1936 On the Continent

Cliveden Reach. It was Charles Kingsley’s opinion that “the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen or care to see is the vale of the Thames from Taplow or Cliveden, looking down towards Windsor and up towards Reading.”
    The woods mass thickly to the riverside, billowing in great sweeps of green to high ridges where the tree-tops meet the sky line. Mercifully, the scene will never be desecrated by the attentions of the speculative builder and his “desirable Thames-side residences”; for the land has for all time been declared inviolable to building by the public-spirited action of the owners.
    After Cliveden, Hurley and Marlow have been passed, Henley is reached. The most classic of all the Thames regattas is held here every summer, when the leading racing crews and individual oarsmen, as well as many famous competitors from abroad, take part in the various events. Henley marks the end of the first day’s run of the two-day journey to Oxford.
    And so along the last miles of the two-day’s steamer route to Oxford, with short stops at Reading, Wallingford and Abingdon. There is a sameness about all the Thames on this stretch, but it is a sameness of which one somehow does not tire. There is always something to see—the swift darting flight of the swallows that skim the water incessantly, a few feet from the steamer’s bows; the stately white flotillas of swans gliding so conscious of their beauty against the green background of the river bank; the constant traffic of small river craft—punts, skiffs, canoes, motor-boats; the glimpses of villages and inns and old church towers and vivid modern bungalows; of urchins bathing in noisy delight and old men fishing in awed silence.
And So To Oxford
    A few hundred yards beyond Iffley Lock the river gives a twist, and through a gap in the trees the first spires and domes of Oxford come into sight.
    There is no town in England quite like Oxford. Almost every building is a “show piece,” and the atmosphere of history and learning and dignity hangs over every stone. You cannot know Oxford in a day, or even in a month or a year. But the best way of reaching the historic old city is undoubtedly by the placid, gradual approach through typically English pastoral and river scenery which the journey along the Thames alone can give.
DOWN RIVER
London Bridge to the Sea
    O N London Bridge romance and workaday dreariness—fetters and freedom—meet with peculiar drama. To realise that it is only necessary to stand on the bridge in the dinner hour and watch the face of some young city clerk, condemned to return to the grey pages of a ledger in a fewminutes, as he gazes wistfully at the ships anchored in the river below.
    When the Thames, east of London Bridge, changes to its other name of London River, it becomes one of the most exciting water highways of the world.
The Ships in The Pool
    What names they bear, those ships! Read the white lettering on the curve of their sterns. “Gretchen Haas,” Hamburg; “Felix Dzerjinski,” Leningrad; “Solveig,” Bergen; “Marietje,” Rotterdam.…
    And just below the bridge, opposite the grim walls of the Tower, is a big black vessel with a cream smokestack and green water-line moored at Hay’s Wharf—the “Baltrover” of the United Baltic Corporation, 5,000 tons, the largest ship that passes through the opened bascules of the Tower Bridge.
    Four days ago her masts were beneath the fantastic Gothic spires of Danzig. She lay at Gdynia while the moonlight threw a pale sheen over the dark Polish forests. Now she’s back in London again. The Thames laps her sides instead of the Vistula. Every fortnight she sails for the Baltic, through the Kiel Canal, carrying passengers and cargo, and bringing the romance of distant places to the very threshold of the prosaic City offices.
From London Bridge To The Sea
    All the way from London Bridge to the tip of the North Foreland the Thames is continually dramatic. The ceaseless procession of international shipping alone would make it so; and in addition its banks are steeped in history. The man who takes a day trip from Tower Bridge to Ramsgate and back by the “Royal Eagle” can absorb in the things he sees enough imaginative matter to bite on for years—if he follows up what he has seen and intends to think about it all properly.
    One of the first features of interest after the huge bascules of the Tower Bridge have opened to let the steamer pass is a couple of squat Dutch eel boats