Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  In the eighteenth century, the most valuable cargo was the rum, coffee, sugar and spices that came in on the West India ships. By 1800 about a quarter of Britain’s income came from West Indian imports. Colquhoun and Harriott persuaded the West India Merchants to put up £4,200, on the understanding that only West India ships were protected, and at 5 a.m. on 2 July 1798 the West India Merchants and Planters Marine Police Institution went out on their first patrol. It was a roaring success. In the first year the West India Merchants saved over £100,000 in stolen goods, several lives were rescued, and the government saved vast amounts of tax revenue. The West India Merchants bought a building on the river at Wapping from which the new police force could operate and this is where the Thames River Police has remained. The foreshore in front of the building regularly yields evidence of their long history. When the river was recently dredged just offshore to build a new pontoon, dozens of early police radios and handcuffs were pulled up, together with old mugs and spoons from thousands of cups of tea. Modern mudlarks have found old shackle-style handcuffs and one of only two known examples of very early River Police uniform buttons. The other was found on a sunken prison ship in Bermuda. Perhaps it had been lost by an officer who had taken a new job transporting prisoners, or maybe it had fallen off while he was herding the condemned onto a prison hulk in London.

  I’ve found more counterfeit eighteenth-century coins around the River Police headquarters at Wapping than anywhere else on the foreshore, which makes me wonder if confiscated property was dumped there. But forgeries are not unusual among the scores of eighteenth-century halfpennies that wash up on the foreshore and are an indication of the sheer number of counterfeit coins in circulation at the time. Most halfpenny forgeries were made of copper mixed with lead or tin, which was cheaper and easier to work with. They are thin, light, brassy-looking and crudely designed, quite obviously not the real deal. Some coiners cunningly cast their coins to look worn and used, but others seemed to make little effort to create a realistic lookalike, with the king cast off-centre and deformed versions of Britannia on the reverse.

  Evasion tokens were produced by forgers to exploit a loophole in the law that made the copying of coins an imprisonable offence. The law only applied if the forgeries were an exact copy of a regal coin, so evasion coins were made to look like regal coins with subtle but deliberate changes. Sometimes the legends read as nonsense, other times they are a cheeky dig at the establishment. The one I have dates from 1788, too early to have been made by Prisoner Maiklem, but it is the year the first transportation ships arrived in Australia carrying men like him who had been convicted of forgery. Instead of ‘BRITANNIA’, my evasion coin reads ‘BRITONS RULE’.

  Counterfeiters of gold and silver coins were often skilled craftsmen – button-makers, locksmiths, clockmakers and goldsmiths. Small-scale counterfeiting of half-crowns and sixpences could be achieved with a simple carved chalk mould, some scrap pewter and a small crucible. Clay pipes were perfect for this job, with the stem providing a useful spout to pour the molten pewter into the mould. My only Victorian forgery is a tin sixpence, which is badly infected with tin pest, but my handsomely crafted brass George III sixpence has stood the test of time well. All it’s missing is the thin layer of silvering that would have passed it off as solid silver.

  Coin debasement was another of the coiners’ tricks. Clipping – shaving small amounts of metal from the edges of coins until enough had been collected to melt down into a bar or to make counterfeit coins – has been done for thousands of years, probably ever since the first coins were struck. A Roman coiner clipped my fifth-century silver siliqua and I have Elizabethan and medieval pennies where the words that once ran around the edge have been shaved away completely. To guard against accepting underweight clipped gold coins they were weighed on small scales with tiny brass or copper weights, known as coin weights, which corresponded to the unclipped weight of the coin. I have a few of these satisfyingly neat little square weights, one for a sixteenth-century Rose Ryall gold coin with a galley ship on one side and a small hand, the symbol for Antwerp (where it was made), on the other.

  Over the centuries various measures were taken to prevent people from clipping coins. A long cross design, the arms of which reached to the edge of the coin, was introduced to silver pennies in 1247. If the cross was interfered with the coin was deemed illegal. In the seventeenth century a square copper plug was punched through the middle of tin halfpennies and farthings to make them harder to forge and the huge cartwheel pennies and twopennies that were minted in 1797 had sunken writing around their wide edges, also designed to foil the forger. After 1662 all coins were produced by machines, which made them uniform in shape and harder to clip. Then, as an extra precaution, Isaac Newton, who was master of the Royal Mint between 1699 and 1727, introduced a reeded edge – small lines that ran across the edge of the coin – which made clipping impossible and is still on some of our coins today.

  The harsh penalties that were meted out to coiners and those trying to pass off forged coins may have encouraged people to get rid of forgeries, and the simplest and most reliable way to do that was to chuck them in the river. The river is still a useful repository and continues to swallow up crimes and misdemeanours. In the centre of town, stolen wallets, bags and purses, usually relieved of their cash and cards, are dumped off bridges. Further east, stolen bikes and motorcycles lie stranded and abandoned in the mud. And there always seem to be mobile phones, laptops, cut bike locks and once even the bolt croppers lying on the foreshore under the park at Shadwell, between Wapping and Limehouse. A fellow mudlark once found eight passports lying on the foreshore and last year I found a big black bin bag full of marijuana plants. Over the years I have come across an arsenal of offensive weapons too – a knuckleduster, lots of vicious-looking knives, a samurai sword and the loaded chamber of a revolver with the barrel and handle roughly sawn off and the serial number filed away.

  People often ask me if I feel safe on the river and the answer is generally yes. It’s open and exposed on the foreshore. There are no dark corners for people to hide behind and I can always see what’s coming. If there are people around, they are usually busy with their own business and it feels safer than on the streets. The most trouble I ever get is from drunks and teenagers showing off on the river path above. They’ve thrown water bottles, cigarettes and beer glasses at me, but I know it’s extremely unlikely they’ll actually come down and get their feet dirty. I carry a personal alarm though, just in case, and I have the number of the River Police in my phone so I can dial it quickly in an emergency.

  I’ve only ever needed to call the River Police out once. I was mudlarking very early one morning, close to London Bridge, at a spot with only one access route in and out. I was so engrossed in what I was doing that the first I knew of my approaching company was the sound of sliding rubble behind me. Two men had followed me onto the foreshore and were making their way unsteadily towards me. One was waving a half-finished bottle of vodka in the air as he steadied himself over the rough terrain. They shouted to each other loudly in Russian. Here we go, I thought. I was irritated that they had stolen my peace and quiet and taken me from my thoughts. But my irritation grew into intense annoyance as they got closer, and then I realised that they had me trapped.

  I don’t get scared very often. So that day, as well as being angry with the loud drunk Russians, I was also angry with myself for being scared. The seriously drunk one slumped down on a large piece of broken concrete to watch the proceedings and yelled what sounded like encouragement to his friend who came and stood next to me. I moved. He came and stood next to me again. They yelled to each other some more and I moved again. Again he followed me. It was a game of cat and mouse and I was running out of foreshore. I reached for my personal alarm, for all the good it would have done at that time in the morning with no one around, and with my other hand I phoned the police.

  It took a moment for my aggressor to comprehend the flashing blue light an
d the men in uniform shouting at him from the police boat that arrived within minutes at the shoreline, and then he turned and fled. His friend simply lay back in the mud and laughed. The police scraped him up and led him off. The other was caught by the river stairs. An officer asked me if I wanted to press charges, but I said no. The tide was coming in. All I wanted was my peace and quiet back so I could make the most of the time I had left on the foreshore.

  GREENWICH

  It’s down by Greenwich I used to go out. The swells sometimes would pitch us coppers out o’ the inn winders and laugh to see us duckin’ our ’eads and our ’ands, an’ tumblin’ one another over in the slush, scramblin’ arter them.

  Richard Rowe, ‘A Brood of Mudlarks’, Episodes in an Obscure Life (1871)

  Greenwich was my home for thirteen years. I moved into a little Victorian cottage, a two-up two-down affair, nothing fancy, in 2002. It was a five-minute walk from the river, just across the water from where my great-great-grandfather had worked and my great-grandmother was born, and five miles upstream from where Robert Maiklem had been held on a prison hulk, though of course I didn’t know any of that at the time.

  All I knew was that I wanted to get out of Hackney and away from its noisy, dirty streets, and it was in Greenwich one hot late-summer’s day that it suddenly became clear to me that this was where I should move to. I’d sweated my way to the top of the hill in Greenwich Park, and was sitting in the long dry grass catching my breath, just under the Royal Observatory where time begins at the Prime Meridian. At 12.55 a large red metal ball on top of the Observatory climbs halfway up a long pole, at 12.58 it rises to the top of the pole, and at precisely 13.00 it falls. Since 1833 the ball has served as an accurate time check for anyone close enough to see it and for the sea captains waiting to set sail from the river below. Where better to start a new life? From the top of the hill, I could see the old and the new layered over each other, Wren’s Royal Naval College underlining the towers of Canary Wharf in the distance, and – just – the long, lazy loop of the river meandering its way around the Isle of Dogs. There was green space, the air was fresher here and the river was like a barrier against the city. The smell of the hot dry grass reminded me of haymaking on the farm, and as I looked out across the view, it felt like home.

  I had been walking along the river path a lot that year, trying to escape the mess of my unhappy relationship, marching against the wind and staring out across the khaki water. And now it was on my doorstep, the river became my regular escape, my healer and my therapist. Whenever I could, I walked east towards Woolwich, past the cement and aggregate works that filled the air with dust at Victoria Deep Dock, and around the deserted peninsula where the empty Millennium Dome was mouldering among the growing weeds. Sometimes all I needed was a half-hour hit, long enough to feel the fresh breeze off the river and to clear my head. And since I lived so close to the water it was easy. I’d walk down to the railings and watch the Clippers roar in and out of Greenwich Pier, depositing crowds of tourists and commuters, or sit on a bench in front of the Naval College, which is now part of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and listen to the students practising. If the tide was low I gingerly descended the slippery steps to be closer to the water. I mooched up and down the line where it played against the stones and gravel, leaping back every time a Clipper sent waves crashing into the shore.

  Gradually my walks became less frantic. My relationship finally came to an unpleasant end and I began to slow down, remembering what my mother had taught me all those years ago on our long, absorbing rambles together, losing ourselves in the details of our surroundings. I spent less time on the river path and more on the foreshore, peering into the mud and kicking over pottery. Eventually I realised I was walking on ‘stuff’: pipe stems, holey stones and pottery seemed to be everywhere. I made mental notes of where there seemed to be more of it and returned to those spots again and again. Since I worked from home, it was easy to time my visits with low tide and I went whenever I could, sometimes twice a day in the summer when the days were long. To begin with, I would get to the shore at low tide, but I soon learned that I had two to three hours either side of it to play with and my visits grew longer. I developed a routine and for several years this was the only part of the river I visited.

  A double set of grand stone steps sweeps down to the foreshore at Greenwich in an inverted ‘V’ in front of the Naval College. I generally walked east first, slipping and sliding through the smooth flint cobbles to a long line of jumbled animal bones that ended just before the Trafalgar pub, which rises out of the river wall and whose large bay windows look out over the foreshore. In the nineteenth century, toffs threw pennies out of these windows for the amusement of watching the mudlarks scrabble about in the mud for them. Sometimes the children would perform tricks and wade out into dangerously deep mud to encourage their audience to throw more. Beyond the Trafalgar, but before the power station, the foreshore is more industrial, filled with nails, rust, smelly tar, abandoned paintbrushes and patches of poured concrete. The local rowing club has a slipway here and early-morning rowers would look up from their preparations to watch me crunch and wobble past.

  Further on there are more bones and lots of modern junk – shoes, phones, toys, and once, rather disconcertingly, some false teeth and a pair of glasses on the same tide. When I reached the fat slimy legs of the pier, I’d turn and go back so that I could get to the western end of my stretch at the lowest point of the tide, walking back past the stone steps, avoiding the deceptive patch of deep rusty gravel that still appears at very low tide and which once swamped my boots. The foreshore was muddier at the western end, with grey patches of erosion, old wooden posts, masonry and bricks and pottery galore. Sometimes I saw other people doing what I was doing here, but it never occurred to me that it had an actual name. I was just happily fossicking, forgetting my troubles and enjoying the peace and quiet.

  Then one day I read a newspaper article that described what I was doing as ‘mudlarking’, by which time, I suppose you could say I was a fully-fledged mudlark. I’d ditched the Tupperware container I’d been taking with me in favour of a bum bag that left my hands free. My favourite wellingtons were kept stationed by the door and I’d started taking a rather cumbersome foam kneeler so that I could search the mud more closely. I had watched my small stretch of the river shift and change over several years and learned how the currents and tides scoured its banks and deposited its treasures. I now knew what freshly eroded mud looked like and that this was where I could find newly exposed objects. I had learned that pins washed together and that smaller metal things joined them, that there were fruitful spots along the back wall worth searching and that worked bone and ivory could be found among the animal bones. I’d also gathered quite a collection of vulcanite bottle stoppers from the place where modern junk washed up by the power station pier and worked out that most of what I was finding at the western end of my patch was medieval and Tudor. My collection was growing.

  I got married in 2008 and instantly created a foreshore widow. I would sneak off to the river whenever I could and in all weathers, leaving a trail of muddy footprints through the house and filling the windowsills and back garden with pipes and pottery. My ever-patient wife simply sighed, stepped over the driftwood and hoovered up the mud. She’s never complained and she’s only been to the foreshore with me once or twice. It’s not her thing. She likes running marathons, which is an obsession in its own right so she understands. By this time I had begun to explore other parts of the foreshore too, travelling into central London to mudlark in the shadow of London Bridge and search the shoreline between Wapping and Limehouse. Then, in 2009, on the day before New Year’s Eve, my difficult and complicated father died suddenly. For a year I haunted the quiet parts of the river, Rotherhithe, the Isle of Dogs, long stretches where I could rant and cry, where nobody could see my twisted face, trying to feel what I thought I should be feeling, to grieve and move on.

  The river
came to my rescue again in 2012 when Sarah and I had twins, a girl and a boy, who filled every second of every hour, sucked every ounce of energy from us and turned our lives upside down and inside out. It was exhausting, frustrating, endlessly fascinating, surprisingly liberating … and I needed an outlet, just a few hours every now and then to re-find myself. On the foreshore I wasn’t an exhausted new parent any more, nobody was demanding anything of me. I was a time traveller and a daydreamer. I searched for treasure and communed with the past. I lived in other people’s lives through the objects I found.

  One morning I arrived at the Greenwich foreshore to find a group of people gathered around the wooden posts that I’d been watching emerge from the mud over the years. They were members of the Thames Discovery Programme, a community archaeology group that monitors structures and deposits on the foreshore before they are washed away or covered over again. I said hello and got chatting to Nat, the lead archaeologist, who explained that the posts were thought to be part of a medieval jetty associated with the palace that had fronted the river between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. In recent years, even more posts and baseplates have appeared and disappeared on the tides. Some of the posts have large holes drilled into them – one even has a metal mooring loop attached to the top. Some still have wooden pegs holding them together. They are so well preserved by the mud that adze and saw marks can be seen on them. The wood is covered in a greenish-brown slime and the top half-inch or so is soft, but underneath it is hard, a testament to the properties of good English oak and elm.