by Lara Maiklem
I usually start my visits to the Wapping foreshore at New Crane Stairs, next to New Crane Wharf, taking in a deep, polluted twenty-first-century breath before cutting off the main road and walking back in time, down a long dark passageway to my other world. It emerges onto a beach of fine, sugar-soft yellow sand, where pigeons peck contentedly at the waterline and heavy black cormorants sit on wooden posts just offshore, spreading their wings to dry and stretching the S-shaped kinks from their necks. If the sand is still smooth and unmarked there is a chance I will be blissfully alone, if only for a short time as this beach is popular with other mudlarks as well as dog walkers.
Most river stairs are slippery, but New Crane Stairs are perilous, as I found to my cost one cold wet day about ten years ago. Each step is deceptively unique in depth and height and the lower section is covered with slimy green algae. Despite the crude cross-hatchings incised into the surface of some of the steps, I lost my footing here, fell heavily, and bumped unceremoniously down the last few steps on my bottom. Luckily nobody was there to witness it and I limped away with little more than a bruised backside, but it taught me a painful lesson and instilled a near-pathological fear of wet river stairs that I have yet to shrug off.
Sometimes, I’ll start my visits further west and come down Wapping Old Stairs. There has been a landing here for many centuries, and the current stairs date to around the nineteenth century when it was one of the busiest points on the river. I once found an eighteenth-century shoe patten partially submerged in the mud here. It’s a cloverleaf-shaped iron hoop that would have been nailed to a wooden sole with leather cuffs to strap it onto the bottom of a shoe. They were used by women of all classes to keep their shoes clear of London’s muck and this one is worn thinner on the right at the back, which shows it had been worn on someone’s right foot. This is what makes it so intimate and special and what helps me to conjure a picture of the woman who lost it. In my mind she’s rather rotund, red in the face and tottering down the busy causeway at Wapping Old Stairs to a waiting wherry. Her iron pattens are ringing on the stones like the hooves of a newly shod pony when suddenly there’s a scrape, a faint crack, a yelp and she’s come crashing to the ground amid the sludge. In the confusion that follows, her right shoe is pulled off, and together with its patten is lost in the mud.
Wapping Old Stairs are next to an old riverside pub, the Town of Ramsgate, once called the Red Cow (allegedly after a red-haired barmaid) and renamed for the fishing boats from Ramsgate that moored there to avoid the taxes they would have had to pay for mooring further upstream, closer to Billingsgate fish market. In the eighteenth century the pub’s cellars were used as a holding cell for the men and boys who were pressed into service aboard navy ships by the press gangs that prowled the inns and taverns in the area, preying on the drunk, homeless and vulnerable from whom they could earn a reward. Impressment into service on land and at sea was legally sanctioned, but the press gangs’ tactics were ruthless. They knocked men unconscious and dragged away those who had passed out from drink, slipping the king’s payment of a shilling into their pockets unseen. Sometimes they dropped the shilling into some poor wretch’s mug of beer and it was only as he drained the dregs that he realised his fate. The practice of accepting a shilling in advance payment for joining the services dated back to the English Civil War, but it became synonymous with the press gangs of the eighteenth century, when England was heavily engaged in war on several fronts.
I have yet to find a silver shilling on the Wapping foreshore, but I have one George III shilling that I found on the foreshore at Greenwich. Old hammered shillings are satisfyingly large and treasure-like, but by the eighteenth century they had been reduced in size in accordance with the value of silver, and my shilling from this period is far smaller and altogether less impressive. I imagine it being pressed into the dirty calloused palm of a drunken man, such a small and insignificant object to exchange for a life of hardship, oppression and fear.
The cellars of the Town of Ramsgate are also rumoured to have held convicts – men, women and children bound for transport ships that would take them to the colonies to serve out their sentences. Britain had been using transportation to ‘colonies beyond the seas’ as punishment since the early seventeenth century, when criminals were sent to the American colonies to provide labour. After American independence in 1776, and following James Cook’s expedition to south-eastern Australia, the British authorities began to transport convicts to New South Wales. The first convicts left England for Australia in 1787 aboard a group of eleven ships known as the First Fleet. A total of around 160,000 men, women and children were transported. I had been reading about transportation ships after finding three beautifully preserved eighteenth-century wine bottles out on the Estuary, far from any settlement, where prison hulks had been moored in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thames prison hulks held, among others, those awaiting transportation to the colonies and I grew curious. The more I read the more I began to wonder if one of them might have been related to me.
The one good thing about having a name that nobody can spell is that it’s easy to research. I’m related, however distantly, to just about every Maiklem in the world, and we all originate from a fairly small area just outside Glasgow. I found websites with lists of the ships that transported people to Australia and I decided to tap my very unique name into the search bar. Much to my surprise, up came a result: Robert Maiklem, departed from London on 22 July 1831 on board the Strathfieldsay and arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) on 15 November the same year. I was beside myself with excitement. A link!
Every detail of every convict transported was recorded: their crimes, occupations, physical appearance and even their conduct in the colonies. Robert Maiklem appears in Description Lists, Conduct Records and Assignment Lists, in elegant copperplate writing. From them I learned that he was five feet four inches, with a ‘low brow’, light red hair, hazel eyes and a fair complexion with freckles. He had a wife and two children and was a ploughman. He was thirty years old when he was found guilty of forgery and sentenced in Glasgow to fourteen years’ hard labour on the other side of the world in Van Diemen’s Land. He was transported with 224 other men: highway robbers, housebreakers, pickpockets, arsonists, embezzlers and thieves. One man had stolen a basket of eggs, another some cheese – crimes that we would now consider little more than petty misdemeanours.
Robert Maiklem, prisoner number 4602, was brought down from Glasgow and briefly held on the prison hulk Justitia – originally a teak-built East India ship, launched in Calcutta in 1799 under the name Admiral Rainier, and hulked in 1824. The hulks were moored alongside areas such as Woolwich Marshes and the Estuary, where few people lived. Many prisoners were held on the hulks for the whole of their sentences. Others, like Robert, were confined while awaiting transportation. Conditions on board were appalling. Twenty years before Robert found himself at Woolwich on board the Justitia, James Hardy Vaux, a pickpocket, thief and fellow forger, described his own experience on the Retribution, a prison hulk also moored at Woolwich. ‘Of all the shocking scenes I had ever beheld, this was the most distressing. There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed; and the reader may conceive the horrible effects arising from the continual rattling of chains, the filth and vermin naturally produced by such a crowd of miserable inhabitants, the oaths and execrations constantly heard among them; and above all, from the shocking necessity of associating and communicating more or less with so depraved a set of beings.’ Men slept shackled in irons and were crowded beneath decks so low they couldn’t stand up; they were often barely clothed or shod; food was scarce and rotten and drinking water was drawn directly from the river. Cholera, dysentery and typhus were rife and around 30 per cent of prisoners died.
But Robert Maiklem survived the hulk and the four-month journey to Tasmania. By 1842, he had served his sentence and as a free man he was given permission to marry. But that’s where the trail runs dr
y. I can’t find any evidence that he had children with his new wife and I haven’t found any living Maiklems in Tasmania either. But perhaps he left something of himself in the river. Some of those imprisoned on board the hulks engraved ‘leaden hearts’, simple mementos for the loved ones they left behind. They used copper pennies, which were plentiful at the time and easy to smuggle in pockets and coat hems, and polished out Britannia and the monarch’s head, both symbols of their incarceration. On them they recorded names, sentences and dates: in many cases their only personal testament to their pitiful end. Of the many engraved coins that have been found on the Thames foreshore it is entirely possible that some were engraved by those awaiting transportation. And maybe one of them was engraved by Robert Maiklem. I look for him when I search the mud at Woolwich and wonder about the things I find that fit with the dates that he was there. Did he chew on this bone? Did this button fall off his coat? The Justitia was sold in 1855 and eventually broken up. Perhaps some of the nails at Rotherhithe were part of it.
In some ways Robert was lucky. At least he hadn’t been hanged. In the eighteenth century, the crime of forgery more often than not led to the gallows, and for those who had committed piracy and treachery on the high seas there was a special gallows on the foreshore at Wapping. Exactly where on the foreshore is uncertain, but it is likely to have been at a place marked on Rocque’s map as Execution Dock.
Between 1735 and the last foreshore hangings in 1830, seventy-eight men were hanged at Wapping. They were tried by the High Court of Admiralty and detained at the notorious Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge. On the day of their execution, they were taken by open cart along streets lined with jeering crowds to Wapping. The procession was led by the Admiralty Marshall who carried a silver oar as a symbol of his authority, and the prisoner was flanked by the hangman and a chaplain. In Wapping High Street they made one final stop, at the Turk’s Head Inn, for a last quart of ale to steady the prisoner’s nerves and prepare him for what was to come.
The gallows on the foreshore was erected at low tide and, to ensure a brutal death, the condemned were hanged on a short rope that denied them the swift end of a broken neck. As they slowly choked, their arms and legs thrashed about in a macabre dance known as the ‘hempen jig’. Once they were still, their bodies were taken down and bound by an iron chain to a wooden post for three tides to pass over them. The bloated corpses of the worst offenders were then covered with pitch, enclosed in an iron cage and hung from gibbets at Cuckold’s Point, Blackwall, Woolwich and Tilbury. The crew of any ship arriving in London would be in no doubt as to how crimes at sea were dealt with in England.
The most notorious pirate executed at Wapping was Captain Kidd, who was hanged in 1701. He had been commissioned by the Admiralty to suppress pirates in the Indian Ocean, but turned pirate himself and is said to have buried his treasure somewhere in the Caribbean. He was finally caught in New York and brought back to London for trial. By the time he reached the scaffold he was completely inebriated, which may have spared him the full horror of what happened next. The first noose snapped, he fell into the mud and the whole dreadful process had to be repeated. Then, after the obligatory three tides, his body was tarred and left in a gibbet at Tilbury where the crows picked his bones clean. They were left there for several years.
Among the great crowds watching the hangings was one of the most hated men of the seventeenth century, Judge Jeffreys, who took prime position on a small balcony in the Prospect of Whitby pub, which was known as the Devil’s Tavern. Here he watched the hangings of the men he had condemned to death in court. Everyone else crammed into the riverside taverns and sat on the decks of ships moored out on the river to watch the spectacle unfold. With this in mind, I generally reach Execution Dock convinced that I’m going to find something special, but I’ve only ever found one thing with a connection to these gruesome times: a chunky, irregularly shaped copper coin that I spotted late one summer evening in a shallow water-filled dip, behind what I imagine was once part of an old revetment. It was getting dark and in the half-light it looked like just another Georgian halfpenny, perhaps a bit bashed about by a bored sailor. So I popped it in my bag and didn’t think much more about it until a few days later when I was cleaning my finds and noticed it was covered with stamps and counterstamps. One of them was a date, 1654, which by coincidence was the year that Captain Kidd was born.
The coin turned out to be a maravedis, which was struck from irregular discs between crude dies mostly for use in the Spanish colonies. The gold and silver coins that were produced in the same way are also known as cobs, or more romantically as ‘pirate money’. They are the original treasure coins, silver pieces of eight and gold doubloons, that were made from rough chunks of precious metal hammered flat and clipped by hand to the correct weight. So who’s to say my humble copper coin hadn’t fallen out of the pocket of a pirate, or at least that of a visiting sailor who may have picked it up in South America or the Caribbean where pirates most famously ambushed their quarry?
Execution Dock is around fifty yards to the east of the Thames River Police station, a distinctive mainly Edwardian building whose origins date back to the eighteenth century. It stands flush with the river wall and has five white-painted bay windows and an apex roof topped with a fluttering Union Jack flag. A walkway that the officers refer to as ‘The Brow’ leads down to a floating pontoon to which at least one fluorescent striped police boat is always tethered. There is a set of river stairs to the side of the police station that has seen better days. Most of the steps have rotted away and there’s no way you could use them to get on and off the foreshore any more. They end on a wide cobbled area that covers half of the foreshore in front of the station, where the old patrol boats were hauled up.
The River Thames Police have been patrolling the river since 2 July 1798 and it is the oldest continually serving police force in the world. It was formed by a Scottish magistrate called Patrick Colquhoun, together with a former sailor and merchant seaman called John Harriott, to deal with ‘the many thousand individuals, male and female, prowling about in this Metropolis, who principally support themselves by various depredations on the Public’ and to protect the thousands of tons of cargo that sat on lighters and ships at anchor in the overcrowded Pool. In 1792 imports into England amounted to £17,898,000 and exports to £23,674,000. Of this, around £500,000 (£35–40 million in today’s money) of cargo was being stolen.
Part of the problem was a lack of security. Despite the value of the cargo, the ships were poorly guarded – scores of rusty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century padlocks are found by mudlarks, many cut and broken. But the system by which ships were unloaded also allowed for the tacit appropriation of goods in lieu of wages. Much of the missing cargo disappeared into the deep pockets of the lumpers, the men who unloaded the ships. They were badly paid, if they were paid at all, and this unofficial ‘payment’ was an accepted and necessary perk of their job.
Alongside the lumpers, there was an army of specialist thieves and general crooks. Colquhoun estimated that around 10,850 people were involved in theft on the Thames. Light- and heavy-horsemen stole almost exclusively from the West India ships. Light-horsemen, also known as night plunderers, were gangs of corrupt watermen who connived with the watchmen nominally tasked with guarding the cargo. They rowed back and forth to the ships, filling black sacks with plunder, which they hid in the bottom of their boats. The heavy-horsemen were criminal-minded lumpers. As well as assisting the light-horsemen at night, they also went aboard in broad daylight to fill the large pockets of their under-waistcoats, long bags, pouches and socks that they tied to their legs under their trousers.
Game watermen conveyed the stolen goods to shore and game lightermen stole from the cargoes of sugar, coffee and spices that they were legitimately tasked with rowing to the quays. Scuffle-hunters worked the quays and warehouses, hanging around on the pretence of finding labour and all the while helping th
emselves and hiding plunder beneath their long aprons. River pirates, thought to be mostly ex-soldiers or ex-sailors, stole parts of the ship itself, including the anchors. Even the rat-catchers were on the make, first infesting the ship with rodents to drive the crew ashore and then stealing at will as they exterminated the vermin.
For a price, shipmates, watchmen and revenue officers colluded with them all by turning a blind eye. The illicit bounty was taken to the copemen, who were the wholesale dealers, receivers of stolen goods and chief facilitators of all illegal activity on the river. They visited newly arrived ships to broker contracts with the shipmates and revenue officers, provided the black sacks and the bladders that were used to steal rum from barrels, and moved the goods onwards into the black market. Wapping itself was flooded with illegally acquired goods, with twelve ‘factories’ receiving them and selling them on throughout the city.
At the bottom of this pile of miscreants were the mudlarks, the lowest class of criminal, mere auxiliaries to the lumpers. They lurked around the ship hulls at low tide, searching for rope, coal and old bits of wood, and collecting the bladders of rum and small bags of sugar, coffee, pimento and ginger that were dropped overboard by the lumpers. In The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, the first definition of ‘mudlark’ is thief, and comes from Colquhoun himself, who recorded the ‘nefarious practices’ and ‘aquatic depredations’ of all these fantastically named gangs in his 1796 book A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis: Containing a detail of the various crimes and misdemeanours by which public and private property and security are at present injured and endangered and suggesting remedies for their prevention.
Henry Mayhew estimated there to be around 280 mudlarks – mostly children and old women – working the foreshore of the Lower Pool, on both sides of the river, in the mid-1880s. He described them as ‘most deplorable in their appearance’ and ‘dull and apparently stupid’. Their bodies were foul with grime and their meagre, tattered clothing soaked and stiff with river mud. ‘They never speak but with a stolid look of wretchedness they plash their way through the mire, their bodies bent down while they peer anxiously about.’ He wrote of a group of child mudlarks, none over the age of twelve, that he came across at a set of river stairs, soon after the children had left the foreshore: ‘The muddy slush was dripping from their clothes and utensils, and forming a puddle in which they stood … Some carried baskets filled with the produce of their morning’s work, and others old tin kettles with iron handles. Some, for want of these articles, had old hats filled with the bones and coals they had picked up; and others, more needy still, had actually taken the caps from their own heads, and filled them with what they had happened to find.’