FATHER THAMES TO-DAY

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 46, 18 November 1929, Page 10

FATHER THAMES TO-DAY

COME INTO LONDON BY THE FRONT DOOR NEW TILBURY DOCK OPENED Dominion Special Service. [By Nellie M. Scanlan.] London, October 7. Yesterday the great new dock at Tilbury was opened. The Orient liner Oronsay, a twenty-thousand tonner, slid in between the concrete walls, and snapped the blue riband with her bow. The largest liner afloat can now dock in the Thames, at the historic old spot of Tilbury; you may enter London by the tFront Door.” It was at Tilbury that Queen Elizabeth reviewed the troops at the time of the Spanish Armada, when she said: “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King—a King of England, too.” “Bungum” is the name for Tilbury mud, and they dug out Bungum fifty feet deep to make the new dock. It took four years to build the dock, and it cost two and a half million pounds. But, what is still more marvellous, the contractors finished a year ahead of time. ■ London is jammed, and crowded and congested. Traffic is held up by interminable delays. Yet when anyone suggests that the river be used to relieve this congestion, as in the days of old, people simply smile. Little-seen London. I sailed in the “Malden Annie” from the steps beneath Big Ben. A warm, mellow autumn day of soft light, but sunshine. We slipped down the Thames on the ebb tide, the London you never See spread out on either hand. Bridge after bridge slid over our heads, Waterloo, with a “fallen arch” like a soldier’s foot, all propped up with splipts. The graceful spire of St. Bride’s in the Strand, the loveliest of Wren’s designs, and the great Dome of St. Paul’s. We pass Puddledock, which Shakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote about. Now, hold your nose, here’s Billingsgate, but Bllingsgate of to-day has lost its tang. Hygiene and respectability have knocked the bottom out of Billingsgate’s reputation. There are some Dutch eel boats moored nearby. This is a privilege, granted them by Queen Elizabeth. It still stands.

We leave behind the trees and embankment and the massive dignified buildings. Warehouses rise from the riverbank, and barges are set firmly in the low-tide mud, while cranes from the warehouse walls drop grasping fingers into the black hulks, and snatch out the produce of the world. Strange Smells. There are strange smells of oil and spice and timber. Rum and sugar from the West Indies, furs and wheat from Canada, meat from Australia, butter from New Zealand, timber from the Baltic, carpets from Persia, marble from Italy, teas and spices from China and the East, ivory and tobacco from Africa, rubber from Java, wine frqm There are ships of every country, «nd flags of every nation float over the river. More than 13,000,000 tons of goods are dealt with every year, and a thousand ships a day pass in and out of the Thames. Sturdy little tugs, each with a string of barges, work the cargo up and down the river, delivering it from the ship’s side lower down, to the very warehouse door. There are beachcombers, too, on the Thames, who skin its edge in the falling tide for treasurs lost from the barges—a crate, a box, a carcass. These bring their reward. Too often the tide leaves behind a ghostly form,someone for whom life has lost its savour—a broken heart, a wrecked career. For the beachcomber, the corpse, too, has its price. Under London Bridge we go, and I think of Macaulay’s New Zealander, that visitor from New Zealand who would one day stand “on a broken arch of London Bridge and view the ruins of St. Paul's.” The Historic Tower. ' Next comes the Tower, with the Traitor’s Gate opening to the Thames, through which so many went in, and so few returned, but left their heads on Tower Hill. And so under Tower Bridge to the open river and The Pool, where shipping moves freely. There is the little “Inn,” “The Turk's Head,” and Wapping Old Stairs, so old and green and mouldy with the wash of the Thames. Along the docks here are vast wine vaults, and also the “King’s Tobacco Pipe,” as it is called, the furnace where contraband goods were officially burnt. Now we reach Limehouse, the Chinese quarters. But the opium dens are closed, and to-day it is neither very wicked nor very picturesque. We reach Blackwall and the India Docks, home of the Blackwall tea and wool clippers, the fastest sailing ships of their day. The Suez Canal killed the clippers, and paved the way for the Orient liners, the Oronsays and the great new Tilbury Dock.

Here is the Isle of Dogs, a bend of the river, and a chain of docks, with their forest of masts, encircle it. It was here that the Great Eastern was built, the wonder of her times. We pass near Greenwich, and I touch my cap in humble salute to the supreme arbiter of Time, then on through Gallions Reach, a romantic name to be neighbour to Barking. It is a long way to Tilbury. Ships of every size and shape pass us. A vessel laden with Baltic timber limps In with a heavy list. Another, with a Spanish name, is piling bales of cork into barges. Oil cake scents the air. Petrol in drams goes speeding by. Now the sun is lower, it lights up the tall brown sails, like autumn leaves, as a barge swings before the breeze. These brown sails remind me of the East.

Tilbury at Last! When the Oronsay sailed into the new dock, Tilbury came Into its own once more.