Herramientas

An academy of ill language [...] I observe ‘tis as great a Pennance for a Modest Man to go a Mile upon the River as ‘tis for him to run the Gauntlet thro’ an Alley where the Good House Wives are picking Okum.⁵⁴

Until the final decades of the eighteenth century, with the exception of those images already mentioned, the representation of the Thames watermen in visual art was rare, this despite their ubiquitous presence as part of the London scene. Since the thirteenth century the profession of the watermen represented a sizeable industry with estimates in Tudor times of as many as forty thousand being employed in, or dependent upon, the trade.⁵⁵ This was surely an exaggeration, although the inability to assess numbers implies that there were a vast number of watermen on the Thames. By the mid-eighteenth century many ferries operated across the Thames and there were some thirty landing-stages between London and Westminster bridges alone. The Waterman’s Company controlled all the passenger boats

51 See for example Slave Trade (1814) by George Morland, NMM: ZBA2507; the original painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1788.

52 See Barrell, J. (1995), pp. 89-129; Dawe, G. (1807), p. 29; Collins, W. (1805), p. 54.

53 See Dibdin, C. (1841), pp. 23-4.

54 Ned Ward quoted in Troyer, H. W. (1968), p. 40.

55 Taylor, the Water Poet quoted in Littell, E. (1831), p. 310.

working on the Thames, and the boatmen, taking advantage of their monopoly, were typically abusive and belligerent. The river was said to resound to the watermens’ cries of ‘Oars, skulls, sculls, oars, oars’.⁵⁶ From the thirteenth century, the Thames watermen were notorious for their insulting and foul language. The violent and ribald abuse they used was known as water-language, Thames wit or water wit, from which no one was immune no matter their position in civic or royal rank. This reinforces the concept of the Thames as a space which is comparable to that of Bakhtin’s definition of carnival, with its ‘suspension of hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of certain norms and prohibitions of usual life’ but more specifically here, in terms of the watermen, the Thames might be considered as a marketplace where it is

‘characteristic for the familiar speech [...] to use abusive language, insulting words or expressions, some of them quite lengthy and complex’.⁵⁷ Anecdotes dating from the turn of the eighteenth-century onwards suggest that it was generally accepted that the moment anybody entered a boat on the Thames they were liable to be insulted in the most revolting manner by any passing waterman, and also by his passengers, and it was the custom to repay abuse with abuse.⁵⁸ For example, Ned Ward gives a fine account of this ritualised raillery in The London Spy. The narrator explains that he entered the wherry of ‘a Jolly Grizzle-Pated Charm,’ when:

...a scoundrel crew of Lambeth Gardeners attacked us with such a Volley of saucy Nonsence, that it made my Eyes stare [...]. One of them beginning with us after this manner, You couple of treacherous Sons of Bridewell B—s, who are Pimps to your own Mothers, Stallions to your Sisters, and Cock-Bawds to the rest of your Relations; Who were begot by Huffing, spew’d up, and not Born; and Christen’d out of a Chamber-pot; How dare you show your Ugly Faces upon the River of Thames, and Fright the Kings Swans from holding their heads above Water?

To which our well-fed Pilot [...] most manfully Reply’d, You Lousie starv’d Crew of Worm-pickers, and Snail-Catchers; You Offspring of a Dunhill, and Brothers to a Pumpkin, who can’t afford Butter to your Cabbage, or Bacon to your Sprouts; You shitten Rogues, who worship the Fundament, because you live by a Turd; who was that sent the Gardener to cut a hundred of Sparragrass, and dug twice in his Wives Parsley-bed before the Goodman came back again? Hold your Tongues, you Knitty Raddish-mongers, or I’ll whet my Needle upon mine A—s and sow your Lips together.⁵⁹

In 1765 P. J. Grosley was astonished by an encounter with the Thames watermen, noting in his A Tour to England on passing through Chelsea: ‘a number of watermen drew themselves up in a line and attacked [...] with all the opprobrious terms which the English language can supply’.⁶⁰ ‘It is well known,’ wrote James Boswell, ‘that there was formerly a rude custom for those who were sailing upon the Thames, to accost each other they passed, in the most

abusive language they could invent, generally however, with as much satirical humour as they were capable of producing’.⁶¹ In Anecdotes of the Customs and Manners of London During the Eighteenth Century, James Peller Malcolm recorded that ‘the Thames seems to have a charter for rudeness; and the sons of Triton and Neptune have not only a freedom of, but a licence for, any sort of speech’.⁶² Their notoriety continued into the nineteenth century when Henry Mayhew described the Thames watermen retrospectively as ‘often saucy, abusive, and even sarcastic’ with ‘the interchange of abuse with one another, as they rode on the Thames, [...]

remarkable for its slang’.⁶³ As Howard Troyer has commented, this exchange of a river vernacular would have been impossible on the streets without precipitating a brawl.⁶⁴ The fact that it was tolerated, anticipated, even relished and indulged, and that it was generally accepted as an intrinsic constituent of the Thames river travel experience, makes it a site-specific phenomenon which resulted in a total distortion of hierarchy within the river space.

The limited visual image of the infamous Thames waterman suggests a tendency to sentimentalise his character. This elevation could well be linked to the reliance of the Navy, and therefore the nation, on the ‘recruitment’ of watermen when the Thames was regarded as

‘the great nursery of the Navy’.⁶⁵ This is supported by porcelain figures of Thames waterman made at the Bow China Works in London in the 1750s. Wearing a Doggett’s coat and badge and standing with one arm raised to attract a fare, the figurine is set in a pose which projects the cheerful attitude of a fine, upstanding and even heroic labourer [Fig. 37].⁶⁶ In addition to this portrayal of the waterman as heroic, elsewhere visual images contained a sexual subtext.

For example, Thames Watermen (c. 1785) depicts the oarsman as a chivalrous gentleman as he escorts two fashionably-attired female customers towards his wherry [Fig. 38]. One of the women looks admiringly upon the good-looking waterman, partially covering her face with her fan in a coquettish manner, implying that she is not as virtuous as she might appear. The other woman points her fan at the waterman as she looks out of the picture towards the viewer, having already turned her back on a red-jacketed soldier. The implication is clear, as it is in Gentleman Helping a Lady Into a Wherry (n.d.) [Fig. 39]. Even the straightforward image titled Waterman (n.d.) [Fig. 40] contradicts the earthy, coarse and ugly characterisation explicit in textual accounts.

Unlike Morland’s sentimentalised and victimised Jack or the generic visualisations of a polite, heroic, even sexualised oarsmen offering their services to supposedly genteel customers, Thomas Rowlandson’s impression of Thames watermen as they compete for custom at Wapping in The Miseries of London....being assailed by a group of watermen....

(1816) reverts to type and conveys the impression of loud-mouthed exchanges and chaotic rivalry. These caricatures give full weight to the worst side of the watermen’s reputation as coarse and expansive bullies willing to get hold of trade by any means [Fig. 41]. In his satirical works, Rowlandson frequently identified the comic potential of disaster and disorder and regularly recorded and exaggerated the city's collisions. His Miseries of London series

66 Dogget’s coat and badge was the prize for winning an annual race for Thames watermen held since 1715; the prestigious prize helped talented watermen attract customers and the race raised the profile of the trade generally.

celebrated everyday comedy, using the streets and byways of London as the arena for tumbles and punch-ups.⁶⁷ In his caricature of watermen taken from the series, Rowlandson selected Wapping Old Stairs as the setting for the shambolic scene. A hefty woman heavily laden with packages and dressed in a billowing gown and beribboned bonnet, has been besieged by at least four Thames watermen as she attempts to descend the steps whilst being buffeted by the wind blowing off the river. The watermen, identifiable by trademark brassards or arm badges sewn to the sleeves of their coats, are aggressively touting their trade as they compete for this customer’s business. The drawing is accompanied by the following handwritten text:

Going upon any of the bridges of London, or any of the passages leading to the Thames, being assailed by a group of watermen holding up their hands and bawling out ‘Oars Oars.

Skulls Skulls. Oars Oars’.

In the lower right of Rowlandson’s caricature, a chubby fisherman’s boy sleeps in a dinghy on a pile of nets. With his eyes closed and a cherubic smile playing on his lips, he appears as a picture of innocence almost impossibly oblivious to the hullabaloo going on around him.⁶⁸ Another waterman stands in his wherry which he has pulled up near to the steps. Leaning out from a balcony which overlooks the entire scene are an amused couple who appear to enjoy the spectacle below, the man puffing on his pipe. In the background a church tower which can be identified as Hawksmoor’s St George in the East is clearly visible, as are the collected masts of general shipping associated with this part of the Thames.

Rowlandson’s grotesque and aggressive types depicted here in the process of ambushing a customer on Wapping Old Stairs represents one of the traits through which Thames watermen were caricatured in satirical prints. Other depictions illuminate different facets of the watermen’s temperament, for example in the anonymous print published by Robert Sayer in 1790 which also locates the scene at the foot of a flight of Thames riverside stairs [Fig. 42].⁶⁹ This print is titled Taking the water for Vauxhall - Be cautious my love - don’t expose your leg, and depicts a waterman apparently thigh-deep in the river as he holds his wherry steady while a young man assists his fashionably attired young female companion as she gingerly embarks near Westminster Bridge visible in the background. Given the close proximity of the waterman to the dry shore upon which the couple are standing it would appear impossible for him to be so deep in the water, but overlooking this artifice the clearly intended result of this peculiar alignment is that the waterman’s gaze is in direct line with the woman’s dainty lower leg as she raises her petticoats and puts forward her elegant foot in its pointed shoe. The notoriety of the watermen for lewd language and bawdy behaviour would have contributed to the undertone of sexual suggestion presented by this image, an insinuation which is then encapsulated by the irony expressed in the warning words: ‘don’t expose your leg’. The satire is ultimately compounded by the couple’s choice of destination – the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens notorious for prostitution, where the exposure of an ankle would have paled into insignificance compared with what else was on offer. Much of Vauxhall's attraction lay in the romantic thoroughfares where it was not unusual for young

67 See Gatrell, V. (2006), pp. 45-50.

68 Young apprentices to Thames fishermen slept in their master’s boat to prevent its theft.

69 Sayer was responsible for the publication of a number of prints which took the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens as their subject, as well as a series of London Cries and general topographic views.

men to ogle the ladies as they passed. Walpole commented on this in 1750 when he wrote of

‘the young bloods lying in wait for unprotected females on the lesser avenues, known as the Dark Walk, the Druid Walk and the Lover's Walk’.⁷⁰ Additionally in the years running up to 1790, when this print was made, there was a particular problem with rowdy behaviour at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, especially as it became customary for visitors to ‘go wild’ on the last night of the season.⁷¹

Before Westminster Bridge was built nearly all visitors to Vauxhall arrived by water, a tradition which was to continue for the remainder of the century and the Thames would have presented an animated scene at such times. Visitors apparently took great delight in the journey, a river phenomenon which Tobias Smollett mentions in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) when Miss Lydia Welford exclaims:

At nine o’clock, in a charming moonlight evening we embarked at Ranelagh for Vauxhall, in a wherry, so light and slender that we looked like so many fairies sailing in a nut-shell.

The pleasure of this experience was ‘damped’ somewhat by the landing when:

...there was a terrible confusion of wherries, and a crowd of people bawling, and swearing, and quarrelling; nay, a parcel of ugly-looking fellows came running into the water, and laid hold on our boat with great violence, to pull it ashore; nor would they quit their hold till my brother struck one of them over the head with his cane.⁷²

This resonates with the account provided by the anonymous author of A Trip to Vauxhall (1737), giving a poetic description of their departure from Whitehall Stairs:

Last night, the evening of a sultry day, I sailed triumphant on the liquid way, To hear the fiddlers of 'Spring Gardens' play.

On arrival at the destination, the exciting ‘new scene’ of Vauxhall fills the waterborne company with ‘pleasure and surprise’, but on closer inspection the glamour is revealed to be illusory:

The motley crowd we next with care survey, The young, the old, the splenetic, and gay, The fop emasculate, the rugged brave, All jumbled here, as in the common grave.⁷³

The image Taking the water for Vauxhall [Fig. 42] offers a visual equivalent for the same narrative arc which is implied within the written descriptions of both Smollett’s 1771 novel and the anonymous poem from 1737: a night out at Vauxhall which begins in a highly cordial fashion with an excursion on the Thames. That a journey on the Thames could be deemed as a

70 Walpole, H. (1895), p. 50.

71 See Coke, D. and Borg. A. (2011); Downing, S. (2009), pp. 33-4.

72 Smollett, T. (1771), p. 95.

73Walford, E. (1873), Vol. 6, pp. 447-467.

refined means of travel for polite personages comparable to the Grand Canal with its artful gondoliers in elegant liveries reciting poetry is in keeping with the majestic mid-eighteenth century image of the river as presented in high art by Canaletto.⁷⁴ At the same time, the subtext of the image, revealed by the waterman’s lascivious ogling of the woman’s exposed ankle, shares common ground with the satirical and comical caricatures of which Rowlandson’s watermen are an example [Fig. 41]. If the river journey to Vauxhall Gardens was as genteel and civilised as contemporary literary texts purport, the polite veneer would soon be offset by the confusion, bawling, swearing and violence of the arrival. At Vauxhall Gardens, visitors would leave the chaos of the river and the watermen behind them, only to come face-to-face with the image of another notorious Thames character.