The Voice of Sirdar

by Jeremy Scott

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. 

During once of the Matches, Sonny, now 95, shouts: ‘Seen young Dagger anywhere? I have to keep an eye on that boy or he’ll get lost in this crowd.’ 

Dick the Dagger was only 89. 

When Dick the Dagger reached the age of 100, he was interviewed by a BBC man, no less. The BBC man asked him if the old boy ever went down the river to look at the old barges. The ones laid up on the saltings, the one’s who’d been hulked, at the end of their useful life and broken up for scrap. 

’See ‘em?’, Dick the Dagger replied. ‘I don’t want to see none of ‘em anymore.’ 

Seems sad. Ungrateful, even. But to Dick the Dagger, barges meant nothing more than hard work and sleepless nights. Toil, trade. The tractors of the river. Maybe it wasn't that much of a glamorous job going down the East Coast picking up hay or bricks or whatever it was. Like lorry drivers nowadays. Maybe it was seen as too mundane to talk about. Maybe people couldn't imagine how what life was like then would be interesting for people now. Or didn’t think that far into the future. They were probably just thinking...well, for them, it's just describing going to the office.

Yes. No-one’s going to write about going to the office. And no-one’s going to want to read about it. 

Sonny Westbrook died at Northfleet when he was over 95. He told a story to old Bob Roberts a fortnight before he ‘he let his anchor go for the last time’, to use his own words. He told Bob about his first barge race aboard the Victis. 

‘We used to start from our anchors off Erith,’ he said. ‘There was an enormous crowd of us. My father, who I started sailing with, he said to me: ‘Never give away to a Kentishman. Port and starboard. Never give way to a Kentishman’. And I said to my father, 'Well dad, why is that then?' And my father said: ‘Because he'll never give way to you'. And so, sure enough, as usual, just after the start, our bowsprit got foul of the mizzen rigging of the Kentish barge just ahead of us. She’d refused to give way. I wanted to show what a smart lad I was and nipped out along the bowsprit like a monkey to clear it. To my surprise, a chap in the other barge climbed the mizzen and punched me on the nose.’ 

The chap who punched poor Sonny… I can’t remember his name. I can’t even remember his face. But I remember that mizzen mast rigging pulling free of the Victis’s bowsprit and us pulling away. I remember the day, all right. The last Thames Barge Match in 1963. ‘This year is the 100th anniversary,’ said the BBC ‘And this one is tinged with salty sadness as it’s the last Thames race of all.’ I remember the sight of us all, Dreadnaught, Sara, Veronica. And me. Smudges of brown canvas spread across the river on the flood of the tide, Barking Reach to the North, Crossness to the South, beating like the clappers in short boards against the stiff south-easterly. 100-year old Dick the Dagger up on the deck of Royal Sovereign, flat hat pressed down to his ears, eyes a-flashing, a small smile lighting up his face. And people lining the banks on to watch us go flying by. Erith. Purfleet. Greenhithe. Ebbsfleet. Tilbury. Gravesend. 

Sonny’s first barge race on the Victis wasn’t the last ever Match, of course. It must have been many, many years before. It must have been one of the first few. But it’s all layers, isn’t it. So what if my story has Dick the Dagger, 100 years old, watching his friend Sonny Westbrook, 18 years old, getting punched on the nose 80-odd years before. If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d understand it. Things layer, one on top of the other, and blend. The places remain. The mud covers us all, in the end

Now. 

I quite like the idea that I’ve… we’ve been left.

I quite like that idea. 

I think it's part of the history. 

Making the best use out of something that is no longer required.  

I can be drawn up on the beach, perhaps to protect a creek or a harbour. 

At least that way I’m still doing a job. 

And then left to sort of slowly fade away.

The mud covering us. 

I don't know how I feel about being preserved.

Or restored. 

Pickled, almost. Something in a jar. 

I feel like we are ephemeral things.

A moment and a place in a time. 

So if we fade away… I'm not sure how sad I am about that. 

Perhaps it would be better just to preserve the ones who are left.

For those of us who aren’t? 

There could be some sort of information board up somewhere, nearby, saying: ‘This is what she was, but this is what happens’.  A picture of me, sails flying. And look at me now. 

We can be preserved in photographs and archives. 

And in stories. 

Like this one. 

In ways that people could go back to later. And see. 

People can come back and see what we were, not what we are. 

Me, I’m easy about it. I’m not so concerned. No, no. 

We’re past. 

It’s proper dark now. The flood has made. The wind is nearly calm. We’re bound down the river, so the only thing for it is to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

Erith. Purfleet. Greenhithe. Ebbsfleet. Tilbury. Gravesend.