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Thames turns North for a few miles into the Georgian
town of Marlow where the river forms the county
boundary between Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.
William Tierney Clark a Bristolian civil engineer built
the suspension bridge at Marlow in 1832 and an almost
identical but larger bridge across the Danube linking
Buda and Pest seven years later. The Compleat Angler
by the bridge is named for the 1632 masterpiece of
angling philosophy by Isaak Walton. Now fiddled
about with to create the maximum number of hotel
rooms it is beyond recognition as an old Thames inn
and I can’t look at it without grumbling. At Marlow in
Higginson Park on the riverside there is a statue of
local boy Sir Steve Redgrave and a house once lived in
by the 18
th
century Doctor William Battie who wrote
the first book on the treatment of mental illness leading
to the expression
“she’s gone batty”.
Jerome K Jerome wrote some of his classic Three
Men
in a Boat
about a journey by skiff from Kingston to
Oxford in the late 1880s at The Two Brewers here on
the river at Marlow. He later retired to the mediaeval
Chiltern village of Ewelme but had he paddled down
past Quarry Wood towards Cookham anytime in the
1920s he might have heard an aria or two wafting
through the trees from the cottage of the Australian
soprano Dame Nellie Melba (for whom the afters was
named). In 1920 Dame Nellie (above right), who also
lived for a time at Kingston-upon-Thames, became the
first artiste to be broadcast on British wireless.
Approaching Cookham are the extensive Cock Marsh
meadows that have been common grazing land for 800
years and are now looked after by the National Trust.
Cookham is officially the 2nd richest village in
England pipped at the post by Chalfont St Millionaire.
Next to Cock Marsh is
Mill Marsh where mooring
is allowed and for just
£6.00 a night you can
tie up and gaze across
to a vast house on the
Buckinghamshire side
owned by quite a young
chap who my pal Andy
the rope man has dubbed
The Great Gatsby. This is
Bourne End and we have
no idea who the Great
Gatsby is but past residents
of this very swanky
neighbourhood include Louis Bleriot (who flew
across the Channel in the 1920s), Enid Blyton and
Kenneth Connor a regular in the Carry On films.
At Bourne End the River Wye empties into the
Thames having risen just 9 miles away at
Bradenham in the Hughenden Valley of the
Chiltern Hills where Benjamin Disraeli lived.
The artist Stanley Spencer was a lifelong resident of
Cookham and lies for all eternity in the churchyard
there. The Stanley Spencer Museum housed in a tiny
old Methodist chapel in the village shows a selection
of his work including the unfinished work Christ
Preaching at the Cookham Regatta that Spencer was
working on at the end of his life and the battered old
pram he wheeled his painting stuff around in..
“You can’t walk by the river at Cliveden Reach
and not believe in God.”
Stanley Spencer
Below: Sir Stanley Spencer Rickett’s Farm, Cookham Dene.
1938 Tate Collection