The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (24 page)

But what, in the modern world, could ever match the internal image of purity? What, in mere material existence, can approach the ideal? We might travel the globe over and never find it, and that is very probably what happens with most of us; unless, that is, we chance upon the chalk streams. They come as a shock. For suddenly, the ideal is real; the internal image is matched. It is hard to convey the faultless nature of their water. Indeed, in
A Summer on the Test
, John Waller Hills, early twentieth-century Conservative politician and fisherman, wrote that one day the water of the Anton, the Test tributary, seemed to him ‘unimaginably pure’. It is not only purer than you have seen before,
or purer than you would see anywhere else, it is purer than you would allow yourself to expect or even conceive of, and so it begins almost to seem not part of everyday life, but of some ultimate condition; and the purity of the water casts its glow over the river as a whole, as an entity, and the river too seems to be something other than an everyday river, it seems almost to belong to a higher state of existence.

Hyperbole? You could say so, I suppose. But what can I do, other than speak of my experience? Once, on a May morning a few years ago, I came out on to the banks of the Upper Itchen, at Ovington in Hampshire, and the river with its flowers and willows and the serenity of its flow and its dimpling trout in its matchless, limpid water, all gilded by the sunshine, seemed to possess a loveliness which was not part of this world at all.

Yet it was part of it; and there, once again, was the joy.

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There is one more river I wish to instance, in looking at the joy we may find in the beauty of the earth, but this case is different, for it’s about failure: it’s about where joy might have been but is not. It’s about a dream which in the end could not be realised; yet I feel the story is worth telling, on many levels, not least as the river is one of the most famous in the world.

It is the Thames: London’s river, and my own, or at least, that’s how I think of it, as I have lived near it for more than twenty years, am fascinated by its history, and ride my bike every week for miles along its towpath, watching its changing waters and its changing moods. It is a handsome as well as a historic river, not least in the part I know best, the eleven-mile stretch from Hampton Court, past Teddington and Richmond to Kew, which runs through a green valley on London’s edge dotted with at least nine great houses or stately homes: this is
the nearest thing we have in Britain to the châteaux of the Loire.

Biologically, however, it is no chalk stream. The Thames has suffered from some of the grossest river pollution Britain has ever seen, and two hundred years ago this led to an extinction which bears direct comparison with the current case of the baiji in the Yangtze, that of the Thames salmon. You may not think of the Thames as a very salmony river, yet until the beginning of the nineteenth century it harboured a significant population of
Salmo salar
, the Atlantic salmon, of the great ocean-wandering fish which came back to breed; and although there appears to be no historical basis to the often repeated story that London apprentices got so tired of being fed salmon they had it written into their indentures that they would be served it no more than once a week, there is no doubt that salmon catches from the Thames were substantial, with as many as three thousand fish a year being taken to Billingsgate market, and individual netsmen frequently making sizable hauls: on 7 June 1749, for example, 47 fish were taken in a single day below Richmond Bridge. There were big fish, too, with several records over 50 lbs, while 16 lbs was a good average. It was a solid, self-sustaining salmon run, dating back thousands of years.

Yet in the blink of an eye – in historical terms – it was wiped out. Compared to other cautionary tales of extinction, such as that of the dodo or the great auk, the story of the disappearance of the Thames salmon is unknown to the general public, but it is as egregious an example as any of the terminal effects of mankind’s activities on living things. It was extremely rapid, taking little more than twenty-five years, and pollution was its cause.

For centuries, London’s river had received waste material but had been powerful enough to flush away whatever the inhabitants of the growing city threw into it, and thus it remained more or less ecologically sound. However, a point eventually
came when it was overwhelmed. After 1800, as the Industrial Revolution took off, London’s population began a mammoth surge, rising from 960,000 in 1801 (the first national census) to 1.6 million in 1831 and 2.3 million in 1851. Two aspects of this boom were fatal for the salmon of the Thames. The first was the vast increase in the amount of sewage going directly into the river, especially after cesspit overflows and house drains were allowed to be connected to the public sewers (which until then had essentially been drainage ditches) in 1815. London’s human waste, its ‘nightsoil’, which for centuries had been collected by cart and spread on the land as manure, began to pour into the river just as the population exploded, and the process was given a further savage impetus by the contemporary invention of the water closet.

The second was the burgeoning industrialisation of the capital and the consequent discharge of toxic effluent into the river from the factories mushrooming along or near its banks, not least from the new gasworks which were built in increasing numbers after gas lighting of London’s streets began in 1807. The waste discharge from gasworks was of exceptional toxicity, containing a cocktail of noxious substances ranging from carbolic acid to cyanide. With raw sewage slushing in on the one hand and lethal contaminants on the other, the Thames in London started to turn into a great poisonous, stinking ditch.

But there was a third contemporary development which told against
Salmo salar tamesiensis
, as we might call our beast: this was the building on the river, upstream of London, of pound locks and their associated weirs, to facilitate navigation of heavier and heavier loads to and from the industrialising city. It happened quite quickly. Teddington Lock, which immediately constituted a new limit for the tidal Thames (historically, it had been Staines) was built in 1811, Sunbury in 1812, Chertsey in 1813, and Hampton Court in 1815. These locks and their weirs became formidable barriers to migratory fish trying to get upstream; they also
changed the whole nature of the river as the water built up, deepened, and slowed behind them, and the natural gravel shallows in which salmon could spawn silted up and disappeared, or were dredged away.

The salmon were doomed. They could not live in the filthy water; it was much harder to swim up the river out of it; and even if they could, they could not breed. Their headlong demise is graphically illustrated in the melancholy record of salmon taken at Boulter’s Lock, Maidenhead, by the Lovegrove fishing family between 1794 and 1821. In 1801, 66 fish were caught; in 1812, 18; in 1816, 14; in 1817, 5; in 1818, 4; in 1820, 0; in 1822, 2; and that was it. George IV particularly sought a Thames salmon for his coronation feast on 19 July 1821; none could be procured. The last Thames salmon is believed to have been caught in June 1833, cited (although with no location given) in William Yarrell’s
A History of British Fishes
, published in 1836.

There were no more for a hundred and forty years. After the fish disappeared the pollution of the river continued to worsen, until it finally became insupportable: in July 1858 a heatwave made the smell from the Thames so hideous that Parliament at Westminster was compelled to stop sitting. This famous episode, known as ‘The Great Stink’, led directly to the construction of the modern London sewer system by the engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. Bazalgette shifted the problem away from central London by building giant interceptor tunnels on either side of the river – the Thames embankments were built to house them – which carried the capital’s sewage eastwards, about a dozen miles downstream of Tower Bridge, to outfalls at Beckton, on the Essex side of the river, and Crossness, in Kent.

But although this relieved Westminster and the City of the worst of it, it merely transferred the pollution somewhere else; the outfalls were not sited far enough downstream for the ebb tide to flush the untreated sewage right out to sea, and it returned on the flood. This massive ‘plug’ of nauseating filth in the lower
river proved mortal to any fish in its vicinity. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth the situation continued, and after the war years if anything worsened, until in 1957 a survey carried out by the foremost authority on British fish, Alwyne Wheeler of the Natural History Museum, proved an astonishing point about the fish of the tidal Thames: there weren’t any.

Between Kew in the west and Gravesend in the east, Wheeler established, there were no viable fish populations. This survey severely jolted the public conscience, and after a couple more damning scientific reports on the chemical and biological state of the river, what should have been done years before was finally carried out: from 1964 the Beckton and Crossness sewage works were cleaned up and the effluent from their outfalls treated before discharge, so that its micro-organisms were no longer capable of sucking all the oxygen out of the water, which had been its most damaging characteristic. The effect was virtually immediate. From the mid sixties onwards, fish started to reappear in the river. They were monitored by Alwyne Wheeler, who had the bright idea of asking the power stations along the banks to check on what was being trapped in their cooling water intake screens. Starting with a tadpole fish (a member of the cod family), species after species began to turn up – lampern, sand goby, roach, barbel, John Dory – until by 1974 no fewer than 72 species had been recorded. And then the incredible happened: on 12 November 1974 an 8 lb 12 oz salmon, a hen fish 31 inches in length and four years old, was caught in the intake screens of West Thurrock power station, near Dartford, about sixteen miles below Tower Bridge. Wheeler himself examined it and identified it that day; and that day, the dream was born.

I often cycle up the towpath on the Surrey side of the river from Richmond to Teddington Lock, and cross over, to return down the Middlesex side; and as I push my bike over the foot-
bridge I gaze at the weir, the weir that marks the limit of the tidal Thames, and I see in my mind’s eye the flashing silver fish, shouldering its way upstream, driven by the imperious urge to reproduce, driven up and over that foaming barrier, leaping for life . . . what a creature the salmon is! What would you not give to have it back in your river! Would that not offer you joy? Many people thought so, when Alwyne Wheeler pronounced his identification: the gates of possibility seemed to swing open. There was huge excitement, enormous publicity – here was the first Thames salmon for 141 years! – and people’s thoughts almost immediately turned to what might be. Was the river really now so clean that the ancient salmon run might be resurrected? Encouragement was given by two more finds of salmon penetrating further and further upstream: the remains of a 21-inch-long fish found on the foreshore at Dagenham in July 1975, and then – quite remarkably – a fish found dead where the River Mole joins the Thames, at Thames Ditton, on 30 December 1976.

It was remarkable because it was above the tidal limit, that is, above Teddington Lock.

It must have jumped the weir . . .

So the Port of London Authority set up an inquiry to look at migratory fish in the Thames, and when this eventually reported that conditions in the estuary would no longer be an obstacle to returning salmon and sea trout, and there was now a good chance of reintroducing both, and all the stakeholders were duly and fully consulted, and all the relevant committees had met, and all the ‘i’s were dotted and the ‘t’s crossed, in 1979 the Thames Salmon Rehabilitation Scheme was established and the dream became official. I have always thought it a tremendous dream. Rarely can a piece of public policy have enshrined such an exhilarating vision: this legendary, righteous fish, which, with its need for a high dissolved oxygen content in all the fresh water it passes through, is such an icon of aquatic purity, was
to be returned to the river as the supreme symbol of the Thames reborn, of a great watercourse brought back to life. This is the fish which speaks to us of Scotland, of Norway, of Iceland and Nova Scotia, of northern wild places which are wholly unspoiled, and London’s river was to host it again. London’s river was to be a salmon river: could ambition be any nobler?

That this did not happen, even after thirty years of trying and the expenditure of a colossal amount of thinking, of devoted effort and of cash, is one of the saddest things I have witnessed in all the struggles to shore up the natural world against the depredations we have made upon it. Yet the first part of the recovery programme was a big success. Its aim was to prove that fish could pass down to the sea through the once impossibly polluted estuary and successfully return back through it. They did, in eye-catching numbers. Smolts – juvenile fish six inches long – stocked in the tideway (that is, below Teddington Lock) were eminently able to come back after a winter or two winters at sea, being captured in the salmon trap specially installed at Molesey weir near Hampton Court. In 1982, 128 returning fish were trapped; in 1986, 176; in 1988, 323; and in 1993, the peak year, 338. This was the period of newspaper headlines about the returning Thames salmon, which reached a climax with the first rod-caught fish, a six-pounder taken by Mr Russell Doig from Staines, in Chertsey Weir pool on 23 August 1983. Mr Doig won the silver cup and £250 prize offered by the Thames Water Authority for the capture, which had earlier been claimed by at least two other anglers, but not awarded (draw your own conclusions . . .). He was pictured in a TWA photo with his rod and his fish (the fish looking stiff from the freezer) in a boat in front of Tower Bridge. It was a staged but unmistakably telling image, which shouted London and shouted salmon, and as such was priceless publicity; yet in so far as it reflected the clean-up of the tideway, the message it was giving out was a true one.