Great timber cranes on the Vintry wharf, worked by men walking inside a wheel, lifting the wine out of the ships
The Three Cranes holds a 4.4 from three hundred and twenty-seven people, and it is named after three machines that stood on the wharf below.
The cranes
Not birds. Cranes – the lifting kind – and there were three of them, on the Vintry wharf, and they gave their name to the stairs, the lane and the tavern.
And they were treadwheel cranes, which is the detail that changes the picture entirely.
A treadwheel crane is powered by men walking inside a large wooden wheel, like a hamster, and the wheel drives the drum, and the drum winds the rope.
Two or three men, inside a wheel, walking – and that is how a tun of wine weighing the better part of a tonne came out of a ship’s hold and onto the quay, thousands of times a year, for centuries.
The Vintry
Which we wrote about at the Vintry pub, a few streets away: the ward where London’s wine came ashore, principally from Bordeaux, which was an English possession for three hundred years because Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II.
The trade was enormous. Tens of thousands of tuns a year, and every single one of them had to be lifted out of a boat by hand or by a wheel, and stacked, and rolled, and cellared.
The Three Cranes were the machines that did it, and they were famous enough to be a landmark, and the tavern beside them took their name.
Pepys was there and hated it
Which is the best surviving reference to it.
He went to a family dinner at the Three Cranes in January 1662 and recorded that it was one of the most contemptible places he had ever seen – a room so small that they could not all sit down, and company he found tedious, and he was very glad to leave.
The greatest diarist in the language went to this pub and thought it was a dump.
The Prat’s editorial desk finds this enormously reassuring and would like to note that in four hundred and twenty-nine articles it is the earliest bad review we have found, and that it is from 1662, and that it is exactly the same shape as a modern one: too small, wrong crowd, left early.
What happened to the wharves
Everything moved east.
The ships got bigger, and a big ship cannot come up to the Vintry, and the docks were dug downriver – and then the container arrived in the 1960s and killed the docks too, and the whole trade went to Tilbury and Felixstowe within about fifteen years.
The Thames through London carries almost nothing now. It was, for two thousand years, the entire reason the city was here.
The pub
An Irish pub, well-run, cheap for the City, and a 4.4 across a modest but real sample.
Verdict
Good pub. Better than Pepys thought. Go, and picture three wooden wheels on the quay with men walking inside them.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
Peter Sellers would have performed this in increasingly baffled and cross tones. The monotone delivery would have made the horror much more apparent.