Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  It is hardly surprising that the foreshore here is littered with shards of drinking vessels. Bungholes from medieval cisterns and large storage vessels are the easiest pieces to identify: thumb-width holes with a flat or crimped wall of thickened clay built up around it as reinforcement to prevent the stopper or spigot from cracking the pot when it was pushed in. They were mostly used for weak, or ‘small’, beer, which was drunk every day by people of every age and class as a safer alternative to drinking water. But it is the bearded faces on the necks of brown speckled stoneware jugs that I search out. The distinct fat-bellied bottles usually had a small looped handle on one side of their short necks and a bearded face moulded onto the other. The quality of craftsmanship varies widely. The earlier ones are often exquisitely detailed, with long flowing beards curling down in waves onto the wide belly of the pot. Crude masks feature on both early and late examples, but they became particularly pinched and ugly in later years, sometimes hardly discernible as faces at all.

  In Germany, where they came from, they were known as Bartmann (bearded man) jugs and in England they were called Bellarmines, after a seventeenth-century Italian Jesuit, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine. He was said to be staunchly anti-alcohol and on the wrong side of the divide at a time of great religious turmoil between Catholics and Protestants. It is commonly claimed that people smashed the bottles for the enjoyment of seeing his face in pieces. In reality, it is more likely the bearded faces were a representation of the Wild Man of the Woods, a mythical hairy being who was popular in folklore throughout northern Europe.

  The first broken beardy man I found was beautifully sculpted, with heavy eyebrows, a smiling mouth and most of his beard. It had taken me some time to find him, but since then I’ve found scores of faces, part faces, eyes, mouths, noses and beards – though never a complete bottle. I can sometimes tell from the size and shape of the shard if it’s going to be a neck and hold my breath in anticipation as I turn it over or pull it out of the mud. Each Bellarmine is unique: some faces are grotesque, sneering and angry, while others have cheerful, daft grins. My motley crew sit side by side in a cabinet at home, a line-up of broken misfits and odd bods. I like to think of them coming to life when the house is asleep, like a group of old men in a tavern, bragging and swapping tall tales.

  The bodies of some German stoneware bottles can also be intricately decorated. I have a collection of shards with applied oak leaves, acorns, small portraits, flowers and the coats of arms of the various merchants who commissioned them and the towns and cities where they were made. Some are randomly splashed with cobalt blue on top of the brown salt glaze and I have one piece that is dated 1594, the year Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors was first performed. It makes me wonder if the bottle slipped from the hand of a theatregoer as he fell asleep, drunk, in the back of a wherry on his way home to the north side and his long-suffering wife.

  Foreshore finds that can be attributed to a specific place or moment in history are particularly special to me and for this reason one of my most precious pieces is a Tudor money box that was found on the foreshore at Bankside in the 1980s. It was given to me by a mudlark who had been given it by another mudlark, and I will be its faithful custodian until I pass it on to the next person to continue its journey through time.

  It is about the size of an orange, a perfect palm-sized fit, and made of a coarse, buff pottery with an uneven covering of rich speckled green glaze, characteristic of the time it was made. Pots, jugs and bowls that were decorated with this type of glaze were dipped quickly or splashed, leaving areas that were unglazed. The two small, unglazed circles on the side of my little money box might be where the potter’s fingers held it while it was dipped or it could be where it rested between other money boxes in the kiln.

  Fragments of similar money boxes were found during excavations at the site of the new Globe Theatre and I have my own collection of button-like moneybox finials from the foreshore at Bankside. It is thought they were used by ‘gatherers’ to collect entrance fees at the playhouses. ‘Groundlings’ stood in the uncovered yard in front of the stage and paid one penny, roughly one-twelfth of a worker’s weekly salary. For an extra penny, you could stand in the covered galleries around the side and for a penny on top of that you could sit in the upper gallery. Only rich merchants and nobility could afford the sixpence for the Lord’s Rooms, which were on a balcony at the back of the stage.

  I wonder if the gatherer who once held my little pot had been busy with a whore and was late for work the day he used it, only just making the performance, which would have begun at 2 p.m. to make use of the afternoon light, and avoiding the wrath of his drunken employer. Perhaps he had snatched the empty box from a pile that had been delivered by the potter earlier that day before squeezing his way through the noisy crowd that had started to gather in front of the brightly painted stage. Much of the audience would already have been loud and drunk and as they pressed their small silver pennies into the slit in the side of the box, they would have blasted him with foul breath from the raw garlic they’d been chewing on.

  His feet would have crunched on the thick layer of hazelnut shells dropped by previous audiences, which was mixed with cinders to give substance to the dirt floor onto which the rain fell through the open roof. The audience added to the stinking quagmire if they were unwilling or unable to urinate into the buckets, which were passed round during the performance and sold on to the dyers and tanners across the river afterwards. The apple, beer, wine and nut sellers may already have been circulating, and he would have held tight to the little box for fear of the pickpockets and rogues that preyed on the drunken crowd, which groaned with each new body that now squeezed in. By the time he closed the door there would have been barely an inch to spare. He would have returned the money box to the room behind the theatre, known to all as the box office, and left as his master began to smash the pots and count his profits.

  Some of my most intimate and evocative foreshore finds are clay pipes, which are ubiquitous to the tidal Thames. Short pieces of broken stems and their little white bowls can be found on virtually every stretch of the river, from Teddington to the Estuary. Any visitor to the foreshore will notice them as soon as they look down. The first time I found one was the day I realised the potential of the Thames and it became more than just a place to walk off my angst; it was somewhere comforting, where I could surrender to the history beneath my feet and escape from the present. That small piece of clay pipe stem was a key to another world and an intimate connection to forgotten lives, a reminder that the human condition is a shared one passed down through the generations: we are not the first and will not be the last.

  Tobacco was first brought back to England in the mid-sixteenth century by ships returning from the New World. To begin with it was rare and expensive and the bowls of the earliest clay pipes reflect this, being no larger than the tip of my little finger. Years later, people finding these tiny pipes thought that they had found the smoking apparatus of elves and pixies and they became known as fairy pipes. It soon developed into a craze, however, becoming both fashionable and commonplace – even Elizabeth I is said to have tried smoking, although in those days they referred to smoking as ‘tobacco drinking’. But James I was not so keen and even wrote a treatise against it called A Counterblaste to Tobacco. In it he railed against smoking, calling it ‘A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomeless’.

  James I failed to turn the general public against smoking and instead it became even more popular. As demand grew, more tobacco was grown in the American colonies, the price of it fell and pipe bowls increased in size until by the eighteenth century they were roughly three times larger than the original ‘fairy’ pipes. London took to smoking with zeal. A Swiss traveller in 1599 noted: ‘They carry the instrument on them, lighting up on all occasions: at the play, in taverns
or elsewhere.’ In 1614, a pamphleteer claimed that there were 7,000 tobacco houses, more than all the ale houses and taverns put together, where tobacco, snuff and smoking accessories, including pipes, were sold. Even allowing for some exaggeration, this shows how popular smoking had become in the capital.

  Tiny Elizabethan pipe bowls are now rare and difficult to find. In all the years I’ve been mudlarking I’ve only found five very precious bowls, and all from one small area that’s known for its Tudor finds. Later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pipes are far more common and I’ve found hundreds of them, but unless they are exceptionally long I leave them where they are for others to find. By the time they surface on the foreshore the stems are usually broken and fairly short, but when they were new some of them may have been quite ridiculously long. In the mid-eighteenth century, pipes eighteen to twenty-four inches long called alderman straws were a fashionable, if impractical, choice. The nineteenth-century equivalents were nicknamed churchwarden pipes (some say it was because churchwardens liked to smoke them while they waited for church services to end), but the longest of all were known as a ‘yard of clay’. Needless to say the fashion did not last. Complete alderman and churchwarden pipes are sometimes found preserved in the soft Thames mud, but as far as I know a complete 36-incher has yet to be found.

  Most of the pipes are plain, but occasionally I’ll spot a decorated bowl: the royal coat of arms, crowned and flanked by a unicorn and a lion; roses and thistles entwined to celebrate the union of England and Scotland; regimental coats of arms and those of livery companies, inns and taverns; Bacchus rolling indulgently around the pipe bowl; Aesop’s fox reaching for some grapes; exotic-looking birds; the delicately moulded head of a Turkish man wearing a jewelled turban and sporting a luxuriantly curling moustache; an early seventeenth-century decorated Dutch pipe that looks like an overblown tulip.

  Decoration lends extra character to pipes and can place them firmly in a point in time. The wigged and frock-coated gentleman depicted on a pipe I found recently was a clue to the individual who smoked it. The words on the pipe read ‘PITT FOREVER’, indicating that the man that smoked this pipe was a Whig and a supporter of William Pitt the Elder, who is credited with the birth of the British Empire 250 years ago. Perhaps the pipe smoker was a merchant and a beneficiary of Pitt’s military campaigns in India, Canada, West Africa and the West Indies. Maybe he smoked it in a fashionable coffee house, where men gathered to discuss business and debate the issues of the day.

  The earliest pipes were probably shaped by hand, before wooden moulds were introduced to speed up production and keep up with demand. One of the only seventeenth-century wooden pipe moulds in existence was found by a mudlark at Bankside. It is a mould for a very small pipe, the size of which has helped the Museum of London to date it to between 1580 and 1610. Metal moulds eventually replaced wood, and iron moulds became the standard right through to the twentieth century.

  Each pipe was crafted in a process that often involved an entire family. Fine white clay was rolled into a thin sausage with a bulb at one end where the bowl would be formed. It was set aside to stiffen up a little before a thin metal wire was carefully inserted up the stem to form the air passage. The whole thing was then put into an oiled metal mould, which was clamped tight in a vice-like press, and a metal stopper was forced into the bowl end to compress the clay and form the bowl cavity. When the stopper was removed the wire in the stem was pushed in a little further to connect with the bowl cavity and excess clay was trimmed off the top of the mould with a knife. The mould was then opened, the pipe was lifted out on the wire, and it was set aside on a rack until it was dry enough to handle and the excess clay trimmed away. The whole process took just a few seconds, which is how so many could be made. Men usually did the moulding and women, most often their wives, finished the pipes, while children helped to prepare the clay and pack the finished pipes.

  Between 1600 and 1700 the rims were usually smoothed and finished with a band of milling made up of a series of short lines, much like those on the edge of a coin, but after 1700, up to 1850, the rim was left with a plain cut surface that often showed the marks of the trimming knife. The best-quality pipes were burnished by rubbing them gently with a hard polished tool made of metal or stone (usually agate) before they were fired. This gave them an opulent smoothness and a soft shine that is still preserved on some of the pipes I find on the foreshore today.

  The ends of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pipe stems were dipped in red wax to prevent them from sticking to the smoker’s lips and freshly eroded pipe stems sometimes have an inch of this faded wax still clinging to the clay. At the other end of the stem, beneath the bowl, clay pipes also have what is known as a ‘heel’. Either side of the small short heels of eighteenth-century pipes often have initials, or occasionally small symbols like suns, crowns and horseshoes. These are makers’ marks. If they are viewed when the pipe is held facing away from you as if it is being smoked, the Christian name initial is on the left and the surname on the right. More rarely, seventeenth-century pipes have initials or monograms, often accompanied by stylised tobacco leaves, stamped into the flat heel of the pipe bowl, which can reveal a remarkable amount of detail about the men that made them – names, dates and even the addresses of their workshops. Smokers also left their mark – tooth marks on stems where the pipe was gripped between yellow stained teeth, bowls blackened inside with soot that sometimes also licks up around the outside edge.

  Given their fragility, it’s incredible how many pipes survive both the waves and the crushing mud of the foreshore. On very low tides, in one particular spot, it is difficult not to step on the eighteenth-century bowls that poke out of the mud and roll around at the water’s edge. There may once have been a pipe kiln close by, or perhaps street waste containing thousands of discarded pipes was dumped in cartloads onto the foreshore. The reason that there are so many of them is that they were relatively cheap and made in hundreds of thousands. Most inns, taverns and coffee houses would have provided boxes of them for their customers to choose from, and some would have been sold ready-packed with tobacco. They were looked after and reused – stems were cleared of built-up tar in the hearth, sometimes bundled into special wire cages – but the stems broke easily and once they became ‘nose warmers’, too short to provide a cool smoke, they were thrown away. I find the number of pipes varies from tide to tide, though some mudlarks insist there are fewer pipes today and blame casual visitors for taking too many (I’ve been told that mudlarks have been saying this since the 1980s). Perhaps the river naturally rations its bounty, releasing them from the mud according to the tides. But once released from the protection of the mud, if the pipes are not collected, they will eventually break and wear away to nothing.

  Searching for clay pipes is refreshingly simple. Their clean white clay bowls are easy to spot, and gently pulling on exposed pipe stems can yield some pleasant surprises – elegant long pipes that emerge from the mud with a satisfying slurp. Some people like to return their foreshore-found pipes to near pristine whiteness. They put them in the dishwasher or soak them in bleach, but this can be disastrous for the pipe, as the bleach soaks into the clay eventually rendering it down to little more than a pile of white flakes. I prefer to leave mine as they are with the rich patina they sometimes acquire in the mud and the distinct smell of river that wafts up from the boxes and trays I keep them in. I’ve stopped collecting all but the very old, unusual or well preserved, but I still get a kick out of spotting them in the mud. Even if I’m not going to take it home with me, I will pick one up just for the thrill of holding such a perfectly formed and skilfully made object. I don’t smoke, but there’s something so tactile about old clay pipes that they could almost convince me to take it up.

  QUEENHITHE

  The wealth which she rescues, half-digested, from the maw of Father Thames, is of a various and rather equivocal description, and consists of more items than we can here specify. We can, however, from ac
tual observation, testify to a portion of them: these are, firewood in very small fragments, with now and then, by way of a prize, a stave of an old cask; broken glass, and bottles either of glass or stone unbroken; bones, principally of drowned animals, washed into skeletons; ropes, and fragments of ropes, which will pick into tow; old iron or lead, or metal of any sort which may have dropped overboard from passing vessels; and last, but by no means least, coal from the coal barges, which, as they are passing up and down all day long, and all the year round, cannot fail of dropping a pretty generous tribute to the toils of the tide-waitress.

  Charles Manby Smith, ‘The Tide Waitress’, Curiosities of London Life or Phases, Physiological and Social of the Great Metropolis (1853)

  There are parts of the foreshore that sing with the voices of the past and have absorbed the richness of life: people’s toil, pain, hope, happiness and disappointment. Their ghostly essence is contained within the mud and thrown onto the shore with every lapping wave. The ancient dock of Queenhithe is one such place. It is the remnant of a time when the riverside rippled with small inlets. As time passed, these have been filled in and built over, but Queenhithe was left, the only surviving ancient dock along the city’s waterfront.

  Queenhithe is located a little to the east of the Millennium Bridge on the north shore of the Thames and is tightly hemmed in on each side by ugly modern buildings: offices and apartments with dark windows that stare down on the ancient space. Now silted up, the dock is filled with shingle and rubble and a lake of deceptively deep mud at low tide. It slopes gently up from the river and traps the flotsam and jetsam of modern London life against its back wall. Bottles, balloons, balls, orange life-preserver rings, traffic cones and all manner of other plastic horrors pile up in a jumbled multicoloured mess. On one side, thick concrete columns support the red-brick building that juts out over part of the old dock, creating a dark, dank river cave lined with brown slime. At its mouth, the foreshore is skinned and naked, the shingle eroded away, exposing the mud to the mercy of the river, which removes a tiny bit more on every tide. As it erodes, the smooth mud gradually reveals the past that has been poured into it over centuries, spitting shards of pottery, buttons, pins, coins, old tallow candles and even a wooden barrel back into the land of the living.