Up the creek
Eric Christiansen
Estuary: Land and Water in the lower Thames basin A.K. Astbury (Carnforth Press pp. 326, £8.75) By taking the long view, and tracing the great arteries of human life outwards from London, you can epitomise the whole of English civilisation in the main railwaystations. In that case, the offices of the Spectator stand on a sort of cultural watershed. To the west, there is a moral slope that leads by leafy squares and airy terraces to Paddington, and Paddington still embodies the sort of world that goes with canons of Hereford guzzling tea on the Cathedrals Express, and boarding school charmers conning The Pony. The connexion with WC1 may appear tenuous at times, but on a clear day you can almost see Blenheim Palace from the upper windows of Doughty Street.
To the east there is another slope, both moral and physical, and it leads by way of Holborn Viaduct to Liverpool St., Fenchurch St, and London Bridge. From there, the lines fan out on either side' of the Thames estuary, and the effect on the novice of this Antipaddingtonian experience can be painful. Half-wrecked, halfdisinfected carriages, scrawled with skinhead slogans, hump the toilers en masse into a twilight of broken machinery, ruined factories, and flawed bungalows. It is a world so _badly put together, so shored up with corrugated iron, asbestos and hardboard that simple explanations of its condition, like poverty, bombing, or local government, hardly cover the facts. When the streets end, the bungalows and huts carry on down to the river, the theme is continued in dead car-bodies, unsorted junk, and caravan sites served by cut-price boating harbours.
Once the traveller reaches the saltings, he can pause by the tide-mark of aerosol cans (this is where they all come to die) and note that he has moved from the job racket, to the housing racket, to the retirement racket and the leisure racket almost without a break. A cruel joke has been played on the inhabitants. The great city has given them the freedom of the great river-mouth as Harold of Harold's Wood once gave Harold of Norway six feet of English soil. There's weakness in numbers down here. Out on the water, the rasping of the water-skiers drowns the unmistakable phut of Pitsea sportsmen wounding gulls with air-gun pellets. Along the outer face of the sea wall the broken glass twinkles cheerfully in the sun, and the boys from Vange race mopeds through the samphire. The former company director from Erith looks for places to hide the dismembered fragments of his mistress which he carries in his nick-sack. This is the sort of place where Pip met Magwitch. They would miss each other in the crowd, nowadays.
Disturbing, very, for those who like to keep their Turner water-colours and their Giles cartoons on separate pieces of paper.
However, that is what the whole coast will be like before the end of the century, and the marshes of North Kent and the Essex hundreds are merely undergoing a rather intense and sticky farewell kiss. It won't be long now, before they sink under the sea for ever, and Billericay Dicky will be able to hydrofoil to Holborn direct. In Roman times the marshlands were five feet higher; and no amount of conservation is going to keep them afloat. So the fastidious Pad dingtonian may not find this an interesting subject. It's sad, but so is Traviata, and with Traviata you get the music, too.
But wait. Among the debris of the shore, a lonely figure moves, stops, and looks. It is the figure of Mr A.K. Astbury, and he is looking at the past. In his waistcoat pocket he has a clipped day return to Ben fleet, and in his mackintosh a pocket edition of Belloc's The River of London and a piece of Roman tile he has picked up from a lay-by. He is no longer young, but he stands in a bitter wind without flinching. Before his gaze, the marshes expand, islands emerge from the mudflats, and the roads, ships, houses and forts of a lost Britain take shape. Mark this man. On his shoulders he carries the weight of civilisation.
He has spent many years thinking about the estuary, and many years trying to persuade someone to publish his thoughts. He has finally had Estuary printed at his own expense. One of the officious half-wits who turned down his MS suggested he augment it with two chapters on the coming of the Saxons and the Vikings, and it is the only regret of this reviewer that he followed the advice. Otherwise, the book is a gem. It is not a history, nor a geography, but a series of reflections and notes on antiquities • connected with the mouth of the Thames. What makes it remarkable is the author. He is wholly and unashamedly amateur, with no academic pretensions of any kind, no claim to technical expertise, no diploma in socio-archaeology, no Latin, no talent for playing the local studies market. He belongs to the old school; a pounds-shillingsand-pence yards-feet-and-inches man, who goes by Kipling, Buchan, Belloc, Rider Haggard and the 'Polish sailor' who lived at Stanford-le-Hope. Among the many proofs of his soundness, the lack of the author's photograph on the jacket is one some readers may regret; but there is no need for it. The book is the man.
Local history tends to breed lunacy, showmanship, or statistics. None of these appears in Estuary. Nevertheless; Mr Astbury is eccentric because he tackles historical problems with the assumption that they can be solved entirely by his own reason and experience, with only polite and rather distant acknowledgements to History Incorporated. He doesn't want to mug professors; he just wants to do things his own way. By explaining this way in detail, he acquits himself of any charges of fraud that might be levelled, and reveals that even nowadays The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties can be rewarded.
He got a job in the Thames Board at Purfleet in 1933, by 'the signal kindness' of one Timon-Lockyer, and adds in a characteristic aside that it was 'a kindness for which I was never able to thank him adequately, or even at all.' For two years, he ate his lunch by the north bank sea-wall, and for much longer he travelled up and down the estuary, taking time off to visit Collins's Music Hall, where the physique of the North Country chorus girls convinced him that Lancashire was colonised by Norwegians. He investigated the brick, stone and timber relics of the river banks by asking workmen what they thought about them, and reading up the parish histories for further information; his equipment was a pair of wellingtons, a tide-table, and a railway ticket. This is not the approved way of doing historical research, and when it leads him to re-write the Anglo Saxon Chronicle the results are poor. But when he deals with ferries, bridges, churches, chalkmines, old roads and landing-places, it pays off.
These things are discussed in a slow and digressive fashion, with the same assumptions about life and learning that were shared by the contributors and subscribers of the Gentleman's Magazine. It might seem questionable whether others really want to know whether East Tilbury Church was bombarded by the Dutch in 1667, or whether the plaque set up by No 2 company of the London Electrical Engineers in 1917 was or was not destroyed on the orders of the War Office, but under the Astbury treatment the answer is definitely yes. And his failures are sometimes as interesting as his successes. There is the case of the vanishing Roman mosaic, which was said to have been built into the floor of Gray's church vestry. Mr Astbury persuaded the churchwarden 'to lift the edge of the carpet which covered the tiled floor. It was not possible to see the Whole of it, for a heavy table covered the centre at which church officials were sorting out the collection . . .' Nevertheless, what he did see, wasn't Roman. While searching for other Roman fragments on the eastern bank of Otterham Creek, he found a whole Shore covered by the tide, but he was compensated for his lack of foresight' by the beauty of the apple blossom in the Overhanging orchards, and the smoothness . Of the pasture. At Shoregate Creek he was marooned by another unforeseen tide; not only did he fail to make any archaeological discoveries, but when he got back to Rainham at 2 a.m. he found 'the station shut, the recreation ground with its shelter locked, and the rain falling steadily, as it had been doing since I was cut off by the tide hours before. While standing in a shop doorway, wondering what to do. . .' Well, the story has a happy ending, which I won't give away.
Perhaps it was this sort of thing that put off the publishers. They must have found it disturbingly lacking in affectation. A nonfictional book without pretensions to superior wisdom or fine writing has become a rare and somewhat unwelcome event. This one proves that such graces are unnecessary. Despite a fair crop of blunders, it gives a careful and convincing picture of life on our most important river in times so remote that scarcely one of its modern features would then have been recognisable. They would not have to be remote for that, of course, as he shows by a last chapter on the 19thcentury literary associations of the estuary. If all solvent Thames-dwellers buy this book, as I hope they will, both up and downstream from London, they will do themselves a favour and beat the system by backing an outsider. One day, they will be spraying CLIOMETR1CS OUT all the way from Liverpool Street to Southend.
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