by Lara Maiklem
But the story doesn’t quite end there. When Cobden-Sanderson died in 1922, his ashes were tucked into a nook in a wall at the end of his garden, overlooking the river. His wife’s ashes joined them in 1926. Then in 1928 there was a great flood. The Thames burst its banks at Hammersmith and the ashes of Cobden-Sanderson and his wife were taken away by the current to join his beloved font. He guards it from the river now.
This was the stuff of fiction. I couldn’t believe it had happened on the Thames, and the more I read the more fascinated I became. Then, when I posted a picture of some of the type I had found on the foreshore further downstream at Blackfriars on my Facebook page, a man called Robert Green responded. He doubted it was Doves, he said, because he had most if not all that had been found. Who was Robert Green and what else did he know about the type? I asked if he’d meet me and some weeks later I was sitting in a cafe in Shoreditch listening to him describe how he had become a man obsessed.
Robert looked about my age, I thought on first meeting him. Stocky with a shaved head, his eyelids drooped to cover tired eyes and his brow furrowed as he talked over coffee about his work as a designer and how the design world had changed since he had graduated from art college. His mood lifted, however, when we got on to Doves. His obsession with recreating what he sees as the most perfect font began in 2010, when he was looking for a specific font for the project he was working on. He knew, as soon as he saw images of Doves online, that he had found what he wanted, and unable to get hold of a digital version of it he decided to create it himself.
He began by copying the font from what were, in his words, ‘rubbish references’: over-contrasted images of the printed type reproduced in reference books, which made everything look thick, blobby and amorphous, and impossible to reproduce accurately. He then sought out examples of Doves Press books in the British Library. The Library wouldn’t let him scan the precious pages at high resolution, which is what he needed, without prohibitive charges and he worked out he would need so many that it was cheaper and more practical to buy some original pieces of his own. So he began to scour London’s book dealers and managed to track down a single page of the famous Doves Bible and enough pieces of Doves ephemera to give him an example of each glyph. For the next three years, he worked on trying to recreate the font from this, but metal type pressed into soft paper distorts and weakens the print and the results just weren’t good enough. The only way he could see to recreate an accurate version, was to use the actual type itself – so he determined to find some. Reading everything he could find about Cobden-Sanderson, he inserted himself into the old man’s state of mind, until he worked out where the type might have been disposed of and he was ready to go down to the river to look for it.
He went onto the foreshore when the tide was out, looked around the riverbed and found the first piece within twenty minutes. It was the letter ‘i’. ‘I knew it was there, I knew it was waiting for me,’ he said. He felt as if Cobden-Sanderson had handed it to him personally as a reward for his tenacity. He found two more pieces within five yards of the first before the tide came back in. He returned a month later with a crew from the PLA, including three divers who searched with their fingertips in near zero visibility, spiralling into the find spot from around ten yards out, but in total they only recovered another 148 pieces. Of the 98–100 glyphs in the original metal font, Robert has around thirty – no numbers and only a few pieces of punctuation. The divers reported a lot of poured concrete at the dive site, from repair works to the bridge, and Robert believes this has entombed many of the 500,000 individual pieces of type he estimates Cobden-Sanderson threw in the river.
Hammersmith Bridge is a suspension bridge with two pairs of pillars at each end, and it’s never been very stable – three IRA bomb attacks haven’t helped. The first, on Wednesday 29 March 1939, was foiled by Maurice Childs, a hairdresser from nearby Chiswick, who was walking home across the bridge in the early hours of the morning when he saw smoke and sparks coming from a suitcase lying on the walkway. He opened it, discovered a bomb and quickly hurled the bag into the river. The explosion sent a sixty-foot column of water up into the air, which could also have scattered the type far and wide. ‘Even if you went down there you wouldn’t find anything,’ Robert said. ‘Those bits I found are my reward for five years of hard work, the rest is all gone now … and I’m not telling you where to look anyway.’ Spoken like a true mudlark. But I know the river and I know how it produces objects at random when you’re least expecting it, so I thought it was worth giving it a try.
I went to Hammersmith on an early-spring day. Pasty-faced people were emerging from winter hibernation and the riverside was busy. Joggers puffed past and office workers sat eating their lunchtime sandwiches on benches, enjoying the year’s first rays of sunshine. As I approached the bridge the traffic petered out. It was closed for the week for yet more maintenance work and was blissfully free of its usual lines of cars. Men in hi-vis vests were hard at work; saws buzzed, hammers clattered and a light cloud of dust hung in the air. I had spoken to Robert earlier in the week and he had let slip a couple more clues as to where to begin my search. Using those and trying to think like someone committing a potentially illegal act, I headed to one of the bays by a pillar where, just like Cobden-Sanderson, I was obscured from one direction and had a good view of oncoming traffic from the other. I could see where Doves Press had once been; it felt right and it felt strange to be standing there, knowing I was treading the same route he had all those years ago.
I walked to the end of the bridge and dropped down onto the river path. The lime-green buds on the trees and bushes were bursting open and the soil smelled of new life and spring. I scrambled down the riverbank, through last year’s dead weeds and onto a soft layer of silty mud that eventually gave way to gravel. A broken safe lay half submerged and an empty champagne bottle had been abandoned by the retreating tide. Apart from that, the foreshore was relatively clean and I spent some time walking along the shingle, trying to locate patches of small pieces of metal where I thought the type might gather in the same way that it did near Blackfriars, but I couldn’t find any and soon gave up.
As I walked to the edge of the water, I disturbed the pigeons pecking around the stones. They flew up among the metal girders beneath the bridge and cooed softly down at me while I searched the tideline, following the water as it retreated. The bright spring sunshine was a surprise accomplice, cutting through the clear water and magnifying the riverbed. Gradually the tide pulled back, away from the pillar, revealing chunks of concrete with nuts and bolts and bits of iron from old repairs embedded in it. My heart sank. Perhaps every bit had gone after all; maybe it was, as Robert had said, encased in concrete. Then, lying in a thin layer of shingle the river had deposited on top of some of the concrete, I saw it. A dull grey slug of type. I couldn’t believe it. I’d found what I had come for and I felt just as Robert had: as though Cobden-Sanderson had reached out through the years and handed me a prize for my efforts.
I squinted at the piece of metal between my wet, frozen fingers and could just make out the curve and tail of a comma. Robert didn’t have a comma; it was, as far as I knew, the only Doves Type comma in the world. To think it had been touched by the man I had read so much about. I stashed it safely in my finds bag and hunted around for more. Two more pieces followed quickly from the same patch, both blank spacers, and then nothing. I searched for another two hours until the river drove me away. I had plundered Cobden-Sanderson’s secret and it was all I was getting that day.
I was beaming from ear to ear as I skipped back over the deserted bridge, desperate to share my discovery with someone who understood. Without really thinking, I retraced Cobden-Sanderson’s footsteps west, along the river path, past the Georgian houses and the houseboats moored against the piers, down the cobbled alley past his white three-storey house to the Dove pub for a well-earned drink. Feeling more than a little smug, I texted Robert a photograph of my treasures. He called me immediately,
a little incredulous. ‘I thought it was all gone,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take another look.’
I didn’t go back to Hammersmith for another year. I wasn’t going to go back at all. I thought I’d cured my obsession and I had a little bit of history to show for it, but it was still playing on my mind. I wanted an actual letter and I had a feeling there was more to find. So one very low, late-night tide, I trekked back to west London for another look. The tide was at its lowest close to midnight, and since I hadn’t wanted to be there alone, I’d asked my friend Lisa to come with me – ostensibly to hold the torch, but also to bolster my nerves. Our excited chatter hushed to a whisper as we descended the stairs to the dark river path. I felt my eyes stretch wide open as I tried to take in as much of my surroundings as I could in the weak light and every step we took was loud and clumsy in the silence.
While Lisa shone the torch, we both peered into the mud. It took perhaps forty-five minutes, but then I saw it. Another slug of type, caught against a chunk of concrete. I snatched it up and trained the light on it – an ‘f’. My wish had been granted. Lisa wanted one too, so we carried on searching for another hour or so. By then it was very late, but we hadn’t found anything more so we called it a night. Since Hammersmith is off my regular mudlarking patch I won’t be going back there – I have what I wanted – but I did recently read about another set of type called Vale that was flung into the Thames in 1903 by a man named Charles Ricketts. His efforts to become ‘a publisher in earnest’ bear similarities to Cobden-Sanderson’s obsession with the Book Beautiful. Perhaps I’ll start looking for that next …
In the meantime, Robert has created a digital version of Doves based on printed references and the type he found in the Thames. As there were no italics in the original version, he is creating them himself and has designed an @ to bring it up to date. According to Robert, it is not Doves but a version based on his interpretation of it: an ‘apparition’ of the original. Perhaps this would be enough to pacify Cobden-Sanderson, who wrote in his journal, ‘It is my wish that the Doves Press type shall never be subjected to the use of a machine other than the human hand.’ If you want to know what it looks like, look carefully at the title on the jacket, the running heads at the top of each page and the epigraphs and first letter of every chapter. They are all set in Doves – and the comma … the comma is mine.
VAUXHALL
I have seen the Mississippi. That is muddy water. I have seen the Saint Lawrence. That is crystal water. But the Thames is liquid history.
John Burns, Liberal MP 1892–1918
I don’t visit Vauxhall often, but on unusually low tides, I will occasionally travel west to descend to the foreshore near Vauxhall Bridge. This is my favourite bridge, a mudlark’s bridge, best seen from the foreshore. From the road it looks quite ordinary and as if it could do with a lick of paint, but from the foreshore and the river it is a work of art that relatively few ever properly see. Mounted above the granite piers and facing the river on both sides are eight allegorical figures representing industry. They are all women, which is quite something since they were cast at the turn of the twentieth century when men dominated almost every sphere of the working environment. Twice life-size, they are also some of the largest bronze figures in London. Each one is classically swathed and holding an object to represent her discipline. Facing upstream, Pottery is solid and strong with a pot cradled in the crook of one arm and the other resting on her hip, Engineering is similarly Amazonian and holds a miniature steam engine, while Architecture, with her scale model of St Paul’s Cathedral, is more delicate and youthful. The hooded figure of Agriculture carries a scythe in one hand and a sheaf of corn in the other. On the opposite side, facing downstream, Education holds a naked infant in her arms and shelters a boy with a book under her cloak, Fine Art looks dreamily down into the water with a palette and brushes held to her breast, and Science and Local Government have a solemn, serious look about them.
The high grey granite wall of the Albert Embankment extends from Vauxhall Bridge to Westminster Bridge along the south bank. It is imposing from the foreshore, carpeted in bright green weed and swagged with three lines of thick chain, and it lends an air of urban sophistication to the river that it lacks further upstream. Before the Embankment was built, this stretch at Vauxhall had a reputation for filth, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Fetid alleyways, decrepit houses, wharves, boatyards and stinking factories tumbled towards the river and the foreshore was thick with sewage and industrial waste. But with the construction of the Embankment between 1866 and 1870 all of this was swept away and the riverbank was transformed. It allowed the Metropolitan Board of Works to construct a main drainage system for the capital and its high walls prevented the low-lying areas of Vauxhall from flooding, which they previously did regularly on particularly high tides. Large carved stone lion faces frown at the river from the wall. Some still hold metal rings in their mouths, while the mouths of others are empty, leaving them with a sad and incomplete look. According to the saying, if the lions are seen drinking on a high tide, London will flood. I’ve seen the lions drinking a few times, but I’ve yet to see London flood.
At very low tides at Vauxhall, the remains of an ancient structure can be seen emerging at the water’s edge. The two rows of wooden posts were first noticed by a mudlark in 1993 and have been dated to the Middle Bronze Age, approximately 1500 bc. Since they were discovered the foreshore has continued to erode and they now stand quite clearly proud of the mud. There are also the remains of a possible Iron Age fish trap nearby and what could be, although it’s yet to be proved, an even older prehistoric structure just to the east of the bridge.
Two thousand years ago, the Thames was a slower moving river, twice as wide as it is now and far more shallow. It flowed over and between a collection of islands and through masrhes, scrubland and mudflats. Only a handful of hills and gravel terraces stood proud of the water in what is now central London, and this is where the Romans founded the city. The native Britons called their river ‘Tamesa’ or ‘Tamesis’, from the Celtic tam, meaning smooth or wide-spreading. As well as the land, the Romans also took the river’s name, translating it into ‘Thamesis’.
The river is why the Romans came. Its tidal waters allowed their ships to come inland, bringing troops and imported goods and taking away local produce and slaves. They built jetties, quays and wharves, and eventually, a river wall. As the city grew, the spaces between the shore and natural river islands were filled in, tributaries were covered over and more land was reclaimed behind a series of wooden and stone river walls. Over the centuries, the riverside crept further and further towards the river’s deepest part and the river channel narrowed to become the familiar thin brown ribbon that loops and wiggles its way through the city today.
In its natural state the riverbed has a gentle incline towards the centre of the river, but to facilitate the loading and unloading of ships that by the start of the eighteenth century were coming to London from every corner of the globe in ever increasing numbers, it needed to be flat. Strips of foreshore were stabilised and level platforms known as ‘barge beds’, or ‘hards’, were constructed next to wharves and jetties. The barge beds that are left on the foreshore today are contained within strong wooden plank and pile structures – called revetments or campsheds – built several yards from the river wall. The revetments were filled with the city’s rubbish, anything that was available – soil, old building rubble and general waste – then capped with a hard surface, often chalk, which was rammed down until it was solid and flat.
Constant use and the persistent efforts of the river to wash it away meant that the barge beds had to be regularly maintained, but by the 1960s and 70s, the working wharves and warehouses had closed and boats and barges no longer unloaded at the river wall. Without anyone to look after the barge beds the river has been slowly picking away at its scabs, breaking through the revetments and scooping out the contents, returning the foreshore to its natural state. In ma
ny places, all that it is left of the barge beds are ghostly streaks of white chalk and broken planks that flap and strain at the metal trusses that tether them on every tide, until they finally break free and float away, washing up further downstream. At Vauxhall, the river is eating away at a layer of old concrete and scooping out the soft chalk below it, creating a craggy lunar landscape of volcanic dips and hollows.
Some mourn the loss of these riverside structures, but their demise is my gain, their contents my treasure. Within the revetments are demolished houses, road sweepings, domestic refuse, kiln waste and spoil from foundations and cellars dug deep into the medieval and Roman layers of the city. It is one of the reasons the foreshore’s bounty is so random, why I have eased an eighteenth-century clay pipe bowl out of the mud only to find a medieval coin beneath it, why Roman roof tiles lie next to Tudor bricks and Victorian bottles rub shoulders with shards of sixteenth-century stoneware jugs. The foreshore is a muddle of refuse and casual losses, and the broken and neglected barge beds have added generously to this swirling mess of history.
The Thames is England’s longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore. Among them are numerous Bronze and Iron Age swords, shields and spears that were found along the stretch between Vauxhall and Teddington and include the famous Battersea Shield. It was dredged from the riverbed in 1857 during excavations for Battersea Bridge and remains one of the most beautiful objects ever to have been taken from the river. It is a long, rounded oblong sheet of bronze that would have been the facing of a wooden shield. It was made somewhere between 350 and 50 bc by an expert in their craft, who engraved and stippled intricate scrolling patterns around three roundels and a high-domed central boss. It is finished with twenty-seven framed studs of red glass ‘enamel’ in four different sizes.