Origin

This is the second in a series of blogposts that explain the origins of the unusual names of several stations on the London Underground railway system. The first in the series was published a mere fourteen years ago when the author of this blog considered Shepherd's Bush. Today, we are thinking about Canary Wharf. Who knows - it might be another fourteen years till we reach the third selected station. I bet you can't wait. Just to warn you - the author will then be eighty seven years old and may be even more doolally.

Before people got used to money, there was something called bartering. You didn’t need money. You could just exchange things with your neighbour. You might have admired your neighbour’s bantam chicken so you’d say “I’d like to have that little chicken” and your neighbour might say, “Okay you can have that bantam for a sack of turnips.” Then you might say “No way Jose! Half a sack of turnips and it’s a deal but not a full sack. Turnips are hard to grow.” And then you might shake hands and the deal would be done with no money involved.

People swapped puppies for kittens and kittens for puppies. When they weren’t working, eating or sleeping they’d be bartering. Once a miller called Mr Russell Square or Square the Miller traded his own daughter’s hand in marriage just to get a carpenter to fix the sails of his windmill and for bags of flour he regularly received sausages, candles, juicy lamb chops and farm crates filled with green cabbages. You didn’t need money.

As years passed, bartering became all the more intense. Some things were great for bartering with and other things were almost useless. You couldn’t get much for a bucket of horse manure but you could get plenty for a brand new wooden chair or a straw-filled fabric snake to stop icy draughts from slipping in under your door. They were all the rage.

Peacock feathers and genuine fox fur scarves became highly prized by fashionable women while men developed a liking for clay pipes filled with dried tobacco leaves. You had to offer plenty to get such things in exchange.

In those days, very few ships came up the River Thames to London. England imported as few goods as it exported. We didn’t need things from anywhere else. We could manage thank you very much but gradually that state of affairs began to change.

Tempting and previously unseen items began to appear. Ivory from Africa. Peppercorns from India. Sandalwood from Asia Minor. Small carvings of leprechauns from Ireland. To acquire these things using historical bartering methods became a real challenge.

In 1641, a Spanish sailboat named “Margaret of Austria” slid west along the Thames, using the power of the high tide to reach wooden jetties east of the city of London. It had become a popular place to unload cargoes. That shoreline, upon a bend in the great river, had seen many things coming and going in preceding decades but nothing like what had been loaded into the hold of “Margaret of Austria” a few weeks before.

There were over a hundred portable bamboo cages and inside each one  small yellow birds from faraway. The din they made was sweet but cacophonous.

“What are they?” asked Huggins as he stacked the cages on the jetty.

“Birds,” replied Dalton.

Huggins whacked him playfully. “Idiot! What kind o' birds? I amn’t seen none like these 'afore. They’s yellow as buttercups.”

“One o' them dago sailors sez they picked 'em up from Spanish islands off the coast of Africa. He sez they’re called The Canaries.”

“Canaries?” echoes Huggins who thought that Dalton was referring to the birds and not the islands.

Anyway. That night, one of those canaries just happened to finish up in Huggins’s tiny house where he lived with his wife Griselda and their nine children - Andrew, Boadicea, Charles, Dave, Elizabeth, Frederick, Gwendoline, Henry and Imelda. Mr and Mrs Huggins planned to complete the alphabet in the next twelve years.

The children were fascinated with the canary. They clapped their hands and yelped with joy to see the little bird hopping about and singing more sweetly than a robin. However, the Huggins family’s possession of the pet bird did not last long. The vicar of their parish, Reverend Biggs heard about the incarcerated bird and decided to barter with Huggins to secure it. He imagined it sitting in a gilded cage in his parlour, twittering away. It would be the talk of clergy throughout the region.

Huggins agreed to exchange the little yellow bird for a suckling pig called Sheila.

This was just the start of the canary trade. People who dwelt by The River Thames went wild for the exotic birds. They became more popular than opium or brandy. To be somebody you really had to have a canary.

As a result, more and more ships arrived at the now expanding port on that same bend of The River Thames east of London, carrying vast cargoes of canaries. The wharfside was filled with their avian music. They waited there, stacked in their bamboo cages ready to be transported hither and thither by horse and cart or barge. Canarymania was rife and there was money to be made. The age of bartering was almost over as the seventeenth century reached out to meet the eighteenth.

And it was those bargemen and carters of long ago who gave the port its name.

As they sat in their favoured east London taverns supping ale and literally chewing the fat, they spoke about their work days – where they had been and what they had done. To distinguish the canary landing point at Wapping from other piers and jetties on the river, they began to refer to it as “Canary Pier” and later “Canary Wharf”. It is the second name that stuck and is still used to this day even though the rampant canary trade of yore dissipated long ago.