Seventy Miles of Docks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 15

Seventy Miles of Docks

OST New Zealanders have only the vaguest idea what the Port of London is like. They might be able to tell you-that it is the greatest port in the world, but still have a mental picture of it as a busy, glorified Port Nicholson or Waitemata. Few could tell you that in the tidal Thames between the sea and Teddington Lock there are nearly seventy miles of docks and wharves and crowded waterways. Now, if you lived in London, or near it, you’d be able to see for yourself-to go down river on

one of the pleasure steamers that run in: the summer from Tower Pier to Margate and = watch what Wynford Vaughan © Thomas calls "the astonishing procession of docks and wharves that accompanies you along almost

me wavie Vw yu route." Not living in London, you can still spend a pretty interesting hour on the busiest ‘part of the river if you listen to 4YC at 8.0 p.m, on Tuesday, April 1, or to 2YA°at 9.30 amor 4YA at 2.30 p.m. on Sunday, April 6.) One Tuesday last August Wynford Vaughan Thomas went aboard the tug Agama, which at 4 o’clock in the afternoon pulled out into Gallions Reach from the quayside by the Harbourmaster’s Office of- the Rdyal Docks. As the tug made its ten-mile journey upstream "Thomas "Géseribed t BBC list- 4 eners the traffic on the river and some of the notable places from. time to time he called up one of his colleagues who were on the job with him to ask what they had found of interest. Charles Parker told listeners that the Burning Ground is a plot of land where His Majesty’s Customs and Excise receive wrecks and salvage reclaimed from the river by ‘Thames watermen, and Douglas Fleming learned about the mooring and care of barges at the barge depot on Blackwall Reach. Others who. took part in the programme were Henry Riddell at a depot where buoys are kept in good. order, Berkeley Smith at a large factory where ocean cables are made, Audrey Russell at the Surrey Commercial Docks, Raymond

Baxter at Wapping River Police Station, and John Snagge at a boys’ club on board a barge. On the voyage the Agama made the journey from the Eastern to the Western Hemispheres as she crossed the Greenwich Meridian near Blackwell Point. The journey ended when the tug passed under Tower Bridge and came alongside the landing stage at Tower Pier, right in the heart of the Pool of London, Recorded and transcribed, the account of this trip is what New Zealand listeners are now to hear.