by Lara Maiklem
It was still some years before I discovered the foreshore, but in the middle of my dirty, noisy, thrilling city I had found something familiar – a wild brooding place with a wide-open sky. Here I found the space and solitude I needed to offset the clamour and chaos my city twin pursued, where I could connect with nature and the two parts of my being could come together. The river became my secret place of peace, where I went alone to watch the seasons change and feel real weather on my face. Without buildings to block the wind and catch the rain, I was as exposed as I would have been at home in the middle of a field, and it was liberating. Even birds are different on the river. Unlike the greasy, maimed London pigeons, they fly unhindered and free. Pure white gulls swoop and soar over the water; cormorants fly low along its length.
When I was by the river, I was somewhere else, disconnected from the city and a world away from my problems. It was my escape, from people, work, awkward situations, even sometimes from myself. It was where I went to forget about my failing relationship and my unfulfilling jobs, it healed my broken heart, helped me to make sense of the senseless and threw a watery arm around my shoulders when life became too much. Sometimes, just a stolen half-hour was enough. Other times I walked beside it for miles, casting my problems into the retreating tide, telling it my secrets.
But I’m not unique, there are others who come to the river in search of peace and to keep themselves together. For some, their visits are a way to control their demons, to deal with what’s going on in their lives or with what’s happened in their past. For them, the foreshore is an anonymous world without judgement or demands, purpose or destination, inhabited only by the ghosts of people who no longer exist. My friend Johnny likens his trips to the foreshore to entering a portal to another world. He calls it Portal 670, because when he first started mudlarking, his route to the river took him past a sign that read ‘P670’ (parking for 670 cars). It became a marker on his journey, the point where he knew he had almost reached his sanctuary.
Over the years Johnny has honed his preferred part of the foreshore down to a patch not much larger than fifty square feet, which he scrutinises regularly for up to four hours at a time. I know I will always find him in this spot and I can tell if he’s had a good day from the way he reaches into his pockets for the little plastic bags that contain his treasures. For the longest time our conversations were limited to the river and the foreshore. We respected each other’s privacy and space and had never intruded into each other’s lives. Then one day he took me by surprise. From his bag he produced a small bulging notebook, held shut with an elastic band. Inside were exquisite miniature paintings, accompanied by neat writing. It was Johnny’s river diary, a record of his visits to the foreshore in which he documented the weather, what he had seen, the people he had met and the things he had found. The work of this man of six foot five was elfin in its proportions. Each of his finds had been beautifully rendered in such detail that they looked as if they could tumble off the page and fall back into the mud again. He’s let me use a few pages from his notebooks for the endpapers of this book, and some of his drawings for the cover.
For most of the people I know, mudlarking is a peaceful pastime, a contemplative escape from the world and a momentary distraction from their worries. But there is another side to it. For some, the foreshore is a battlefield, albeit a quiet one, and the site of petty feuding, territorial disputes, jealousies, fierce competition and paranoia.
Modern mudlarks fall into two distinct categories: hunters and gatherers. I am one of the latter. I find objects using just my eyes to spot what is lying on the surface. Eyes-only foragers like me generally enjoy the searching as much as the finding, and derive pleasure from the simplest of objects: an unusually shaped stone, a colourful shard of pottery or a random blob of lead. There is an element of meditation to what we do, and as far as I’m concerned the time I spend looking is as important, if not more so, than the objects I take home with me.
Hunters, by contrast, are more demanding of the river. They are usually driven by the find, its monetary value or its rarity. Most hunters use metal detectors, sieves and trowels to cut into the mud, breaking open the foreshore and peeling back its skin, too impatient to let time and nature take its course. In my experience, the hunters are often men, while gatherers tend to be women. It is rare to see a woman on the foreshore with a metal detector.
There has been a mudlarking permit system in place for years for those who wish to metal detect, scrape and dig, but until recently there was some confusion over whether a permit was necessary for eyes-only searching. Concerns have also grown about safety, people mudlarking in restricted areas and the unreported removal of historic artefacts. So in 2016, the Port of London Authority, which administers 100 per cent of the riverbed and foreshore up to the mean high-water mark, decided to clarify the situation. Anyone searching the foreshore in any way at all now needs to hold a valid permit. There are two kinds of permit: a ‘standard’ permit, for which anyone can apply, allowing metal detecting and digging down to 7.5 centimetres in permitted areas, and a ‘mudlark’ permit, which allows the holder to dig to a depth of 1.2 metres and use metal detectors on parts of the foreshore that standard permit holders aren’t allowed to detect on.
But it is not as easy as you might think to get your hands on a mudlark permit. Currently, you have to be a member of the Society of Mudlarks, and in order to be eligible to join the Society of Mudlarks, you need to have held a standard permit and have been reporting your finds to the Museum of London for two years. But even that doesn’t guarantee a mudlark permit, since membership is at the discretion of the society, which maintains a deliberate air of mystery and exclusivity. Their loose invitation-only, one-in-one-out policy limits its numbers, and it can take years to receive an invitation, if at all.
You would be forgiven for thinking the society’s roots lie in some nineteenth-century cult, but in fact they only date back to the 1970s, when hobbyist metal detecting was in its infancy. In an attempt to control and monitor what was being taken and to discourage illegal digging, permits were issued that allowed people to dig the foreshore in return for recording their finds with the Museum of London. Over time, the society has developed into a select group of around fifty members, predominantly men and mostly metal detectorists, who meet regularly at a secret location (actually, it’s a not-so-secret London pub). I don’t know exactly what happens at these meetings, nobody does except the members – even the Finds Liaison Officer who records their finds for the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the experts who are invited to come and talk on various subjects have to sit outside the room and wait until they are called in – but I suspect it follows a similar pattern to most metal-detecting club meetings and involves nothing more mysterious than comparing and discussing recent finds.
Our knowledge of the city and the lives of its inhabitants over millennia has undoubtedly been increased by the objects society members have dug up over the years, but I think the time has come to ban digging completely. There is no need to keep disturbing an already fragile and fast-eroding foreshore for more and better objects. They are better left where they are for the future, rather than putting them at the mercy of an indiscriminate spade or fork. While only a handful of people still legally dig, the damage they do can be considerable. They hack through centuries in an afternoon, and in their rush to beat the incoming tide, they smash delicate objects and miss the small and non-metallic pieces that don’t register on the sweep of their metal detectors. They leave the foreshore pocked with soft mud and poorly filled-in holes that are lethal to unwary ankles, and the objects they overlook are left to the mercy of the tides. I have made some of my best finds where the diggers have been at work and I hate to think how much more the river has claimed.
Some people commit their troubles to the river in a more tangible way by physically throwing them in and letting the water take them away. The more modern flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the foreshore can sometimes feel quite intrusive. I have found
prayers and curses, remembrance wreaths, single roses, love letters, torn-up photographs, and wedding and engagement rings. They are all windows onto private moments and uncomfortable evidence of unhappiness. In many ways, I dread these encounters. They make me feel uneasy, as though I am rifling through personal possessions or eavesdropping on a stranger’s life. It is a very different feeling from finding an old object that belonged to someone long ago. There is a good chance the owners of these objects are still alive and that they threw them into the river in the belief that the water would swallow their problems up and make them disappear for ever. They thought they were throwing them into a private space; they didn’t consider scavengers like me.
I’ve kept or given away the modern rings I’ve found, except for one. It was a simple plain nine-karat gold wedding band, worn in places, nothing unusual apart from the inscription ‘WJ 1970’ engraved on the inside. I put it in my pocket without thinking, but as I continued with my day it began to weigh on my mind. If it hadn’t had the initials and date I would have kept it, but something about them made it too personal. It carried an extra sadness that I didn’t want to let into my life, so I threw it back into the water where it was intended to be. Even more troubling than the ring was an object that looked quite innocuous at first sight. It was a grey plastic brick that had been washed up next to a crook in the river wall in a drift of empty water bottles and broken polystyrene packaging. I had never seen anything like it before. I expected it to be light, but when I picked it up, it was surprisingly heavy. I shook it, and it sounded like sand and gravel mixed together, then as I turned it over in my hands, a soggy label revealed its contents: ‘Remains of the Late …’ I had found someone’s ashes.
I stared at the lonely little box for some time, pondering my options carefully. I even walked away from it a couple of times. But I couldn’t just leave it there in the mud. Eventually, I wished the grey box and its contents a solemn goodbye, dropped it back into the river and watched as it floated east towards Tower Bridge. I like to think whoever was inside made it past the Estuary and out to sea, but it’s more likely they’re marooned, further downstream, on a more isolated part of the foreshore, with the old car tyres, plastic bottles and orphaned flip-flops.
But I think T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, the nineteenth-century bookbinder who tipped 500,000 tiny pieces of his beloved metal type into the river at Hammersmith – to be vouchsafed ‘for ever and for ever’ – really wanted his secret to be discovered. The story of Doves Type is mudlarking legend, although I hadn’t heard of it in the days of the anonymous office block by the flyover, which was just as well otherwise the temptation to break free from the office to look for it would have been too great. I found out about Doves when I started mudlarking and began to find pieces of lead type on the foreshore in central London. I was curious about them and asked other mudlarks what they knew.
With so many printers north of Blackfriars Bridge the general consensus was that the type had accidentally washed down the drains, into what was once the Fleet River, which now trickles beneath Fleet Street and emerges from a storm drain under Blackfriars Bridge. But there were other theories. One man told me about a lead recycling plant that was beside the river near Rotherhithe until the 1970s. He said the type was delivered by barge, so perhaps it had fallen into the water in the process. Others suggested it had been deliberately thrown in by typesetters emptying their pockets on their way home over the bridges. When the pages of set type were destroyed after printing, each tiny piece had to be put back into a separate compartment in a type case. This is where the terms ‘upper case’ and ‘lower case’ come from: capital letters went in the top part of the case and small letters went beneath them in the lower part. It was a fiddly job and I’ve been told the typesetters often stuck the smaller pieces in their pockets to save themselves the trouble of re-casing them. Like so many Thames mysteries there seemed to be no definitive answer, but the recurring question from the people I showed the type to was, ‘Is it Doves?’ and this piqued my interest. What was Doves?
The story begins in 1900, when Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson together with Emery Walker founded the Doves Press beside the River Thames at Hammersmith. Walker was a typographer and printer; Cobden-Sanderson was the leading bookbinder of his generation. Both men were involved with the Arts and Crafts movement, and both had houses overlooking the river. They named their press after the riverside pub, the Dove, which is a few doors down from where Cobden-Sanderson lived at 15 Upper Mall, a three-storey house now painted white with a yellow door, a black porch and black railings.
The two men set about creating a type using fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance books for inspiration. Each letter was carefully developed and the punches, from which the type was produced, were carved by hand. It was made in only one size (16pt), with upper and lower case and no italics. The books they created were as pared down as the type, with plain white vellum covers and gold spine lettering. There were no illustrations inside to interfere with the type – the only variation was larger capital letters that were wood-engraved or hand-drawn. For Cobden-Sanderson, this was a quest to create the perfect book, suitable for only the highest works of literature – the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth. As the biographer Colin Franklin put it in his book about private presses, Cobden-Sanderson believed ‘books could reduce God to a page of visible type, as sunlight on a still morning showed the river in His form’. Cobden-Sanderson wrote in his journal on 11 December 1898: ‘I must, before I die, create the type for today of The Book Beautiful, and actualise it – paper ink, printing, writing, ornament, and binding. I will learn to write, to print, and to decorate.’
For six years the two men worked together to print, bind and publish Cobden-Sanderson’s dream, but in 1906 they fell out. Cobden-Sanderson had become increasingly obsessed with the quality of his work and less able to cooperate with anyone else, and he told Walker he wanted to sever their arrangement, offering to buy him out. Walker refused. He wanted half of everything connected with the press and that included the type – an idea that Cobden-Sanderson couldn’t countenance. To him the type was sacrosanct and he couldn’t risk it becoming commercialised and in his mind defiled. Although it was finally agreed that Cobden-Sanderson could continue using the type to print books until he died, upon which time it was to pass to Walker, he was prepared to prevent it from falling into his old business partner’s hands at any cost.
Having worked beside the Thames since 1893, Cobden-Sanderson was familiar with the movement of the river. He even once described its surface as a ‘sheet of molten lead’ and perhaps this is what gave him the idea to do what he did next. In his journal, on 9 June 1911, he spelled out his intentions:
To the Bed of the River Thames, the river on whose banks I have printed all my printed books, I bequeath The Doves Press Fount of Type – the punches, the matrices, and the type in use at the time of my death, and may the river in its tides and flow pass over them to and from the great sea for ever and for ever, or until its tides and flow for ever cease; then may they share the fate of all the world, and pass from change to change for ever upon the Tides of Time, untouched of other use, and all else.
And so, in March 1913 he began to commit the type to the river, first throwing in all the punches and matrices and recording what he did from then onwards in his journals: ‘Yes; yesterday, and the day before, and Tuesday I stood on the bridge at Hammersmith, and looking towards the Press and the sun setting, threw into the Thames below me the matrices from which had been cast the Doves Press Fount of Type, itself to be cast by me, I hope, into the same great river, from the same place, on the final closure of the Press in __?’
But it wasn’t until the night of 31 August 1916 that he began to dispose of the type itself. ‘I had gone for a stroll on the Mall, when it occurred to me that it was a suitable night and time; so I went indoors, and taking first one page and then two, succeeded in destroying three. I will now go on till I have destroyed the whole of it.�
�� It took him until January 1917 to get rid of it all, throwing over a ton of lead type into the river in the course of around 170 nightly visits. Under the cover of darkness he walked a mile from his house on the Mall, along the river and over the bridge, to a point where the water was deepest and where he was concealed from the road. There he waited until a vehicle passed, to drown out the splash of the type hitting the water, before scuttling back over the bridge and home. Rather than feeling remorseful, Cobden-Sanderson’s journals suggest he was in his element. Although he feared being caught by the police, he also revelled in being found out. ‘I rather like the idea of the discovery. I shall not attempt to hide it up if I am discovered, but shall own up and explain the object I had in view, “to dedicate the type”.’
Each visit was a carefully planned adventure. He tried carrying the type in his pockets, or in linen bags, or by wrapping it in paper. One Friday night he threw two packets that landed on a projecting pier of the bridge. Instead of panicking he found the whole affair quite comical, and after deciding not to hire a boat to retrieve them, waited to let the river decide his and their fate. Eventually he found a wooden box with a sliding lid, which proved to be the best solution. ‘I heave up the box to the parapet, release the sliding lid, and let the type fall sheer into the river – the work of a moment.’ But this method was not without its risks either and one night he nearly emptied the contents into a passing boat.
By the time Cobden-Sanderson had finished, the only existing pieces of Doves Type left belonged, rather ironically, to Walker. He had used them to set a Christmas message to his wife that read: ‘May this Christmas of the Century Prove the best kept unto the last for thee. M.G.W. 3 Hammersmith Terrace W. Christmas 1900.’ But it represented just a fraction of the 98–100 glyphs – or characters – in the original metal font and without the rest of the type it was unusable. Cobden-Sanderson had succeeded.