A vast armada will sail, chug, row and paddle along the Thames and into London today to prepare for the largest and most diverse gathering of watercraft the great river has seen, a history of Britain in boats.
At the start of a four-day nationwide celebration, the capital is preparing for more than a million people to gather tomorrow on the river banks to witness the seven-mile, 1,000-boat Diamond Jubilee flotilla: the opening tribute to Queen Elizabeth’s 60-year reign, but also a testament to a rich maritime history and our infinite capacity for messing about on the river.
The great floating procession will be headed by a 60-metre, 12-tonne floating belfry, ringing in the Jubilee with eight vast bells cast at Whitechapel, followed by 265 man-powered vessels. Then will come the Queen herself, setting off from Cadogan Pier in the Spirit of Chartwell, a sightseeing vessel converted into a royal barge with two thrones and a golden sculpture of Old Father Thames.
Behind her will follow boats of every conceivable shape, size and vintage, and awaiting her at Tower Bridge, the end of the route, is the “Avenue of Sail”, 41 boats too tall to sail farther upriver, moored on either bank to form an extraordinary, many-masted nautical corridor.
The Thames has seen great waterborne celebrations before, but nothing on quite this scale, or with this level of preparation and attention to detail. Even Charles II, introducing the country to his queen in 1662 with music, fireworks and cannon fire, could not slow the river’s current to one-half mile an hour — a feat that will be achieved this year with the help of the Thames barrier. Moving at a stately 4mph, the entire flotilla will take at least an hour and a quarter to pass. Blink, and you won’t miss it.
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About 7,000 police will turn out to man the riverside parade route between Battersea and Wapping, and they will all be praying that the weather gods defer. With a grim forecast of rain and chilly temperatures, the chief harbour master of the Port of London Authority told The Times yesterday that he would “have to start taking people off” the river if the wind speed got too high.
Around Britain, the nation is preparing to party like it’s 1952, only with better food and even more bunting (1,500 miles of it, according to the latest estimates). Tesco is expecting to sell 200,000 bottles of champagne, 2.8 million Victoria sponges and two million punnets of strawberries this weekend.
But the river procession, organised at a cost of £10.5 million to honour 60 years of an unsinkable monarch, will be the main event, celebrating the astonishing variety of ways we have devised to travel on water and the cultural richness of the Thames itself, the “liquid history” that runs through the capital and out to the world.
The great royal flotilla will include just about every type of boat: kayak, corvette, Hawaiian war canoe, coaster, ketch, and tug. This fleet will include a Mississippi paddleboat, a 1913 Dutch canal boat that was once a pub for journalists, and the traditional sailing barges with their russet sails that dominated the Thames waterscape until the Second World War. HMS Belfast, a 600ft cruiser that was once part of the naval blockade of Germany, will rub nautical shoulders with a tiny, home-made currach, the wood-framed, canvas-covered fishing boat dating back two millennia.
These are boats built to travel and explore, to race, fight, fish, save lives, break records and, perhaps above all, to trade. The sheer variety of goods that these vessels once carried reflects the mercantile commerce on which the British Empire and the monarchy was built: whaler, oyster boat, and peat trader, boats that carried sand, eels, chemicals, fertiliser, whisky, sugar, hay, clay and herring. Among the tall ships and small ships will be 41 of the “Little Ships” that took part in the Dunkirk evacuation, including Angele Aline, a 1920s cod-fishing boat that made three trips to rescue more than 300 men.
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The Havengore, which carried Sir Winston Churchill’s coffin during his state funeral, will be in the procession, but so will the De Walvisch, a cargo ship commandeered by the Germans and reinforced with a view to being used in the invasion of Britain.
Only one ship, the Amazon, was present during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Royal Fleet review at Spithead in 1897. But then, the sharp contrast between those two celebrations is revealing.
At the last Diamond Jubilee, 115 years ago, it was reported that “Her Majesty, as she sat in her magnificent carriage, amid all the splendour of her court, the glistening of gold, the shining of sabres and the pomp of cavalry, in her quiet simple dress, all of us recognised a grand example of humility, of patience, of long suffering — in a word, womanliness.”
That celebration was all about Empire, power, and awe, with state balls, diplomats and dignitaries, 60,000 orchids from every imperial corner, and braised beef for lunch. A banner acclaimed the “Queen of Earthly Queens”. Tomorrow’s royal regatta will not be like that: instead it will show a very ancient and decorous institution in a modern and informal way. There will be singing, flag waving, millions of Scotch eggs and parties across the land. It will be “cheerful”, in the words of Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, who is odds-on favourite to be the first to fall in. The 1,000-odd skippers have been advised to stay off the rum until they are safely moored.
Ten barges will carry choirs, bands and bagpipers, playing music from Handel’s Water Music to Bollywood hits to the Beatles: as they pass the MI6 building at Vauxhall, the bands will play the James Bond theme tune. If it rains, there are plans to play Singing in the Rain; if it pours, they will play Raindrops keep falling on my head. The names of the boats in the flotilla say something about an eccentric and imaginative national identity: Boadicea, My Alice, Thistle, Queen Galadriel and Pudge.
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The oldest boat on the river — and possibly the oldest boat still afloat — will be the St Michael’s Mount State Barge, which has been used to ferry passengers to St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, since 1740.
But boats are, in a way, like monarchs: with proper care and attention, they can stay afloat, magnificently, for a very long time.