18

Graves Enders

At Gravesend all foreign-going vessels are compelled to stop and embark pilots, while homeward-bound ships take aboard a customs house officer. The Thames narrows to half a mile width, day and night the channel is full of every class and description of shipping – from the stately and majestic ironclad to the fussy little steam tug; from the clean-cut China clipper to the Dutch galliot, schooner yacht, deep-laden hay and coal barge.

– The Thames: ‘Waterway of the World’: A Literary, Commercial and Social Review, Past and Present, 1893

A few months after my visit to Tilbury with Iain, I returned to that same quayside to take the ferry across the water to Gravesend. The Tilbury–Gravesend crossing has connected the Essex and Kent coasts for centuries. In the medieval period, sheep fattened on the marshes were moved in rowing boats from one bank to another; now, a motorized boat transports workers travelling to and from Tilbury Docks. It is the last public river crossing before the Estuary becomes open sea.

The Duchess was just leaving Tilbury as I approached. It took less than five minutes for the ferry to motor across the swirling, brown waters of Tilbury Reach to Gravesend Pier, where she docked briefly to let passengers disembark. From Tilbury, the historic maritime town of Gravesend looked charming, with its old hotels, stone church, riverside pubs, iron piers and Regency-style buildings – remnants of a time when Gravesend was a popular holiday destination for Londoners, with pleasure gardens, water baths and elegant promenades – but the place has a darker history, as its name suggests. Those who died at sea were once unloaded from incoming ships at this border point and buried in the town to stop the spread of disease into London.

Because of its geographical location, Gravesend has been the first and the last port of call for inward- and outward-bound vessels for centuries. All ships headed for the New World in the seventeenth century, including the square-rigged merchant ship Mayflower, filled with the first English settlers to establish a colony in New England, stopped at Gravesend to load goods and passengers ‘and be examined by the Minister of Gravesend’. The passengers took oaths of allegiance to the monarch and swore to follow the state religion before proceeding on their long sea journeys. Foreign sea captains from around the globe have anchored at Gravesend before travelling upriver; waiting between tides, offloading goods, changing crews, taking on board supplies, customs officers and passengers. River pilots board in-bound ships here to help steer them safely into the docks, and Trinity House pilots board outward-bound vessels at the same point, navigating ocean-going ships safely across the treacherous Estuary waters. Today, these pilots are trained from a bridge simulator in a specially designed building on the waterfront – the headquarters of the Port of London Authority. The PLA also monitors ninety-five miles of the Thames from Teddington out to the North Sea, tracking both commercial and leisure vessels with radar radio equipment and keeping the river open to vessels in all weathers. It also conducts underwater surveying programmes to map the ever-changing riverbed and provides divers to remove obstructions from the sea floor. PLA vessels travel up and down the river daily, both policing and supporting traffic on the Thames Estuary.

I watched the Duchess motor back over to Tilbury and stepped on board. It was too late in the morning for commuters and there was just a handful of other people making the crossing: two cyclists, an elderly couple and me. Inside the sparse interior of the ferry, large wooden blocks served as makeshift seats. I bought my return ticket, then made my way up to the wheelhouse to meet Gravesend resident Dave Simmons, a freeman of the river, who can navigate any vessel wherever the tide flows within the PLA limits. He currently pilots the Gravesend ferry and occasionally runs the Pocahontas pleasure cruiser as well, but over the years he has skippered every craft you could think of, including tugs, barges, salvage and rescue boats. ‘Any freeman of the river of my age will give you roughly the same story,’ he said, as he steered the ferry effortlessly across the water. ‘The only thing I’ve done different was becoming a diver in my mid-twenties. I was navy-trained; it was exciting – I lived on adrenaline.’

Over the years, Dave has dived in most reaches of the Estuary, all the way around to Margate, halfway across the Channel, under Southend Pier and in the docks. He learnt to dive in the early 1960s, with a forty-pound brass helmet and fifty-six-pound weights on his back, his chest, on each of his feet. It was hard to walk on land but, as soon as he got into the water, the suit filled up with air and he became like an astronaut on the riverbed. ‘I could literally run along, it was almost balletic. If I wanted to go up, I’d pump more air into the suit. If I wanted to come down, I hit the knot valve. If I had a stay line from the surface, I could go up and down in about a hundred feet of water like a lift.’ Most dives lasted no more than an hour and then the tide would pick up. He showed me a video on his phone of him wearing the diving suit, which looked just like something out of a Jules Verne novel. It seemed incredible to me that, when I was a child, people were still diving in outfits like this. The suit looked as if it should have come from the Victorian era.

Most of Dave’s work involved recovering sunken craft, although wrecks were often left on the seabed after being identified and charted if they were not a danger to shipping. Sometimes, the diving team went down with archaeologists. In his time, he has recovered cannons, stone wine bottles, boxes of copper plate with fancy little signatures on them: ‘all sorts of oldy stuff’.

Throughout the early 1970s, he dived on the Montgomery numerous times, checking the progress of the wreck. She was opening up and her ribs were working outwards, so there was concern that the moving decks would slowly squeeze the explosive percussion caps and set them off. Dave crawled around the crumbling decks and the holds, filled with waterlogged munitions, for six years before his diving team got twitchy and stopped accepting the work. ‘We just weren’t earning the money to make it worth the risk,’ he said.

Dave was a PLA diving supervisor for twenty years and was in charge of two teams. They often dived on the wrecks out at Shivering Sands and Red Sands forts. The PLA hydrographic survey boat would go out first with side-scan sonar and draw a 3D picture of the riverbed. Sometimes, a wreck would appear on a dive which had not shown up on the survey, particularly at Shivering Sands, ‘so-called because every now and again they move, the sand tumbles, it rotates and occasionally gives up a wreck. They reckon there’s probably about sixteen wrecks down there, on top of each other, right down to Spanish galleons.’

He spoke with sadness about the disappearance of a way of life on the river which his family had been involved in for generations; he feels that the Estuary has changed irreversibly in recent years. Dave has worked for the PLA for over forty years and still remembers when they employed thousands of workers. ‘We had about four canteens to feed people in Tilbury Docks, and gangs of blokes marched on board the boats, picking up stacks of bananas, or individual frozen sheep …’

I travelled back and forth numerous times that morning, listening to Dave’s endless, fascinating tales of the river. I finally disembarked and wandered around the town for a while before heading to the Three Daws Inn, a fifteenth-century pub near the pier, where I had arranged to meet activist, artist, sailor and local resident Jane Trowell.

Together with her partner, James, Jane works at Platform, an arts/environmental/human rights group based in London. The couple met whilst working on a project about London’s buried and polluted rivers: Still Waters was a month-long series of performances along four different buried rivers, uncovering and exploring the history of each. They recently celebrated their twenty-first anniversary with an epic journey from the source of the Thames to its mouth. They walked the first section, then hired a Thames skiff and rowed downriver for two weeks before picking up their sailing dinghy at Limehouse and finishing with a day-trip on the Pocahontas from Gravesend to Southend. The Thames is still ever present in their lives; they live in Kent, overlooking the river, and sail as often as they can on the Estuary.

Over the last few years, they have sailed far and wide along the North Kent coast – as far east as Aldeburgh – and have got to know the creeks, tides, histories, conflicts and natural world of the Estuary, building up a complex picture of the place from both water and land. Slowly, they have overcome their fear of the big ships out in the shipping channel which loom over their fourteen-foot yachting dinghy. Jane told me she and James were extremely cautious sailors who were interested only in gentle weekend sails along the backwaters. She offered to take me out and, whilst I loved the idea, I knew I wasn’t ready to get back on a sailing boat, even though it had been well over a year since my accident.

Jane and James live on the Hoo, in Lower Higham, by St Mary’s Church. Jane told me that, every year, the local church organizes a marsh day to get people out on the wetlands. The annual ritual has echoes of a much earlier tradition, when fifteenth-century nuns from nearby Higham Priory used to run a ferry across the Thames. ‘There are loads of women in the story of the river,’ Jane said. ‘In terms of employment, the Estuary has always been a male domain, but there are other stories to uncover. All those men were sons, lovers, husbands, fathers. There’s that whole story of what happened onshore, and that was the women’s role.’ Even more so than when she related the female history of the Estuary, Jane spoke passionately about its present and future as a creative space. ‘There are more and more women making artwork around rivers and estuaries. I want to charge women to take on more industrial landscapes.’

There’s no shortage of women answering Jane’s challenge. She introduced me to Thames Portraits, a fantastic book by E. Arnot Robertson, a woman in disguise. It is filled with river journeys and conversations with people who worked on the water in the 1930s: a similar project to mine in some respects, except Eileen was an extremely competent sailor herself. Jane’s neighbour Sarah rebuilt a Thames barge (a joint project with her husband, a captain of coastal freighters) and lived on it on the Medway for years. And another neighbour, Fiona Spirals, is an artist fascinated by the mud, creeks and low water of the Estuary who makes work on the rotting stumps of piers and the landscape of the North Kent Marshes. Female artist Fran Crowe collected 46,000 pieces of plastic rubbish from the beaches north of Aldeburgh – roughly the amount of plastic to be found floating in one square mile of ocean across the planet at any point in time. And the Friends of the North Kent Marshes is a lobbying group founded by female activists who have campaigned passionately against the planned Estuary airport. I was fascinated to hear about so many different female responses to this landscape, which has been, traditionally, male territory.

We started walking along the promenade to meet Helen Skellorn, who has been sailing for over half a century. As we walked, we discussed some of the other great creative responses to the Estuary by women taking place now, including the work of Leigh-on-Sea author Syd Moore, who has conducted extensive research into the Essex witch trials and uncovered disturbing information on Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women in Essex and East Anglia during the English Civil War. We also discussed the new body of work focusing on riverside rituals by photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews. During the last four years, Chloe has been walking along the Thames in sections, interacting with people along the way and photographing events. She has documented African Pentecostal baptisms on Southend beach, attended by hundreds of worshippers dressed in white robes; the scattering of ashes by Hindu communities near Eel Pie Island at Twickenhan; the activities of a lone Druid, Chris Parks, who made a coracle by stretching animal hide around a wooden frame and paddled down the Thames with an ostrich egg in his boat. The egg received blessings and prayers from Druids, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists on its long journey out to the North Sea, where Chris cast it into the water as a symbol of peace and hope. Chloe also photographs non-religious rituals: the mudlarkers who take daily pilgrimages out to the shoreline, the ship spotters at Tilbury who sit every day by the passenger ferry, sipping hot chocolate from flasks.

We reached Gravesend Sailing Club and found Helen waiting for us inside. The club is based in a small wooden building overlooking the river; the original building was constructed in 1904, though parts of its structure have been modernized and expanded since then. Helen showed us a faded sepia photograph of the old club room in the Victorian era. ‘It is the oldest-established sailing club on the Lower Thames. Of course, women were not allowed in the club back then,’ she said. ‘In fact, there were no lady members until relatively recently. I do remember being brought into the clubhouse by my father as a child, but my mother would not have come in on her own. Post-war, there were new motions put forward, but there was always a group of gentlemen who protested. Eventually, we were allowed one lady representative on the general committee, who was shut in the bar once the men had got their drinks until the point on the agenda came to report from the ladies. Then they would open the door and she would say something like, “Well, this year we’ve made over a hundred cups of tea for members and we are getting short of teaspoons. Could we get six more teaspoons, please?” ’ Helen proudly told us that she became, in the early 1970s, the first female commodore of the club, which involved preparing annual reports, making speeches ‘and ensuring you did a reasonably entertaining job of it’.

Helen started sailing in an EOD at the age of three and has been on the Estuary waters ever since. A lifetime of sailing here has enabled her to create a perfect memory map of the sandbanks and the creeks around the Kent coast: she described the place with knowledge and intimacy, without needing any maps or charts. Her memories stretch back to the 1930s, when the river traffic outside Gravesend Sailing Club was heavy and she would weave her way through fleets of Thames barges and past an old hulk called HMS Cornwall (a reform school for naughty boys), dodging tugs moored four deep. Three or four dozen bawleys would moor up overnight in front of the Clarendon Hotel, the crew boiling the shrimp on board then selling them by the pint, unshelled, straight off the boat.

After leaving Helen and Jane at the club, I made my way back along the promenade, past Bawley Bay, and decided to stop for a quick drink in the Three Daws before heading back to Tilbury. Inside, the panelled walls are covered in sepia versions of what Gravesend and the docks once were. As I examined these framed pictures, I noticed an extremely thin, tall man with a lined face, wearing tattered jeans and an old camouflage-patterned shirt, watching me with interest. After a while, he approached me and introduced himself as River Jim, a local historian and licensed mudlarker of the Thames Estuary. ‘Gravesend is what I live and breathe,’ he said, staring at me intently. ‘My family have lived here for three hundred years.’

Without stopping for breath, he embarked on a potted history of the town, a place on the boundary between London and the wider world. ‘We’re halfway between the sea and the land. The sea comes in as the tide ebbs and flows; some days you can smell the sea and other days you can smell the fresh water. We’re a coastal resort, we’re a seaside resort and we’re a river resort.’

He spoke with great passion and at speed, wringing his hands then gesticulating wildly. ‘We are a rough port town full of smugglers and press gangs and stories. I find a lot of stoneware from the seventeenth century, Delftware from Holland, coins from the Baltic, clay pipes with Virginian tobacco.’ Jim’s speech raced through local history, some of which I knew already but many new stories, too: the unmarked grave of the Native American princess Pocahontas; James Oglethorpe’s expedition to settle Georgia in the eighteenth century; the 1840s exodus to colonize Australia. He described the Northfleet disaster, a ship that was hit off Dungeness in the nineteenth century: ‘nearly three hundred people died: immigrants – women, children and men.’ And he recalled memories of the time before the Iron Curtain fell, when East German and Russian communist sailors would sneak off their berths into Gravesend to buy cheap toys for their children. ‘We have a high percentage of migrants here; bearded Sikh men wearing brightly coloured turbans sit on benches in the town square with Polish workers. We’ve always heard accents and voices here, and people have left their mark through objects that wash up on the shore … then somebody like me – a scavenger, a rogue, a mudlarker – will find them and try to understand them. It is all history: it has no cut-off point; it continues all the time.’

Jim spent his childhood playing down on the riverside, searching for treasure. Since then, he has received his mudlarking licence from the Port of London Authority, and he still spends a great deal of time exploring the foreshore at Gravesend, 70 per cent of which consists of man-made objects: ‘You can find everything there – from a pair of sunglasses lost on a sunny day to the occasional silver coin worn flat by years in the Thames. The plastic looks prehistoric, but is actually from the 1950s; it’s a bit like Planet of the Apes, when they find the cave with the human items all fossilized. I found a stone head over there – very small, about two inches high – and it was from Mesopotamia, 3,500 years old. Victorian and medieval objects and the occasional piece of Roman pottery, right back to Mesolithic flints from Doggerland. There’s an older landscape underlying the present one. The Estuary is not a permanent thing. It’s moving, it’s changing, it’s eroding.’

Jim told me that mudlarking is a solitary sport. ‘You can’t concentrate with people jabbering in your ear. You just put your head down, and stare and stare and stare. You’ve got to rely on that eye. It’s like putting a floppy disk in your brain – if I decide I am going to look for a coin, I just look for a round disc. I might take a small trowel to prise something out, but a good mudlarker uses their eyeballs and nothing else. The lads up London who dig five-foot holes and have to use a metal detector – that’s not for me. I prefer the challenge of looking – that’s part of the pleasure.’

His favourite find of all time was a local tap token from the Three Daws Inn, in which we were sitting. It’s a small, round piece of flat tin about an inch across, which once would have entitled the barrow boy to a free pint when he came in to deliver beer. ‘It has no monetary value, but for me it was a triumph. I’d rather find that than any gold sovereign or medieval silver coin. It’s local, it’s something I desired and strained my damn eyeballs to heaven and back for.’

Jim’s enthusiasm was tinged with sadness as he admitted that things have been getting harder in recent years. ‘There’s been a lot of silt build-up on the foreshore. You can’t go mudlarking in Gravesend any more.’ There’s no way for him to know if this is caused by the ferry constantly churning up the mud, or a ferocious storm a few years back, or building works downriver for the super port.

He has started exploring further afield, along the wilder coastline of the nearby Hoo Peninsula. ‘It’s wonderful to get out on the marsh, to bigger horizons. The desolation, the birds, the semi-wild ponies roaming around … You can look back at Gravesend in the distance and sense you’re on a marginal land. Give it another 1953 flood, and that place would become the North Sea again. If there’s a breach in the sea wall, it floods. The salt marsh has a memory: it wants to go back to what it was.’

But the mud there on the foreshore is also extremely dangerous: Jim will not walk out unless he sees plenty of stone, brick and tile. The ground is soft, sinking and deceptive. ‘You can’t just go on a ramble out there, ’cos you could end up up to your neck in mud. And it’s an isolated place and people might not find you. I have nightmares about drowning in mud.’

He described the flotsam and jetsam that washed up on the foreshore of the Hoo, which included a lot of modern detritus blown off container vessels and rubbish barges coming up the Thames. The concrete sea wall acts as a buffer for endless bits of plastic, bottle tops, builder’s helmets, fast-food containers – all sorts, including human remains sometimes. Jim had never found a body but knew other mudlarkers who had, although he did not expand on these stories. Once, he found a message in a bottle from a boy who had dropped the bottle in Southend about two months earlier. Quite often, he finds little statues and bowls of incense and burnt offerings which have washed ashore from Hindu ceremonies. ‘They deposit these objects in the river as part of their religious practices, and they dissolve over time. I don’t touch them, because they are sacred.’

Before I left to get back on the ferry, he showed me some extraordinary photographs on his smartphone of watercolour paintings he had done. ‘Years of mudlarking have burnt the Thames foreshore into my brain. So when I come to paint a picture I attempt to illustrate every pebble, every stone, every piece of china, coin and tooth. The same eye that enables me to draw in this much detail is the same eye that enables me to spot a fragment of coin sticking out of mud amongst trillions of stones.

‘Everyone draws pictures of Thames tugs and boats, but the Estuary is more than that,’ he said. ‘It’s the river wall, it’s the foreshore, it’s the seaweed, it’s what’s been left behind by human society; it floods and ebbs, it disappears for five thousand years and comes back as farmland or salt marsh. I never get bored of it. When I come back I can taste the salt on my lips and smell it in my hair. I fall straight to sleep and dream of mud.’