DOWN THE RIVER

Hokitika Guardian, 16 August 1932, Page 8

DOWN THE RIVER

■HEART OF LONDON

i(By J'.’ M. N. Jeffries, in the P.L.A Monthly).

'LONDON, July 51. From now on till the end of September a vessel of no great dimensions but of comfortable aspect, the Essex Queen, slips away every Wednesday afternoon from the pier beside the Tower’-Bridge. In an invitation which came to me’to 1 travel by her she ' was listed as “the p.g. Essex Queen,” and the initials pfe- 1 ceding her name, whatever be their real maritime meaning, by me at least because of the journey which she makes, are interpreted as “postscript.” Postscripts, as everyone is aware,, contain matter which should have been* written before, at the very start of the epistles which they finish. The Esqpx Queen is a postscript to the life of London. The Essex Queen is twenty, 'thirty yeaxs, decades of years overdue:,! the conscience of England should have created her and sent her on her mission 1 ‘ long agp. She gives to those who board ne,r knowledge which the multitude’of : vehicles taking Londoners and visitors about the City and the West End have never imparted. i . 1 From Tower Bridge she sails dowii the River, and at Blackwell .'turns .into . the, great docks and traverses them. 1 ‘ Thus her passengers do something more t than “see . London;” they • cause of the vast city’s very existence, they perceive the water-traffic of whiter J ondon was born and by which if ;?« ' maintained, they visit the wharves,hj|d. the lanes of ishlps without which • tjjie streets and tihe avenues of offices”would never have been built. It seems strange that such a triih'ih’e .first'which every Londoner and every. ’ vsitor to London should have made,, has only just become feasible. Yet so it is: last Wednesday was the ’.'AhniV verisarjr of the maiden cruise by the Port ofLondon Authority only twelve mopths ago. The most that 4s) 1 individual can disburse to take parff ; ti .one of these cruises is • threw lings and qixpenfce. Croups ,of ten piprl ' sons pay less per head, and student. and scholars . tass still. The details they oaii learn from the Authority’s, pieces or from any tourist -company pi

But .the.price of passage in any case is the price of a.cinema-seat, tjhe periepce, is for all V surprise, for ffiatiy ’ a .dpiiight, and for some maybe' a cpiiln* ing-to-touch, if only for a few hours, wall sights and with, sounds which they have loved all their '.lives unattainable.' r Looking back myself on those * four -. hours aboard, I find that as, we; sped down the-river, on a swift current all planner .of interests. awaken^},,.ip . me. There was the eight, of Wapping ■tStaii's to begin with, and of the XYIIIth century inns ■which lhad been the compaaions of its hey-day, the "Turk’s , Head” and the “Prospect of Whitby,’’ fitti ug their bow-windows and their , balconies in between , the dark , ware-; 'j houses •as though they were heifloomi . in niches. There were other alleys,, too, some descending by ladder to the water, ■ other' mere gaps in the long river i frontage, short inolines of . foreshore, ’ * parti-coloured green by the endless wash | of Thames and black by the shadows • out of which they came. The interest V of these was the interest of old ballads and of old tales, ? ’ .

: But further interests were to come. !' _ Here were rows of barges, moored | I together in lines no ruler could IhavA " bettered, the pennants at their niast- 1 : heads aligned in the wind. Other barges ! were at work in midstream', enormous and unwieldy of aspect, like piers carried away by the flood, yet each govern- ' ed in tjie tide’s full strength by one' ' man, handling oars as thick and as I long as trees. ! There were fish “postmen,” rapid ( • craft with no thought but of speed,. ! painted some campaign tint, tearing l past with . the loads for Billingsgate 1 ! which had been poured like mails into : them by smacks and trawlers. There I was a ferry-boat, loaded with carts ', , and with hay-wagons as though inlhnid- j Bedfordshire, with riot much more coun- 1 1 ter than a marit'elpiepe, hut with long, 1 narrow chjmney-stacks rising 'as if out j of her keel and looking tlhe boats Mark Twain . piloted up the Mississippi, i Here, in these active craft, were the *: interests of the busy day. . 1 j Then, as we advanced, off Mill wall, j, 1 over a tangle of lesser spars and of intervening dock-buildings, rose the 1 1 four masts of the Abraham Rydberg, • the first of the sailing fleet to * arrive from Australia, four masts pointing., their unblemished yellow against!, 'the ■ grfey sky. Men Stliink <only of the j I grace of sailing-ships, hut tfhoee stern . • yards faced the clouds with, the dis- ~ ! cipjine of an army, rank behind rank, j Wild duck,-amid the wharves and storehouses' of Millwall, flew past them 1 as il watched, and on then to where two other masts, .low and grey these, could ’ , be seen projecting. i They looked' nulled with time rirtd wear, and to the top of one an old weathered barrel was fixed. Shackleton’s Quest, no less, with her Polar ’oob-out, .biding her time. Interests ' here of great names and of deeds done across the wo ril'd' and of great sea-deeds , still being done. . '' ' H Greenwich came the interests of history and of art, There was the strefeh of grass which Elizabeth kept upon the river bank, opposite her palace, to beet the gaze which had lit so magnificently upon the universe for rn many vears but now had grown tired, and but -asked a little green and a Ut+t’e sympathy from a span of soil. It iftill • I survives,.unbuilt upon, as a small public garden. We slid past it and past Greenwich Hospital, where o.n the palace taife two greatest architect*

, hsvf“ piled mountainously , .their silver plate. We breasted the Observatory oil its heights, sailed over the meridian and in so far added the interests of. science to the cruise. "jßut, |>y now we had come to the ,the Victoria, tJie Albert, the George V, all linked together, thirteen miles of quays, two hundred and fortyhix acres of water, > combination and' a sight unequalled:.in ..the world, if» some sort the council-chqmber of land arid of sea. A tug took hold of us and towed us as though we were a liner comirig to her berth, The gates of th° locks, which open for no casual callers. Opened for us: bridges aside or patted strangely asunder with the soft movement of cats. We, came ; into tTne highways where the ships lay in ocean file. ■ ' 1 , ;Japanese, Dutch, American, German, •Italian, but in these days chiefly our own British: the high-bridged Port Brisbane; the new Highland Patriot, with her .flowing bows, her streaming funnels, her whole form amove, as though the wind had blown her lines into her ; the aquamarine Moreton Bay from Queensland; the Mai da ; the Soudan and the whale clump of P. and O.’s in /the mystic colours of sand and of black, night on the desert; the Tongariro ; the Hardwick Grange; the tossed Nowdhera with the very shape of breaking ways in the stains upon her sides: and a dozen more. Here was the greatest and deepest interest of all, amid the loading and discharging ships, amid the hammerings and whistling and the cranes bending their totem-heads, where men in singlets halted on gangways and*'waved to us, and 'Lascars patiently smiled as we passed. Through the criss-cross of .halliards and the smoke drifting from funnels, tlhe sky, before we turned back, took, -a remembered tone. ti,,Thc breeze blowing over tile decks through passing rain came from the ■quarters of •memoi’y. Here was England’s greatest work, her primary calling and the decks which sometimes -I had trod. * it. C? '•*.< * •