Few people can have loved London's river as much as Albert Gravely Linney (1873–1936). He was a writer and journalist, a creditable cricketer in his youth, and a keen amateur photographer. As a young man he trained as a teacher and then took passage on a small barque from the West India Docks to Australia. Failing to make his fortune there, he worked his passage back on an Orient liner.
In 1925 he became the first editor of the new Port of London Authority Monthly Magazine and it was in this capacity that he was able to fully explore the working Thames and its riverbanks. Permitted access to the enclosed docks, he rode frequently on the Harbour Service patrol boats as they went about their daily business. And wherever he went, Linney took his camera. He also published a number of books, most noticeably Peepshow of the Port of London (1929) and The Lure and Lore of London's River (1930), both of which offered a eulogistic portrait of the Thames and the port.
What distinguished Linney was his intense fascination with the Thames riverscape in all its variety, with its docks and wharves, dockyards, oil tankages, power stations, rubbish dumps and gravel pits; from the lonely marshland of the estuary to the close-packed docks in Rotherhithe and the Isle of Dogs.
He savoured the different flavour of each of the enclosed docks and was particularly sensitive to the presence of the past in the river environment. Sometimes this brought out an almost mystical quality in his observation. "I sat in the doorway gazing over to the Isle of Dogs, and it seemed that around me were shadowy others staring out at a river of the past." His favourite location for watching the coming and going of the Thames was undoubtedly the garden of the Tilbury Hotel "On a spring morning when the long path of the garden running parallel to the water is gay with flowers and the blossom is on the trees I know no more delightful spot for lingering."