Not far from Three Cranes Wharf was the Watermen’s Hall, home of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames. It was on St-Mary-at-Hill, a short steep street near Billingsgate fish market.
The building was narrow, two storeys high, with a lot of nicely carved stone and a majestic double door. Most of the first floor was taken up by a leadlight window with a coat of arms that looked like two angry fish beside a rowing boat, in a sea of frills from which a brawny arm emerged.
Inside, it was clear that a person enquiring about an eighteenth-century ancestor had come at a bad time. The Watermen’s Hall was hired out for grand corporate functions, and one of these was happening that night. In an office cluttered with filing cabinets and desks overflowing with papers, a harassed young man was trying to answer six phones while also dealing with the builders. No, he couldn’t let me see the back rooms. No, he had no information about the history of the Company.
Behind him, I could see a room with glass cases and, like the most innocent seeker after knowledge, I asked if I could have a quick look around while he got on with the phones.
He assessed me for a long moment. Hair: a mess. Shoes: tourist walkers. Clothes: dowdy respectable. Disposition: obsessive. Another phone rang. ‘Oh all right,’ he said. ‘Just for five minutes.’
Inside were two glass cases, one containing a gigantic model of a windjammer made of carved bone, the other with a model of a rowing boat. Several enormous oars hung on hooks on the walls. There were some dim woollen jackets with a lot of elaborate piping and braid.
I glanced quickly at these dull things and heard all the phones ring imperiously, including a mobile playing ‘Men of Harlech’. I thought it was probably safe to explore a bit further.
Beyond the room with the glass cases was a hallway. This had a seriously old look—worn flagstones, tongue-and-groove planks on the walls, a chill pre-damp-course sort of feeling. A narrow pew ran down one side as if to accommodate a line of people waiting.
The hall led to a curving staircase, as graceful as a twist of orange peel, its handrail gleaming, not with polish but with a couple of hundred years of hands sliding up and down it. To the surprise of a couple of burly builders doing things with buckets full of rubble, I whipped out my camera and took a few snaps.
I didn’t want to push the harried young man beyond his patience, so I retreated to the room with the glass cases and was staring at the bone windjammer when he came in. He ushered me back to the office, and would have shooed me right out the door except that the phones started up again.
While he was answering them, I noticed a locked glass case full of things you could buy—watermen’s ties and buttons, mugs with the coat of arms. I could see a book there: The Life and Character of Thomas Mann, Honest Waterman of St Katherine-by-the-Tower. I wasn’t especially interested in an honest waterman, only a particular dishonest one, but I decided to buy it. It gave me an excuse to go on waiting for something to turn up.
He was such a nice young man. He was pleased I was going to buy the book, partly because it soon became obvious that no one had ever wanted even to look at anything in the case, much less buy anything out of it, and partly because if I bought something I might then leave.
The only snag was the key.
He looked in all the drawers of all the desks. He looked in the filing cabinets and the cupboards. He looked on various hooks and shelves. Finally he turned to me, apologetically. No key. End of the road.
I knew he could try harder and, if it weren’t for the builders and the phones, he would. I mentioned that I was keen to buy it because my ancestor, a convict sent to Australia, had been a lighterman…Now I had his attention. All the way from Australia! In that case, we must find the key.
He looked again, more thoroughly, in all the drawers. He opened the safe and fossicked in there. He rang up someone else to ask. It appeared that the only human being on the planet who knew where to find the key of the locked glass case in the front office of the Watermen’s Hall was Old Harold. Old Harold was on an errand somewhere, and would be back at some unspecified time.
I nearly didn’t wait. The book was looking less fascinating every moment. I wasn’t interested in a tie or a mug. But something kept me standing there, trying to stay out of the way of the builders as they massed in the tiny room wanting to know what to do about the junction box.
The minute Old Harold arrived, I knew it was worth the wait. Old Harold was a man not very much older than myself. He was a smiling balding person of great calmness of presence. I got the feeling that Harold had been waiting all his life for someone to come along who found the watermen as interesting as he did. That person had now appeared, in the shape of a dishevelled woman from Australia.
Old Harold found the key, I bought the book and waited till the young man was busy on his mobile. Then I quietly asked Harold whether I could have a look around. Harold— with a quick glance at the young man—jerked his head sideways. I followed him through the room with the glass cases, out into the stone-flagged passage, and up the lovely staircase.
At the top of the stairs he stood back to usher me into a big peaceful room. A radiant window filled one wall, the watermen’s crest glowing on it. Under it, three enormous wooden tables were arranged like a judge’s bench. Whiskery gentlemen frowned out of gravy in gilt frames on the walls.
Harold told me that this was the room where, as a would-be apprentice to the Company of Watermen and Lightermen, he’d been ‘bound over’ some forty years earlier. The masters, daunting men in black suits, sat up behind the table quizzing the boys about the river rules.
‘They had the fire going,’ he said. ‘And we had to stand here, hard up against the fireplace. It was that blessed hot, the seat of me pants was just about on fire.’
But Harold got through, and Solomon Wiseman must have, too.
Would Wiseman have been bound here, or in some earlier version of the Watermen’s Hall? According to Harold, it would have been in this same room. Wiseman would have come up that staircase. His hand would have added its share to the patina of age on the handrail.
Harold was a warm, clever and generous man, bemused that I was taking notes about the day his trousers nearly caught fire. Harold’s father and his father’s father had been watermen. His family had lived in Bermondsey as long as anyone could remember. He was proud of his skills and knowledge, of the hard work he’d done, of getting through those tough apprentice years. Harold knew who he was, where he’d come from, and what part of the world he could claim as his own.
It was from Harold that I learned how to find out exactly when and where Solomon Wiseman was born. Since he had served an apprenticeship, his binding—including his date of birth—would be in the registers up the road at the Guildhall.
The Guildhall Library turned out to contain every kind of document, picture, map and book relating to the City of London and its guilds.
It didn’t take long to find him: bound 17/12/1795, place of birth Southwark Christ Church, April 27, 1777, master Thomas Evans Gash, freed 06/01/1803.
And in the margin, a single word in a coarse script: DEAD.
One glance had taught me more than all that time on the internet and at the Society of Genealogists. Of the many Solomon Wisemans who’d flirted with me behind the gauze of dates, churches, and parents’ names, not one was my great-great-great grandfather. I could take the piece of paper which I’d so proudly propped up on the bed at the hotel, make it into a small ball, and throw it away.
Now that I knew about the Guildhall Library, I’d mine it for all it could tell me.
From the many dense volumes of Henry Humpherus’ History of the Origin and Progress of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames, first published in 1869, I learned the difference between ‘watermen’ (they transported people) and ‘lightermen’ (they transported goods). I learned how Old London Bridge (still standing in Wiseman’s day) choked the river so much that at low tide it created a fall of water like rapids. I read Boswell’s account of choosing to get out of the boat and walk around, rather than dangerously ‘shoot the Bridge’. I learned that the watermen were famous for thievery and ‘foul oaths’. Unfortunately Mr Humpherus was too delicate to write down the exact words that constituted a ‘foul oath’.
In the Guildhall’s collection of pictures was an engraving of a waterman standing up to his knees in the river steadying his boat and watching his customers board. The gentleman— a puny slip of a fellow with dark curls—was saying to his lady, ‘Be cautious my Love, don’t expose your leg!’ but her white-shod leg, with its dainty green high-heeled slipper, seemed displayed for the boatman’s pleasure, and from the look on his face he was getting a good eyeful.
There were smudgy old maps with names you’d never dare to invent: Pickle Herring Stairs, Gun & Shot Wharf, Horselydown Old Stairs, Tattle Alley.
A few twentieth-century lightermen left memoirs in which they recalled their apprenticeship binding:
I was still getting my ‘river hands’. One very old gentleman (one of the master lightermen) who, from the look of him, had passed the century mark years ago, managed to mumble, ‘Blisters healed, sonny?’ I shook my head and held out my hands, which were puffed-up from all the heavy rowing. There was a general laugh at this, they all thought it blasted funny, except me.
And gave instructions on ‘tapping a cask’:
The majority of men carried ‘screws’ (gimlets) and as cargoes were often wine, rum and gin, the drink was cheap. Tapping a cask could be done without showing any evidence from the outside. ‘Do it clean’ was the maxim, by gently tapping the hoops toward the tapering end, then boring two small holes. After the ‘waxer’ had been drawn, the holes were neatly splined, and the hoops hammered back over the holes and secured.
These stories were from the 1930s, but something told me that nothing had changed all that much for the Company of Watermen and Lightermen since Solomon Wiseman’s day.
I’d always assumed, from the family story, that being a lighter-man was an unskilled job, something you learned on the run, the only qualification being a strong back: like being a builder’s labourer in my own world. When Wiseman was described in the trial as a ‘journeyman lighterman’ I’d taken this to mean a kind of day-labourer, journeying from one job to the next.
It made it easier to be sympathetic. In a world with no social security, no free education, no hope for a poor man, there was Wiseman, rowing his heart out on the Thames, scrounging such work as he could, living on the sweat of his brow until his health gave out—my heart always swelled with indignation at the thought of him so doomed by the accident of birth. He was no angel, but a ‘journeyman lighterman’ without the killer instinct wouldn’t have lasted a week.
Now I was learning that a ‘journeyman’ is by definition someone who has served an apprenticeship. That made it the equivalent of being a plumber or an electrician rather than a builder’s labourer. Not right at the top of the social ladder, perhaps, but not at the bottom by any means, and with the economic leverage of someone working in the closed shop of the guild system.
And yet—if being a journeyman lighterman was the equivalent of being a plumber today, would he have risked death to steal that Brazil wood?
The image of Wiseman was doubling, trebling, quadrupling: the Wiseman who was desperate, for whom the risk of death was worth taking; or someone else, with a skill to sell, a long way from starvation.
Wiseman came and went among the pages of the books, and I was starting to feel more and more earnest and ridiculous, trying to pin him down. Disoriented, too, like standing in the surf and feeling a swell lift you up, weightless, drifting where the sea will take you.