A Thames waterman soliciting for passengers
From ancient times, boats have used the Thames as a highway, carrying goods and passengers to, from, and around London. The Romans built the first bridge between their city of Londinium and what become Southwark. It was of wood, and needed to be replaced many times until the stone bridge was built in the twelfth century.
That bridge, the famous London Bridge of the nursery rhyme, with its shops and houses, remained the only bridge until Westminster bridge was built until 1750. In all that time, wherrymen and lightermen and their boats of all sizes remained the main way of crossing the river or of negotiating up and down its current. Wherrymen carried passengers; lightermen goods and cargo. By the sixteenth century, some 40,000 men made their living on or around the river. In this century, too, an Act of Parliament regulated the fares wherrymen could charge, and another, a few decades later, appointed a ruling body, the Company of Watermen and established seven year apprenticeships.
“As may easily be imagined, they formed very much of a caste by themselves… They were a rough, saucy, and independent lot, if we may judge from allusions to them which occur in the novels, comedies, farces, and popular songs of the last century.” —Old and New London Vol 3
The coat of arms of the Company of Wherrymen and Lightermen
As London grew in the second part of the Georgian era and on into the Victorian years, more and more bridges were built. Still, the Thames remained a vital thoroughfare, for both pleasure and business. In the Regency, there were still over 3000 wherries (or water taxis) plying their trade in London.
Slowly, in the Victorian years, as more and more bridges connected the city to the increasingly well maintained road network and railways began to stretch over and under the river, the importance of the watermen diminished. Today, they still have more than 900 members who ply their ancient craft of the Thames, albeit mostly in a ceremonial role.
Im my novella, Melting Matilda, my hero argues about the fee that a waterman wants to charge when Charles and Matilda want walk on the frozen Thames. (The fee and the role of the watermen is accurate, the conversation is fictional.)
On Monday the thirty-first, the Thames was a complete field of ice from London Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge. The watermen, who had been barred from their usual profession for most of the month by the dangerous ice floes, quickly organized to test and then to control access to the ice. When Matilda went down to view the area she and Lady Hamner had chosen for the Haverford marquee, they demanded payment for helping her and her party over the small rivulet that had formed at the bank.
“That is outrageous,” complained Charles, at her elbow as had become usual.
“Na, jes’ think about it,” the waterman coaxed. Matilda focused to translate his thick accent into words she could understand. “People pay us to take them on the river. Doesn’t matter whether it is wet or dry. We did the same twenty odd years back, and before that, I reckon.”
“Were you here for the last Frost Fair,” Matilda asked? He certainly looked bent and wrinkled enough, what she could see of him in his greatcoat, cap, and scarf.
“That I were, me lady. And this bids fair to be a better one, it does.”
Charles paid the couple of sixpences the man demanded, and then Matilda pointed out that he had now received the value of a boat ride. “Would you escort us, and tell us about the last Frost Fair, and what you expect for this one?”
They spent half an hour listening to the waterman’s stories while they looked for a good site for the marquee and its subordinate tents—far enough from the main booths and activities of the fair that access was easy to control, and yet close enough that the ticket-holders could stroll the fair at their pleasure.
“That was clever,” Charles noted, as they settled themselves back under the furs in his sleigh. “You’ve convinced the watermen to keep that part of the ice clear, and have negotiated a fee to make entry to the ice free to anyone who shows a ticket.”
Matilda was pleased, too. “They shall do very well out of it: a lump sum deposit before the event and another afterwards, and all they have to do is keep our space clear, let our servants onto the ice to set up, and pass people who show a ticket on the third of February. Not that I grudge them. Imagine being unable to earn a living because the river you depend on freezes solid.”
“You are a remarkable woman, Matilda Grenford,” Charles said.