Bugsby

 

Some eight years ago moves were afoot to change the name of the bit of the River which runs from the tip of the Greenwich Peninsula to Charlton.  The historic name is ‘Bugsby’s Reach’  and in the days when the river was the River and had real ships on it, this was a place name which sailors worldwide would have recognised and it appears in a great deal of maritime literature in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

 

The name Bugsby more properly refers to ‘Bugsby’s Hole’. Before 2000 and all the changes on the Peninsula The Pilot Inn stood in a road, called Riverway, which – well, went down to the River. At the end was a long causeway which took us out to ‘Bugsby’s Hole’ – that was destroyed to make the place prettier for visitors to the Dome!   So what was all that about?? There are a number of ‘holes’ in the river and it is a traditional term meaning ‘an anchorage’.  So if we want to find out where the name comes from we are probably looking for someone called Bugsby who had an anchorage somewhere off the Greenwich Peninsula

 

First we need to establish how long this name has been in use. Once this part of the river had an entirely different name; it was ‘Cockle's Reach’ or ‘Podd's Elms Reach’. The ‘Roque map’ of 1744 shows a great semi circle of trees stretching across both sides of Horn Lane (next to today’s Peartree Way’)

 

The earliest reference to the name of ‘Bugsby’s Hole’ seems to be a report in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' of March 1735 to 'Williams the pirate' being hung in chains at Bugsby's Hole'. Williams, incidentally was dead when he arrived here to be gibbetted – he had died by hanging with due ceremony at Execution Dock in Wapping.  As a further diversion from my main subject it might be of interest to know that Williams had been convicted at a specially convened Admiralty Court for “running away with the ship Buxton Snow, late Captain Beard, bound from Bristol to the Island of Malemba Angola in Africa, and selling the Ship; and also the Murder of the said Captain Beard, by cutting his Throat with an Axe”.   Williams seems to have been generally a bad lot and there is a lot about him on the net if you know where to look.

 

I used to be fairly disbelieving about the gibbets but an article by Pieter van der Merwe in the Greenwich Society newsletter was convincing and Pieter subsequently came up with a map showing where they all were. I have more recently come up with the suggestion that there was “a whole grove of gibbets at Bugsby's Hole … under which parties used to be made to drink tea, the tarred remains swinging over their heads.”   Oh! How lovely!

 

People tend to think that the Greenwich Peninsula was always cut off and ignored until the coming of the Blackwall  Tunnel and the developers – but this was never really so. On the north bank of the river from about 1617 was the East India Company Yard which by the mid-18^th century was the great Blackwall Yard – world famous – then the largest ship building and repair establishment on the River.  They built and repaired high tech – cutting edge –vessels in the yard, which went going off to conquer and colonise the world. Bugsby in his/her Hole was probably nearby, on the south bank, through some connection with this.

 

A.G.Linney writing in the 1930a referred to Bugsby in The Lure and Lore of London's River, and suggests that he was a market gardener. He also cites a 'book published about a hundred years ago' which talked about a robber who had 'a cabin' in the osier beds and who, in order to 'escape the vengeance of the law' 'cast himself into the river' and that later 'much treasure was found'.

 

I have tried to find out about this, and failed.  The records for the Greenwich Peninsula and its riverside, covering this period are very good.  I have spent some time going through the records of what was then St. Alfege Parish, through the minute books of the City Conservators and – most importantly – struggled through the handwriting of the Wallscot Minutes, the body which  managed Greenwich Marsh from 1620.  And I found nothing – there is loads of information in the Wallscot minutes if it is nettle and bramble growth in drainage channels you want, but nothing about pirates hiding in the reeds. I guess anyway that they wouldn’t have remained hidden very long from the marsh bailiff and his staff – and also from the soldiers guarding the Government Gunpowder Works, on the site which is now Enderbys.

 

So – all we really have in answer to ‘Who Was Bugsby??’ is a lot of speculation.  

 

Some of that speculation has been around bugs and bugaboos and ghosties – and relates to the aforesaid gibbets.  It has been suggested it is really ‘Bugs Marsh’. This is the subject of  article from the 1970s and in 2000 picked up and flung into hyper inflation by the then fashionable writer, Iain Sinclair.

 

Some other speculation has been around the place name ending ‘by’ which apparently refers to a Scandinavian root.  Was it a Scandinavian farm, the author suggested? 

 

The other thing- which I think is strange – is that round the world there are other ‘Bugsby’s Holes’. The nearest is at Sheerness on that crumbly bit of the coast where whatever was there in the 18^th century fell into the sea years ago.  I have been down to see and it looks nothing like Greenwich.  There are however other Busgsby’s holes around the world  -- for instance on St. Helena.

 

The name ‘Bugsby’ is fairly unusual.  A brief trawl of it on Google will show you that the name is more common in the United States and the West Indies than it is in the UK.    Is there a link with all those big vessels from Blackwall Yard – or even the activities of some of Thomas Williams’ and his friends on the high seas? And dare we mention a possible link with the slave trade??

 

And then we come to an American family history researcher – Dale from Vail – who I think may have a point.  He says we should think about the name ‘Bugby’ rather than ‘Bugsby’. He says he has found the name used in the River ‘as far back as 1401’ and that it was the point at which ‘ships were required to fly their colors prior to entering the city’.  He also says that from the ‘1800s some maps started to misspell the name as “Bugsby.’ However Dale is keen to find ancestors involved in river work – athough none of them appear to be medieval. He cites a Captain John Bugby ‘active in overseas shipping’  and also Timothy and William Bugby around in 1625. He says ‘The Bugby family of London had the money to invest in plantations at Montserrat, St. Croix, and South Carolina during that time.  “Bugby Hole” was used as the name for these plantations in the West Indies’. He has many other reference to maritime, and possibly slaver, Bugbys

 

All of these associations, the date and everything connect back to when ‘Bugsby’s Hole’ along with ‘Blackwall Fashion’ were names known to sailors and adventurers around the world.  They relate to when Thames shipbuilders developed amazing vessels which soon ruled (and plundered) the world.  This isn’t about the Navy and Nelson and all that – it is about trade, and the economy, along with the lives of thousands of shipwrights, sailors, river workers, adventurers, pirates, and, probably, slaves.  But while we might want to distance ourselves from the politics of empire and exploitation, surely we can respect the technologies developed by a hierarchy of skilled working shipwrights and artisans, along our bit of the River. Our comfortable lives derive directly from them.

 

In the early 20^th century there was a whole lot of romantic literature written about the River and the ‘great days of sail’ – W.W. Jacobs conflated with Treasure Island..  I wouldn’t necessarily want to go down that route myself but it is one with which Bugsby as a name is associated – and it is an attractive medium to many people – and – to - er – tourists.