BOOKS.

HISTORY OF THE PORT OF LONDON.*

A rum history of the Port of London has long been needed, and Sir Joseph Broodbank, who was formerly Chairman of the Dock and Warehouse Committee of the Port of London Authority, has met the want to admiration. His two volumes are evidently the result of long and affectionate labour ; they are a pleasure to read and a pleasure to look at ; they are likely long to remain the standard work on the subject. We cannot praise too highly the choice of the numerous illustrations These begin with " Here a ship from England " taken from the Bayeux Tapestry, and end with great -liners and bird's-eye

• History of the Port of London. By Sir .70.3enh' G. Broodbank; 2 vols. London: Daniel O'Conrkor. ISA 3a. net.)

photographs taken from aeroplanes. The design for the inside of the cover at the beginning of the second volume is one of the most decorative pieces for its purpose we have ever come across.

The Port of London is the only example of a first-rate port In combination with a capital city. By an extraordinary paradox Londoners are scarcely aware of this fact. People who live in Sydney or Liverpool or Southampton or Cardiff or Hamburg see their port stretched out, as it were, at their feet ; but Londoners, except a minority who live near the banks of the river " below bridges," are hardly aware of the immensity of the Port. It stretches away eastwards for nearly fifty miles. From the eyes of the average Londoner it is hidden, and he could hardly tell-you how to gain access to a sight of the river anywhere within ten miles eastwards of London Bridge. The chief reason for this is that the river is walled off for many miles of its busiest part by docks and warehouses. Another reason is that there is no regular means for seeing the river from the river. For many years a private company which owned the " penny steamers " struggled against adversity, but it threw up the sponge when the London County Council became the owners of a brand new river fleet—only to fail, of course, more expensively than any preceding proprietors. Even if there were steamers or launches available to carry you up and down the river, you would not get a real impression of the gigantic business of the Port because the vast majority of ships are hidden away in docks. Apart from the vessels at wharves bordering on the river and the vessels actually moving on the tide, you would probably see not much more than the tops of masts and funnels, or—a really picturesque spectacle—the thicket of masts, spars, and rigging in docks which receive large sailing ships. As Sir Joseph Broodbank says, the comprehensive capacity of the Port may best be illustrated by the fact that it fulfils the functions which in Holland are performed by three cities—The Hague which is the seat of Government, Rotterdam which is the chief port, and Amsterdam which is the centre of finance.

It is necessary to understand that there are two distinct kinds of ports in the trading world : the transit port and the entrep5t port. Most ports are transit ports. They are places where goods are landed or from which they are shipped, but they do

not store goods or serve as a mart. Sir Joseph Broodbank says:— "An instance of the pure transit port is Rotterdam, which is the greatest transit port of the world, and its rapid rise in late years is due to the fact that it has become the principal sea outlet for German traffic on the Rhine. This class of business offers little advantage to the inhabitants of the town concerned, and Rotterdam is, as a fact, one of the poorest cities in Europe for its size. It is a matter for wonder why the Dutch have for so many years been spending their millions. of florins on the magnificent accommodation on the Maas, merely to do at the cheapest possible rates the work of hewers of wood and drawers of water for tho manufacturers of Cologne, Dusseldorf, and the centres of German industry in Westphalia. They get no more benefit out of such trade than do wayside villages out of motor traffic passing through their streets."

Entrep6t ports are ports in association with markets and are

sources of wealth to the communities they serve. They provide room for the sale of goods ; they are, in fact, wholesale markets of foreign produce. Liverpool, Hamburg, Havre, Antwerp, and Amsterdam are all entrep6t ports. But there is not an entrepot port in the world to match London. The difference in the profits derived from the two kinds of ports is suggested by the fact that though the tonnage of shipping using Amsterdam is only one-fifth of that using Rotterdam, Amsterdam is one of the richest cities in Europe. Describing the nature of entrepot trade, Sir Joseph Broodbank says :—

" The value of this class of trade to the community cannot be exaggerated, It gives far more employment to labour of the better class than transit business. Large sums are paid to the warehousekeepers. Banking and insurance follow the goods. A multitude of paying guests in the form of sellers and buyers are brought into the city. These are some of the benefits to the community, and these benefits are widespread and fruitful. It is not over-stating to say that the prosperity of modern London has been chiefly due to the carrying on of its huge entrep5t trade during the last 300 years. London's outstanding position as a great wholesale market centre for the world is not realized by the general public. The names of the retail markets for meat, fish, and vegetables are household words all over the English- speaking world. Comparatively few know the real meaning of the transactions carried on at the Wool Exchange in Coteman Street or at the Commercial Sale Rooms in Mincing Lane, because the goods which are sold there are not open to 'view on the premises, but are at the docks or riverside wharves some miles away, and sales take place on sample or inspection. Just as every class of manufactured article can be obtained at West End stores, so the great wholesale markets and warehousing stores on the eastern side of London offer the choice of the products of the world in bulk. Wool is the most important of London's entreplt trades, and just before the war began it represented £25,000,000 per annum. It is perhaps the most striking example of this class of trade. Practically none of the wool remains in London. In normal times about two-fifths are purchased by foreign buyers, and the rest goes to the manufacturing districts of our own country. London is the market, and the wool comes to London simply to be sold. The advantages to the Metro- politan community are that besides the thousands of pounds spent on labour in landing the goods at the docks, more money still is spent on the operations in the warehouses in preparing for sale, m railway and cartage services, in financing transactions, in the insurance of the goods, and in the entertainment of the buyers who flock into London during sale days."

Naturally, the position of London has been challenged over and over again, but in spite of all competition, in spite of the opening of new routes, and in spite of the accumulation of cables enabling traders to telegraph their wants instead of corning in person, the entrepot trade of London grew continually up to the war. There are many reasons for this unchecked progress, but the chief reason is, of course, the geographical advantages of the Thames. London is about sixty miles from the open sea ; that is to say, about the distance which an average steamer can cover on a flowing or ebbing tide. London is at a point where the radius for the distribution of goods by land is very large, and yet it is not so far inland as to interfere with distribution by sea. It was relatively safe from an invading enemy even in the days when a naval assault by the river was possible. And if London is in an advantageous position as regards the rest of Britain, it is in a similarly advantageous position as regards the Continent. The mouth of the Thames faces the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt, and the Seine and the Elbe are easily, accessible. Finally, London is again in an advantageous position as regards all the rest of the world. It is at the centre of the land surface of the globe. No capital is so well placed to be the clearing-house of the world's trade. Then, the river itself is wonderfully convenient ; it is broad and remains deep without the help of much dredging. Its low banks and alluvial marshes are extremely easy to deal with when a new dock or wharf has to be built.

The Thames, before it was put to its present great uses, had a 'strangely different appearance. It wandered about in number- less creeks and lavished its waters at high tide over irpmense tracts of marsh. The channel was, of course, considerably. shallower than it is now, and may have been little more than a slit of water meandering between mud banks. It was the confining of the Thames between artificial river banks that made it navigable by the largest ships. The author is par- ticularly interesting when he writes about the origin of these, banks, which extend from London to the mouth of the river in Essex and Kent. The schooling of the river within a comparatively narrow bed of course caused a much faster stream and kept the channel deep through the scouring of the tides. Incidentally, the acceleration of the tides gave free motive power at the rate of from three to four miles an hour to vessels which move from place to place by drifting. But who built the embankments which endowed the river with these merits ? They have generally been attributed to the Romans, and probably the Romans did do a certain amount of embanking. When the British chief, as recorded by Tacitus, complained that the bodies of his people were worn out by clearing woods and draining marshes, he may have had in mind some of the work done along the line of the Thames, and not merely such undoubted Roman work as the waterway

which runs from the Welland to the Witham or the sea dyke in the neighbourhood of Boston and Wisbech. Sir Joseph Broodbank points out, however, that there was little or no motive for the construction by the Romans of a hundred miles

of earthworks along the Thames. Their ordinary route for the troops was not by water but along the Dover road. No direct record of the making of the embankments exists, but in all the circumstances the author has come to the conclusion that they were thrown up when the land was being gained from the river for cultivation. Probably no question of naviga- tion was involved ; the only prize was the reclaimed land :-

" Is it not reasonable to conclude that the making of the banks was in pursuance of schemes, gradually carried out, for the reclamation of land, and that these schemes were initiated and executed largely by the Flemish element in imitation of work with which they were familiar in their own country ? The builders in carrying out their object would not trouble:

themselves as to the effect their work had on the stream, nor did they realize that they were in fact performing a mighty service in providing for London one of its greatest assets as a Port. Support is given to this theory by the fact that the earliest statutes extant relating to embankments are of Henry III.'s reign and that they refer to laws of his grandfather Henry II., showing that the question of embankments was becoming one of public interest and importance."

In the reign of Richard I. the conservancy of the Thames was vested in the Corporation of London. The first record of a regular trading ship belonging to the Port—the Little Edward '—is found in the year 1315. It is easy to imagine how congested the river became in course of time as trade multiplied. Large vessels would have to anchor in the middle of the stream, smaller vessels nearer the shore ; but the cargo of every vessel had to be unloaded into boats, or what we should now call barges and lighters, and conveyed to the shore. This congestion gave ample scope to thieves and scoundrels of every kind :-

"There were River Pirates,' who were armed thieves, cutting lighters adrift at night and following them till they drifted on shore, when they disposed of the proceeds ; ' Night Plunderers,' who were watermen of the lowest character ; Scuffle Hunters,' who prowled about the quays ; Light Horsemen,' the mates of ships and revenue officers ; Heavy Horsemen,' porters and labourers, and Mud Larks,' working in concert with labourers, who threw goods overboard at high water from vessels lying

• near the river bank, the goods being picked up from the mud after the tide had ebbed. ' Mud Larks ' were stated often to earn £5 a night. Several estimates were made as to the amount of the losses, but no satisfactory data existed for making the calculation. The estimates placed the aggregate losses from plunder to merchants and the public revenue at from £250,000 to £800,000 per annum."

But apart from the congestion which gradually became more

and more beyond control, there was of course a vast amount of superfluous labour in loading the boats at the ships' sides and unloading them again on the river banks. The solution was the dock system. It was easy to carve recesses in the low-

lying sides of the river and bring ships right up against the dock walls where they could be unloaded. The first dock which could be properly so called in the modern sense was constructed in the reign of Charles II. Pepys refers to it in his diary. He viewed " the dock, and the new wet dock, and a brave new merchantman which is to be launched shortly."

We have not space to follow Sir Joseph Broodbank through his intensely interesting history of the growth and improvement of docks. The name of William Vaughan should never be

forgotten in this connexion. His pamphlet On Wet Docks, Quays, and Warehouses for the Port of London, with hints respecting Trade, appeared in 1793, and if one compares what has been done with what he said ought to be done it will be acknowledged that his prescience was extraordinary.

As for the administration of the Port, it is a long Story of conflict. The struggle between the Government and the City Corporation ended in the creation of the Thames Conservancy, and the Thames Conservancy ultimately gave place in the management of the trading part of the river to the Port of London Authority. The author thinks that the Port of London

Authority is still too much restricted and is required by statute to give away many points to private competition. Upon that subject we have our doubts. Private competition is the best reminder, tonic, and incentive ; it is good for the soul and the efficiency of the supreme Authority. It is partly because of this private competition, and not in spite of it, that we agree with the author's handsome prophecy about the future of the Port and its Authority :— " Given efficiency in its operations, a constant alertness to accommodate new forms of trade, labour intelligently applying its strength to work, and a moderate tariff of charges, the future of the greatest port in the world can be regarded with as much confidence as we look forward to the future of the Empire of which it is the capital."