Dancing on ice

“THE FREEZING WINTER WAS A TIME OF GREAT DISTRESS FOR MANY, BUT DOWN ON THE THAMES A CHEERIER MOOD PREVAILED”

It was Monday 6^th February 1814, the early hours of the morning. For a full week, an extraordinary esplanade of ice had spanned the Thames between Blackfriars and London Bridge, but signs of structural distress were starting to appear. It had rained heavily on the Sunday evening and the groan of cracking ice was clearly audible. As one observer put it: “In short, this icy palace of Momus, this fairy frost work, was soon to be dissolved, and was doomed to vanish, like the baseless fabric of a vision – but leaving some wrecks behind.”

Among the wrecks in question were nine men who, despite the obvious danger, had chosen to spend yet another night out on the rigid river, drinking gin in a booth owned by the landlord of the nearby Feathers pub – one of many such constructions. Around 2am, the section of ice hosting their drinking den was shorn off by the tide and propelled along the Thames “with the quickness of lightning”. Responding to the crisis with a predictable lack of dexterity, the drinkers added to their peril by accidentally setting fire to the booth’s tarpaulin. Against all the odds, they managed to find refuge in a small boat that was freed by the thaw, but this was immediately dashed to pieces against one of the piers of Blackfriars Bridge. By some miracle, no one was killed.

The next day, these nine men weren’t the only Londoners left feeling sore. “Thousands of disappointed persons thronged the banks; and many a prentice boy and servant maid sighed unutterable things at the sudden and unlooked for destruction of the Frost Fair.” This was it. The 1814 Frost Fair – a spontaneous festival of food, drink, music, sport and shopping – had finished. There’d been many such events in the preceding centuries, and they’d all ended in a similar way: suddenly, disappointingly, dangerously. But this would be the last ever Frost Fair. The party was over.

Knowing the Thames as it is today, it seems incredible that this huge, fast-flowing river could have frozen sufficiently solid for thousands of inebriated revellers to dance on its surface for days on end. For this, our forebears were indebted to the climate of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling in the North Atlantic region which extended from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The topography of the river also helped. Before steep embankments were erected later in the 19^th century, the Bankside section of the Thames was a wider, shallower and slower-moving monster than it is today.

As a result, any long spell of sub-zero temperatures could turn the river into a rink. This happened in the winter of 1564-5, when New Year’s Eve celebrants out on the ice “plaied at the football” and “shot at prickes” (less alarming than it sounds: a prick was a type of archery target). Over the next few days, people “went on the Thames in greater numbers than in anie street of the Citie of London”. January 1608 saw more prick shooting, together with bowling, and dancing. Booths were set up by resourceful market traders, including “fruit-sellers, victuallers that sold beere and wine, shoemakers, and a barber’s tent.”

One of the biggest of the Frost Fairs came in 1684, in the coldest winter ever recorded in England. This was a time of great distress for the nation. “It was a severe judgment on the land,” observed the diarist John Evelyn, “trees not only splitting as if the lightning struck, but men and cattle perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with ice, that no vessels could stir out or come in. The fowls, fish, and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens, universally perishing. Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear, that there were great contributions to preserve the poor alive.”

Meanwhile, down on the Thames, a cheerier mood prevailed. There were “sleds, sliding with skates, a bull-baiting, horse and coach-races, puppet-plays and interludes, cooks, tippling, and other lewd places.” It was, concluded Evelyn, “a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water”. And Restoration London was very good at bacchanals. After periods of civil war and repressive Puritanism, the city – now under the louche leadership of Charles II – had been relearning how to party. As Londoners took that learning out onto the ice, even the King joined the fun.

We know that the royal family partied at the 1684 Frost Fair because their presence was marked by a commemorative print produced out on the ice. Printing would remain a lucrative staple of the fairs, with printers dragging their heavy typesetting equipment down to the river to fire off posters, poems, personalised gifts and even entire books. One of the best sources of information on the 1814 event is a heavy tome called Frostiana, most of the sections of which were seemingly churned out at the fair.

Visitors may have left with souvenir prints, but they came for the food and drink. One poem from 1684 described a “cheating, drunken, leud, and debauch’d crew” feasting on hot codlins (cooked apples), pancakes and all sorts of roasted poultry, washed down with sack (Spanish fortified wine), all procured from hastily erected booths, many of which featured hilarious signs (“The Flying Piss-pot” being a notable example). There were venders of coffee, tea and cocoa – alluringly exotic drinks only recently arrived from Arabia, China and the Americas respectively. Mostly, though – Brits being Brits – everyone got stuck into the booze. As one anonymous poet put it: “As many tuns of ale and brandy flow / Above the ice, as waters do below; / And folk do tipple, without fear to sink, / More liquors than the fish beneath do drink.”

In January 1716, the booze booths were back, peddling what one reporter described as “exhilarating liquors”. That same year, the Protestant Packet newspaper described sellers of port, Rhenish (a sweet German wine), bohea tea (the cheapest tea on the market), tobacco, Cheshire cheese and the “whitest Brentford peas” (a rare example of anything vaguely healthy being bought on the ice). At every Frost Fair, there was always plenty of gingerbread and at least one spit-roasted ox. In 1739-40, a man called Hodgeson claimed the privilege of ceremonially killing the ox, which was brought down from Smithfield Market. This was, he claimed, a family tradition, “his father having knocked down the one roasted on the river in the Great Frost of 1684”.

All this eating, drinking and entertainment played out in a spirit of exhilarating anarchy. Unlike an official marketplace, there were no license fees here. No sheriffs, no weighing beams, no fixed start and finish times. In 1789, the London Chronicle described a booth with a sign stating: “Beere, wine, and spirituous liquors without a license!” A gingerbread seller delivered a similar happy message: “No shop tax, nor window duty.” The only vaguely authoritative presence came from burly boatmen rendered unemployed by the ice. Robbed of their income, they charged a toll to allow people onto the river. In 1789, these muscular entrepreneurs smashed up the ice close to the shore so that no one could sneak in without paying. To their credit, they did in return spend a lot of time saving the lives of those unfortunate souls too drunk, reckless or unlucky to avoid falling into the frigid waters.

There were plenty of these. In one little tale from Frostiana, “three prim young Quakeresses had a sort of semi-bathing, near London Bridge, and when landed on terra firma, made the best of their way through the Borough … amidst the shouts of an admiring populace.” Others, however, suffered a fate far worse than wolf whistles. In his poem Trivia (1716), John Gay told of the gory death of an apple-seller known as Doll: “The cracking crystal yields: she sinks, she dies, / Her head chopt from her lost shoulders, flies; / Pippins, she cried, but death her voice confounds, / And pip, pip, pip, along the ice resounds.” In 1814, “a plumber, named Davis, having imprudently ventured to cross with some lead in his hands, sank between two masses of ice, to rise no more.”

Such tragedies aside, the Frost Fairs represented the purest distillation of collective joy – and 1814’s week-long party meant they ended on a high note. “There were fires blazing, sausages frying, fiddlers tuning, horns blowing, and groups of dancers in incessant employment and requisition,” summarised the Illustrated London News. It all kicked off on 1^st February with the familiar eruption of booths, ornamented with streamers, flags and signs, offering food, drink and entertainments. “Among the more curious of these was the ceremony of roasting a small sheep, which was toasted, or rather burnt, over a coal fire, placed in a large iron pan,” wrote the author of Frostiana. “For a view of this extraordinary spectacle, sixpence was demanded, and willingly paid. The delicate meat when done, was sold at a shilling a slice, and termed ‘Lapland mutton’.”

By the following day, a “grand mall” stretched from Blackfriars Bridge to London Bridge, “lined on each side with tradesmen of all descriptions.” As has been true of every public event in the history of Britain, a lot of what was sold was tourist tat: “Every day brought a fresh accession of pedlars to sell their wares; and the greatest rubbish of all sorts was raked up and sold at double and treble the original cost. Books and toys labelled ‘bought on the Thames’ were seen in profusion.”

While the entertainment was plentiful, it seems to have been a little less bloody than in previous years. “Skittles was played by several parties, and the drinking tents filled by females and their companions, dancing reels to the sound of fiddles, while others sat round large fires, drinking rum, grog, and other spirits.” For a change, there was no mention of fox hunting, bear baiting or bull fighting. No animals other than roasted oxen were ripped to shreds on the ice.

There is a prevailing legend that the 1814 fair featured the most extraordinary of all Frost Fair animals: an elephant, paraded around on the ice. While I would love this to be true, I haven’t found a single contemporary reference. Apparently, none of the event’s reporters deemed the appearance of a massive pachyderm sufficiently noteworthy to warrant inclusion in their accounts. Frostiana, for example, tells of “four donkeys, which trotted a nimble pace, and produced considerable merriment”, but remains tellingly silent on the matter of elephants.

The elephant, then, is almost certainly a myth, but it’s one we might still choose to believe. With so much adrenaline, anarchic joy and Old Tom gin coursing through the Frost Fairs, stranger things certainly happened. We shouldn’t let facts spoil the fun.

Mark Riddaway is the author of Borough Market: Edible Histories, available now in paperback