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In the Beginning
About two million years ago a glacier swept past the
extinct volcano we know as Arthur’s Seat, cutting valleys
between seven hills on which the City of Edinburgh
would one day be built. As a Londoner, the first time
I visited Edinburgh I was disturbed and confused.
All those bridges and yet no river! I felt a bit sorry for
them. Millions of years ago, when Britain was joined at
the hip to France, the Thames was but a tributary of the
Rhine until our very own glacier swept it through the
Chiltern Hills at the Goring Gap thus changing its course
and forging a new valley on its way to the sea. This
glacier’s ice sheet stopped at Finchley. As well it might!
2000 years ago some Italians from warmer climes sailed
up the river and where the tide ended they built a bridge
and a city they called Londinium. Soon after this they
began writing home for fish sauce and warm socks.
A Thames Childhood
At Christmas time for each of the past 15 years I have
cruised up and down the River Thames for a few weeks,
as dusk and then dark falls, in the company of the
Campion family. The Campions have been watermen on
the River Thames for generations. Probably since records
began. It’s a thoughtful sort of place this mighty river
when dark falls. The River Thames has always been a
presence in my life. As a child I didn’t know that the
mournful bass drone of foghorns on the River would be
consigned to history by the time I grew up. My father
worked in one of the Thames power stations and my uncle
would enthral us kids over our cold meats, mash and
piccalilli on Boxing Day with tales of the banana boats
that arrived in the Royal Docks with spiders “as big as a
man’s hand they’d come bouncing across towards you like
a Dunlopillo bed”.
We were, I think, pre-teens in the sixties, the last
generation of free-range children and in the footsteps of
those gone before we spent long happy days sifting old
clay pipes and shards of blue and white crockery from
the muddy foreshore at low tide, running races through
the foot tunnels at Woolwich and Greenwich or playing
pirates and smugglers on the “high seas” as the Woolwich
Free Ferry swung from bank to bank. As south London
nippers we were banned from going ashore “norf of the
water” where, according to our mothers, the natives were
“nothing but trouble”.
The Woolwich Free Ferry
In 1989 I was back on the Woolwich Ferry. I’d set up
City & Village Tours the year before and while I was
building up a following and to keep myself from the
workhouse I was teaching adult education history classes,
which I enjoyed, and conducting new hotel marketing
surveys, which I endured. The latter was very dull indeed
so I was delighted to be contracted to co-ordinate events
to celebrate the centenary of the Woolwich Free Ferry.
This would include an exhibition tied in with the
publication of a book by local history librarian Julian
Watson and a party on board a ferry that would break
free from its rigid daily trajectory to sail up river (as it
does once a year for a party for disabled children) passing
beneath the raised bascules of Tower Bridge. The guest
of honour would be local MP and then Minister for Roads
& Traffic Peter Bottomley.
On the day this former lorry driver and card-carrying
member of the TWGU got stuck in traffic and missed the
boat. He arrived somewhere off Rotherhithe, James Bond
style, clambering on board from a speeding police launch.
Not knowing quite what the usual protocols were for late
arrivals of Her Majesty’s ministers but keen to get back to