Mudlarking

by Lara Maiklem

  For a time, there was a particularly fruitful spot at Greenwich that gave me Elizabethan fairy pipes and hammered coins, Tudor dress hooks, a wooden medieval knife handle, a fifteenth-century ear spoon with a thin twisted wire handle, a tiny bone die and hundreds and hundreds of pins of all styles and sizes. In fact, there were so many pins I had to be careful not to get pricked by them as I picked up other objects. This was also where I first noticed the little metal tubes that I later found out were lace aglets. I left scores of them to the mercy of the tide because I was convinced they were modern and for some reason something to do with electrical circuits.

  Even to my relatively untrained eye I could tell this spot was special. I’d noticed water trickling through the lower part of the river wall nearby, so when I heard other river searchers talking about ‘the sluice’ it all fell into place. Perhaps the objects I was finding had washed down with the effluent of the palace and out into the river where they had become trapped and embedded in the mud and muck on the foreshore? But whatever it was, it became my go-to spot and it yielded some lovely objects. Among them was a broken pottery whistle that came all the way from Belgium in the fourteenth century – a yellow-glazed cow-like creature, with long rabbit ears onto which a hooded rider is holding tight; the mouthpiece of the whistle emerges from the creature’s rear end and it has a correspondingly confused look on its face – and a little flat clay cockerel, about as long as my little finger, which is thought by the Museum of London to be a seventeenth-century fairing, a child’s toy bought for a penny or two from a fair or a pedlar. It was produced in a two-part mould with the same white clay that was used for tobacco pipes and he still has traces of salmon-pink paint on his wattle, which suggests he was once brightly painted. The end of his beak is chipped and most of his tail is missing, but I can see he has the long legs and rangy look of an old-fashioned breed of chicken, the type that was used in cockfights.

  Henry VIII had a cockpit built at Greenwich Palace and cockfighting was a popular sport in England. It was banned in 1849, but continued illegally for much longer. Some taverns had their own pits where men gathered to watch the poor creatures, their wattles and combs removed to give them a more aggressive appearance and to help prevent them being damaged in the fights. Another barbaric game, which originally took place on Shrove Tuesday, involved throwing stones or cudgels at a live chicken buried up to its neck or tethered to the ground. The winner got to take the dead bird home for dinner and the bird’s owner made his money by charging for each throw. An engraving of the Thames frost fair of 1683/4 shows a bird tethered to the ice and surrounded by excited men in hats and frock coats, which proves that by then it had moved beyond an Easter custom to become a popular London pastime. Crude little lead cockerels, looking very similar to my clay version, have been found on the foreshore by mudlarks. They are known as ‘shies’ and were specially produced for children to practise their skills in preparation for the adult sport. A clay shy may have been too delicate for a game of ‘cockshy’, but if the player aimed to destroy the cock completely it would have served its purpose well.

  Giant nets of stones have now been placed two-deep against the river wall at Greenwich to try and shore it up against erosion. My special patch has been covered up, together with the top part of the foreshore, and half an hour on every tide has been taken away from me. But erosion, as ever, is a double-edged sword. It is stealing away the medieval jetty at Greenwich and compromising the river wall, but it is also washing out treasures for mudlarks and revealing the remains of the old palace itself.

  In later life, Henry turned his attentions to Hampton Court, and although Elizabeth made Greenwich Palace her primary summer residence, she never had the same affection for it as her father did. By the end of the Civil War of 1642–51 it was in a dire state of disrepair. With no respect for its royal status, the Commonwealth ordered the state apartments to be turned into stables and later, it housed prisoners of war from the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–4. It was already a very old building and after years of neglect and wilful damage, Charles II decided to demolish it. Much of it, especially the valuable stone, was probably taken away and recycled, but some broken masonry, smashed floor and roof tiles and shallow irregular Tudor bricks still found their way onto the foreshore and lie scattered across its surface.

  Tudor bricks are easy to identify among the rubble that covers the foreshore in central London. They are far thinner and lack a ‘frog’, the central depression that characterises bricks from around the late eighteenth century. Bricks became larger after 1784 to avoid a brick tax payable per thousand bricks, which was introduced to help pay for the wars in the American colonies. The government responded by passing a new law taxing larger bricks at double the rate and in 1839 they set a maximum volume of 150 cubic inches. This is still far larger than the average modern house brick, which is 87.41 cubic inches.

  I came to bricks fairly late, having ignored them for many years, but they are surprisingly interesting and the Thames foreshore provides a seemingly unending supply of examples from every era. There are local red bricks, small yellow Flemish ‘clinker’ bricks, and hard-wearing nineteenth-century ‘blue’ bricks that were used to build the bridges and tunnels that came with the Industrial Revolution. Some have the maker’s name stamped into them. If you are lucky you might find one stamped ‘Diamond Jubilee’ in celebration of Victoria’s extended reign. Others have fragments of clay pipes embedded in them, perhaps dropped by accident into the clay as the brick-maker worked.

  The bricks that built the palace and now lie in the mud at Greenwich were probably made of local clay, excavated in the autumn and overwintered to break it down and help remove the soluble salts before brick-making began in the spring. The clay was thrown into simple wooden frames that were open at the top and bottom, and excess clay was removed with a ‘strike’ before the frame was lifted off. The moulded bricks were laid out to dry until they were strong enough to be placed on edge. Then they were turned daily until they were fully dry and ready for firing. It took vast amounts of timber to fire the kilns and clamps. Even then the firing temperature was far lower than that of modern kilns and varied within the clamps, which meant that some bricks were underfired while others were overfired and vitrified. As a result of this, and because of the speed at which bricks were made and the huge quantities that were needed for the project, their quality varied enormously.

  Among the bricks and tiles, I have also found short strips of lead and tiny pieces of shattered window glass. Glass was expensive in Tudor times, and because it was difficult to make large sheets of it, windows were constructed of smaller pieces held together by strips of lead, known as ‘came’, in a lattice pattern. The windows in the rooms the king used would have been glazed, but the best that ordinary people could expect was polished horn, paper or cloth. Many had nothing other than an old piece of sacking to pull across an open window to protect them from the worst of the elements.

  The glass is particularly poignant. Had it been in a window in the monarch’s private apartments? Had Henry looked through it as he deliberated over his decision to have Anne Boleyn executed? Or had his daughter Elizabeth, as she wrestled with her conscience before signing the death warrant of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots? Henry may have watched his warships as they sailed past from the royal dockyard, just to the west of Greenwich, from behind this piece of glass, and Elizabeth might have seen her ships set sail and return from newly discovered worlds through it. Did they look out at low tide? Could they see the foreshore I search today?

  The palace was replaced with the classical buildings and twin domes of the Old Royal Naval College that still stands today. The college was originally designed by Christopher Wren as a Royal Hospital for Seamen and opened its doors to the first pensioners in 1705, admitting elderly or injured seamen who could no longer serve in the navy and who had no other means of support. They were like the army’s Chelsea Pensioners, only they were known as Greenwich Pensioners, and their frock
coats were blue instead of red. At its peak, in 1814 during the Napoleonic Wars, it provided accommodation for over 2,700 men, but by 1869 numbers were dwindling and the hospital closed.

  I imagine them walking along the river in front of the hospital buildings, wearing tricorn hats and the traditional blue frock coats, smoking clay pipes with long curved stems and the royal coat of arms or the Prince of Wales plume of feathers moulded into the bowl. I’ve found more of these decorated eighteenth-century pipes at Greenwich than anywhere else, along with the bottoms of several dark green, early nineteenth-century square gin bottles.

  Complete square gin bottles are rare. Most have been shattered and battered by the resting hulls of ships and barges and the shifting tides and I am still searching for a whole one. But they were once common and the standard method of transporting gin. Their tapered shape allowed them to be packed in sets of six to twenty-four in wooden crates for safer, easier and more space-efficient transport and storage. Gin originally came to England from Holland in the seventeenth century, with soldiers returning from the Thirty Years War. They drank it to keep warm on the battlefield and to steel their nerves – it was the original ‘Dutch courage’ – but it quickly became popular on the streets of London too. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was the scourge of the city and being cheap it was consumed in vast quantities by men, women and children alike. But navy gin was even stronger and it was said that ship’s captains tested its strength by mixing it with gunpowder. If it failed to light, chances were it had been watered down by the distiller or by someone on the ship hoping to get away with an extra ration.

  I’ve found naval buttons at Greenwich, lost and pulled from the uniforms of sailors as they embarked and disembarked from their ships. They are gratifyingly easy to date, thanks to their design. The earliest British naval buttons have the stylised round-petalled rose on them and date from 1748, when uniform regulations for officers were first introduced. The rose was changed to an anchor in 1774. In 1812, after the design on Merchant Navy buttons changed from a plain anchor to a fouled anchor, a crown was added to most Royal Navy buttons to distinguish them and the design has remained much the same ever since. It was the officers who ‘wished to be recognised as being in the service of the Crown’ who lobbied for regulation uniforms. It is said that George II chose blue after seeing the Duchess of Bedford in a riding habit of blue faced with white. Some captains established general standards of appearance for the seamen on their vessels, but there was little or no uniformity between ships, and ordinary seamen continued to dress in ‘slops’, jackets, waistcoats and trousers that were made to specifications set out by the Admiralty, until the mid-nineteenth century when uniforms were introduced for all ranks.

  The pretty porcelain head of a Victorian sailor figurine that I found rolling around at the edge of the water at Greenwich is wearing a straw hat, which was standard issue in the navy at that time. I found him at the bottom of the sweeping steps up which Nelson’s coffin was carried following his death at the Battle of Trafalgar. His body had been preserved on board ship in a cask of brandy mixed with camphor and myrrh and he lay in state for three days in the Painted Hall at the Royal Hospital where more than 15,000 people came to pay their respects. On 8 January 1806 he was carried back to the river stairs to a waiting black-canopied funeral barge that took him upstream to Whitehall, where he spent the night at the Admiralty before his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral the next day.

  I moved away from my precious Greenwich in 2015, when the twins got bigger and our little house began to strain at the seams. We left the river and made a home by the sea, not far from the Estuary. But Greenwich still pulls me back – it’s an old friend now and I’d miss it too much if I didn’t visit. I come for an early tide, arriving when the sun is rising and the water is still lapping the green-fuzzed stone wall, and stay searching until the river creeps back in and gently shoos me away.

  TILBURY

  The sewer-hunters occasionally find plate, such as spoons, ladles, silver-handled knives and forks, mugs and drinking cups, and now and then articles of jewellery; but even while thus in ‘luck’ as they call it, they do not omit to fill the bags on their backs with the more cumbrous articles they meet with – such as metals of every description, rope and bones. There is always a great quantity of these things to be met with in the sewers, they being continually washed down from the cesspools and drains of the houses.

  Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851)

  The foreshore after heavy rain can be quite repulsive. Even after relatively light rainfall, London’s Victorian sewers, which were built to deal with a population half the size it is now, simply can’t cope and they overflow into the storm drains that lead directly into the river. Each year around 7,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools of untreated waste water is discharged into the Thames. There is no mistaking a sewage-spill day. One of the first things you notice is the smell that overrides the usual clean alkaline odour of the river and replaces it with a repellent human essence that hits your nose in wafts and thickens at the back of your throat. The smell is worse close to the storm drains, where it’s concentrated and soaked into the mud and sand.

  The drains themselves are often skirted with unmentionable filth. Many have heavy iron covers that swing open as the water flows out. Some of these openings are quite small, but others are large enough to crawl into, which is what the specialist tribe of sewer hunters called toshers did to earn their living in the nineteenth century. Toshers were the mudlarks’ subterranean counterparts. Mayhew described them as ‘strong, robust, and healthy men, generally florid in their complexion’, whose escapades underground earned them an elite wage among the working classes of the time. ‘Sometimes they dive their arm down to the elbow in the mud and filth and bring up shillings, sixpences, half-crowns, and occasionally half-sovereigns and sovereigns. They always find the coins standing edge uppermost between the bricks in the bottom, where the mortar has been worn away.’

  Toshers dressed distinctively in long greasy velveteen coats with large pockets, canvas trousers and a canvas apron to which a lantern was strapped. They carried a long pole with a large iron hoe at one end to rake through the muck and to help steady themselves in the sludge; it was also to defend themselves from the packs of huge rats that lived in the sewers. The men had nicknames like Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George and Short-armed Jack, and worked in gangs of three or four, accessing the sewers from the outlets on the river and searching for anything of value that had passed down the drains – coins, nails and scrap metal, jewellery, plates, knives and forks. It was a dangerous occupation, and in 1840 unauthorised entry into the sewers was made illegal, which is one reason it was done mostly at night. Toshers risked drowning on incoming tides, getting lost in the miles of crumbling sewers and being overcome by the poisonous gases that rose from the filth. A bite from a rat could turn septic and often proved fatal.

  Fantastic stories circulated among them, like the legend of the wild hogs who lived in the sewers beneath Hampstead, and the myth of the Queen Rat, a supernatural creature who was said to invisibly follow the toshers around as they worked. If she liked the look of one of them, she would turn herself into a beautiful young woman, albeit with claws on her toes and rat-like eyes that reflected the light, seduce him and then would reward him with good finds. If he offended her, however, his luck would soon change. One tosher, named Jerry Sweetly, is said to have lashed out at the Queen Rat after she bit him on the neck while they were making love – she did this to protect her lovers from other rats. She gave Jerry Sweetly his luck in the sewers, but she cursed his wives, the first of whom died in childbirth and the second after falling into the river. His children were all blessed with luck, but in every generation of the Sweetly family since there is said to be a child born with one blue eye and the other the colour of the river, a reminder of their ancestor’s brush with the Queen of the Sewers.

  The river has been used as a convenient dump ever since the Ro
mans. Refuse and human waste was thrown directly from the houses on London Bridge and the buildings along the river’s banks; the city’s privies and cesspools were carted to the river and dumped in it; the middens and piles of rubbish that grew up around the city were periodically shovelled up and taken to the river; and it was a useful repository for the butchers, tanners and fishmongers who worked along the riverfront. By the nineteenth century, it was little more than a tidal sewer with a floating scum of street muck, domestic waste, animal dung and ashes from the city’s hearths. The increasing popularity of flushing toilets, which emptied into sewers that led directly to the river, and London’s growing population eventually tipped the balance. By the 1840s, 200 tons of human waste was gushing into the Thames every day. In 1858, after a long hot summer, the smell rising off the river was so overwhelming that Parliament was almost abandoned. It became known as the Great Stink and an Act of Parliament was passed to find a solution.

  The engineer Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to design a system of large sewers to run along the edge of the river in newly constructed embankments built on land reclaimed from the foreshore. The new system intercepted the existing sewers and took the waste to the eastern edge of the city. Bazalgette’s sewers improved the quality of the water in central London, but the problem didn’t just go away. It simply moved downstream to the river just east of Woolwich. Huge ‘mud’ banks built up around the sewage outlets at Crossness and Beckton, and two continuous streams of fermenting sewage, ripe with noxious gases, turned the river here into a thick, slimy, stinking cesspool that moved slowly on each tide towards the sea. Its true horror became apparent in 1878 when the paddle steamer the Princess Alice collided with a collier and sank in this most polluted part of the river. Of the 900 passengers on board, only around 130 survived and it remains Britain’s worst peacetime disaster. The chemicals in the water bleached the clothes of the corpses and discoloured their skin. The effects of the sewage caused them to bloat to such an extent that extra-large coffins had to be made, and of those fortunate enough to be plucked from the river, many died later from the effects of ingesting the water.