This page begins the exploration of memories of businesses and industries that flourished on or beside the Thames. Some of them continue to thrive there much as before, others have changed out of all recognition and some have now closed or moved away. These testimonies reveal how these businesses provided goods, employment and even contributed to the survival of the nation in times of emergency.

The following stories have been collected and researched by our London Lost Waterways oral history volunteers.

Boat Building and Repair: Boat Yards

John Tough was interviewed and researched by Graham Strudwick

John grew up in Teddington by his family’s boat yard, his family have been working on the Thames for over two hundred years. In 1811 Alexander Tough came to London from Aberdeenshire .

He signed on in 1813 as an apprentice Waterman and started the family’s relationship with the river. Through the 1800s the family formed a number of Companies working with other families in lighterage with a number of offices on the Thames from Old Barge House up to Brentford and the Grand Union Canal and up to the barge repair yard in Teddington. John’s grandfather, Douglas did an apprenticeship in Bunn’s Yard, Ferry Road, Teddington. Sometime later, alongside his brother, Gordon, they started a business building boats and conducting repairs on them in around 1926/7. Going into the 1930’s the demand for boats and repairing was still needed and so the two brothers doubled down on their business acumen and opened a barge repair yard in Manor Road, Teddington.

John explained that before World War 2 Douglas Tough won contracts to build motor gun boats (MGBs) and motor torpedo boats for the Royal Navy.

As the Germans won the Battle of France and pushed the British Expeditionary Force back to the coast he got a call from the Admiralty to assemble as many ‘little ships’ as he could and get them down to the mouth of the Thames. He helped co-ordinate the loan of river craft to the admiralty so naval personnel could use them to ferry troops from the beaches of Dunkirk to larger vessels moored off-shore . This operation (codenamed Dynamo) was far more successful than anyone anticipated. Having (for the most part) returned safely the Toughs repaired the boats and returned them to their owners. Some owners were reluctant to accept them back in anything less than perfect condition. One owner insisted that the admiralty should pay to replace a monogrammed china dinner service which he claimed had been aboard his boat. Douglas Tough had ensured full inventories were taken when the boats were collected and was able to point out that no such crockery had been recorded aboard.

Life after the war was hard as demand for boats was low and much of the effort was going into repairs. In the 60s things improved but this was not sustained, and prestige boat building was fading. After centuries of work on the river, the livelihoods of Lightermen and Watermen started to dwindle in the 1960’s when the docks moved out downriver to Tilbury in Essex. At the same time pressure for housing by the river was increasing and in 1997 the main boat yard was sold for development .

Even though the main yard was sold, the family business sense and connection to the Thames remained with the next generation of Toughs, plying their trade much the same as their ancestors did all those years before. Many river families all worked together for generations, children would go on to apprenticeships and even end up marrying into the other families which helped create a great community and spirit of camaraderie.

There were once many boat yards on the Thames. One survivor is BJ Woods at Isleworth. Another exists at Lot’s Ait, Brentford. From 1920s – 1970s, it was operated by the Thames Lighterage Company. It was reopened by John Watson in 2012 and is currently in production.

At Richmond riverside there has been a boat house since the 18th Century It was operated by Emily, Wheeler and Blight and then bought out by the Turks family who run pleasure steamers between Richmond and Hampton Court. In 1992 Edwards bought the boat house and builds rowing boats. In 2011 – 2012 he built the Gloriana a Royal Barge for the Queens Diamond Jubilee in 2012. There is also an operational boat yard with slipways on Eel Pie Island in the river next to Twickenham .

Links:

I raised my kids on the River Thames and now they only feel at home on a boat
Teddington Riverside: Locks, suspension bridge and a film studio

Watermen

Elizabeth also spoke about the watermen waiting for passengers and taking them across the river and how the building of bridges meant their role became redundant . Now people walk, cycle or drive across the river and think little of what happened before the bridges were built. Some people are aware that, in the past, you were reliant on watermen and their wherries to take you across or along the Thames but few realise they were still much in evidence within living memory.
She explained that the steps you see along the Thames going down to the river were, at least in part, for people to walk down to the boats operated by the watermen .

Freda Hammerton (1930-2021)
Interviewed 25th July 2019 by Ian Oxley
Freda sadly passed away on 10 July 2021. She came from a family with a long heritage of river folk. Freda’s father Fred later worked as a boat builder and tug master with the Tough family at their boat yard in Teddington. He was also one of the Tough employees involved in getting the little ships down the river to Margate and Ramsgate for the Dunkirk evacuation and then bringing them back up river again to be repaired at Toughs prior to being returned to their owners .

Watermen plied their trade working the river with oars, ferrying cargo or people for a fee. The Lightermen commanded a large flat-bottomed craft called a lighter which would carry goods and cargo on the tide. Unlike barges which were powered by sail or engine, lighters would float on the tides with the aid of oars or tug boats. Watermen and Lightermen were all highly skilled workers with vast knowledge of the tides and currents of the Thames.

Freda’s father was a Ferryman, whose job it was to work the ferries that went up and down the Thames, carrying people to and fro. When she was little, she wanted to be just like her father and do what he did too.

When she was growing up in the 1930’s and 1940’s, there was a large community of river people involved in all types of trade whether it was commercial, such as people carrying, or industrial such as coal and sugar being shipped from the multitude of wharfs down river to be sold on.

Marchioness Disaster 1989

Elizabeth recounted how surprised those who knew the river were by the collision between the Marchioness and the dredger Bowbelle at 01:46am on the 20th August 1989 as there was an understanding and code about other boats on the river . She explained how the steps down to the river were reworked after the disaster, inferring that if they had been in better repair the fire brigade could have helped more readily. It is a salient lesson that though the use of things may decline, they may remain important. Perhaps if people realised the steps still possessed importance or utility and maintained them fewer lives could have been lost.

Transport of goods and refuse on Thames Barges

Stephen Manning (b.1949 East London) was interviewed by Elaine Tedder on 22nd January 2018. The Interview was then researched by Shirley Regan

He recalled that when he worked as a dustman, he could unload rubbish directly into the City Tip Barges – ‘When we couldn’t go to dump our rubbish anywhere else… we’d go to the city tip…. you’d tip your load into a barge and that would go down river’.

Corbyn Morris a government customs official wrote of London in 1752 ‘As the preservation of the health of the people is of great importance, it is proposed that the cleaning of this city, should be put under one uniform public management, and all the filth be carried into lighters and conveyed by the Thames to proper distance in the country.’

This approach, moving waste by boat from the London boroughs to large landfill sites along the Thames estuary, continued as the main option of waste management well into the 20th century. Nowadays large lighters are loaded with rubbish in shipping containers. The lighters are tugged from Wallbrook wharf in the city to Belvedere in Kent where recyclable items are recycled and non-recyclable rubbish is burned in furnaces that also generate electricity.

Stephen explained about Cargo Rope – ‘when you are coming past Southwark bridge and all along there…you’ve got the barges, and all the cables laid out…you’ll notice that they’ve each got a coloured line going through them. That’s called the rogue’s yarn… If you were leaving the docks with a covered lorry…they’d look at the rope. The lines would tell you what was on that lorry.’ The recorded definition of rogue’s yarn is ‘a yarn of distinctive colour, material or twist, laid in a strand or strands of rope to identify the owner’

Thames River Police

‘Colquhoun put a wall around the docks – he was the co-founder of the Marine police down at Wapping’.
Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820) was an influential merchant of Scottish Ancestry. He was involved in building walls around the docks and founded the Thames River police as the first regular preventative police force in England. Prior to these actions, merchants were losing an estimated £500,000 worth of stolen cargo annually from the Pool of London. With an initial investment of £4200 and 50 men employed to police the river workforce, the Thames River police began operating on 2 July 1798.

Stephen explained ‘if you are going under Cannon Street there’s a place called sterling passage. That site was where there were German traders from the east …they’d bring in the best silver… if you got some good silver, it was ‘Easterling’ silver…. that’s how we got our word ‘sterling’’. The story of how the word sterling was incorporated into the name for silver is rooted in C12th folklore. It is said that as payment for cattle, an association of eastern Germans paid the English farmers with silver coins called ‘Easterlings’. The name was ultimately abbreviated to sterling, which indicates that it contains at least 92.5% silver.

Learn More

Explore more of our oral history themes:

Business and Industry

Boats and transport

Sport and Leisure

Environment and Flooding

Mudlarking Memories