by Lara Maiklem
Over the course of the nineteenth century the river was transformed. Embankments were built on both sides of it, Old London Bridge was torn down, new bridges and docks were built, and the channel was dredged to enable large ships to travel further upstream. The river began to relinquish its treasures. Rich collectors and antiquaries pounced on the objects that appeared in the dredgermen’s buckets and beneath labourers’ spades. Two men in particular, Thomas Layton and Charles Roach Smith, each built up enviable collections of exquisite river-found objects, which they bought from mudlarks, fishermen, watermen, dredgermen and workmen, often for little more than a bottle of beer.
Roach Smith was a chemist by trade and focused his attentions on the Roman objects being dredged out of the river at London Bridge. Layton, who lived at Brentford, spread his net far wider. He paid comparatively well for what he bought, and as a result he was well known among the river workers. As soon as anything of interest was found, word went round and Layton was contacted. His collection soon grew quite out of proportion. His house was stacked high with boxes of rare treasures that spilled out into his garden and filled thirty sheds. He became a recluse, gradually retreating into his own world in his odd house amid his hoarded possessions. Sometimes he lent pieces to learned societies, but mostly they stayed in boxes, hidden away and unrecorded. When he died in 1911, antiquaries came to assess his collection. They opened box after box of delights, among which they found twenty-eight Middle Bronze Age rapiers, thirty-three Late Bronze Age swords, thirty-four spearheads and six bronze sickles, all of which had been found in the Thames.
But not all was as it seemed. In their haste to acquire booty from the river, some collectors fell foul of two cunning mudlarks called William Smith and Charles Eaton, who cleverly exploited the situation to make a few quid for themselves. Billy and Charley decided that they could make more money by manufacturing their own ‘found’ antiquities and began casting a range of faux-medieval objects in hand-cut plaster moulds. At the start of their enterprise they claimed to have found their trinkets at Shadwell, where the new dock was being excavated. For several years they passed them through a network of antique dealers who sold them to middle-class collectors, often with more money than knowledge, and even to some of the most eminent collectors of the time, among them Charles Roach Smith. But in 1861 they were rumbled by a sewer hunter who revealed their covert means of production to a member of the Society of Antiquaries.
Though their exposure restricted their market, Billy and Charley, who were never found guilty of anything, continued in business until Charley’s death from consumption in 1870. Nothing more is known of Billy after this date. I like to think he retired on his profits, but it is more likely that he also succumbed to TB or met with a similarly miserable end in a workhouse. But the boys had the last laugh. Examples of ‘Billy and Charleys’ are now kept by the British Museum and the Museum of London where they are proudly displayed next to the objects they sought to emulate. On the open market examples are rare and much sought after, sometimes commanding an even higher price than the original equivalent.
It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that people began to appreciate the ordinary treasures the Thames contains. And for this we have the late great Ivor Noël Hume to thank. The godfather of modern mudlarks, Noël Hume was a largely self-taught archaeologist who began work after the war excavating sites that had been exposed by the Blitz before reconstruction work on the city began. Hume tells the story of a fireman called Robin Green who, during the Second World War, fell into the water while fighting a blaze in a bombed-out warehouse and surfaced holding an eighteenth-century clay tobacco pipe. Green began visiting the foreshore, where he collected the objects that had to this point mostly been ignored – buttons, clay pipes, buckles and broken pottery. He amassed quite a collection, which he sold to the Guildhall Museum (a precursor to the Museum of London), which is where Hume worked.
Hume became an avid mudlark, or as he put it, ‘a something for nothing collector’, and spent eight years – ‘the most stimulating and exciting hours of my life’ – searching the foreshore before he left London for America in 1957 to become chief archaeologist at colonial Williamsburg. In 1955 he wrote the brilliant Treasure in the Thames, whose title says it all, and in 1974 he wrote an anecdotal book about the pleasures of studying and collecting everyday objects called All the Best Rubbish.
Hume was the first archaeologist to recognise the historical significance of objects found on the foreshore. Until he came along most archaeologists were dismissive of artefacts found out of context, perceiving them to have less historical value, but Hume was different and considered it his duty to rescue and appreciate objects for what they were in themselves and not just for where they came from. His ethos made him perfectly suited to the foreshore, because almost everything here is out of context.
Fine shingle and sand spreads down to the river in a gentle slope at Vauxhall, but this is not a stretch for the complacent. Dips and hollows hide thick mud and layers of gravel disguise treacherous sink patches that can suck you in, steal boots and hold legs tight. There are pinch points too – ‘waists’ of foreshore that fill back in quickly on the incoming tide, marooning the unwary. I’ve been caught out by one of these, further downstream, when I lost track of time and turned round to find that the river had cut me off. I escaped by wading knee-deep through icy water, but ten more minutes and the current would have been too strong to risk it. I’ve never had to call out the emergency services, but in that situation it would have been my only option. I’m more careful now. I keep a check on my escape routes and I watch the water carefully once it turns.
The unpredictable nature of the foreshore at Vauxhall means that I rarely visit alone. Sometimes I tag along with Mike, a foreshore archaeologist who has been visiting this stretch for many years and knows it well. His passion is pottery and we have spent long, convivial hours together combing the foreshore for unusual pieces to add to his collection. A gentle man with kind, bright blue eyes, he has a generous spirit formed by a life of hard knocks. History and a personal sense of place within time have gripped Mike since he was small. At the age of six or seven he was told at school to go home and find out about his family history. He had known he was adopted from an early age, but it wasn’t until he was directly confronted by the past that he realised he didn’t have one. His obsession with history grew from this, and a few years later the little boy without a history found himself at the Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum standing face-to-face with the funerary mask of a boy not much older than himself. It was then and there that he decided to become an archaeologist, but it was some time before he realised his dream. After a few false starts he eventually went to university, took his degree and finally began work as a qualified archaeologist. Then one day, in the mid-1990s, he was asked if he was interested in helping to conduct an archaeological survey of the River Thames and he was hooked straight away. He hasn’t left the river since.
Much of Mike’s work has been to raise awareness of the archaeological potential of the river and the value of the foreshore, which until the 1990s was much overlooked. At the time nobody paid attention to the artefacts that were being found, except the mudlarks who were collecting and selling them. Mike is committed to sharing the foreshore in a more responsible way and encouraging people to use it to explore their own history, but the river is more than a job for him: being surrounded by so many fragments from the past offers him a feeling of comfort and a sense of belonging that fills the gap left in his own history.
It was Mike who took me back to prehistoric London one low tide at Vauxhall. As the river retreated he explained how it came into being and showed me where the water had scoured the foreshore down to the firm yellow-brown London clay, which was laid down on top of chalk around 55 million years ago, when London was under warm tropical seas. Around 40 million years ago the seas receded, land appeared and the river that was to become the Thames was born. At this time it was a tribu
tary of the ancestor of the modern river Rhine in Germany and followed a course to the north of where it currently flows. Glacial advance 440,000 years ago pushed the river south to its current course, where it began to erode a path in the soft clay, leaving behind a series of gravel and sand terraces.
Encased in the clay and lying among the gravel on the foreshore are the fossilised remains of the creatures that inhabited those prehistoric seas. The pencil-like internal shells of belemnites, ancient extinct squid, that swam in shoals over 66 million years ago; bivalves the size and shape of cockles, frozen in stone; and ‘devil’s toenails’, an extinct form of marine oyster that lived in the sediment of the seabed. At Warden Point on the Estuary, fossilised crabs, lobsters, shells, twigs and shark teeth fall from the low cliffs of London clay onto the beach where they can be collected by the handful, and occasionally smoothed pieces of yellow amber will wash ashore where the Estuary and North Sea mingle. Years ago, before people knew what fossils were, they were shrouded in folklore and assigned all kinds of quasi-religious and mystical associations. One of the most commonly found fossils in the south of England, and along the Thames foreshore, are echinoids. The colloquial name for echinoid is ‘sea urchin’, which comes from the old country name for hedgehog. But it is only their feather-light outer skeleton that survives fossilisation and transforms the delicate spiny creature into something smooth, strong and heavy.
When I was a child, my father’s cousin had a farm on the chalky North Downs and every autumn we would follow the plough looking for these neat, bun-shaped stones, covered with intricate patterns of dots and lines. We understood their age and how they were formed, but they still held a fascination and a magical quality we found irresistible. They would have been familiar and yet mysterious to early prehistoric people digging for flints to turn into stone tools and they have been found in both Bronze and Iron Age burials, proving that they held special significance. Depending where you are in the country, they are known as ‘fairy loaves’, ‘shepherd’s crowns’, ‘pixie helmets’, ‘fairy hats’, ‘sugar loaves’, ‘chalk eggs’ and ‘eagle stones’ for the apparent claw marks along their sides. They were kept by the hearth to ensure the house never ran out of bread and on windowsills to protect against lightning and to help predict the weather – they were said to sweat before a storm. They protected the owner from witchcraft and could cure and prevent disease, and in some areas they were kept in the dairy and the pantry to prevent the milk from turning sour. A sea urchin fossil lived in the dairy on the farm where I grew up. It was on a high dusty shelf and had been there, out of reach, for as long as I could remember. I’m not sure if someone had found it in a field and forgotten about it or if it had been left there on purpose, but as far as I know the milk never turned sour, even on thundery days.
Some foreshore fossils have come to London across oceans, arriving in the cargo and ballast of ships from all over the world. Close to a dump of fossilised coral limestone, I once found a large, flat tooth, about two inches long. Every detail had been preserved in the smooth black stone including the characteristic lobed root that told me it was a shark’s tooth. I queued at the Natural History Museum one wet miserable day to get it identified and was told it had once belonged to an Isurus hastalis, a giant white shark that became extinct around 3 million years ago. They can be found in many places around the world, but fossils like this are not known to come from the Thames area. Neither are the speckled chunks of fossilised Lepidodendron bark that are commonly found on the foreshore. Great forests of these tree-sized Carboniferous plants grew about 359 to 299 million years ago in the wetlands that covered the Earth’s tropical land areas. The forests they grew in eventually became coal and the fossils probably arrived in London on coal barges from the north of England.
Flint came in the chalk that was used on the barge beds and it is also native to the foreshore. It formed many millions of years ago within chalk and comes from the natural layers of chalk that line the Thames basin. Areas of grey worn flint cobbles can be slippery and unstable to walk on; they twist ankles and slow progress along the foreshore. Newly eroded flint nodules strike tortured and eccentric shapes, natural modernist sculptures and miniature Henry Moores. Sometimes mistaken for ancient carvings, they are in fact Mother Nature’s own handiwork. Flint is too hard and brittle to carve, but the gentle and persistent action of water can, over many millennia, drill holes through weaker points.
Flints with holes in them are easy to find on the foreshore and traditionally considered to be lucky. In England they are known as witch or hag stones, and were traditionally hung in doorways and windows as protection from evil. It was also thought they could cure and prevent sickness, guard from nightmares and provide a window into the fairy world. I used to collect them when I was small and lugged heavy bags of them home from the beach to thread with wire and make into giant necklaces. I collect them from the Thames now and still thread them into necklaces, which I hang on the fence and from the branches of trees in the garden. For luck, and as a reminder of the power and persistence of nature, I left a pile on the table at my wedding reception for guests to take away, and now I’m teaching my children to use them as spyglasses into magical realms.
Four hundred and forty-thousand years ago, the Thames flowed through a cold, treeless tundra inhabited by woolly rhino, mammoth, wolves, bear and early humans. As temperatures and sea levels rose and fell, other animals found their way across from continental Europe. Lions hunted giant deer along the banks of the Thames, hippos wallowed in its shallows, and by the Mesolithic period, ten thousand years ago, nomadic groups were hunting auroch, bison, wild horses and red deer on the grassy plains by the river and searching for berries and nuts in the dense woodlands nearby. They eventually settled along its wide, meandering course, fishing in the shallows and using dugout canoes to paddle between the many sand and gravel bars that dotted its waters.
Those early humans left behind a range of flint tools, including large oval handaxes and delicately worked small brown slivers with facets as smooth as glass that were struck off larger pieces. Worked flints are difficult to spot among the naturally occurring stones, but I have learned that the key to identifying them lies in the ‘bulb of percussion’ – a cone-shaped bulge that spreads out from the exact point where the flake is struck from the flint core. The tools these people produced would have had many uses. Small flakes may have been attached to a pole with resin and twine to make a harpoon for fishing, scrapers would have been used to clean hides and scrape meat from bones, and blades were multipurpose.
I searched for years on the foreshore before I found my first Mesolithic flint, a round mud-coloured stone that fits perfectly between my thumb and forefinger. Since then I’ve found several others in the same spot – my Thames-found collection is now of a reasonable size and includes small microliths, scrapers, blades and part of a broken spearhead – but the first one was the most special. You’d think picking a stone out from among other stones would be difficult, but it wasn’t, it was obvious, it didn’t fit into its background. I can’t explain it any other way. It just didn’t look as if it should be there – it looked ‘interfered with’ – and I knew exactly what it was the moment I picked it up. I’d found one at last and a mad, giddy, bursting-with-happiness feeling washed over me that had been waiting thirty-five years to get out. I was the first human to touch it in thousands and thousands of years. It was (and still is) the most ancient man- or woman-made object I’d found.
Along the waterline at Vauxhall are humps of what look like rich dark brown mud, which Mike told me was prehistoric peat, created around 3,750 years ago during a period that saw the water level rise and drown the scrub and forests that grew along the river’s banks. Embedded in the humps are soft spongy roots, thin crumbling branches and perfectly preserved hazelnuts, delicate and blackened over time. I picked at the mud and looked carefully at its make-up. Tiny delicate plant fibres disintegrated between my pinched thumb and forefinger into a smooth chocolatey
paste.
Hazel is the tree of knowledge and its forked branches are still used by some to find water and buried treasure. I have three delicate prehistoric hazelnuts from Vauxhall in my freezer and I don’t dare risk defrosting and drying them in case they crumble away to nothing. It’s incredible they’ve survived in such a perfect state. When I picked them up I expected them to dissolve into mush, but they were still hard, not as hard as a new nut, but hard enough to survive being transported home in a small plastic zippy bag. They were the oldest datable organic objects I’d ever found and I felt as if I had made an incredible discovery. But I was not the first to have noticed them. About a year after I found my little flood survivors, I came across a reference to something very similar in Pepys’s diary. On Friday 22 September 1665 he wrote about a conversation with Henry Johnson, a shipbuilder at Blackwall who had been digging a new dock there and ‘did 12 foot under ground find perfect trees over-Covered with earth – nut trees, with the branches and the very nuts upon them – some of whose nuts he showed us – their shells black with age and their Kernell, upon opening, decayed; but their shell perfectly hard as ever’. I had made the same discovery as Pepys had 350 years ago and that felt almost as special as holding prehistoric hazelnuts in my hand.
The best evidence of prehistoric life on the Thames, however, lies almost twenty miles downstream from Vauxhall at Erith, right on the border of London with Kent. The foreshore at Erith has a reputation for unpredictability and I had heard stories of people having to be rescued from the mud, so with this in mind Mike suggested I contact Jane, an environmental archaeologist and Inspector of Ancient Monuments who is tasked with protecting London’s most iconic sites. Each year, on an early spring tide, Jane visits Erith to assess the site, and each year she reports fewer preserved prehistoric trees. They are slowly being claimed by the river: another disappearing riverine feature.