Old Father Thames - Sol Invictus

The serpent in the bosom of London

The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London

The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London begins in one or more boggy

fields in Gloucestershire and ends in Southend at the crowstone:

an obelisk set in the sands to mark the boundry of the port of London

Authority.

Less imposing and considerably younger than Cleopatra’s needle near

the Waterloo Bridge, it still bears an uncanny snse of history as the tide gos

out, revealing it like a spire from Atlantis or the corpse city of R’lyeh

The serpent in the bosom of London

The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London

The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London

The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London

In 1820 Fredrick Marryat captained HMS Rosario for the purpose of bringing the

news back to Britain of Napoleon’s death-in-exile on St. Helena.

A respected sailor and author, he later wrote about Thomas Saunders,

a fictional and archetypal mudlark and his life on the Thames, from digging up

coins and scraps on the river’s foreshore to becoming a pilot navigating

trading vessels through the labyrinthine docks and mudflats.

Marryat was

running against tide though.

The Victorian artist were more fascinated in a

river that brought death rather than life.

The medieval «Winchester Geese»

continued to haunt the river.

G. F. Watts painted «Found Drowned»,

John Everett Millais painted «Bridge of Sighs» sharing it’s title with Thomas

Hood’s poem.

All were artistic reactions to the working girls, brought low by

disease, pregnancy or despondency, who were found floating dead in the river

downstream from the Old Dock Bridge

The Thames, the serpent in the bosom of London