. These places, for us,
must remain names.
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IV
THE WALL
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IV
THE WALL
I DO not mean the old wall of London, that which was built by the
Romans, was rebuilt by Alfred, was repaired and maintained at great cost
until the sixteenth century, when it began to be neglected, as it was no
longer of any use in the defense of the City. For two hundred years more
the gates still stood, but the wall was pulled down and built upon, no
one interfering. That wall is gone, save for fragments here and there. I
speak of another wall, and one of even greater importance.
No one knows when this other wall was first built. It was so early that
all record of its building has been lost. It is the wall by which the
low-lying marshes of the Thames, once overflowed by every high tide,
were protected from the river and converted into pastures and
meadow-land and plow-land. It is the wall which runs all along the north
bank of the river and is carried round the marshy Essex shores and round
those Essex islands which were once broad expanses of mud at low tide,
and at high tide shallow and useless stretches of water. It protects
also the south bank wherever the marsh prevails. It has been a work of
the highest importance, to London first, and to the country next. It has
converted a vast malarious belt of land into a fertile country, and it
has made East London possible, because a great part of East London is
built upon the reclaimed marsh, now drained and dry. In order to
understand what the wall means, what it is, what it has done, and what
it is doing, we must get beyond the houses and consider it as it runs
along the riverside, with fields on the left hand and the flowing water
many feet higher than the fields on the right.
In order to get at the wall, then, we must take the train to Barking,
about eight miles from London Bridge. This ancient village, once the
seat of a rich nunnery, some remains of which you may still see there,
is on the little river Roding; we walk down its banks to its confluence
with the Thames. There, after suffering a while from the fumes of
certain chemical works, we find ourselves on the wall, with no houses
before us; we leave the works behind us, and we step out upon the most
curious walk that one may find within the four seas that encompass our
island.
No one ever walks upon this wall; once beyond the chemical works we are
in the most lonely spot in the whole of England; no one is curious about
it; no one seems to know that this remarkable construction, extending
for about a hundred and fifty miles, even exists; you will see no one in
the meadows that lie protected by the wall; you may walk mile after mile
along it in a solitude most strange and most mysterious. Even the
steamer which works her noisy way up the broad river, even the barge
with its brown sail, crawling slowly up the stream with the flowing
tide, does not destroy the sense of silence or that of solitude. We seem
not to hear the screw of the steamer or even the scream of the siren;
overhead the lark sings; there are no other birds visible about the
treeless fields; the tinkle of a sheep-bell reminds one of Dartmoor and
its silent hillsides.
Presently there falls upon the pilgrim a strange feeling of mystery. The
wall belongs to all the centuries which have known London; it is a part
of the dead past; it speaks to him of things that have been; it reminds
him of the Vikings and the Danes when they came sweeping up the river in
their long, light ships, the shields hanging outside, the fair-haired,
blue-eyed fighting men thirsting for the joy of battle; they are on
their way to besiege London; they will pull down part of the bridge, but
they will not take the City. The fresh breeze that follows with the
flood reminds him of the pageant and procession, the splendid pageant,
the never-ending procession, of the trade which is the strength and the
pride and the wealth of London, which has been passing before this wall
for all these centuries, and always, as it passes now, unseen and
unregarded, because no one ever stands upon the wall to see it.
A strange, ghostly place. If one were to tell of a murder, this would be
a fitting place for the crime. Perhaps, however, it might be difficult
to persuade his victim to accompany him. The murderer would choose the
time between the passing of two ships; no one could possibly see him; he
would conduct his victim along the wall, conversing pleasantly, till the
favorable moment arrived. The deed accomplished, he would leave the wall
and strike across the fields till he found a path leading to the haunts
of man. Any secret or forbidden thing might be conveniently transacted
on the wall; it would be a perfectly safe place for the conjuration of
conspirators and the concoction of their plans, or it would be a place
to hide a stolen treasure, or a place where a hunted man could find
refuge.
Let us stand still for a moment and look around. The wall is about
fifteen feet high; at the base it is perhaps thirty feet wide; the sides
slope toward the path on the top, which is about seven feet across; the
outside is faced with stone; the inside is turfed. Looking south the
river runs at our feet, the broad and noble river which carries to the
port of London treasures from the uttermost ends of the earth and sends
out other treasures in exchange. There are many rivers in the world
which are longer and broader,—for instance, the Danube and the Rhine,
even the Oronoco and the Amazon,—but if we consider the country through
which the river flows, the wealth which it creates, the wealth which it
distributes, the long history of the Thames, then, surely, it is the
greatest of all rivers. As we stand over it we mark how its waters are
stirred into little waves by the fresh breeze which never fails with the
flood of the tide; how the sun lights up the current rolling upward in
full stream, so that we think of strong manhood resolved and purposed;
it is not for nothing that the tide rolls up the stream. Then we mark
the ships that pass, ships of all kinds, great and small; the ships and
the barges, the fishing smacks and the coasters, some that sail and some
that steam; the heavy timber ship from the Baltic, the Newcastle
collier, the huge liner; they pass in succession along the broad
highway, one after the other. This splendid pageant of London trade is
daily offered for the admiration of those upon the wall. But it is a
procession with no spectators; day after day it passes unregarded, for
no one walks upon the wall. And if a stray traveler stands to look on,
the pageant presently becomes a thing of the imagination, a dream, an
effect of animated photographs.
On the land side lie the fields which have been rescued from this tidal
flow; they are obviously below the level of the river; one understands,
looking across them, how the river ran of old over these flats, making
vast lagoons at high tide. It is useful to see the fact recorded in a
book or on a map; but here one sees that it really must have been so.
Gradually, as one passes along the wall and looks landward, the history
of the reclamation of the marsh unfolds itself; we see in places, here
and there, low mounds, which are lines of former embankments; these are
not all parallel with the river; they are thrust forward, protected by
banks at the side, small pieces rescued by some dead and gone farmer,
who was rewarded by having as his own, with no rent to pay, the land he
had snatched from the tide. Perhaps it was long before rent was thought
of; perhaps it was easier to build the bank and to take a slip of the
foreshore and the marsh, with its black and fertile soil, than it was to
cut down the trees in the forest and to clear the land; perhaps these
embankments were constructed by the lake dwellers, who made their round
huts upon piles driven into the mud, and after many thousands of years
made the discovery that it was better to be dry than wet, and better to
have no marsh fevers to face than to grow inured to them.
When was this wall built? How long has it been standing? Is it the first
original wall? Have there been rebuildings? Learned antiquaries have
proved that long before the advent of the Romans the south of Britain
was occupied by people who had learned such civilization as Gauls had to
teach them. This was no small advance, as you would acknowledge if you
looked into the subject; they knew many arts; they already had many
wants; they had arrived at a certain standard of comfort; they carried
on an extensive trade.
How long ago? It is quite impossible to answer that question. But there
are other facts ascertained. Let us sum them up in order.
1. South Britain, at least, and probably the Midland as well, had the
same religion, the same arts, the same customs, the same forms of
society, as Gaul.
2. There was an extensive trade between Britain and Gaul—of what
antiquity no one knows.
3. When we first hear of London it was a place of resort for many
foreign merchants.
4. Tessellated pavements of Roman date have been found in Southwark at a
level lower than that of the river.
5. Tacitus made Galgacus, the British leader, indignant because the
Britons were compelled by the Romans to expend their strength and labor
on fencing off woods and marshes.
6. Roman buildings are found behind the wall in Essex. To this point I
will return immediately.
7. No settlement or building or cultivation whatever was possible beside
the river anywhere near London until the wall had been built.
8. Are we to believe that a city possessing a large trade, attracting
many foreign merchants, would have continued to stand in the midst of a
vast malarious swamp?
9. Indications have been found of an older wall, consisting of trunks of
trees laid beside each other, the interstices crammed with small
branches. Such a rude wall might be effective in keeping back the great
body of water.
10. In order to arrive at the civilization represented by a large
foreign trade and a trading city there must have been many years of
communication and intercourse. In fact, I see no reason why London
should not have existed as a trading-place for centuries after Thorney
was practically deserted, having ferries instead of a bridge, and
centuries before the coming of the Romans.
These considerations show the conclusion to which I have arrived. For
centuries there had been a constant intercourse between the Gauls and
the southern Britons; trading centers had been established, notably in
Thorney Island, at Southampton, at Lymne, which was afterward an
important Roman station, and at Dover. When the ships began to sail up
the Thames the superior position of London was discovered, and that port
quickly took over the greater part of the trade by the Thorney route.
When London grew, it became important to reclaim the malarious marsh and
the wasted miles of mud. Some kind of embankment, perhaps that old kind
with trunks of trees, was constructed. At first they put up the wall on
the opposite side, which the Saxons afterward called the South Work
(Southwark), meaning the river wall and not a wall of fortification;
then they pushed out branches on the north side and they carried the
wall gradually, not all at once, but taking years, even centuries, over
the work, down the Thames, along the Essex shores and round the mud
islands, but the last not till modern times.
At the end of the Essex wall there is an instructive place at which to
consider its probable date.
It is a very lovely and deserted place, about a mile and a half from a
picturesque little village, five or six miles from a railway station,
called Bradwell—I suppose the meaning of the name is the broad wall.
When the visitor reaches the seashore he finds the wall running along, a
fine and massive earthwork; but behind the wall, and evidently built
after the wall, there are the earthworks of a Roman fortress; you can
still trace the ramparts after all these years though the interior is
now plowed up; this was one of the forts by means of which the count of
the Saxon shore (Comes littoris Saxonici) kept the country safe from the
pirates, always on the watch for the chance of a descent; his ships
patrolled the narrow seas, but always, up the creeks and rivers, all the
way from Ostend to Norway, lay the pirate,—Saxon, Dane,
Viking,—watching, waiting, ready to cross over if those police ships
relaxed their watchfulness, ready to harry and to murder. You may stand
on the wall, where the Roman sentinel kept watch; you may strain your
eyes for a sight of the pirate fleet, fifty ships strong and every ship
stout, clinker built, sixty feet long and carrying a hundred men. As
soon as the Romans took their ships away they did come, and they came to
stay, and as soon as the Saxons forgot their old science of navigation
the Danes came, and after the Danes, or with them, the men of Norway.
Long after this Roman fortress had been deserted and forgotten, so that
to the people it was nothing more than a collection of mounds round
which clung some vague tradition of terror, a person, whose very name is
now unknown, built here a chapel dedicated to St. Peter; the chapel,
still called St. Peter’s on the Wall, is now a barn. Ruined chapel,
ruined fortress, both stand beside the wall, which still fulfils its
purpose and keeps out the waters from the lowlands within.
Why do I mention this chapel? What has it to do with East London? Well,
consider two or three facts in connection with this chapel. If you walk
along the wall you presently come to a little village church; it is
called the Church of West Thurrock; the church, like that old chapel of
St. Peter, stands beside, or on, the wall; it is a venerable church; it
has its venerable churchyard; it is filled with the graves of rustics
brought here to lie in peace for a thousand years and more. And there is
no village, or hamlet, or farm, or anything within sight. It was built
beside the wall. Again, they built two churches at least, beside, or on,
the wall of London City, not to speak of the churches built at five
gates of the City; they built a hermitage beside the wall at Wapping;
another by the city wall at Aldgate; on London Bridge they built a
chapel; on the wall in Essex, as we have seen, they built a chapel. I
see in all these churches and chapels built beside, or on, a wall, so
many chapels erected for prayers for the preservation of the wall; at
West Thurrock the people of the farmhouses made the chapel their parish
church, and so it has continued to the present day. But it was
originally a chapel on the wall, intended to consecrate and protect the
wall. Perhaps there are others along the wall, but I do not know of any.
I have said that it is possible that the wall stands upon the site of
earlier attempts to rescue the land and to keep out the water. For
instance, when the excavations were made for the foundation of the new
London Bridge, three separate sets of piles for rescuing more and more
of the foreshore were laid bare, and lower down the river, as I have
said, the workmen found, in repairing the wall, a very curious
arrangement of trunks of trees laid one upon the other, with branches
and brushwood between, evidently part of a wooden work meant for a dam
or tidal wall.
The maintenance of the wall has always been a costly business; the tides
find out the weak places, and bore into them and behind them like a
gimlet that grows every day larger and longer and more powerful. For
instance, there was a flourishing monastery near the junction of the Lea
with the Thames; it was called the House of Stratford Langthorne. One
morning the brethren woke to find that the river wall had given way and
that their pastures and meadows, their cornlands and their gardens were
all three feet deep in water. They had to get away as fast as they could
and to remain in a much smaller and more uncomfortable cell, on higher
ground, until the wall could be patched up again. In the fifteenth
century the pious ladies of Barking Nunnery made a similar discovery;
their portion of the river wall had broken down. They had no funds for
its repair. Then King Richard, the third of that name, came to their
assistance. This pious monarch had got through with most of his enemies
and nearly all his relations, and was just then going off to settle
matters with his cousin, Henry the Welshman, when this misfortune to the
Barking nuns happened.
Fifty years later the Plumstead marshes were “drowned” by the breaking
of the wall. In 1690 the Grays Marsh, lower down the river, was
overflowed by the same accident; in 1707 the wall gave way at a place
called Dagenham; it took nearly twenty years to repair the wall, which
was carried away time after time; the receding tide carried out into the
bed of the river so much earth that a bank was formed in mid-channel,
and it seemed as if the river would be choked. At last, however, it was
found possible to construct a wall which would stand the highest tide.
If we walk along this part of the wall we observe a large black pool of
water; this was left behind when the wall shut out the river; the lake
still remains and is full of fish, and on Sundays it is surrounded by
anglers, who stand all day long intent upon expectations which are
seldom rewarded. Out of this lake and its fishing originated the
ministerial white-bait dinner. It began when the occupant of a house
beside this lake invited William Pitt to dine with him in order to taste
the eels of the pond and the white-bait of the river. Pitt brought other
members of the Cabinet, the dinner became a yearly institution, the
place was presently transferred from Dagenham to Greenwich, and the
ministerial white-bait dinner was held every year, in June or July,
until ten or twelve years ago, when the pleasant institution was
stopped.
To return to the date of the wall. We have seen that nobody knows when
it was put up, that it must have been there in some form or other for a
very long time. It is tolerably certain that the wall was either built
by the Romans or that it existed before their time. My own belief is, as
I have stated, that it was put up here and there as occasion or
necessity served, that some of the land was rescued strip by strip, each
time by a new wall advanced before the others. Embankments, mounds, and
traces of a more ancient wall can be observed, as I have said, at many
points; it is worthy of note that in the county of Lincoln, where there
is also the necessity of a sea-wall, there are two, one standing at a
distance of half a mile in advance of the other. And I think that this
process of rescuing the land has gone on at intervals to the present
day. Even now there are broad stretches of mud along the Essex shore
which might be reclaimed; at the present moment there are projects
afloat for reclaiming the whole of the Wash, but the conditions of
agriculture in England are no longer such as to encourage any attempts
to add more acres to estates which at present seem unable to pay either
landlord or farmer.