Concrete barges

Whilst walking the final stretch of the London Loop path near Coldharbour Point, I came across 16 concrete boats wallowing in the mud. Some had their bows pointing towards shore, as if trying to clamber onto dry land, whilst others lay marooned at random angles. Lengths of rusty reinforcing bar showed through gaps where the concrete had decayed.

When I got home, I decided to research them. These boats were built in the early 1940s to cope with the increased wartime need for vessels. They are technically called ferro-cement barges - the advantage of concrete being that less steel was required in their construction, at a time when steel was scarce. The barges were also not expected to last long, whereas a ship might be designed to serve for decades. Each weighs about 200 tons, and were constructed at the London Docks before being craned into the water. These particular ones were built for handling and transporting petrol.

It is rumoured that barges of this sort were used in the D-Day landings and Mulberry Harbours, perhaps as parts of the floating roadway. Whether these particular vessels were used or not, they were dumped on the riverside after the 1953 floods to act as coastal protection, and have lain there ever since.

Or have they? They seem in a slightly odd arrangement and location for that to be the case, at least to my inexpert eyes. Were they used, and then moved to be dumped at their current location once the defences had been repaired?

They appear to be in surprisingly good condition given they were built around 75 years ago, and have been abandoned for over 65. Whereas wooden vessels soon disintegrate except where they are buried in sand, and metal rusts to nothing, some of these concrete boats appear as though they could be refloated and used - although that is almost certainly a false appearance.

The concretebarge.co.uk website has details on how similar vessels were made (although I believe not these particular ones) - including an interview with the designer! It's interesting to see Gunite was used - an early version of the shotcrete used in civil engineering nowadays.

At times the Second World War can seem rather distant. It is therefore good to see some concrete reminders of the war - even if it is in a rather bleak, industrial and wind-blown spot on the Thames Estuary.

John Bellingham

Political assassinations are thankfully uncommon here in the UK. Aside from the tragic murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016, there have been precious few attacks on our MPs.

Before Jo Cox's tragic death, the IRA and their predecessors had done their best to kill MPs, succeeding on six occasions. Despite the list of sitting MPs who have been murdered is thankfully low.

But these are just the successful attempts; there have been other, unsuccessful ones. Labour MP Stephen Timms was attacked by an Islamic extremist, whilst a tragic machete attack on Nigel Jones killed his researcher, Andrew Pennington. It is clear that MPs can make an attractive target.

A simple plaque on a building in St Neots tells the story of John Bellingham, the only person to successfully murder a sitting Prime Minister.

An event to have civic pride in?

By all accounts (mostly, it should be said, written after his crime), Bellingham was not a success in  life. Born in St Neots in 1776, he set himself up in business and travelled the world, including to Russia, where he ended up in jail in 1804 over bad debts. It took him five years to finally make it home, and he seems to have spent that time getting increasingly annoyed.

For some reason, he believed the British government owed him compensation for his imprisonment in Russia. After his pleas to the government failed, he travelled on the 11th May 1812 to the Houses of Parliament, where he waited in a lobby. As Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (apparently not 'Percival' as on the plaque) appeared at about 5.15 in the afternoon, Bellingham shot him in the chest.

Bellingham made no attempt to escape, and in fact sat down on a bench. He therefore cannot have been very surprised when he was swiftly arrested, tried and executed within a week - despite people attempting to help him escape!

There was a surprising amount of public sympathy for him, partly due to Spencer Perceval's unpopularity, and a subscription ensured that the success he had missed in life was partly gained in death.

As for Perceval? He is a forgotten Prime Minister. Few remember him, and when they do, it is for the nature of his death that any of his many achievements in life.

London in the 1850s

Recently I've been doing a little research for fun into mid-Victorian Britain. It is the Britain immortalised by Dickens, of orphans, of the workhouse and of the lucky others: the upper classes.

I wanted to see if I could get some non-fictional accounts of life, and laboured through various sources until I came across Henry Mayhew's excellent four-book series "London Labour and the London Poor"

In these volumes, he describes in sometimes tortuous detail the lives of various London citizens. He quotes extensive interviews, giving a direct account of people's lives. These interviews give flesh to the rich seam of statistics he also includes.

The wealth of detail is astounding: for instance, there are a couple of pages on "The Street-Sellers of Dog-Collars", including the life story of one person, or when he went to a "Meeting of Thieves" - the British Union gave out free tickets, and 150 under-20 year olds turned up.

An example of the detail he goes into is a section entitled: "Of the cesspool and sewer system of Paris", where he describes the situation in the French capital, all the better to understand the English system. The job of Chiffionniers - men, with baskets on their back, who scavenged the piles of refuse outside French houses at night - is even gone into in detail. So is more scatological detail, like the fact that the average Parisian contributed 243 litres of waste to the city's cesspools each year. This is less than it should be for the obvious reason: the Parisian poor rarely used commodes, simply because they did not have access.

Poverty pervades this book. And so it should: because although there were rich people in the metropolis, the vast underbelly of the poor is poorly acknowledged, even in Dickens' work.

For instance, here is an interview with a forty year old homeless miner, who Mayhew classes as a genuine case of hardship:

"I'm a minor, sir, and I've been working lately five mile from Castleton in Darbyshire. Why did I leave it? Do you want me to tell the truth, now - the real truth? Well then I'll tell you the real truth. I got drunk - you asked me for the real truth, and now you've got it. I've been a miner all my life, and been engaged in all the great public works. I call a miner a man as can sink a shaft in anything, barring he's not stopped by water. I've got a wife and two children. I left them at Castleton. They're all right. I left them some money. I've worked in eighteen inches o' coal. I mean in a chamber only eighteen inches wide. You lay on your side and pick like this. (Here he threw himself on the floor, and imitated the action of a coal-miner with his pick.) I've worked under young Mr.Brunel very often. He were not at all a gentleman unlike you, sir, only he were darker. My last wages was six shilling a day. I expect soon to be in work again, for I know lots o'miners in London, and I know where they want hands.

And a section on "Park Women, or those who frequent the Parks at night and other retired places.":

Parkwomen, properly so called, are those degraded creatures, utterly lost to all sense of shame, who wander about the paths most frequented after nightfall in the Parks, and consent to any species of humiliation for the sake of acquiring a few shillings.You may meet them in Hyde Park, between the hours of five and ten (till the gates are closed) in winter. In the Green Park, in what is called the Mall, which is a nocturnal thoroughfare,you may see these low wretches walking about sometimes with men, more generally alone, often early in the morning. They are to be seen reclining on the benches placed under the trees, originally intended, no doubt, for a different purpose, occasionally with the head of a drunken man reposing in their lap. These women are well known to give themselves up to disgusting practices, that are alone gratifying to men of morbid and diseased imaginations. They are old, unsound,and by their appearance utterly incapacitated from practising their profession where the gas-lamps would expose the defects in their personal appearance, and the shabbiness of their ancient and dilapidated attire.

Hyde Park's certainly changed!

As a social record it is invaluable: as a description of utter poverty it is depressing; as a measure of how far we have come it is commendable.

All four volumes are freely downloadable in PDF format from archive.org:

Volume 1: The London street-folk

Volume 2: The London street-folk comprising: Street sellers. Street buyers. Street finders. Street performers. Street artizans. Street labourers.

Volume 3: The London street-folk comprising: Street sellers. Street buyers. Street finders. Street performers. Street artizans. Street labourers.

Volume 4: Those that will not work, comprising; Prostitutes. Thieves. Swindlers. Beggars.

They are well worth a browse if you have time.