Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Like the cannon balls, the lead shot I’ve collected also varies greatly in size, from the smallest ‘swan shot’, which may have been used in early shotguns or blunderbusses, to large canister balls or grapeshot, which were packed into metal cans or tied tightly into bags and shot from cannons to inflict mass injuries. Unlike a modern bullet that pierces the flesh with a neat hole, musket balls tore into their targets, smashing bones and dragging filthy shreds of uniform into the wounds to infect and fester. My most treasured musket balls and nineteenth-century bullet-shaped Minié balls are those that are flattened on one side, having met their mark. Foreshore folklore tells of one musket ball found by a mudlark with a human tooth embedded in it, but I’ve never met anyone who’s seen it.

  Lead shot would have been made in huge quantities in the armoury at the Tower. The ones I’ve found on the foreshore may have been washed down drains or swept into the river with the rubbish. On other parts of the foreshore they may have been dropped by soldiers and sailors as they set off to and returned from war, rolling off ship decks and jetties. They may have cast their own shot on the quayside or on ships as they waited to leave, pouring the molten lead into small moulds, trimming the surplus and sprues, then filing them to a smooth ball. Not all of them were successful. I’ve found musket balls where the two halves are off-centre and a short set of three pistol balls that haven’t been cut from the sprue. Whoever made them may have picked them up too soon, burned their fingers and dropped them into the river.

  I’ve also found a few gunflints, which are difficult to find because they look so natural. I only saw them because their smooth flat sides caught the light and when I picked them up it was obvious the trapezoid shape was man-made. They’re dark brown, almost black, which means it’s likely they were made at Brandon in Suffolk. By 1800, Brandon was the sole supplier to the Board of Ordnance and by the height of the Napoleonic Wars it was supplying over one million musket flints a month. Brandon flints were the best, good for fifty shots before they had to be replaced, which was better than their rivals, but the flintknappers’ life was hard. Their day started at 7 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m. In that time a man could produce 2,000 flints in a room so filled with dust that many died early of lung disease.

  By the mid-nineteenth century bullets and rifles had mostly replaced muskets and lead balls. Live rifle rounds from both the First and Second World Wars still wash up on parts of the Thames foreshore, often close to the munitions factories at Silvertown and Woolwich where they were made. Some were dumped in the river, along with hand grenades and guns, by returning soldiers looking for a safe place to dispose of souvenirs and forgotten caches of ammunition. Unexploded bombs also lurk on the foreshore, cushioned by the water and the mud as they fell amid the noise and chaos of the Blitz almost eighty years ago.

  I found my first and only ordnance early on in my mudlarking career. I was poking around on the south side of the river, almost opposite Tower Beach, where there’s a lot of rock and rubble and not very much else. I’d been mudlarking all day and had decided to try my luck there before I went home. It was tough going across the slippery rocks and uncomfortable in my thin-soled wellies, really not worth the effort, and I had turned to retrace my footsteps back to the stairs when I noticed what looked like a large bullet about as thick as my arm lying innocently between two rocks. It looked interesting and I knew enough to know it was some kind of missile, but it didn’t have the metal bit on the end so I reasoned it was probably harmless, picked it up, popped it in my rucksack and headed for the station.

  At home, it sat in my shed for a couple of days before I remembered that one of my neighbours had an interest in planes, bombs and general war regalia so I took it round to show him. Once over the threshold I proudly pulled out my ‘giant bullet’ and he took a very big step away from me. On closer inspection he concluded that it was probably inert and most likely OK, but advised me to take it back to the river as quickly as I could, just in case. I did, and threw it out into the deepest part I could reach. Since then I don’t touch so much as an old rifle round, which might seem like an overreaction, but they are still live and potentially dangerous, and since I’m certainly not going to take them home with me, I reckon they’re better off left completely alone.

  I’ve been told by fellow mudlark Dave, who spent years in the Army Bomb Disposal Squad, that old hand grenades can be extremely unstable. In 2015, police ordnance experts exploded a grenade that had been found by a mudlark on the foreshore near Greenwich. The explosion could be heard up to three miles away. When larger bombs are found, whole areas are evacuated while experts work to defuse them, often bringing the river and parts of London to a standstill. Because of the amount of unexploded ordnance in the river, the general rule on the foreshore is: if you don’t know what it is, leave it alone, and if you do know what it is, leave it alone.

  On a submerged sandbank off Sheerness in the Thames Estuary, an old ship has been nursing her cargo of explosives since she sank on 20 August 1944. Only her three rusted masts are visible above the water, with warning signs attached to them. The SS Richard Montgomery was an American cargo ship destined for France and loaded with 1,400 tons of explosives (13,700 different devices), when strong winds ran her aground and she broke up. She has been there ever since, too dangerous to empty, a ticking time bomb in the Thames. A government report in 1970 suggested a column of water and debris around 1,000 feet wide would be blasted almost two miles into the air if she ever exploded, creating a tsunami thirteen feet high and breaking every window on Sheerness. A more recent report in the New Scientist in 2004 said the force of the explosion would be roughly a twelfth of the size of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is thought the chance of an explosion is remote, but in Sheerness she is known as the Doomsday Ship.

  But beyond the bullets and bombs, the personal face of war is also buried in the foreshore; discarded and lost objects that tell otherwise forgotten stories. In 2015 a follower on my London Mudlark Facebook page posted a picture of a medal he had found close to Blackfriars Bridge. It was a World War I Victory Medal, with the winged figure of Victory on one side and the name FA French and a service number, 19028, on the other. From these details the finder had already managed to track down the recipient: Francis Arthur French, born in 1899 in a village in Hertfordshire, and died, childless, near where he was born in 1958.

  The trail had ended there, but his post was shared by an amateur historian to a Facebook page for the village that Private French had grown up in and incredibly it was seen by a distant cousin called Kristian. Kristian was able to fill in the gaps and even provide a photograph, which shows a well-built young man, immaculately dressed in the distinctive dark blue uniform and peakless cap of the Royal Marines. He is looking directly into the camera, his mouth set hard in a straight line.

  Private French was born into a poor labouring family and joined up shortly before his seventeenth birthday in 1916. He was too young for overseas service and instead was sent to Ireland to guard Dublin Harbour. Aged eighteen and finally eligible to serve overseas he joined HMS Morea, an armed merchant cruiser. He would have been on board to witness the disaster of the HMS Llandovery Castle, a Canadian hospital ship torpedoed off southern Ireland in June 1918. Two hundred and thirty-four doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in what was Canada’s deadliest naval disaster of the war. Some were machine-gunned in the water and the German U-boat responsible ran down all the lifeboats but one. Only twenty-four people, the occupants of this single life raft, survived.

  A senior officer aboard the Morea, Captain Kenneth Cummins, vividly described the horror: ‘We were in the Bristol Channel, quite well out to sea and suddenly we began going through corpses. The Germans had sunk a Hospital Ship, The Llandovery Castle, and we were sailing through floating bodies. We were not allowed to stop, we had to go straight through. It was quite horrific, my reaction was to vomit over the side … It was something we could never have im
agined, particularly the nurses, seeing these bodies of women and nurses, floating in the ocean, having been there some time. Huge aprons and skirts in billows, which looked almost like sails because they dried in the hot sun.’

  I can only guess at the lasting effect such a sight would have had on nineteen-year-old Private French, but he stayed in the marines and travelled the world, living for a time in Bermuda before returning to England in 1942 to serve in the Second World War. In the first four months he was back, he served on HMS President, a training ship moored just upriver from Blackfriars Bridge and armed with anti-aircraft guns to protect St Paul’s Cathedral nearby. It was also used as a floating base for the French Resistance, who planned subversion and sabotage missions from deep inside her hull. It is then that he must have lost his medal, perhaps in the chaos of an air raid.

  The same year that Private French’s medal was found at Blackfriars, a Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest honour for bravery, was discovered in the mud further upstream by a metal detectorist. It is one of only 1,358 Victoria Cross medals to be awarded since 1857 for ‘gallantry in the face of the enemy’. Being potentially valuable and historically significant, it was passed to the Museum of London, who tested it for authenticity and began the search for its original owner. The metal was compared to metal of the cannon from which almost all VCs are made. It passed the test, it was genuine, but the only clue to its recipient was the date of the battle engraved on the back: 5 November 1854, the day the Battle of Inkerman took place during the Crimean War. The lower ribbon suspension bar, on which his name would have been engraved, was missing.

  Research by the Museum of London and the National Army Museum eventually concluded that it had most likely been awarded to Private John Byrne of the 68th (Durham) Light Infantry. Byrne was born in Kilkenny in Ireland and enlisted in 1850 at the age of seventeen. He was by no means a perfect soldier, though, and in November 1853 he was sent to prison for an unknown crime. He was released in August 1854 to sail with his regiment to the Crimea, where he shone under battle conditions. The London Gazette of 24 February 1857 reported: ‘At the Battle of Inkerman, when the Regiment was ordered to retire, Private John Byrne went back towards the enemy, and, at risk of his own life, brought in a wounded soldier, under fire. On the 11th May 1855, he bravely engaged in a hand to hand contest with one of the enemy on the parapet of the work he was defending, prevented the entrance of the enemy, killed his antagonist, and captured his arms.’ His regiment went on to fight the Maoris in New Zealand, where he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, and in 1872, after twenty-one years in the army, he took his discharge at Cork.

  Byrne’s discharge papers offer us the only known description of him, as five feet seven inches with grey eyes, brown hair and a fresh complexion. By 1878 records show he was working as a labourer for the Ordnance Survey in Wales, where, on 10 July 1878, he accused one of his work colleagues of disrespecting the Victoria Cross. An argument broke out and Byrne shot the man, John Watts, in the arm with his revolver, before fleeing. Several hours later, when the police arrived at his house, he put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  At the inquest into his death at the Crown Inn in Newport, Monmouthshire, in July 1879, Watts denied the insult. Evidence of Byrne’s fragile health was given by a Lieutenant Barklie who claimed that Byrne had spent time in what was then known as a lunatic asylum in the Straits Settlements – now Malaysia and Singapore. Barklie also said he enquired after Byrne’s Victoria Cross. Newspaper reports of the inquest that ran in July 1879, stated: ‘When Byrne came to Bristol for his pension Lieutenant Barklie asked him if he knew why he had not had his Victoria Cross, and Byrne seemed rather embarrassed so the question was not pressed.’

  Byrne was destitute after he left the army and possibly in poor mental health. There is no evidence that he went to London and even if there was we will never know if or why he threw his medal in the Thames. It may even have been stolen and ended up in the river many years later. Private John Byrne VC was initially buried in an unmarked grave near Newport, but a headstone was erected for him in 1985 in recognition of his valour.

  ROTHERHITHE

  Mudlarks are boys who roam about the sides of the river at low tide, to pick up coals, bits of iron, rope, bones, and copper nails that fall while a ship is being repaired … The copper nails fetch four-pence per pounds but they are very difficult to find, for the mudlark is not allowed to go near a vessel that is being coppered (for fear of their stealing the copper), and it is only when a ship has left the docks that the nails are to be had. They often pick up tools – such as saws, hammers, etc. – in the mud; these they either give to the seamen for biscuits and beef, or sell to the shops for a few halfpence.

  Henry Mayhew, Letters to the Morning Chronicle (1849–50)

  There is still a set of rotten wooden river stairs at Cuckold’s Point on the tip of Rotherhithe Peninsula, where the river pushes north-east in a wide loop that stretches over two miles from Bermondsey to Deptford. It leads to a stone-paved causeway, where the ferry once departed for the north side of the river, and has been known as Horn Stairs since 1562, when a pair of ram’s horns, an ancient symbol of a cuckold, was tied to the top of a pole and erected there, perhaps a reminder to sailors of what their wives had been up to while they were away. The stairs marked the start point of the notoriously riotous Horn Fair, where people gathered before processing east through Deptford and Greenwich to Charlton Hill. They also marked the turn in the river where it begins to make its way upstream into the Pool of London.

  The original Pool of London is the naturally deep channel east of the Tower that runs alongside Old Billingsgate Market. It is a powerful, brooding part of the Thames, which has accommodated seagoing vessels since the Romans and swallowed centuries of the city’s history. Seemingly disconnected from what flows into and out of it, some days it is thick and dark like treacle, with a flat, mirrored finish; on others, flocks of seagulls ride high choppy waves. It is unique both in character and in importance. In 1581, under Royal Act, Elizabeth I established legal quays on the north side for cargo to be assessed by customs officers and taxed. A century later, it was handling 80 per cent of the country’s exports and 69 per cent of its imports. As trade increased and ships became larger and more numerous, so-called sufferance wharves and docks spread east, and the Pool of London grew. The original section became the ‘Upper Pool’ and the new stretch between Bermondsey and Limehouse was referred to as the ‘Lower Pool’.

  Until the end of the seventeenth century, maps of London mostly ignored the river east of the Tower of London, but John Rocque’s map of 1746 shows how important this stretch had become. His map takes in the whole of the Pool of London, both Upper and Lower, all the way out to Cuckold’s Point, which is marked on the map between two timber yards. It is busy on both sides of the river, with stairs, wharves and docks, but the peninsula itself is empty and deserted. The great docks of the nineteenth century had yet to be built and the area was still inhospitable marshland, unsuitable for farming. A road snakes around the edge of the peninsula and the riverbank is lined with shipwrights and timber yards. To illustrate how busy it was with ships that had come from all over the world, Rocque has drawn the river east of the Tower with tiny galleons in full sail and tall-masted seagoing vessels.

  Until the early nineteenth century, there was only one large dock where ships could unload their cargoes. Howland Wet Dock, renamed Greenland Dock at the end of the eighteenth century, is London’s oldest riverside wet dock. It could receive up to 120 large merchant ships at a time, while the rest waited in the Pool for their turn to offload. Some waited for riverside berths, while others were unloaded midstream by lighters, small barges that ferried goods to the riverside, thus making the ships ‘lighter’. In 1726, in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe ‘found about 2000 Sail of all Sorts, not reckoning Barges, Lighters, or Pleasure-boats, and Yachts; but of Vessels that really go to Sea’ in the Pool
. By the early 1800s, colliers bringing coal to fuel the rapidly industrialising city swelled the number of vessels on the Thames even further. In 1835, the daily number of colliers awaiting a berth was between forty and three hundred.

  The river was so densely packed with boats of all types, it was said to be possible to walk from one side to the other on their decks. It had become a vast floating city, filled with bored, restless men – and whatever they dropped overboard, the river hungrily gobbled up. Broken clay pipes, dark green shards of rum and wine bottles, smashed bowls and plates and piles of chopped mutton bones wash up every day on the foreshore at Rotherhithe. I’ve found the soles of shoes and the buckles that once held them together, boots squashed flat by the weight of the mud, coins, buttons, pieces of broken watch chains and several pewter cufflinks set with coloured glass stones.

  I usually leave Rotherhithe with something interesting. One freezing cold afternoon, as I headed for the stairs and the pub to warm up, I spotted something square emerging from a patch of smooth grey mud. Luckily it was coming out face first and my eye caught on its engraved decoration. Sideways on and I would have missed it completely. I held my breath. It looked like a watch fob, set with a carved intaglio. I hoped I was right. I knelt down and gently picked it out with my fingernail. It left a small indent in the otherwise perfect mud, a cast of its striped patterned back. I could see where the loop that had once attached it to a chunky watch chain had broken off and reasoned that this was probably how it got lost. I wondered how many years it had lain there, whether it had been washed around by the tide before it settled or if it had fallen right where I was standing almost 200 years before.