Kingston upon Thames

“ Then we pass Kingston, where several Saxon kings were crowned, and the coronation-stone, marked with their names, it is said, still remains in the market-place. Teddington Lock is the last upon the Thames, and a mile below is Eel-Pie Island, lying off Twickenham, renowned for the romance that surrounds its ancient ferry. Near here lived the eccentric Horace Walpole, at Strawberry Hill, while in Twickenham Church is the monument to the poet Pope, which states in its inscription that he would not be buried in Westminster Abbey. ”

“ When we returned to Kingston there was a lonely but lovely walk along Thames side, seeking a bridge to give us a turning on the left, with sun and wind and rain, and ducks falling through the air with a ssh, and cunning swans sailing forward expecting food, and crying gulls. It was the towing path toward Teddington Lock. The riverside houses came down to the water with lawns and landing stages, terraces, gardens, formal beauties. The Thames is a fair stream; we have made it fair. Once it was otherwise, and England also—unnamed, unloved, wild, woody, marshy. Man has made it dear unto himself. ”

“ The first stone was laid by the Earl of Liverpool, November 7, 1825, and the bridge was opened in due form by her royal highness the Duchess of Clarence, on July 17, 1828.
Kingston is one of the most picturesque towns on the banks of the Thames; and its antiquarian attractions are of the highest order. ”

“ A few old houses in the market-place are all that now remain of the many mansions that were once the pride of royal Kingston, but its fine situation on the Thames preserves to it something of the distinction it enjoyed for so long. ”

“ The name of the Thames was given to the river explored. The natives in the neighbourhood behaved in the most friendly manner; but while the commander and Dr Solander were on shore, and Mr Banks with Tupia and some of the natives were below, a lad took possession of a half-minute glass from the binnacle. Mr Hicks, who was commanding officer, ordered the lad to be triced up and a dozen lashes given to him. His countrymen interfered, and called for their arms from the canoes alongside. In vain Mr Banks, hearing the noise, and coming on deck, expostulated with the lieutenant. ”

“ The river front of Surbiton wears a decidedly foreign air, with its tall white houses, and winding walks and shrubberies along the bank. This esplanade, starting from the water-works, extends for some distance towards Kingston, and is an excellent hint to the local authorities of other water-side suburbs. Surbiton is an interesting spot to rowing men, for it is the head-quarters both of the well-known Kingston Rowing Club and of the Thames Sailing Club. Other interest it does not possess, and everything in and about it is painfully modern. ”

“ Here the Thames becomes as lovely as it is between Hampton Court and Kingston. The banks are profusely timbered, and a bushy little eyot in the centre of the stream adds to the charm of the view. Where the towing-path for a time ends, near Kew Foot Lane, there begins on each shore an irregular line of water-side villas buried in lilac and laburnum, surrounded by smooth lawns with edgings of geometrical flower-beds, those on the Middlesex side still in Twickenham, which extends quite up to Richmond Bridge. ”

“ This is, according to the most probable conjecture, the place at which the great road which ran from the Straits of Dover to the north-western ports of the island crossed the Thames.
Here, of course, there could be no question of a ford; there can only have been a ferry. Such a ferry existed throughout the Middle Ages and up to the building of Westminster Bridge, and produced a large revenue for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The memory of it is preserved in the name of the street upon the Middlesex shore. ”

“ AT that spot below Reading where the Kennet pours its comparatively crystal waters into the main stream of the Thames, there is to be seen by all that look for it a very picturesque, if irritatingly new, boat-house. It is here that the youth of Reading hires its skiffs when contemplating an assault upon the silence of the early night; here that many an old river-man chooses to mark time upon the journey downwards from his Mecca at Oxford. And here it was that, some two years ago, I found the racing-shell which brought me indirectly to knowledge of the ragged intruder. ”

“ The clouds, alternately deep blue and flaky-white, seem to cast their moving reflections upon the crest of the hills, for the gilded sunshine melts with delicate gradations into soft, shimmering shadow. Half a mile or so below Cleeve Lock the stream divides, the cut to the left going to Goring Lock and the main channel to Streatley. From the point of divergence to Streatley and Goring Bridge is but a brief pull, and few pilgrims of the Thames will desire to push on without halting for a while at this pretty village. ”

“ All the way down you have at intervals old stonework and old place names, indicating habitation upon the upper Thames.
A proper system of locks is comparatively modern on any European river. The invention is even said (upon doubtful authority) to be as late as the sixteenth century, but the method of regulating the waters of a river by weirs is immemorial.
We have no earlier record of weirs upon the Thames than that in Magna Charta; but some such system must have existed from the time when men first used the Thames in a regular manner for commerce. ”

“ A warming westerly wind had scattered the mists and conjured up a little ocean of bubblinig waves. The woods took the shape of castles and strongholds sett upon black hills; the wash of the water over the sedge grasses was a dirge, very mournful and lonely to hear. I had not looked to find company upon the Thames at such an hour, least of all the company of the Honourable one. Rare was the day when he could afford a candle against the dark; rare the occasion when he had not fuddled away his wits with any drink that he could get long before ten o'clock struck. ”

“ The waters are swollen with the feculence of the myriads of living beings that dwell upon the banks, and with the waste of every manufacture that is too foul for utilisation. Wheresoever we go, whatsoever we eat or drink within the circle of London, we find tainted with the Thames.... No one having eyes, nose, or taste, can look upon the Thames and not be convinced that its waters are, year by year, and day by day, getting fouler and more pestilential.... The abominations, the corruptions we pour into the Thames, are not, as some falsely say, carried away into the sea. ”

“ Chertsey, next up the river, took on the work. Like Westminster—though, by tradition, a few years later than Westminster—its foundation goes back to the birth of England. Its history is known in some detail, and is full of incident, so that it may be called the pivot upon which, presumably, turned the development of the Thames Valley above London for two hundred years. Its site is worth noting. The rich, but at first probably swampy, pasturage upon the Surrey side was just such a position as one foundation after another up and down England settled on. ”

“ Then the sordid flats are touched into beauty by the cold gleam, and the winds, and the waters, and the sailing clouds, and the quiet ships pass like a mystic pageant, fleeting, fleeting, ever eastward. The veriest townsman that ever waked the echoes under Kingston Bridge with his clamour will own at such a time that few sights in England are finer than the noble outflow of our splendid river. ”

“ The greatness of England depends upon this liberal and majestic Thames—a fact so apparent, even in the time of Queen Mary, that an acute Alderman, hearing of the sovereign’s intention to remove with the Parliament and the Law Courts to Oxford, observed that they should do well enough, provided her Majesty left the river behind. Even in the time of the Roman occupation, London was a great commercial city; and since then, eighteen centuries of development have reared the mighty fabric of her trade. ”

“ The enemy also attempted to destroy a Dutch 64 which was driven on shore, but her commander defended her with so much bravery, that he compelled the French to desist, and she, being got off, arrived safe in Holland. The earl then retreated into the Thames, leaving a few frigates to observe and watch the motions of the enemy, who remained masters of the channel. In consequence of his conduct, the earl was brought to a court-martial, but having ably defended himself, he was unanimously acquitted. ”

“ Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond. ”

“ Civil war, rather than time, seems to have made an end of all the previous bridges save that which immediately gave place to the present. For centuries London Bridge was the only other permanent means of crossing the Thames; consequently, when there occurred one of the frequent commotions in which our ancestors delighted, there was a good deal of competition between the two sides to get Kingston Bridge destroyed first, and so prevent communication between Middlesex and Surrey. ”

“ Before arriving at the bridge there are the backs of untidy houses, and generally a great medley of barges, laden with hay and bricks and coal, lying about by the wharves.
Kingston, as we have said elsewhere, can boast of one of the oldest bridges over the river. A bridge of wood stood here in 1225, when there was no other in the whole sweep downward as far as London Bridge. The present one is very narrow, and its convenience is not increased since a double line of tramways has been laid across it. The general similarity of position between it and Richmond Bridge may be remarked. ”

“ The growth of great towns, one of the last phases of our national development, one which finds its example in the Thames Valley as elsewhere, and one to which we shall allude before closing these notes upon the river, has somewhat obscured the quality of this original accumulation of wealth along the Thames. But when we come to consider the figures of the census at an earlier time, before modern commercialism and the railway had drawn wealth and population into fewer and larger centres, we shall see how considerable was the string of towns which had grown up along the stream. ”

“ A matchless stream for its congregated wealth. Miles of warehouses, miles of stone docks, miles of shipping, and thousands of seamen. And yet a dirty and turbid and ungrateful river at times, when it overflows the fish-stalls, when it overflows the high street in Wapping and drowns myriads of rats in Upper and Lower Thames street.
VAGRANCY AND PAUPERISM.
We went down the "London Stairs." Every bridge that spans the Thames has four stairs or flights of stone-steps running down to the water's edge. ”

“ Kingston-on-Thames is still provincial in appearance, though now the centre of a great growth of modern suburbs. Here we are eleven miles from the Borough, and at the end of the first stage out of London in the old days of the mail-coaches. Modern drags, like the “Rocket” Portsmouth coach of some years back, changed at the “Robin Hood,” in Kingston Vale, but the coachmen of coaching times made longer stages. ”

“ They had been bound for the Thames. The men said that when they saw the Longships they fancied that it was the Eddystone, and that when they struck they supposed that they were not far off Plymouth Breakwater, though they were wondering why they did not see the light.
“It is one of the many sad examples we have had of the effects of drinking,” observed papa. “If I had to make a voyage, I should choose a temperance vessel. Though a master may appear sober enough in port under the eyes of his owners, unless he is a temperate man, one can never tell what he may do at sea.” ”

“ The estuary has, of course, always formed a division, and in the barbarian period it separated the higher civilisation of Kent from that of the East Saxons, who were possibly of a different race, and certainly of a different culture. But the Thames above London Bridge was not a true boundary until the civilisation of England began to form, towards the close of the Dark Ages. It is perpetually crossed and recrossed by contending armies, and the first result of a success is to cause the conqueror to annex a belt from the farther bank to his own territories. ”

“ Nothing has been built upon it save a wandering host of rich and careworn men.
Suppose a man to have gone down the Thames when the new discussions were beginning in London and (as was customary even at the close of the Middle Ages) were spreading from town to town with a rapidity that we, who have ceased to debate ideas, can never understand. Let such a traveller or bargeman have gone down from Cricklade to the Tower, how would the Great Houses have appeared to him? ”

“ On the waterway, kept clear of all vessels at anchor for a breadth of 200 feet, the strong white sunlight gleams, making clear to the spectator what the poet Spenser had in his mind when, in his rich vocabulary, he spoke of “the silver-streaming Thames.”
Spenser’s phrase is one which has been greatly misunderstood. The Thames, even in its quietest and least corrupted days, can never have been a very pellucid stream. When Taylor, the water poet, plied his craft upon it he must have found almost as much difficulty in looking into its mysterious depths as we find to-day. ”