George Little was born in 1860 in Bromley-by-Bow, East London, into a riverside working-class family. Growing up among the canals and wharves of the Lea and the Thames, he learned to swim as a boy and followed the local economy into skilled work as a lighterman, moving cargo on barges through locks and tidal currents.

Over the next four decades, that everyday river work turned into an extraordinary rescue record. Contemporary reports credit him with saving dozens of people from drowning and recovering over a hundred bodies from the Lea and the Thames – one newspaper famously claiming he had “saved forty-eight lives and recovered 104 bodies.” He received multiple Royal Humane Society medals and certificates, and became a regular witness at East End inquests, where the coroner jokingly called him his “best customer” and jurors nicknamed him the Thames “body snatcher”. George himself preferred “champion life-saver”.

Despite the headlines, his home life stayed precarious. With a large family and irregular work, he was even discussed in 1909 as a “hero in distress” by the Poplar Board of Guardians, when attempts to secure official help ran into bureaucratic boundaries about what counted as “sea” bravery. On 26 February 1925, George collapsed in the street and died in an ambulance on the way to St Andrew’s Hospital, aged 63, his death certificate describing him as a night-watchman, formerly a lighterman. At his inquest, his son told the court his father had saved more than fifty lives and recovered over two hundred bodies – a reminder that behind the grim arithmetic was a working-class East Ender who kept going back into the river because he could, and because someone had to.