A VERY dark night it was, and bitter cold; the east wind blowing bleak,
and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and
fen—from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Some of the component
parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London
might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels’
foot-prints, crocodiles’ hatching-places, loosened grains of expression
from the visages of blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans
of turbaned merchants, vegetation from jungles, frozen snow from the
Himalayas. O! It was very, very dark upon the Thames, and it was
bitter, bitter cold.
‘And yet,’ said the voice within the great pea-coat at my side, ‘you’ll
have seen a good many rivers, too, I dare say?’
‘Truly,’ said I, ‘when I come to think of it, not a few. From the
Niagara, downward to the mountain rivers of Italy, which are like the
national spirit—very tame, or chafing suddenly and bursting bounds, only
to dwindle away again. The Moselle, and the Rhine, and the Rhone; and
the Seine, and the Saone; and the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, and Ohio;
and the Tiber, the Po, and the Arno; and the—’
Peacoat coughing as if he had had enough of that, I said no more. I
could have carried the catalogue on to a teasing length, though, if I had
been in the cruel mind.
‘And after all,’ said he, ‘this looks so dismal?’
‘So awful,’ I returned, ‘at night. The Seine at Paris is very gloomy
too, at such a time, and is probably the scene of far more crime and
greater wickedness; but this river looks so broad and vast, so murky and
silent, seems such an image of death in the midst of the great city’s
life, that—’
That Peacoat coughed again. He _could not_ stand my holding forth.
We were in a four-oared Thames Police Galley, lying on our oars in the
deep shadow of Southwark Bridge—under the corner arch on the Surrey
side—having come down with the tide from Vauxhall. We were fain to hold
on pretty tight, though close in shore, for the river was swollen and the
tide running down very strong. We were watching certain water-rats of
human growth, and lay in the deep shade as quiet as mice; our light
hidden and our scraps of conversation carried on in whispers. Above us,
the massive iron girders of the arch were faintly visible, and below us
its ponderous shadow seemed to sink down to the bottom of the stream.
We had been lying here some half an hour. With our backs to the wind, it
is true; but the wind being in a determined temper blew straight through
us, and would not take the trouble to go round. I would have boarded a
fireship to get into action, and mildly suggested as much to my friend
Pea.
‘No doubt,’ says he as patiently as possible; ‘but shore-going tactics
wouldn’t do with us. River-thieves can always get rid of stolen property
in a moment by dropping it overboard. We want to take them with the
property, so we lurk about and come out upon ’em sharp. If they see us
or hear us, over it goes.’
Pea’s wisdom being indisputable, there was nothing for it but to sit
there and be blown through, for another half-hour. The water-rats
thinking it wise to abscond at the end of that time without commission of
felony, we shot out, disappointed, with the tide.
‘Grim they look, don’t they?’ said Pea, seeing me glance over my shoulder
at the lights upon the bridge, and downward at their long crooked
reflections in the river.
‘Very,’ said I, ‘and make one think with a shudder of Suicides. What a
night for a dreadful leap from that parapet!’
‘Aye, but Waterloo’s the favourite bridge for making holes in the water
from,’ returned Pea. ‘By the bye—avast pulling, lads!—would you like to
speak to Waterloo on the subject?’
My face confessing a surprised desire to have some friendly conversation
with Waterloo Bridge, and my friend Pea being the most obliging of men,
we put about, pulled out of the force of the stream, and in place of
going at great speed with the tide, began to strive against it, close in
shore again. Every colour but black seemed to have departed from the
world. The air was black, the water was black, the barges and hulks were
black, the piles were black, the buildings were black, the shadows were
only a deeper shade of black upon a black ground. Here and there, a coal
fire in an iron cresset blazed upon a wharf; but, one knew that it too
had been black a little while ago, and would be black again soon.
Uncomfortable rushes of water suggestive of gurgling and drowning,
ghostly rattlings of iron chains, dismal clankings of discordant engines,
formed the music that accompanied the dip of our oars and their rattling
in the rowlocks. Even the noises had a black sound to me—as the trumpet
sounded red to the blind man.
Our dexterous boat’s crew made nothing of the tide, and pulled us
gallantly up to Waterloo Bridge. Here Pea and I disembarked, passed
under the black stone archway, and climbed the steep stone steps. Within
a few feet of their summit, Pea presented me to Waterloo (or an eminent
toll-taker representing that structure), muffled up to the eyes in a
thick shawl, and amply great-coated and fur-capped.
Waterloo received us with cordiality, and observed of the night that it
was ‘a Searcher.’ He had been originally called the Strand Bridge, he
informed us, but had received his present name at the suggestion of the
proprietors, when Parliament had resolved to vote three hundred thousand
pound for the erection of a monument in honour of the victory.
Parliament took the hint (said Waterloo, with the least flavour of
misanthropy) and saved the money. Of course the late Duke of Wellington
was the first passenger, and of course he paid his penny, and of course a
noble lord preserved it evermore. The treadle and index at the
toll-house (a most ingenious contrivance for rendering fraud impossible),
were invented by Mr. Lethbridge, then property-man at Drury Lane Theatre.
Was it suicide, we wanted to know about? said Waterloo. Ha! Well, he
had seen a good deal of that work, he did assure us. He had prevented
some. Why, one day a woman, poorish looking, came in between the hatch,
slapped down a penny, and wanted to go on without the change! Waterloo
suspected this, and says to his mate, ‘give an eye to the gate,’ and
bolted after her. She had got to the third seat between the piers, and
was on the parapet just a going over, when he caught her and gave her in
charge. At the police office next morning, she said it was along of
trouble and a bad husband.
‘Likely enough,’ observed Waterloo to Pea and myself, as he adjusted his
chin in his shawl. ‘There’s a deal of trouble about, you see—and bad
husbands too!’
Another time, a young woman at twelve o’clock in the open day, got
through, darted along; and, before Waterloo could come near her, jumped
upon the parapet, and shot herself over sideways. Alarm given, watermen
put off, lucky escape.—Clothes buoyed her up.
‘This is where it is,’ said Waterloo. ‘If people jump off straight
forwards from the middle of the parapet of the bays of the bridge, they
are seldom killed by drowning, but are smashed, poor things; that’s what
they are; they dash themselves upon the buttress of the bridge. But you
jump off,’ said Waterloo to me, putting his fore-finger in a button-hole
of my great-coat; ‘you jump off from the side of the bay, and you’ll
tumble, true, into the stream under the arch. What you have got to do,
is to mind how you jump in! There was poor Tom Steele from Dublin.
Didn’t dive! Bless you, didn’t dive at all! Fell down so flat into the
water, that he broke his breast-bone, and lived two days!’
I asked Waterloo if there were a favourite side of his bridge for this
dreadful purpose? He reflected, and thought yes, there was. He should
say the Surrey side.
Three decent-looking men went through one day, soberly and quietly, and
went on abreast for about a dozen yards: when the middle one, he sung
out, all of a sudden, ‘Here goes, Jack!’ and was over in a minute.
Body found? Well. Waterloo didn’t rightly recollect about that. They
were compositors, _they_ were.
He considered it astonishing how quick people were! Why, there was a cab
came up one Boxing-night, with a young woman in it, who looked, according
to Waterloo’s opinion of her, a little the worse for liquor; very
handsome she was too—very handsome. She stopped the cab at the gate, and
said she’d pay the cabman then, which she did, though there was a little
hankering about the fare, because at first she didn’t seem quite to know
where she wanted to be drove to. However, she paid the man, and the toll
too, and looking Waterloo in the face (he thought she knew him, don’t you
see!) said, ‘I’ll finish it somehow!’ Well, the cab went off, leaving
Waterloo a little doubtful in his mind, and while it was going on at full
speed the young woman jumped out, never fell, hardly staggered, ran along
the bridge pavement a little way, passing several people, and jumped over
from the second opening. At the inquest it was giv’ in evidence that she
had been quarrelling at the Hero of Waterloo, and it was brought in
jealousy. (One of the results of Waterloo’s experience was, that there
was a deal of jealousy about.)
‘Do we ever get madmen?’ said Waterloo, in answer to an inquiry of mine.
‘Well, we _do_ get madmen. Yes, we have had one or two; escaped from
‘Sylums, I suppose. One hadn’t a halfpenny; and because I wouldn’t let
him through, he went back a little way, stooped down, took a run, and
butted at the hatch like a ram. He smashed his hat rarely, but his head
didn’t seem no worse—in my opinion on account of his being wrong in it
afore. Sometimes people haven’t got a halfpenny. If they are really
tired and poor we give ’em one and let ’em through. Other people will
leave things—pocket-handkerchiefs mostly. I have taken cravats and
gloves, pocket-knives, tooth-picks, studs, shirt-pins, rings (generally
from young gents, early in the morning), but handkerchiefs is the general
thing.’
‘Regular customers?’ said Waterloo. ‘Lord, yes! We have regular
customers. One, such a worn-out, used-up old file as you can scarcely
picter, comes from the Surrey side as regular as ten o’clock at night
comes; and goes over, _I_ think, to some flash house on the Middlesex
side. He comes back, he does, as reg’lar as the clock strikes three in
the morning, and then can hardly drag one of his old legs after the
other. He always turns down the water-stairs, comes up again, and then
goes on down the Waterloo Road. He always does the same thing, and never
varies a minute. Does it every night—even Sundays.’
I asked Waterloo if he had given his mind to the possibility of this
particular customer going down the water-stairs at three o’clock some
morning, and never coming up again? He didn’t think that of him, he
replied. In fact, it was Waterloo’s opinion, founded on his observation
of that file, that he know’d a trick worth two of it.
‘There’s another queer old customer,’ said Waterloo, ‘comes over, as
punctual as the almanack, at eleven o’clock on the sixth of January, at
eleven o’clock on the fifth of April, at eleven o’clock on the sixth of
July, at eleven o’clock on the tenth of October. Drives a shaggy little,
rough pony, in a sort of a rattle-trap arm-chair sort of a thing. White
hair he has, and white whiskers, and muffles himself up with all manner
of shawls. He comes back again the same afternoon, and we never see more
of him for three months. He is a captain in the navy—retired—wery
old—wery odd—and served with Lord Nelson. He is particular about drawing
his pension at Somerset House afore the clock strikes twelve every
quarter. I have heerd say that he thinks it wouldn’t be according to the
Act of Parliament, if he didn’t draw it afore twelve.’
Having related these anecdotes in a natural manner, which was the best
warranty in the world for their genuine nature, our friend Waterloo was
sinking deep into his shawl again, as having exhausted his communicative
powers and taken in enough east wind, when my other friend Pea in a
moment brought him to the surface by asking whether he had not been
occasionally the subject of assault and battery in the execution of his
duty? Waterloo recovering his spirits, instantly dashed into a new
branch of his subject. We learnt how ‘both these teeth’—here he pointed
to the places where two front teeth were not—were knocked out by an ugly
customer who one night made a dash at him (Waterloo) while his (the ugly
customer’s) pal and coadjutor made a dash at the toll-taking apron where
the money-pockets were; how Waterloo, letting the teeth go (to Blazes, he
observed indefinitely), grappled with the apron-seizer, permitting the
ugly one to run away; and how he saved the bank, and captured his man,
and consigned him to fine and imprisonment. Also how, on another night,
‘a Cove’ laid hold of Waterloo, then presiding at the horse-gate of his
bridge, and threw him unceremoniously over his knee, having first cut his
head open with his whip. How Waterloo ‘got right,’ and started after the
Cove all down the Waterloo Road, through Stamford Street, and round to
the foot of Blackfriars Bridge, where the Cove ‘cut into’ a public-house.
How Waterloo cut in too; but how an aider and abettor of the Cove’s, who
happened to be taking a promiscuous drain at the bar, stopped Waterloo;
and the Cove cut out again, ran across the road down Holland Street, and
where not, and into a beer-shop. How Waterloo breaking away from his
detainer was close upon the Cove’s heels, attended by no end of people,
who, seeing him running with the blood streaming down his face, thought
something worse was ‘up,’ and roared Fire! and Murder! on the hopeful
chance of the matter in hand being one or both. How the Cove was
ignominiously taken, in a shed where he had run to hide, and how at the
Police Court they at first wanted to make a sessions job of it; but
eventually Waterloo was allowed to be ‘spoke to,’ and the Cove made it
square with Waterloo by paying his doctor’s bill (W. was laid up for a
week) and giving him ‘Three, ten.’ Likewise we learnt what we had
faintly suspected before, that your sporting amateur on the Derby day,
albeit a captain, can be—‘if he be,’ as Captain Bobadil observes, ‘so
generously minded’—anything but a man of honour and a gentleman; not
sufficiently gratifying his nice sense of humour by the witty scattering
of flour and rotten eggs on obtuse civilians, but requiring the further
excitement of ‘bilking the toll,’ and ‘Pitching into’ Waterloo, and
‘cutting him about the head with his whip;’ finally being, when called
upon to answer for the assault, what Waterloo described as ‘Minus,’ or,
as I humbly conceived it, not to be found. Likewise did Waterloo inform
us, in reply to my inquiries, admiringly and deferentially preferred
through my friend Pea, that the takings at the Bridge had more than
doubled in amount, since the reduction of the toll one half. And being
asked if the aforesaid takings included much bad money, Waterloo
responded, with a look far deeper than the deepest part of the river, he
should think not!—and so retired into his shawl for the rest of the
night.
Then did Pea and I once more embark in our four-oared galley, and glide
swiftly down the river with the tide. And while the shrewd East rasped
and notched us, as with jagged razors, did my friend Pea impart to me
confidences of interest relating to the Thames Police; we, between
whiles, finding ‘duty boats’ hanging in dark corners under banks, like
weeds—our own was a ‘supervision boat’—and they, as they reported ‘all
right!’ flashing their hidden light on us, and we flashing ours on them.
These duty boats had one sitter in each: an Inspector: and were rowed
‘Ran-dan,’ which—for the information of those who never graduated, as I
was once proud to do, under a fireman-waterman and winner of Kean’s Prize
Wherry: who, in the course of his tuition, took hundreds of gallons of
rum and egg (at my expense) at the various houses of note above and below
bridge; not by any means because he liked it, but to cure a weakness in
his liver, for which the faculty had particularly recommended it—may be
explained as rowed by three men, two pulling an oar each, and one a pair
of sculls.
Thus, floating down our black highway, sullenly frowned upon by the
knitted brows of Blackfriars, Southwark, and London, each in his lowering
turn, I was shown by my friend Pea that there are, in the Thames Police
Force, whose district extends from Battersea to Barking Creek,
ninety-eight men, eight duty boats, and two supervision boats; and that
these go about so silently, and lie in wait in such dark places, and so
seem to be nowhere, and so may be anywhere, that they have gradually
become a police of prevention, keeping the river almost clear of any
great crimes, even while the increased vigilance on shore has made it
much harder than of yore to live by ‘thieving’ in the streets. And as to
the various kinds of water-thieves, said my friend Pea, there were the
Tier-rangers, who silently dropped alongside the tiers of shipping in the
Pool, by night, and who, going to the companion-head, listened for two
snores—snore number one, the skipper’s; snore number two, the
mate’s—mates and skippers always snoring great guns, and being dead sure
to be hard at it if they had turned in and were asleep. Hearing the
double fire, down went the Rangers into the skippers’ cabins; groped for
the skippers’ inexpressibles, which it was the custom of those gentlemen
to shake off, watch, money, braces, boots, and all together, on the
floor; and therewith made off as silently as might be. Then there were
the Lumpers, or labourers employed to unload vessels. They wore loose
canvas jackets with a broad hem in the bottom, turned inside, so as to
form a large circular pocket in which they could conceal, like clowns in
pantomimes, packages of surprising sizes. A great deal of property was
stolen in this manner (Pea confided to me) from steamers; first, because
steamers carry a larger number of small packages than other ships; next,
because of the extreme rapidity with which they are obliged to be unladen
for their return voyages. The Lumpers dispose of their booty easily to
marine store dealers, and the only remedy to be suggested is that marine
store shops should be licensed, and thus brought under the eye of the
police as rigidly as public-houses. Lumpers also smuggle goods ashore
for the crews of vessels. The smuggling of tobacco is so considerable,
that it is well worth the while of the sellers of smuggled tobacco to use
hydraulic presses, to squeeze a single pound into a package small enough
to be contained in an ordinary pocket. Next, said my friend Pea, there
were the Truckers—less thieves than smugglers, whose business it was to
land more considerable parcels of goods than the Lumpers could manage.
They sometimes sold articles of grocery and so forth, to the crews, in
order to cloak their real calling, and get aboard without suspicion.
Many of them had boats of their own, and made money. Besides these,
there were the Dredgermen, who, under pretence of dredging up coals and
such like from the bottom of the river, hung about barges and other
undecked craft, and when they saw an opportunity, threw any property they
could lay their hands on overboard: in order slyly to dredge it up when
the vessel was gone. Sometimes, they dexterously used their dredges to
whip away anything that might lie within reach. Some of them were mighty
neat at this, and the accomplishment was called dry dredging. Then,
there was a vast deal of property, such as copper nails, sheathing,
hardwood, &c., habitually brought away by shipwrights and other workmen
from their employers’ yards, and disposed of to marine store dealers,
many of whom escaped detection through hard swearing, and their
extraordinary artful ways of accounting for the possession of stolen
property. Likewise, there were special-pleading practitioners, for whom
barges ‘drifted away of their own selves’—they having no hand in it,
except first cutting them loose, and afterwards plundering
them—innocents, meaning no harm, who had the misfortune to observe those
foundlings wandering about the Thames.
We were now going in and out, with little noise and great nicety, among
the tiers of shipping, whose many hulls, lying close together, rose out
of the water like black streets. Here and there, a Scotch, an Irish, or
a foreign steamer, getting up her steam as the tide made, looked, with
her great chimney and high sides, like a quiet factory among the common
buildings. Now, the streets opened into clearer spaces, now contracted
into alleys; but the tiers were so like houses, in the dark, that I could
almost have believed myself in the narrower bye-ways of Venice.
Everything was wonderfully still; for, it wanted full three hours of
flood, and nothing seemed awake but a dog here and there.
So we took no Tier-rangers captive, nor any Lumpers, nor Truckers, nor
Dredgermen, nor other evil-disposed person or persons; but went ashore at
Wapping, where the old Thames Police office is now a station-house, and
where the old Court, with its cabin windows looking on the river, is a
quaint charge room: with nothing worse in it usually than a stuffed cat
in a glass case, and a portrait, pleasant to behold, of a rare old Thames
Police officer, Mr. Superintendent Evans, now succeeded by his son. We
looked over the charge books, admirably kept, and found the prevention so
good that there were not five hundred entries (including drunken and
disorderly) in a whole year. Then, we looked into the store-room; where
there was an oakum smell, and a nautical seasoning of dreadnought
clothing, rope yarn, boat-hooks, sculls and oars, spare stretchers,
rudders, pistols, cutlasses, and the like. Then, into the cell, aired
high up in the wooden wall through an opening like a kitchen plate-rack:
wherein there was a drunken man, not at all warm, and very wishful to
know if it were morning yet. Then, into a better sort of watch and ward
room, where there was a squadron of stone bottles drawn up, ready to be
filled with hot water and applied to any unfortunate creature who might
be brought in apparently drowned. Finally, we shook hands with our
worthy friend Pea, and ran all the way to Tower Hill, under strong Police
suspicion occasionally, before we got warm.