eastlondonhistory.com

Last week we saw how the unlikely trio of master mariner John Harriott, magistrate Patrick Colquhoun and philosopher Jeremy Bentham were responsible for the formation of the Marine Police Force on the River Thames. Having swiftly proved to Parliament that his new river force was saving the docks a huge sum in pilfered goods, Colquhoun found himself in charge of a publicly funded police force.

The Marine Police took a lease on a riverside site at Wapping and set about appointing permanent officers, with a Superintendent of Ships Constables in charge of five Surveyors, men who would patrol the river by both day and night, rowed in open galleys by Thames Watermen. A further four Surveyors would visit ships being loaded and unloaded, while Ship Constables would watch over the dockers. There was also a Surveyor of Quays with two assistants and 30 Police Quay Guards.

It was an unwieldy setup, and it was hard and dangerous work, but by the 1830s, the Marine Police had grown to having three stations (Waterloo and Blackwall had been added) and 15 boats. In 1829, Robert Peel formed the Metropolitan Police and in 1839 the new force amalgamated with the river force, which was now renamed Thames Division.

A disaster in 1878 was to force change from the river police’s use of rowing boats … though it was a long time coming. On 3 September that year, iron ship the Bywell Castle ploughed into the pleasure steamer Princess Alice at Galleons Reach. The paddle boat, returning with 800 holidaymakers from a day trip to the Kent coast, was snapped in two and sank with the loss of more than 600 lives. It was the greatest ever loss of civilian lives in UK waters. The inquest found that Thames Division were woefully underpowered with their rowing galleys, and the first two steam launches came into service in the mid 1880s. By 1898 there were eight more, but it was 1905 before the 28 row boats were finally phased out. In 1910, motor launches joined the fleet.

The late 20th century had its own river tragedy, and again it forced a change in how the Thames was policed. At ten minutes to two on the morning of 20 Auguest 1989, the dredger Bowbelle collided with the pleasure boat Marchioness close to Cannon Street Railway Bridge. The river police were swiftly on the scene, getting to the collision inside six minutes. Four police boats, assisted by the passenger boat Hurlingham plucked 87 people from the waters of the Thames, but 51 people died, and the inquest that followed demanded change.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency ( MCA ), the Port of London Authority ( PLA ) and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution ( RNLI ) worked on setting up a dedicated Search and Rescue service for the tidal River Thames, taking over at least part of the role that the River Police had fulfilled for more than two centuries. And on 2 January 2002, the RNLI opened four new lifeboat stations at Gravesend, Tower Pier, Chiswick Pier and Teddington. And the river police (now called the Marine Support Unit or MSU) work in tandem on rescues with the RNLI, the Coastguards and a London Fire Brigade boat.

Today, the job of protecting the London Docks from pilfering is no more - because of course the London Docks are no more, having long since moved downriver to Tilbury. But to this day the river police operate out of the same Wapping High Street address that has been their home for more than two centuries, and now has 22 boats in its fleet. The beat of the MSU covers 14 miles of river, between Hampton Court and Dartford Creek. Above Hampton Court, the Surrey Police patrol the river along with the Environment Agency. Below Dartford, the Essex and Kent Police take over, with an Essex marine unit based at Burnham-on-Crouch police station.

Two of the founders of the river police have been remembered in the names of police launches. The John Harriott was in service from 1947 to 1963, while a Targa duty boat currently bears the name. Police launch Patrick Colquhoun patrolled the Thames from 1963 to 2003. Jeremy Bentham, strangely, has never been thus commemorated. Perhaps his ‘auto icon’ sat on display at University College London is memorial enough.

The Marine Policing Unit at Wapping is a sophisticated and unique branch of the Metropolitan Police. The men and women in boats have to liaise with the Port of London Authority, Special Branch, Customs and Excise, the Coastguard service, London Fire Brigade and Immigration. And their motor launches are a familiar sight, speeding from the Wapping River Station that has been its home for more than 200 years.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of the unit, when officers ventured into the docks in rowing boats, and often had standup fights with dockers … who resented the new coppers curtailing their ‘bonuses’. For the story behind the river police is of theft from the docks on a grand scale, and a curious genesis involving Spitalfields philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham was a fascinating and contradictory figure. A lover of freedom, he also famously he devised the panopticon - a prison where the inmates could be observed at all times (while never being aware that they were being watched. His philosophy of utilitarianism is brilliant but controversial. To put things simply, the theory says that the worth of an act is judged by its contribution to the sum total of human happiness: many have argued that, logically, utilitarianism could lead to great individual unhappiness for the individual. Yet he was startlingly liberal for his day - a proponent of animal rights, equal rights for women, gay rights and an end to both slavery and the death penalty.

But we’re not here to argue philosophical theory, we’re talking about ships and crime. Bentham also saw himself as an intensely practical philosopher - hence the panopticon. Hence too his interest in the problem of thievery at the docks, where merchants in the Pool of London were losing half a million pounds in filched cargo each year. The great thinker was persuaded to work on a solution by Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, alongside Essex Justice of the Peace and Master Mariner John Harriot.

Within weeks, Colquhoun had a plan to put to the merchants. Armed with £4200 put up by the West India Merchants and the West India Planters Committees, the magistrate recruited 50 men to police the 33,000 dock and river workers - Colquhoun claimed 11,000 were on the make, a figure surely plucked from the air.

So was born England’s first professional police force, and they were hated. Just like the earlier Bow Street Runners (founded in 1749) and the later Metropolitan Police, they would be considered an infringement of Londoners’ liberties; the idea of a police force seems to have been viewed by many rather as identity cards are now. The Marine Police Force was pilloried as an idea suitable for France or Germany, but not for the free men and women of England.

Colquhoun’s ‘11,000′ may not have been far off mind. Soon after the force began its work on 2 July 1798 a mob of 2000 attempted to burn down the Wapping Police Station with the officers inside. The fight that ensued saw the first English policeman killed in the line of duty, with the death of the unfortunate Gabriel Franks. One of the forces’s current launches is named ‘Gabriel Franks’ in his memory.

The crux of Colquhooun’s plan was in giving his men a salary, unlike the Bow Street Runners, who relied on a (rather erratic stipend). By putting the river men on a regular wage he could make them full time, demand higher standards of professionalism and, arguably, reduce the likelihood of corruption. The brilliance in involving Bentham in this plan was that the founders used utilitarianism to sell the marine force to local businesses. They used a cost-benefit model, effectively saying ‘for every pound you cough up to fund our police force’ you’ll make more than a pound back’.

And it worked. A year in, Colquhoun reported back that his men had ‘established their worth by saving £122,000 worth of cargo and by the rescuing of several lives’. Possibly some made-up figures again there from Mr Colquhoun, but the authorities figured that such furious resistance must mean the police were hitting a nerve, and Government acted to transform the freelance agency into a public police force. Colquhoun had not only invented the idea of the publicly funded police force, he had also introduced the idea of crime prevention (rather than simply capture and punishment) for the first time. Again, this rankled with many, who argued that a free Englishman should be free to commit crimes and then be caught, rather than being snooped on by officers. But the authorities loved it of course, and the model was copied around the world.

Next week: Fights, rescues and tragedies … how the river police developed.

Momentous days indeed as the United States elects its first black president. And, while it may seem a little presumptuous for the East End to claim Barack Obama as one of their own, the President Elect did reveal earlier this year that he was a West Ham fan - a legacy of a trip to London a few years back.

East End connections with the office of President of the United States and with America itself go back a lot further of course, with one First Lady being born on Tower Hill and another president being the scion of an East End family. Indeed the very roots of the United States stretch back to Wapping. Of course there are numerous competing claims as to who were the first Europeans to ‘discover’ and then to settle in the Americas. There is evidence that the Vikings beat Columbus to it by 500 years or so, with Leif Ericson and his Norsemen stumbling across what would later become Newfoundland.

Columbus famously ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1492 (bringing the gift of European diseases, which would wipe out huge swathes of the indigenous population). In 1513, the Spanish conquistadors were the first to reach the mainland of the modern US, in Florida. Subsequently, the English made 18 failed attempts to settle America, failing each time. The most famous and mysterious attempt was the Roanoke settlement, organised by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587, but then left without supplies for three years. The colony would yield the first English child to be born in the Americas, but when the English eventually returned, the settlers had vanished without trace.

East Enders enter the picture 20 years later, making the first permanent settlement in America. Captain John Smith’s expedition made landfall in what is now Virginia, on 26 April 1607. The ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery had set off from Blackwall Stairs on 19 December 1606. The colony was beset by illness, bad water, quarrels with the Native Americans and rotten planning. But they somehow survived and the English-speaking America was born. East Ender John Laydon was the father of the first child born of a Protestant wedding in the territory - she was fittingly baptised Virginia.

In 1667, William Penn left his home on Tower Hill, to found the Province of Pennsylvania. The state founded by the Quaker (a pacifist of course) was a beacon of democracy, religious freedom and unusually good relations with Native Americans. Voltaire praised the province’s government for its respect for minority rights, and the city of Philadelphia became a melting pot of races and religions, as people settled from all over Europe. The London man had set a template for the later America, and partly inspired the American constitution, where ‘all men are equal under God’.

These were the years that America was fighting for independence from Britain, though that didn’t stop them returning to London for a focus for their fight. The Liberty Bell, with its inscription “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” was commissioned from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1751. The bell still hangs in the Philadelphia State House steeple today.

One of the Founding Fathers inspired by Penn’s example was Thomas Jefferson. He was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, and become in turn the third President of the United States. Jefferson was born in Shadwell, Virginia, the settlement being named after the East End area where his mother had been born. Jane Randolph had left Shadwell and Wapping in 1735. Jefferson served as President from 1801 until 1809.

Another interesting London link centres on the church of All Hallows, the oldest in the City of London, dating in part back to 675 AD, and from the tower of which Samuel Pepys had watched the Great Fire in 1666. Just a year later, Penn would leave for the Americas, but he had been baptised in All Hallows in 1644. In 1797 John Quincy Adams (who would become the sixth President of the US) was married in the church. His wife, Louisa, had been born at Tower Hill, and it was another four years before she set foot in America. Adams’s political enemies forevermore directed the ultimate insult at the only First Lady to have been born outside the United States - that she was ‘English’.

Wander east along Narrow Street, past the Limehouse Basin to your left and the Thames to your right, over the swing bridge and the vista suddenly changes. Narrow Street defies its name to become broad, and the jumble of faux warehouse homes give way to a slice of the real Limehouse.

Numbers 78 to 88 Narrow Street form an imposing terrace backing onto the river. They are older than the  ‘Docklands’ developments of course, but also much older than the real warehouses of this old sefaring quarter. To the ill-educated eye (mine) they might appear Georgian but in fact date back to the reign of Elizabeth I. They are also some of the last remaining houses on this north bank of the Thames. But having survived from the 16th to the 20th century, they very nearly fell foul of the developers in the 1960s.

The story of Number 88, and the other houses in the terrace form the core of an extraordinary memoir of Limehouse by Rozelle Raynes. ‘Limehouse Lil’ covers 60 years - from when Rozelle first visited the East End at the close of the Second World War. She had just been demobbed, as a 20-year-old Wren, from a naval base in the Portsmouth Command. The East End of the time was beyond the pale for a young woman from an upper class family, but there was a magic and romance about it that drew her in. As Rozelle admits, there was no mystery about when the seed had been sown.

“The whole adventure had been inspired by a book which my mother gave me when I was lying in bed with measles at the age of 12. ‘The Romance of London’s River’ was beautifully illustrated by Frank Mason (RI) and from it I learned there were warehouses full of elephant’s tusks in Wapping, gigantic Russian timber ships in Lavender Pond and oriental cafes filled with almond-eyed Chinamen in Pennyfields.” And the romance was only heightened by the names of the thoroughfares in the book. Were there really places called Shoulder of Mutton Alley, Picked Herring Street and Wapping Old Stairs?

Indeed there were, and Rozelle and fellow Wren Sue found them all. A lifelong love of the sea had been engendered by their tough jobs as Wren Stokers and Limehouse and Wapping, with their centuries of seafaring tradition (by that time sadly coming to an end) only fired their imaginations. The river at Limehouse and Wapping was still busy then, and the pair would sit for hours in Shadwell Park “entranced by the everlasting pageant of shipping”. There were tugs attached to long strings of barges, fish carriers hurrying upriver to Billingsgate, long ugly flat irons taking coal to Fulham gas works, a rusty Spanish freighter with a crago of oranges from Bilbao. “But the finest sight of all was a Thames sailing barge with its giagantic tanned mainsail, tacking up to Tower Bridge against the last of the ebb.”

The pair fell in love with the place, and while their posh friends were sipping cocktails up west, they could often be found drinking beer in the Prospect of Whitby. And there one of the other great things about the East End became apparent to Rozelle. Although undoubtedly outsiders, she and Sue were soon accepted as friends by a colourful crew that centred around Lucy Durrell, a Wapping matriarch then in her sixties. Lucy had survived a tough childhood to become the hub of an ever growing family (by the time Rozelle and husband Dick attended Lucy’s 80th birthday party in 1965, she had 28 great grandchildren). She was a link back to the myth and mist shrouded Wapping of the 1890s, with its dozens of pubs and brothels, its opium dens and poverty, and she had the stories to back it up.

As well as sinking pints and singing songs in the Prospect of Whitby, Rozelle would join the Durrell clan on their annual trip down to pick the hops in Kent. It was a friendship that endured. Even after Rozelle and Dick married and settled in an old farmhouse at Pluckley (Dick working as a GP in nearby Ashford), the pair kept in touch with the Wapping contingent. And it was at that 80th birthday party for Lucy, that the seeds were sown for the couple’s move to Limehouse. Dick mentioned to the guests that the pair would love to move to the East End if they should ever leave the country. It was a passing comment but a persistent dream. Then two years later the phone rang. There were some old houses being converted into flats in Wapping … would Dick and Rozelle like to take a look?

Next week … Changing Limehouse, from the 1960s to the present day.

Limehouse Lil: And That Small Corner of London’s Docklands Where She Ruled Supreme…Until Canary Wharf Arose (Paperback) by Rozelle Raynes, Catweasel Publishing, ISBN 0954746716, £7.50

Last week we heard how Dick and Rozelle Raynes fell in love with, and settled in Limehouse. Their friends were horrified: Rozelle recalls cocktail parties in west London where people talked of the area as if it hadn’t changed since the days of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu. ‘However did you come to live in a ghastly place like Limehouse,’ asks one. ‘It’s full of opium dens and drunken seamen isn’t it. Surely nobody actually lives there?’

But its otherness and its grittiness was what the pair loved, as Rozelle writes: ‘There are no soft undulations or vague contours in the Limehouse silhouette. It is a region of bold strong outlines, tall cranes, mighty chimneys, dark warehouses and immense blocks of council flats standing out in stark relief against the evening sky.’

In Rozelle’s fascinating memoir of 40 years of Limehouse Life*, she spends a lot of time looking up - at the ever-changing skies above Number 88 Narrow Street, at the wheeling seagulls and the walkways that used to run above the street, linking warehouse to warehouse. She look up at the chimneys of No88, which she baptises Lucy, George, Doris and Albert. But most of all she gazes up at ‘Limehouse Lil’ the enormous chimney towering overhead and belching smoke into the Limehouse air.

Dick and Rozelle caught their first glimpse of ‘the most beautiful house in London’ in the late sixties. The vendor had saved the entire terrace from numbers 78 to 88 a few years before, leading a battle against the GLC and Tower Hamlets Council, who had wanted to redevelop the lot. The eccentric owner plies them with sherry, before making them promise to give him first refusal should they ever want to sell the house again. And so began the pair’s life in Limehouse, and a string of new friends, including the redoubtable Dorothea Woodward Fisher, OBE, terrifying matriarch of the neighbouring barge yard. There are friends from Brightlingsea Buildings opposite, bonfires on the wasteground, trips out with the kids from Cyril Jackson School, and the initially suspicious (though eventually very welcoming) fellow members of the Greenwich Yacht Club.

Alongside anecdotes of their lives in Limehouse, Rozelle sprinkles plenty of historical colour: previous visitors included Charles Dickens, while Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Gilbert both lived in Narrow Street. Down the centuries (and Number 88 and its neighbours date back to the reign of Elizabeth I) Limehouse has been a rough, ready and hard working corner of London.

And that was just the way Dick and Rozelle loved it: the wharfs and the houses on one side, the river on the other. But inevitably Limehouse began to change. If Limehouse Lil had dominated the skyline for countless years, a new tower was rising to the east. And that, for good or bad, was the future of Docklands.

First One Canada Square grew and grew, and then Canary Wharf mushroomed around it. Slowly and not very successfully at first, but then the new ‘yuppified’ Docklands began to take over, and Limehouse changed forever. Back in the Sixties and Seventies, the Rayneses and neighbours such as Lord Owen, Ian McKellen, Janet Street Porter, Daniel Farson and Francis Bacon had been a rather exotic breed, considered eccentrics for settling in remote Limehouse. By the late Eighties, many of the surviving warehouses had been transformed into luxury homes, and developers were building new properties apeing the warehouse style. The ‘bold strong outlines’ of Limehouse had been watered down and sold to a new generation of settlers.

For many of the new breed, the old Limehouse was a little too rough hewn. Rozelle recalls the day she was stopped by one of her new neighbours, who gushed ‘Have you heard about the new marina they’re building to replace that monstrosity’. The monstrosity was Limehouse Lil, and Rozelle watched in tears as the chimney was swiftly felled. Their old friends in Brightlingsea Buildings were moved on as the council block was razed to make way for a much more profitable, if rather ugly, terrace of town houses. In true London style, the pub at the end of the terrace was spared - and the Black Horse could go on serving at least. Mrs Woodward Fisher’s barge yard was sold by her son to a property developer. Three luxury flats, at a half million each replaced the old yard, but the reassuring clank of the barges at their moorings was gone forever.

* Limehouse Lil: And That Small Corner of London’s Docklands Where She Ruled Supreme…Until Canary Wharf Arose (Paperback) by Rozelle Raynes, Catweasel Publishing, ISBN 0954746716, £7.50

I stumbled across a terrific documentary on BBC1 last night, covering the work of the doughty officers who work out of Wapping’s River Police station. The programme, which the BBC in an admirable lack of hype had simply called River Police followed them over the course of a day, with handheld cameras. The work, unsurprisingly, largely seems to consist of talking people down off bridges or fishing them out of the water if they’ve already jumped.

Superb footage of the Thames by day and especially by night - this was a lovely little film, quite old fashioned in feel, and touching on a part of the city that all of us are aware of but rarely see. If you missed it, don’t worry. Courtesy of the magic of the internet and digital media you can watch River Police on your computer screen or download it to watch later. Just click the following link:

River Police on BBC 1

Panoramas of the River Thames have a long and fascinating history, stretching back to the 16th century. Visiting Dutch and Flemish artists would create oil paintings, pencil drawings, etchings or engravings, capturing in minute detail the buildings and ships of the waterfront.

Into the 20th century, and many Londoners lost touch with their river, as water traffic dropped and they would only see the Thames as they crossed its bridges.

Fortunately, before the old world of the docks, wharves and river trade disappeared forever, a definitive record of the riverfront was produced. The Port of London Authority commissioned a series of photographs in 1937. Stitched together, they comprised a complete panorama of the river’s banks, both north and south.

A couple of years ago, a group of photographers decided that the job needed to be done once more. Charting every inch of the river’s north bank from London Bridge to North Greenwich, and back again on the south side from Greenwich to London Bridge, they offer a fascinating picture of how the East End’s riverfront has changed over the last 60 years.

Brought together in London’s Riverscape Lost and Found the two panoramas provide a startling contrast. The 1937 pictures show a busy waterfront, when the East End was the world’s greatest port and home to a huge number of manufacturing and processing works. By 1997 most of the vistas had moved from industry, through dereliction, and on to residential use.

One of the most dramatic changes is at St Katharine Wharf, right next to Tower Bridge. In 1937 the Steam Packet Wharf still dominated the skyline, but by 1997 the monolithic Tower Thistle Hotel has taken its place.

Much of the docklands was destroyed by German bombing in World War II. In the 1937 pictures, the Union Stairs, with the Turks Head pub, is almost unchanged from Whistler’s 1859-61 Thames Set of etchings. But this ramshackle riverfront, made up of small wharfside buildings of differing heights, was erased by enemy bombs.

Of course, much that wasn’t destroyed has since become a lot more desirable and valuable. The Wapping Pierhead Houses, fine Georgian homes overlooking the river and just yards from the City, are much sought after today. Right next door, Oliver’s Wharf was to undergone a transformation considered revolutionary in 1972. Built in 1870 in a stunning Tudor gothic style, it was still handling cargoes in 1937. Redundant in the early seventies, it was one of the first warehouses to be converted into luxury apartments.

The next building along, Orient Wharf, was not to survive. At first glimpse, though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Toynbee Housing Association homes that replaced it were part of the original riverfront. Built in 1988, they adopted the mock-warehouse look that has become the style for much new building in Docklands.

In fact moving along the Wapping riverfront, it is often difficult to tell new from old. The derelict Middleton’s and St Bride’s Wharves were demolished, and now the massive Towerside development sits tidily next to the refurbished (but original) New Crane Wharf. The irony – comparing the 1937 vista of a working port to that of the industry-free 1997 – is that the 90s’ waterfront has more wharf and warehouse buildings.

But there’s no risk of confusing the 1980s’ development of Ratcliff’s Free Trade Wharf with the original working model, which shut up shop in 1971. Looking rather like a jumbled heap of cardboard boxes you could never imagine this was part of the old riverscape.

The site of the West India Docks, at the neck of the Isle of Dogs, provides the most dramatic contrast in the two sets of pictures. It’s now the site of Canary Wharf, and the eighties development leaves no trace of the original riverfront.

Further down the Island it’s little different. Unlike Wapping, where preserved facades concealed gutted and gentrified interiors, most of the riverfront developments are new. In the 1937 pictures, Morton’s Sufferance Wharf (the works employees’ football team was later to become Millwall FC) can still be seen with a steam tug moored out front. By 1987 it had been replaced by the dramatic Cascades apartment block, much hated and criticised by Prince Charles.

But some Island wharves were already going in the thirties. In the 1937 pictures, the Workmen’s Dwellings were just being completed on the site of the old Phoenix Wharf, where Duckham’s Paints used to do business. And not all eighties developments were for moneyed newcomers. Maconochie’s Wharf was demolished to be replaced by a scheme known as the Great Eastern Self-Build Association. By 1990, 89 houses had been built by and for local people.

It’s almost a relief to get to the end of the northern stretch and find one site that’s recognisably the same. Island Gardens, with its trees and the dome of the Greenwich foot tunnel is unmistakable. The most dramatic difference is the looming tower of 1 Canada Square, which dominates almost every one of the 1997 pictures.

London’s Riverscape Lost and Found, Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner, ISBN 1-874044-30-9, www.londons-found-riverscape.co.uk

ONE thing we all take for granted today is clean, fresh water and – barring the next Thames Water hosepipe ban – plenty of it.
But until just a century ago, East Enders were more likely to be killed by their water than revived by it.
In the 1800s, as Tower Hamlets multiplied in size with the influx of immigrants from the countryside and abroad, cholera became a chronic threat to human health.
Look left out of the train window as you travel from Bromley-by-Bow to West Ham and you will see the distinctive rococco form of Abbey Mills pumping station.
It may look like something from a horror film but, in its day, it made the East End a safe place to live and work, as it carried sewage out to the Thames.
London had a problem getting rid of its rubbish for centuries, and for a long time the East End benefited. There was no mains drainage in the middle ages – instead excrement would be stored in cesspits under the houses.
This ‘nightsoil’ would then be carted away to ‘laystalls’, and then from there to the new market gardens around the Essex villages of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Bow.
If that sounds unsanitary, it was an improvement on the earlier system in the City, where a gulley down the middle of the street would be awash with rubbish and human excrement.
The lack of concern of Londoners was shown by Samuel Pepys observation in his famous Diary, recording how his wife “stooped down in the street to do her business”.
The Tower Hamlets market gardens may have flourished, but by the mid-1800s they had been buried under bricks and mortar, and cholera epidemics were sweeping the borough.
In desperation, the newly- formed Metropolitan Commis-sion of Sewers decreed in 1847 that cesspits were now banned.

The move was a disaster, as the main sewers and underground streams now discharged their filth straight into the Thames. A decade before, salmon had still been seen jumping in the river at Wapping. By the 1850s nothing could live in what had become a huge, stinking open sewer.
The matter came to a head in the long, hot summer of 1858. Wapping windows had to be draped with lime chloride soaked curtains, and tons of chalk and carbolic acid were tipped into the Thames.
But nothing could mask ‘The Great Stink’ as it became known. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli himself described the river as “a Stygian Pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”.
It was the last straw, and in that year a Bill for the purification of the Thames was passed – but the first step was to find an answer to the removal of the human waste of three million Londoners.
One plan was proposed by the painter John ‘Mad’ Martin. Rather unfairly named, his plan was to pipe the filth out to Essex to propagate land – pretty much what the East Enders had previously done for their farmland.
But the task eventually fell to the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He constructed a huge system of sewers running east from London Bridge for a distance of eleven miles, assisted by pumping stations such as Abbey Mills.
When Bazalgette was finished, London boasted 1,300 miles of sewers, along with the London Underground, one of the great engineering marvels of his age.
And as with the Under-ground, many of the same tunnels are still serving East Enders today. Others, like that beneath Stratford’s Greenway, have now gone out of service.
But all were part of the hidden network that saved the East End from the cholera-ridden hell it was a century ago.

The London bobby on the beat is probably the most famous figure of the hundreds of police forces worldwide.
When home secretary Robert Peel finally forced through his Metropolitan Police Bill in 1828, after six years of Parliamentary and public resistance, he established a properly organised, city-wide law enforcement service for the first time.
Their distinctive blue uniform and top hats were chosen to emphasise to a hostile populace that this wasn’t an army set up to control the general public. Despite riots and attacks on the new force, the ‘Peelers’ were here to stay.
But it’s a common misconception that the Met – replacing the rag bag of detective agencies, watchmen and Bow Street Runners which patrolled the old London – was the first modern force. That honour goes to the Thames River Police, established some 30 years earlier. As so often before, the East End led the way, and certainly had a more pressing crime problem!

Silks, rum, tobacco

In the 1700s, London became the busiest and most important port in the entire world, sitting as it did at the hub of a huge new empire. The West Indies, the Americas, the Far East and India – all were stations in this huge global enterprise by British merchants. And as a result, tea, coffee, sugar, rum, spices, silks, furs, tobacco and many other valuable commodities flooded through the wharves of Wapping.
The East End had a valuable inshore trade, too, with coal from Newcastle and fishing fleets landing hauls from the North Sea. The merchants of Wapping flourished… but so did the thieves.
Some of the inbound ships never made it to the Pool of London. Pirates operating further down the Thames toward Tilbury would waylay the vessels as they came in.
Wapping locals would have all the time in the world to observe craft being laden with outgoing goods during the working day and would brief the pirates, who would intercept the unfortunate captains at night. Robbery with violence was the norm – any resistance would be dealt with at knifepoint.

Stolen goods

The processing of the stolen booty was a highly organised Wapping business in itself, with 12 factories in the town receiving the goods and selling them on throughout the City.

But the greatest criminal element was within the docks themselves. There were around 33,000 lumpers, as the 18th century dockers were known, and 11,500 of them were known thieves. With no organised force to patrol the river, the assorted band of mudlarks, long apron men, scuffle hunters, light horsemen and heavy horsemen (as the various types of thief were colourfully known) were free to steal without fear of capture.
The Rum Boat Act of 1761 was intended to prevent theft but was never enforced. Fortunately, in 1797, a man came along with a vision and a plan to establish law and order on the river.
John Harriot, a mariner and a ‘man of many parts’, constructed a plan for a force and took it to the Lord Mayor of London. The Mayor, also Conservator of the River, amazingly declared it to be of ‘no concern to London’.
Undeterred, Harriot teamed up with Patrick Colquhoun, an energetic Scot from Dumbarton who had founded the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, the first in the UK. Colquhoun was now a London magistrate and worked with Harriot to set up the Marine Police Establishment. On July 26, 1798, the office was set up at 259 Wapping New Stairs – as near as possible to the vulnerable incoming craft.
Businessmen such as the West India Planters, which alone reckoned to be losing an astonishing £250,000 a year from theft, breathed a sigh of relief. The first modern police force had been born.
Patrols in rowing galleys commenced from Wapping, and the present headquarters of Thames Division still occupies this site.
The force cut cargo losses and led to the arrest of so many criminals that on October 16, 1798, a riot took place and an attempt was made to destroy the court building. During the riot two police officers were shot – one in the hand and the other subsequently died from his wounds.
The police officers were ordered by Harriot to fire into the crowd. The crowd dispersed and Dr Colquhoun set a legal precedent by allowing one hour to elapse before pursuing the ring leaders of the riot who were by this time known to the authorities. One was hanged and a further six were transported.
The Marine Police became an officially recognised body in 1800 when parliament passed a Bill to run for seven years. This was extended for a further seven years in 1806.

In 1907 a petrol/paraffin engine was developed at Wapping and was first installed into the rowing galleys. This unfortunately affected the balance of the craft and several capsized – leading to the death of one officer.
In 1914, purpose-built craft were in use, and a civilian engineering and carpenters workshop was opened, releasing the police officers to do what they do to this day: patrolling the river, keeping users safe and catching crooks.

Visit the Thames River Police Museum, 98 Wapping High Street, E1 (tel: 020 7481
1212). The archives contain
a comprehensive collection
of photos, documents
and artefacts.

St Katharine Dock is probably the best known of all the
old London docklands to outsiders .
While the huge docks of the Isle of Dogs and beyond were hidden to anyone but East Enders themselves, tourists and Londoners alike only have to wander a few yards east of Tower Bridge to be in the heart of one of the relics of the Pool of London.
It was also one of the first of the moribund docks to be brought back to life: long before Canary Wharf and Yuppie housing were a twinkle in the planners’ eyes, St Katharine’s Dock had become a berth for luxury watercraft and a popular watering hole, thanks to the Dickens Inn and the Tower Hotel.
Royal connections
The Dock was a hugely ambitious but, in reality, never particularly successful venture. It was carved out of the banks of the Thames in 1827, marking a triumph of commerce over religion and bringing to an end the area’s centuries of history as a sacred site.
When St Katharine’s Hospital was pulled down in 1827 it brought to an end an association dating back to 1148, when Matilda of Boulogne, the wife of the usurping king of England, Stephen, established a hospital for the repose of her two deceased children.
It was also the start of a
long association with queens
of England. In 1273, Queen Eleanor, the widow of Henry III, kicked out the Prior
and brothers who had
been purloining funds, and re-established St Katharine’s with a new master.
Philippa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III, was
next to grant funds and found
a charity to benefit St Katharine’s, and the two Henrys V and VI later became benefactors.
The hospital benefited
further when its master, Thomas de Bekington, later the Bishop of Bath and Wells, obtained a Royal charter of privileges in 1445.

21-day feast
Thomas had cut a marvellous deal. The precincts of the hospital were declared free from all jurisdiction, be it civil or ecclesiastical, other than that of the Lord Chancellor. And to bolster funds, an ann-ual fair was to be held on Tower Hill, starting on the Feast of St James and lasting a full 21 days.
Short of being declared an independent state with its
own tax-raising powers, St Katharine’s couldn’t have had it better.
And St Katharine’s even escaped the grasp of that great dissolver of holy establishments, Henry VIII. In 1526, the king confirmed its rights, supposedly as a favour to his new queen, Anne Boleyn.
But the hospital was too rich a plum to remain unplucked forever. And in Edward VI’s reign, its lands were seized by the Crown. Then Dr Wylson, the secretary to Elizabeth I, tore up Henry VI’s charter and swiftly drew up a new one, conveniently leaving out any mention of Tower Hill Fair. He sold rights to the fair to the Corporation of London for the sum of £466, 13s and 4d.
The beleaguered hospital was ravaged by fire in 1672, when 100 houses were destroyed, and a storm in 1734 razed 30 more. Then, during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, a Protestant mob tried to destroy the church – its sin being that it was built in ‘Popish times’.
In the end it was not the greed of kings, the vagaries of nature, nor the bigotry of rioters that ended St Katharine’s. Big business saw it off in 1825, when the church was demolished to make way for the new docks.
The Gothic building, with stalls dating back to 1340, was unceremoniously razed and the hospital was no more.