Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
River times
BLACKADDER STAR UNCOVERS HIDDEN WONDERS TV historian Tony Robinson recalls lif on the Thames as a boy and how it has defined his family for 300 years
IT is Britain’s most iconic waterway and for presenter Tony Robinson the River Thames holds a family significance that goes back centuries. The star explores the hidden wonders of the 215-mile river in a new documentary starting tonight and reflects on the vital but often difficult work it provided for generations of Londoners, including his grandfather.
“People often think of the Thames just as what they see in London,” says Tony, 75. “But it’s so much more than that. In fact, it’s the lifeblood of southern England.”
In tonight’s opening episode of the series, The Thames At Night, Tony visits Tilbury docks in Essex, where his grandfather, Horace Parrott, worked on the front gate, after being a steward on Union-castle Line ships for 50 years.
“My grandfather was working at Tilbury long after retirement age,” he says. “I must have been down to see him as a kid and it was very eerie going back and realising that most of the places I visited during the series, probably one relative or another of mine had worked there or somewhere close by at some time in the past 300 years. I felt the connection enormously.”
He adds: “My whole family is defined by the Thames.
“They’ve been Eastenders for 300 years. Not wealthy Eastenders but things like cardboard box cutters and seamstresses, matchmakers. Two of my great-grandparents ended up in the workhouse. One died of diphtheria.
“They were part of that working class struggle for survival – and that survival was given to them by the Thames because it was such a complex, busy river.”
Tony, who found fame with Blackadder, also worked on the river, which stretches far beyond London, running from Gloucestershire to Southend-onsea, before his acting career took off.
“I spent a lot of my teens and early 20s working on the Thames,” he says. “I worked for a firm of ships and when I passed my driving test I had a van.
“I used to drive down to this great big warehouse in Stepney and I’d go to all the various docks all the way down to Tilbury and take the orders from the ships’ cooks about what they required.
“I got to know the working Thames really well and now there’s virtually none of it left, or just the occasional crane left as a memento. If I try really hard I can often work out what the area was like before it became skyscrapers and flats.”
Despite his vivid memories from working on the river, Tony says he is not overly nostalgic for the Thames of the past.
“It was a very hard life,” he says. “And there are still elements of it there. There are still families who work on the river, although now most will commute in from Essex or Kent rather than live by the side of the river.”
Through the course of the four-part Channel 5 series, historian Tony examines the
Lots of us assume it just goes to sleep at night, like your gran TONY ROBINSON ON RIVER THAMES
fascinating world of work that goes on along the river once the sun goes down – and discovers it now transports more goods than it ever has in its history. He travels from the Thames estuary in the East right through the heart of London and beyond.
As well as meeting the people who spend their working lives on the water he goes behind the scenes at huge landmarks – including the Thames Barrier.
“The work they do is incredible,” says Tony. “I hadn’t realised but to keep the river at the level it needs to be, tides from as far away as Scotland are monitored.
“I’d never realised, I thought they came from Calais, but to see tides building as they come past Aberdeen and Lincolnshire all along the way, hurtling down past Essex and clipping into London is quite riveting.
“It happens in this really sci-fi type context, in that all round the Thames Barrier it’s absolutely quiet, and then you go in and there are all these long corridors and there are these two guys in this futuristic-looking control room.
“They’re the people who stop our feet getting wet when it rains. When they built the Barrier our tides were much lower, they predicted the tides would rise, so we could keep going with it as it is until something like 2070.”
Elsewhere Tony, who grew up in East London, joins fishermen off Whitstable, Kent, as they search the depleted waters for Dover sole and hops aboard a family-owned ship that transports rapeseed along the shallow waters of the river.
“It occurred to me recently that we don’t really understand how cities keep running,” says Tony. “Why don’t they just collapse? I’ve felt that very strongly about the Thames, which is the lifeblood of southern England. I think lots o just assume it’s there at night, almost it goes into hibernation like our old going to sleep at nine and staying t til she wakes at six in the morning.
“But, of course, that couldn’t be fur from the truth. It’s at night, when these very skilled people come ou work to keep things running.”
Spending such a lot of time on Thames during filming – this is his t series about the river – historian T could reflect on the remarkable cha it has undergone.
“The fascinating thing about Thames is that for most of 2,000 yea was London’s highway,” he says.
then in the early
20th century it got clogged up with shipping. The time came when there were moments you could cross the
Thames by foot jumping from one ship to another.
“Then when the internal combustion engine took over things shifted to the road in the 1950s and 1960s.
“But now it’s being transformed back to London’s great thoroughfare again.
“We have the London clippers acting as a taxi service, we have fire services there, we have oil coming up and down.
It actually carries more goods now than ever. Far fewer boats, but much bigger boats. It’s been a wonderful experience to get a better understanding of the workings of this extraordinary river.”
The Thames at Night with Tony Robinson, Channel 5 tonight at 8pm.