Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  Ships also filled up with London ballast: riverbed gravel, dredged up by big-boned, muscular men known as ballast-getters, who tied pieces of sail around their feet and legs to prevent the gravel from falling into their shoes as they worked. In this way London’s flint, bricks, rubble and even broken pottery were spread across the world and mixed into foreshores and beaches thousands of miles away. Flint from the riverbed of the Thames has been found in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, where it was used by indigenous people to make tools and arrowheads. Broken English pottery has been found scattered over beaches in Bermuda, and it is quite possible that the silver Edward VI shilling, dated 1551–3, which was found by a metal detectorist on a beach on Vancouver Island in 2014, arrived in ballast dredged up from the Thames and not, as has been speculated, from a secret voyage made by Francis Drake.

  As I step over the ship timbers and crunch through the nails, I wonder if any of them were once part of the Mayflower, which set sail from Rotherhithe in July 1620 on the first leg of her voyage to found the first permanent colony in New England. She returned in May the next year and by 1624 she was described as being ‘in ruins’. Although there is no factual evidence to support the myths, rumours suggest the Mayflower was broken up on the Rotherhithe foreshore in front of the pub that was rebuilt in 1958 and renamed in her honour. The Mayflower pub is still one of the only places in the UK where American postage stamps are sold, a leftover from the days when it was licensed to sell British stamps to mariners for their letters home.

  I have found other possible evidence of New World settlers at Blackwall on the opposite shore further east from Rotherhithe. The Virginia Settlers were sent by the Virginia Company, a commercial trading company with a charter from James I, to establish an English colony in the New World. They left England from the river stairs at Blackwall and the voyage took them just over four months. On 14 May 1607, they landed at the site that was to become the first permanent English settlement in America: Jamestown. They had taken with them everything they needed to begin a new life in an unknown land and over the following decades supplies were sent out to them from London.

  In the mud at Blackwall I’ve picked up seventeenth-century clay tobacco pipes and shards of delft, German stoneware and early blue-and-white hand-painted Chinese porcelain, all of which are a perfect match for the shards of costrels, dishes and bowls that have been found beneath the soil at Jamestown in America. One morning I found what looked like a coarse pink clay bangle, half submerged at the edge of the water. It’s actually the lip of a Spanish olive jar, just like the ones that have been found at Jamestown and which are mentioned in the Virginia Company Records of June 1623, when Robert Bennett acknowledged the arrival of ‘750 jarse of oylle’ from Spain. They were also used as containers for bullets, capers, beans, chickpeas, lard, tar, wine and olives in brine.

  I have found trade beads on many different parts of the foreshore – like the white, red and blue layered chevron bead I found at Three Cranes Wharf – and at Blackwall I have found the same long, drawn-tube beads that were taken to Jamestown. They were probably made in Venice, or possibly Bohemia in the present-day Czech Republic, by pulling a cylinder of molten glass into a long thin tube and cutting it up into beads of varying lengths. In this way vast numbers could be made relatively quickly. The ones I have are mostly plain yellow, green or blue, but I also have treasured candy-cane-striped beads. Tiny seed beads wash up on the foreshore as well, often among the handmade dress pins. They were also made by drawing and cutting long tubes of glass and were traded with American Indians in bulk from the mid-nineteenth century. They are so small that they would have easily fallen through the tiniest rip in a sack and dropped between the wooden boards of quays and jetties as they were being loaded onto ships.

  The settlers in Virginia began to cultivate tobacco soon after they established their colony in Jamestown. Their tobacco was sent back to England on the ships that brought them their supplies and it soon formed the basis of the colony’s economy. But as the American tobacco plantations flourished, the English tin industry collapsed. In an effort to bolster it, tin money – farthings and halfpennies – were minted between 1684 and 1692, but people didn’t trust money that was made from what they saw as worthless metal. They were also easily counterfeited, so they were quickly withdrawn. I have several of these twisted, pocked and bubbling tin coins. They have been affected by tin pest, a disease of the metal caused by an allotropic reaction in the cold mud that turns the normally white metal powdery and grey. A tin coin in good condition from the Thames is a rare and elusive find.

  In August 1688 several tin-mine owners put in a request to expand the project to include the ‘American Plantations’. Minting presses and tools from Skinners’ Hall in the City were used to produce patterns for the coin and they were sent to the Royal Mint for approval. There is some doubt as to whether this was ever given and no evidence that these plantation tokens were circulated in America, but during the final months of James II’s reign, before he fled to France and abdicated, some plantation tokens must have been minted.

  I have two American plantation tokens, both of which I found within a few feet of each other (I’m not saying where), and several years apart. Despite the tin pest, it is possible to see the four crowned shields of England, Scotland, France and Ireland on one side and James II resplendent on horseback on the other. Perhaps some of the coins leaked into circulation and were discarded when people discovered their worthlessness. Or maybe a whole bag was stolen in the confusion of the king’s deposal and eventually dumped into the river when the thief decided they weren’t worth risking the hangman’s noose for, which would explain why so many tokens have been found in one place. I know of several mudlarks who have found them in the same spot.

  I find Georgian halfpennies all along the foreshore of the Lower Pool, most of them smoothed almost blank from a million transactions, the king’s face worn away and Britannia rubbed out. I can tell what they are only by the size and thickness of the disc. Sometimes just a shadow of the design hints at which of the Hanoverians I’m holding. They are so common and so badly worn that some mudlarks ignore them completely, throw them back into the river or leave them where they are, but I collect them for the history they hold and I have quite a handful to jingle and stack. It is said they come from the old custom of ‘buying the wind’, when sailors tossed a coin into the river before setting sail to guarantee luck and a fair wind on their journey.

  Much has changed along the river, but the wind has not. It is a biting, whipping wind that blows along its length from west to east, leaving the water at the Isle of Dogs to race between the tall buildings of Canary Wharf before emerging onto the river again at Blackwall, and gathering pace until it is a powerful force that blasts the wide flat expanse of the Estuary. The wind on the tip of the Rotherhithe Peninsula is especially strong. It slices through jackets and squeezes under scarves, pulling hair and slapping cheeks. The waves it conjures pound the foreshore and dance across the river’s surface like tiny demons, lifting brackish spray into the air to settle on my lips. It is the same wind that once caught the sails of great sailing ships and rattled their rigging. It blew trade into the city and sent ships to new worlds. Sometimes, out on the peninsula, when I close my eyes and strain into the wind, I’m sure I can hear their canvas sails snapping and their ropes creaking.

  WAPPING

  You asked me who were Light Horsemen?—that’s a name for one set of people who live by plunder:— that lighter will have a good slice of her cargo out to-night; for those who cut her adrift, know what’s on board of her. Then we have the Heavy Horsemen,—they do their work in the daytime, when they go on board as lumpers to clear the ships. And then we’ve the Coopers and Bumboat men, and the Ratcatchers and the Scuffle Hunters, and the River Pirates; and, last of all, we have the Mudlarkers: all different professions, Jack; never interfering with each other, and all living by their wits.

  Frederick Marryat, Poor Jack (1840)


  Wapping is the stretch of foreshore directly opposite the Mayflower pub at Rotherhithe. It is part of the north side of the Lower Pool that extends eastwards through Shadwell to Limehouse. When the Romans arrived, it was low-lying marshland with gravel terraces and small islands that stood proud of the spreading water, but by medieval times tidal mills had been built along the water’s edge to harness the river’s power to grind London’s corn. Slowly the land was reclaimed and turned over to pasture, and as the world opened up and the Pool of London spread east, Wapping grew too. By the time John Rocque drew his map in 1746, it was a busy riverside community of dockers, sailors, slop sellers, taverns and brothels, a place of closely packed cottages, wharves, warehouses, yards and narrow alleyways leading down to the river. On the north side of the river, from the Tower to Limehouse Hole where the Lower Pool ends and Rocque’s map ends, there is barely a patch of open riverside space.

  The map shows far more river stairs on the Wapping side than at Rotherhithe, with wonderful names like Frying Pan Stairs, Execution Dock Stairs, Pelican Stairs and Kidney Stairs. Some of them lead up from the river to taverns, where sailors, fishermen and lightermen came straight off the water to drink. By the mid-eighteenth century there were thirty-six taverns on the stretch of road that ran behind the yards and buildings alongside the riverfront. Their names reflected the occupations of the men who drank in them: the Ship and Pilot, Ship and Star, Ship and Punchbowl, Union Flag and Punchbowl, the Gun, North American Sailor, Golden Anchor, Anchor and Hope, the Ship, Ship and Whale, and the Three Mariners.

  Today, there are just two of the original old pubs left along the riverside at Wapping – the Prospect of Whitby and the Town of Ramsgate – and nearly all of the old warehouses have been converted to apartments. Private developers have done their best to block public access to the river and the streets are eerily deserted, but of all the places I visit on the tidal Thames, Wapping is the most evocative. The narrow passageways that survive are cobbled time tunnels, unchanged for centuries; dark, cold and windy, musty and damp with river air, they smell and feel like the past. In places they lead to equally ancient stairs, rotten wood and stone steps worn by millions of feet into a series of sagging crescents. And with the outside world kept at bay behind the tall brick walls that line the river, I can easily lose myself in another world altogether.

  Wapping is usually quiet and I can almost guarantee I will be left alone to mudlark, which is one reason I like it; but I also have a deeper and more personal pull to this part of the foreshore. This is where my people first came to the river when, around the middle of the nineteenth century, my great-great-great-grandfather James, a fisherman, boatbuilder and crofter, left the Shetland Isles for work. I knew the bare bones of the story from my grandmother, who told me how her grandfather had worked in the boatyards at Blackwall and that her mother, Kate, had been born within the sound of Bow Church Bells, a true cockney (not that she ever wanted people to know much about it after she moved upriver to Teddington to ‘better herself’). I filled in the rest by searching through old photographs and birth, marriage and death certificates, visiting the streets where they had lived and searching for houses that had been flattened by the Luftwaffe or pulled down in slum clearances.

  For James to have moved to such a place for a ‘better life’, suggested that life on Shetland was even worse. Indeed, his flight from the island coincided with two historic disasters. First, the Clearances, when crofters were thrown off the land they rented to make way for more intensive sheep farming; and then a famine, after potato blight struck. According to the records, James lost a wife and two daughters in Shetland, so it may have been grief or hunger, or both, that drove him south. For a time he worked in the dockyards in Sunderland, where he remarried and my great-great-grandfather John was born in 1855. Soon after, they moved to London, where in the 1860s the Thames had the greatest concentration of iron shipbuilders in the world. John’s brother James was born in Limehouse in 1857. Four more children followed and by the 1871 census they were living in Poplar, alongside the Limehouse Cut, a short canal that connected the lower reaches of the River Lee to the Thames at Limehouse. James is listed as a shipwright and fifteen-year-old John as a ‘Rivit Carrier’, presumably in the same shipyard as his father. By the time he got married, John had become a boilermaker, a skill that reflected the change in shipbuilding that came about in his father’s life. While James’s skills lay in building sailing ships made of wood, John worked on the metal ships that replaced them.

  Sometimes as I come down the river stairs at Wapping and Limehouse I stop and look at their worn curves. I pick out a mark or imperfection in the stone and think about the feet that have passed over it and how the riverfront has changed over the years. My riverside ancestors must have used the same stairs as I do along this stretch and walked down the causeways on the foreshore that are now broken up and vanishing. I am treading in their footsteps and it makes the foreshore here feel like it belongs to me. I can’t help wondering if they ate off the broken plates I find embedded in the mud, or if any of the rivets I find on the Isle of Dogs and at Blackwall were once in young John’s bucket. Did James smoke the pipe I found yesterday, as he sat on the quayside watching the ships pass by, or did he drop it as he chased the mudlarks away from the hull of one of his newly built ships?

  The wooden fid I found washed up on the foreshore at Limehouse has become one of my most treasured finds. Not because of its age or rarity, but because of the family links I have imagined and attached to it. It’s a tool that James might have used and would certainly have been familiar with. It’s about as long as my forearm and as wide as a broom handle with one end sharpened and the other neatly rounded off and decorated with a simple line around the top. Fids were used by sailors, riggers and rope-makers to create spaces through which the rope could be woven together, or ‘spliced’. It has the comfortable feel of a well-loved tool; perfectly balanced, weighty, smoothed by use and with a slight depression on one side that fits my thumb perfectly. The small dimple on top of the blunt end is where it was held in the lathe while it was being turned and the pointed end has been roughly sharpened with a knife. Perhaps after years of loyal service it became blunt and worn and was sharpened to extend its life. It’s made from lignum vitae, one of the heaviest types of wood in the world, which sinks rather than floats in water, but its density is offset by the oils it contains, making it the perfect material for use at sea.

  The most poignant objects for me, though, are toys. I can’t help but wonder if they were once part of the games of my great-great-great-uncles and -aunts played, but even without a direct personal link, lost toys are powerfully resonant. They have been sucked down into the mud and suspended in time as their young owners grew up. Entombed in the foreshore are forgotten and dismembered china dolls; Meccano wheels from the 1960s, just like the ones that lurked in the dust beneath my brother’s beds; the tangled wreckage of an old toy tram; an army of lead soldiers separated from their mounts, legs, arms and heads missing, their once smart uniforms scoured away, and a fearless kilted Highlander, fixed bayonet snapped, red jacket worn to faded pink patches, separated from his regiment.

  Some toys are simple and timeless: clay marbles that have changed so little over thousands of years that they are impossible to date, and their more glamorous modern glass counterparts, swirled with bright colours, sometimes chipped, often dulled from being washed around with the shingle. I once found a pig tarsal bone with two holes drilled through it for a cord that had turned it into a ‘whizzer’ or ‘buzzer’, and a little whistle, whittled from a broken pipe stem.

  Tiny frozen Charlottes are the simplest and smallest of dolls, and Kate would probably have had one. I have a collection of six from the Thames – one of them is not much more than an inch high. They are pale, naked children, moulded in unglazed bisque porcelain and sparingly coloured or painted. Most were made in Germany and were popular throughout northern Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. They could be bought cheaply at fairs and the smaller ones were baked into cakes or puddings as lucky charms. Their name is less prosaic than it seems though, and has a macabre association with a popular American folk ballad, ‘Fair Charlotte’, which was based on the poem ‘A Corpse Going to a Ball’. In it, a young lady called Charlotte refuses to spoil her pretty dress by wearing a warm coat and freezes to death on her sleigh ride to a ball.

  Along the river I have found nineteenth-century dolls’ house furniture – two broken, tiny white china ewers and a small tin bath with no base, all in the same spot – and an early twentieth-century doll-sized teacup that’s missing its handle. Pewter toys are precious finds and can date back to medieval times. I have half a seventeenth-century plate, the back of a toy watch and a beautifully preserved toy dripping pan of the same date that is a perfect copy of those that were placed under the spit to catch the fat that dripped from roasting meat. Tiny toy cooking pots, frying pans, plates, jugs, cups and bowls as well as muskets, cannons, carriages, anchors, chairs and candlesticks have all been found by mudlarks on the Thames and are a delightful insight into childhoods of the past.