Limehouse to Mucking. Back upstream. As far as Tower Bridge. Or on to the buoys at Woolwich. Coasters are the hardest sailers of all. Up to the Humber and Kings Lynn. To dangerous silting ports like Wells in the Wash. Down Channel with cement for Exeter. Cattle food for Poole. Linseed to Northam. Pick the wrong time to arrive, or the wrong sort of weather, and you can founder and be lost with all hands. Other times, you have to crack on with every inch of sail drawing just to get there at the right time to enter, or to beat another barge in for first turn to unload. Or you might have to stand out to sea and heave to to wait for the tide. Or for the weather to change so you can get in. 

These are the lives of the bargemen.

These are the lives of the barges. 

Dick Miller from Margate was a bargemen. A wonderful old bargeman, was Dick Miller. They used to call him Dick the Dagger. Apparently, back in the day, his skipper said: ‘That boy Dick is as sharp as a dagger.’ And that just stuck with him for the rest of his life. And he lived to be over a hundred. 

Even I didn’t last that long. 

Dick the Dagger’s barge was named Royalty. She ended her days at Dunkirk. Dick the Dagger and his mate ferried troops out to the waiting warships, taking out a few at a time across the shoals. 

Dick the Dagger started age 11 in barges belonging to Mr Kee, who owned the yard at Greenhithe. A barge named City of London was being sent out to a Paris exhibition in 1889. Dick’s guv’nor said: ‘We must take young Dick out of that that barge. Paris is a wicked city.’

So they put Dick the Dagger as mate aboard aboard a little stumpy with young Sonny Westbrook. Sonny was skipper, Dick was mate. Sonny was 17. Dick was 11. 

They traded hard, up and down the London River with materials for building that new bridge: cement, stone, bricks and shingle. In London at St Katherine’s Dock, young Sonny Westbrook wouldn’t let Dick go ashore because Jack the Ripper was about, and had done one in not far away from the wharf. 

To Sonny Westbrook, Dick the Dagger was always ‘the boy’. 

Time passes. 

Many, many years later, when they had grown old and retired, they used to come together to watch the Thames Barge Matches. They’d go aboard the committee boat, Royal Sovereign. Bill and Fred Everard always saw to it that they were well fed and watered.