Selwynn Price

A harbourmaster of London’s lower waters, whose authority over berths, moorings and approach traffic is practical rather than ceremonial, exercised where the capital’s docks, quays and mud stairs meet the tide.

Selwynn Price is one of London’s harbourmasters, an officer of the lower-water administration through which the capital orders its berths, basins and approaches. He belongs to the daily language of the lower waters alongside the port-reeve, the dock brokers, the tar inspectors and the pilots: the working officers through whom River London teaches its hierarchies as plainly as through its piers and tides.

His authority is practical rather than ceremonial: berths, moorings, traffic in the approaches, and the order in which hulls may enter crowded water. He directs it as readily from a harbour-control tower, by tide drum, semaphore and pneumatic dispatch, as from a wet quay with a speaking trumpet in hand. Quay men speak of him as blunt, unpleasant to argue with and seldom wrong about the tide, a man who would rather hold a vessel an hour at anchor than untangle a collision afterwards. He is said to know most working masters on the lower river by their hulls before their names, and to remember which of them have tried to talk their way past his notices.

Companies meet him when an errand begins or ends on the lower river: a berth wanted at short notice, a vessel lying where it should not, a cargo that must come ashore quickly and in order. He is not a man whose favour can be bought, and a company that keeps its papers straight and its boat out of the fairway will find him no worse than the river he administers.

In person

In person, Selwynn Price is a compact, straight-backed and moderately heavy man of fifty-eight, of middle height, with very short, tightly curled silver-grey hair and a precisely trimmed silver goatee and moustache. His square face is unusually symmetrical and formal, his medium-brown complexion weathered around dark hazel eyes, and his expression controlled and observant; part of his left eyebrow is missing, and a narrow old burn scar runs from behind his right ear down his neck. He wears a long deep-teal harbour coat over a charcoal waistcoat and high cream collar, dark trousers, polished but well-used waterproof boots and black leather gloves, adding a black waterproof shoulder cape in foul weather and a compact peaked harbour cap outdoors. His whistle, brass telescope, tide watch, seal of office and compact speaking trumpet stay about him, with the berth-allocation ledger, rolled harbour plans, signal cards and brass dividers close at hand. His domain is one of brass berth indicators, mechanical tide drums, semaphore repeaters, pneumatic message tubes, illuminated channel markers and an articulated model of the basin, lit by only the few restrained, Cambridge-certified navigation lights he permits.