The Eyes Have It — Cracking the Thames Foreshore

Searching the Thames Foreshore in the City of London has always been one of my favourite ways to while away a few hours. Wandering about looking for likely spots and employing the time-honoured mudlark's method of 'eyes only' I usually find one or two items worth having in a day's work and occasionally something really very nice indeed.

Objects from Thames mud are usually in fantastic condition due to oxygen free conditions that halt oxidation and corrosion in their tracks so even ordinary copper alloy metal finds that from land sites might be dismissed as 'hedge fodder' come up almost 'as new' and that makes them special. Perhaps the best thing about the Thames though is that it's not all about metal finds. There's plenty else made of other materials, from wood, leather, bone and ivory, to stone, pottery and glass to stumble across.

A Charles I copper farthing in typical condition. Toned, but as fresh as the day it was struck

For a beginner the Thames is daunting. It takes some time to get used to the search methods and only long experience will tell you why you should be looking in the right places rather than the wrong ones. The majority of the surface has been picked clean over the years and in places where erosion has halted it's unlikely you'll find anything much but discover those spots where erosion, no matter how subtle, is taking place and that's where to be.

A Tudor period iron spur inlaid with silver. Such preservation is usual for ancient iron objects

In those areas you'll likely find collections of nails, wire, small pieces of this and that and mostly made of iron. These have collected in places where the motion of water has swept them and because of their similar weight and size, just like granules of gold in a prospectors pan full of river gravel, they separate from the matrix and end up in the same place. Amongst this iron trash is where far rarer non-ferrous metal finds are most often made. However, non-metallic finds can be almost anywhere because the same laws that apply to metals also apply to them but they have very different weights and sizes so they end up in different places.

It's also well worth investigating any lump of concreted iron you come across. The lovely spur I discovered was locked inside a large brown lump that looked interesting enough to warrant further investigation, but only when I went to work on it at home did I fully realise what I had. The concretions aren't that hard to remove so I'll take home anything that might come good. Inside the rusty prison can be a treasure waiting to escape!

How many finds in this one random picture? The Thames Foreshore in london is half man-made material...
You'll notice this is the bowed down approach and even this picture makes you feel a little motion sick. 

You have to know what you are looking for on any search. There's little point going to look for coins and buckle sized metal finds but expecting to also discover larger objects, and vice versa.  Small items and large items require two different stances and two very different kinds of concentration.

The first approach requires you walk about with your hands behind your back, legs straight and upper body bowed over with your nose as close to the shingle as you can comfortably get. This gives you just a small section of shingle in vision at any given time and when I find areas really productive of small finds or I believe are worth taking a detailed look at then I'll crouch or even get right down on my knees in order to focus really close-up. This is hard and focussed concentration.

Medieval Iron chain mail is rare, but it washes up in the iron rich
spots as do the very rare brass fringing links from the same garments

The closer you get to the shingle the harder it is to appreciate large objects right under your nose and you'll miss everything outside peripheral vision often walking straight past great finds just yards away without having a clue. So, the second approach requires an upright stance from which you'll see large objects clearly, miss many of the smaller ones, but be quite unable to discern anything the size of a Medieval farthing. This is a relaxed and broad form of concentration.

You cannot do both at once but in a day I'll employ both in rotation. I'll cruise for large objects and likely areas of erosion and then crouch over whenever I find those crucial collections of iron. This way I use the brief time available well, don't get back ache, and avoid the queasy motion sickness that walking bowed over all the time tends to create.

Shape and colour are important. If you go with the intention of finding silver and copper coins then expect them to turn up as they do on land sites — silver and green coloured respectively — then you'll probably never find any at all because silver coins from the mud are usually black or very dark grey and copper coins often bright and brassy if they've been freshly washed out or a light yellowish brown colour when they've been knocking about a while on the surface. I've never found anything that was green-coloured but pottery or glass or silver-coloured unless stainless steel!

Very large objects such as this fabulous 13th century moulding are there to be
found but because the face of such an object will be buried it has to be flipped.

What confuses matters even more is that coins are rarely spied flat and round but more often seen edge on or partially obscured. The foreshore is smothered in pieces of broken mussel shell that are black in colour and have rounded edges. These fragments need to be investigated when it isn't obvious they are shells because I've lost count of the times that a piece has turned out to be a hammered coin on edge by investigation.

Another consideration is flipping over any object that looks remotely interesting. Often the reverse lays face up and looks anything but special but the other side is highly decorated. The amazing hand carved Viking Age gaming piece I discovered was a startling example because when I first saw it I believed it to be another one of the perforated plain bone disks I'd found so many of. Only when I flipped it over did the decorated face appear.

And then there was the Medieval harness boss that looked just like the modern iron washers the foreshore is strewn with in certain places. I flipped it over and it had a brass face plate decorated in repouse work with a beautiful quatrefoil. That it had been crushed wasn't the point, it was a very rare find indeed and only one other of its kind is recorded!

In short, to make finds you have to investigate anything out of the ordinary and anything within the ordinary too because finds rarely present themselves clearly. If it looks worth the effort then investigate it — curiosity is your best friend down there, believe me.

What works against you is time. The tide waits for no man and all the while the clock is ticking. Get there as the tide ebbs away, exposes the first useful areas and start straight away. Only leave when forced off by the flood. You have just a few short hours in which to locate areas and make finds and those few hours must be used well.

There's are rules to be obeyed. You cannot use a metal detector without a license from the Port of London Authority and cannot dig down further than a few inches without being part of the Mudlark Society and having a special permit. Unfortunately, the society is a closed group, you must be seconded by an existing member and cannot simply apply for membership. The good news is that you do not need permits of any kind to walk on the foreshore and makes surface finds by 'eyes only' methods just so long as you do not scrape the surface with a tool, because that counts as digging and requires the appropriate permit.

It goes without saying that you should have recorded anything interesting enough to warrant it and take anything really interesting along to the Museum of London where the keepers will happily take a good hard look at it. The museum's enormous collections wouldn't be half as fabulous as they are without the many thousands of finds mudlarks have made from the Thames, you know.

Dead man's man's footprints. A 17th Century high-heeled silk shoe or an 18th Century square-toed leather boot? Experts at the Museum of London will know which or if it's something else entirely.  

Access points are not hard to find but I would not advise climbing up or down any ladder. The drop from the top of the wall to the foreshore can be as high as thirty feet and it's not worth the risk or braining yourself when a flight of stairs is usually nearby. I usually start making tracks toward a convenient exit point when the tide has risen above a certain point covering over the most productive areas, but it's actually hard to become stranded anywhere because the exit points are so numerous. Take a mobile phone in any case.

As for the reputation of the mud — it's not to be feared. Not really that dirty a place to be, it's mostly a very firm shingle and mud mixture with lots of tile and brick in it and walking about safely requires only a careful footfall, a slow pace and the avoidance of slippery rocks. I'll go down even in shoes I'm wearing on a day out in London and just wash the mud off on leaving.  I've never hurt myself in any way and have never sunk more than few inches, though I have seen others come a cropper. If it looks too soft then it probably is, so avoid it. You'll get your shoes filthy otherwise but it's unlikely be any worse than that.

And lastly, nobody will be looking at you as if you're some kind of social misfit these days. When I first started as a teenager I'd get coins thrown at me from above but since the South Bank at Southwark and Bankside was regenerated making it so very popular with tourists, loads of people began to enter the foreshore and have a dabble.

Nowadays it's seen as a legitimate pastime for all the family because you absolutely cannot fail to find something of interest. It might not be a treasure, but treasures are certainly there for the insatiably curious to find because London has been a world-class city for two millenia and arguably the world's greatest city for the last 300 years, so on any given day, at any given place, a few good things will always be visible and somewhere, believe me, there'll be a jackpot.

Undiscovered, then tomorrow they'll be in another mudlarks pocket or more likely washed under a stone and rendered invisible perhaps for years to come, but that's the whole point and appeal of 'eyes only' searching on the Thames. With any luck it'll be you who there's at the right place, at the right time, and with their eyes wide open to the chance.

Our Miss Sivewright

An Oxfordshire lace maker at work at her pillow.

Three or four years ago I came into possession of a box of lace making equipment. It belonged to a friend of ours whose pastime it was when she was young. This equipment was probably passed down by her mother because even without prior experience of handling bobbins I could see that most of them were very old.

In the bottom of the box were strips of card with thousands of tiny holes carefully pierced through them and outlines drawn over the top. These were obviously lace patterns. Many were yellow with age and two carried inscriptions. The most interesting of these was the one with instructions written upon it in old brown ink... 

'To be worked only for Mrs (?) - The Rise - Oxford'

Though I tried and tried, I just could not work out the lady's surname. I could see plainly the name began with an 'S' but I thought it ended in an 'R'. Therefore none of the letters between made any sense at all. It was just an indecipherable scrawl.

Two 'Oxfordshire' lace bobbins from the box. These are known as 'Bucks point trolly bobbins' The largest is a 'thumper' and it really is a beast of a bobbin considering the extreme delicacy of 'Bucks point ground' lace they were asked to make. Both possess pewter gingles, but neither possess pretty bead spangles dangling from the bottom. And they were never meant to. These were tools and tools fit for the serious purpose of work! 

My client's instructions were to sell what I could for her. So I listed a number of items on Ebay and successfully shifted half or more of what I had. I was happy that quite a few items were acquired by one going by the user-name of 'dontbhasty'. She was clearly a proper collector because she selected only the most interesting items as all serious collectors do. And I seem to remember that she was particularly interested in these 'prickings' and certain types of bobbin. But then my client friend moved away, we lost contact for some time, and so I stopped selling for her. 

Two weeks ago I recommenced. And began with a listing of the item under discussion. In the description I freely admitted that I hadn't a clue about the surname and requested an answer if anyone had it. The next day that answer arrived, and of course, it was my old customer Dontbhasty who provided it.

"Hello Jeff, SIVEWRIGHT is the name"

And of course it was! If only I'd read the 'R' as 'T' and then' IGHR' AS 'IGHT' then I might have worked it out for myself.

Dontbhasty won the auction and I sent the pricking off to her. When I received feedback I reciprocated but then sent a message requesting further information. In the meantime conducted a little Internet research of my own when to my astonishment not only did I found Mrs Sivewright out, but also discovered where she'd once lived...

'Sivewright Mrs, Headington Rise, Headington Hill.'

Not our miss, but just how I imagine her...

And there's me thinking all along she'd turn out to be anonymous. Yet another wealthy 'must have' client for whom I believed some factory or another had designed and made lace exclusively and expressly for. I really hadn't thought she'd be traceable. But things didn't stop there. I then discovered that she was not quite the wife of an idle rich inheritor of an Oxford pile I'd imagined her to be when I came across the book, 'Fine Buckinghamshire Point Lace Patterns Belonging to the Misses Sivewright and Pope'.

Dontbhasty filled me in...

"Hello Jeff,

Miss Sivewright was the 'lady', Miss Pope was an experienced lacemaker. They seem to have been in partnership for some time, they later moved and traded in Torquay. 

Let me know if I can help further. 

Diana"

Our 'Miss' Sivewright, as it turns out, was not anonymous at all. She was an Oxfordshire businesswoman and perhaps a designer with a flair for pattern. Miss Pope it seems was the Golden Goose with her remarkable ability with the point of a needle — turning the ideas in Sivewright's head into prickings for the making of beautiful lace. What with the acumen of one and the talent of the other, in Oxford and between them, they seem to have produced fine and desirable products of the highest quality, and sold them.

And then they moved to Devon. These two busy 'Misses'. Together...

J. M. W. Turner, 'A View of Oxford from the South Side of Heddington Hill, 1803–4.
Ashmolean Museum. Miss Sivewright's house, 'The Rise', is left in the picture.

Thames Mudlarking — One of the Most Beautiful Finds I Ever Made...

...but when I discovered it, there was no Eureka moment.

It was just a skinny square object that was picked up only because I pick up and examine everything down the river that is clearly made of metal and not immediately recognised. I almost pitched it back to the shingle as a worthless blank piece of modern trash. But my better judgement kicked in. Nothing unusual once found must be left for others to discover. It is the law of the foreshore!

It had no detail at all, just a covering of a strange kind of slimy muck and therefore it did not go in the leather finds pouch hung safely round my neck where anything good gets to live. I pocketed it. In the crap pouch along with pot shards and encrusted iron requiring further investigation it went!

Under magnification it seemed that there was indeed detail of sorts to be seen. So I put it in the electrolysis bath, switched on the current, and let it be while I made myself a nice cup of tea. When I went back I was astonished to find that all the crud had vanished and what was left behind was a little jewel of a thing. Each side a tiny work of art.                                              

So far as I can tell, the two plates covering what remains of the thin flat iron tang are not solid gold, though they do appear to be. I think it must be heavily gilded brass. There's hardly any wear that I can see and so the gilt finish is as fresh as the day it was made. That's very rare with gilded finds. Usually gilding on metal is microscopically thin and easily rubbed away. As you well know.

It is a knife terminal, about the size of your thumbnail, and dates circa 1500. Originating from the Rhineland it was imported to Britain for sale or arrived here with its owner. It depicts a hare and a hound, a common enough hunting theme. I think they are both charming and delightful. Naive and yet artful. 

And to think I very nearly left them behind on the shore...

Thames Mudlarking — A Georgian Fob Story (Pt3)

What are our finds have if they aren't food for the imagination? Even the most trivial have something  small to tell us but best of all are those things that suggest an entire story. Even if the imagined tale is not what actually happened, it doesn't really matter. It is your yarn and that's all that is important.

Of course when you discover something and make it into something it is not then that's a problem. Imagination can and will make a silk ear out of a sow's purse but finds are only ever what they are and the facts must be established before you let imagination out of its pen. 

A watch would be have been 
attached to the top  hook

It wasn't so difficult to pinpoint with absolute certainty what this chain was. Though I hadn't much of a clue at the riverside, a quick scroll through a few of pages of Internet content gave me plenty of leads. I first thought it to be a lady's chatelaine — a chain suspended from the skirt from which were hung the keys to the house. 

Close. But not quite right. Turns out it once belonged to a gentleman and was part of his fob set. 

Fob watch, fob seal, key fob, fob chain. We're all familiar with those terms but I wonder how many know why they're called that. The 'fob' was actually a very small pocket stitched into a man's breeches and everything that tucked into it or dangled out of it had the word 'fob' appended. 

This pocket was very small indeed and the expensive watch a gentleman owned was stuffed inside. The tight fit made it very difficult to extract the watch so a chain was attached and it was pulled from the fob with it. Of course, this purely functional chain became more and more elaborate and soon fashionable dandies were hanging seals and watch winders and keys from the bottom.

The only trouble with this was that gleaming pendants hung below the waistcoat where they advertised just how rich a man was likely to be and therefore how much his concealed and costly watch was likely to be worth.

George III by Thomas Gainsborough.  Seals and watch keys on plain view

Of course such a visible and ostentatious display of bling made him a target for pickpockets. A sly lift of the waistcoat, a swift snatch at the pendants, a smooth upward tug — that was all it took to relieve a man of the lot. 

I have Georgian fob seals, watch keys, and a couple of watch casings too. They turn up from time to time, don't they? But how often have you come across one still attached to a short length of chain by a hook? Not often I'll bet. But if these items were lost rather than disposed of then many should be because surely the chain would break first, not the hook.

Am I suggesting that all these trinkets were jettisoned by pickpockets and highwaymen but not actually lost by their owners? No. But I am suggesting that more than just a few were and especially those made of base metals because they had no scrap value. Sure, a thief could prize the hard stone intaglio from a gilt brass seal and get something for it, but again, it carries incriminating evidence in the form of the victim's crest. 

If it ain't of solid noble metal or a carries diamond, emerald or ruby, then good riddance, chop, chop.

Georgian England was a not a disposable society. Things were not chucked in the midden till they were quite beyond useful function. (think leaden pot mends) Pennies to fix, pounds to replace. If it had been broken by the owner then it would have been sent for repair.

But there's not just a break in the chain, but three missing hooks too. And further, one of the two that remain was distorted by violent force. What's more, the monogrammed cartouche of the open-work plate, broken and distorted by what looks suspiciously like undue pressure between thumb and forefinger, also has three deep parallel scratches on its reverse made either carelessly or in haste by a sharp object or implement...

I think there's evidence enough to suggest shady goings on!

In Poultry, by Cheapside, London. It's late afternoon, on Friday 19th of October, the Year of our Lord one-thousand seven-hundred and eighty-one. Washington assisted by the French will this day defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, when the American Revolution will be effectively, over. 

   Shopping that fateful day for a well-hung cock pheasant and quite unaware that things will never be  the same for him ever again — Our Hero, Josiah Purswell — feels another truffling about in his silks, turns on his heels, only to find himself attached at the waist by his chain to a wall-eyed ruffian sporting a battered beaver tricorn in process of snatching his watch. 

   The thief is rumbled but thinks the prize valuable enough to risk a scuffle for. Knocking him down he yanks it from the fob but the prone Purswell fights back, battering him about the head with the bird, knocking off his hat and causing a colourful cloud of downy feathers to swirl around clogging his nostrils. Snatching up his hat the thief flees up Old Jewry sneezing, his victim back on his feet and in hot pursuit...

   The rascal might be the bastard whelp of a Covent Garden 'lady' but he's as fly as a Newgate Market butcher's dog from a lifelong career spent dodging. Purswell's thick-head from the previous night's excess of Madeira Sack at Boodle's coupled with the onset of gout in his left foot big toe put him at something of a disadvantage. Through St Olaves Churchyard, up Ironmonger Lane and west along Gresham Street he keeps sight of his assailant but there's an acute corner to turn into Milk Street where his wig slips across his left eye at the crucial moment. Into a dark and dank blind alley green with worts and ferns growing out the cracks in the mortar slips the thief, where he evades his hapless pursuant. 

   Resting a while in a shaded doorway he pulls out his folding knife. Scratching the back of the chain's monogrammed plate with its sharp point and holding it to his nose to check for the odour of brass, the miscreant finds that it's not what he'd hoped for. One chain is broken already but he can't tear the watch away from the two remaining. Unwinding the knurled collar of the hook he removes the captive timepiece, pockets it, then grasping the plate between thumb and forefinger yanks off each of the 18-carat baubles dangling beneath, one by one. 

   Checking his back, he hops over a brick wall into a yard and from there saunters through the city streets as casually as he can under the circumstances. Taking a circuitous time wasting route but in a generally southerly direction toward the river, he's hell bound on reaching Trig Lane undetected at dusk and there a wharf and its proprietor who's 'professornal' blind eye can be relied upon and who he knows 'wery well'. Luckily for him the tide had turned just an hour before his arrival and so the barges have all departed downstream assisted by the tide bound for Mersea Island to fetch cargoes of oysters.

   He looks about, finds the coast is clear, when he casts the worthless handful of evidence just as far as he possibly can into the Thames' concealing waters...

   Somewhat dishevelled and browbeaten, Perswell having given up the chase by nightfall bids a cab and returns to his Pall Mall pad. He's thinking he'll call on a Grub Street hack 'acquaintance' come morning to whom he'll tell his tale and try for a mention in the Daily Universal Register — hopefully securing some form of justice. Unshaken but cautious always, the pickpocket makes furtive progress across the bridge to Southwark, pockets laden with Perswell's loss. Heading to a consort's impoverished but spick and span apartment at Jacobs Island and within spitting distance of her creature comforts, he pauses. 

   Though she's always well pleased with a haul of silver coin, she just can't be trusted to hold fast her excitable nature, or her tongue, in the sight of gold. And so, he slopes back wearily to his grimy nest in St Giles rookery.

   The proprietor of our Trig Lane wharf, though, exercises due diligence. He always has (and always will...) take careful, detailed note of the evening, its characters, and its curious affairs. By his calculations whatever it was he'd witnessed tossed in the air fell short of intentions. So he'll go down stairs to the barge bed come midnight's low ebb and add what's discovered to his little mahogany boxfull of 'circumstantials' with date and time and name of culprit written down in black ink on a little card label attached with a short length of hemp netting twine...

   There's a lantern to light, and a pretty thing to find by it. He won't sleep till he has.

Ah, I could carry on all day long with this!

And you're believing my yarn now, aren't you?  But you do know what other meaning the word 'fob' has, don't you? 

To 'fob off' means to appease a person with falsehoods or dispose of fake goods by trickery. But I suppose that is exactly what a tale is, in essence. A fabrication of words that creates a picture so convincing that another takes it to be true and buys into it. 

Of course the chain may simply have passed out of fashion as all fashionable things must when whoever 'JP' was broke it up and threw it away in disgust...

But that's no kind of a Georgian fob story, is it?

PS

We still have fob pockets, though we don't really know what to do with them. You have one stitched into your favourite pair of jeans. It's that silly little affair in the right hand pocket that you fear to drop anything into for fear of not being able to get it out again. The reason it is there is because the first pair of Levis was made at a time when men still had their watches on chains rather than on a wrist strap. 

Thames Mudlarking — A Georgian Fob Story (Pt2)

There's times when a discovery is so unusual and interesting that it demands that you sit down straight down on the ground, and stop. I was arrested and taken into custody. It was such handsome thing to have found that I couldn't quite believe I had. It didn't seem possible that such a delicacy could have survived two centuries in a puddle of mud without breaking apart into hundreds of tiny pieces and utterly destroyed.

Holding it up to the light and turning it over in my hands was one of those rare transcendental moments that mudlarks and detectorists experience just a few times in long careers. You know what I mean, I'm sure, because you've had them too. When you flipped up your first Celtic stater, or that lovely gold posy ring that now sits gleaming at the summit of the mountain of junk you've amassed. That was one of them, wasn't it?

On the shingle I sat for what seemed an age in reverie before the rising tide forced a move. When I got up I climbed Trig Lane Stairs, walked through the winding streets of the city to Liverpool Street Station, and there caught the fast train back home to Romford. Hurtling through Ilford at 100mph I realised I should have stayed on a little longer and worked at finding its missing parts...

Hardly a thing in this square yard of the forshore is natural. It's 95% man-made

Returning next day I wasn't sure I'd find more of it but I trawled through the pocket of mud it had emerged from and scanned the rocks nearby. Sure enough I did find another length of chain, a single link and part of a sprung hook. But it was still incomplete. After an hour or two spent dissolving mud in the Thames, sifting through the sand and gravel that remained behind, but without success,  I finally resigned myself to the certainty that I never would find another fragment. What was missing was probably missing when it was thrown in the river two centuries before.

It was quite some time before I had any notion about what might have happened just before it was discarded and why such a pretty bauble would under certain imaginable circumstances be too hot to handle. 

It is a gentleman's watch chain. At the time of its disposal it would have had the appearance of being made of solid gold, but it isn't. Gilded with a very thin skin of 18-carat gold (the only quality sold at the time) it would have appeared to be, but beneath the surface the time has exposed a sham because it's actually made of the eponymous alloy, 'pinchbeck'. This is a copper zinc alloy invented in the early 18th Century by the Fleet Street watch and clock maker, Christopher Pinchbeck, and so so closely does it resembles 18-carat gold that when the gilding rubs away, as it had with this piece, you wouldn't be able to tell.

Pinchbeck didn't intend to deceive anyone, It was simply his solution to a problem. Gold is too expensive to make large objects from so when a client such Louis XIV requires a musical clock but only wants to pay £500 for it, then a clock in pinchbeck is what he got from Pinchbeck. Of course it wasn't long before the jewellery trade was making items from it, and crooks passing their wares off as solid gold.

The metal became very popular with the gentry who would wear items made from it whilst travelling the thief infested roads of England. If they were waylaid and their possessions were stolen then the miscreants got away with metals worth almost nothing as scrap. It must have been a comfort for the victims to know that when the gang flew the scene of the crime and arrived back at the rookery, they'd set to work on the haul and discover that apart from what coin of the realm they'd pilfered, the exercise had been a waste of their time in terms of jewellery.

Of course they could still sell the pinchbeck items to their fence who'd pay pinchbeck price. However, when an item is marked with a monogram as this is, then no thief or fence in his right mind would have it. 

Traceable directly back to the victim it would have been stripped of its anonymous and saleable pendants and disposed of hastily. Failure to do so promptly may have meant lodgings in Newgate followed by a short a trip up the road to Tyburn...

I think that a plausible explanation of how this watch chain came to be where it was found. Criminals have always used the Thames as a convenient dumping ground for incriminating evidence and that is as true today as it was in the past. Every year I imagine there's an arsenal of firearms ditched over the bridges of London that are never found because they fall in the central channel. In Georgian times, though, there was only the crowded bustle of one bridge but plenty of silent and secret access to the riverside where hot property could be safely disposed of. 

I wonder if it's just coincidence that it was found in a puddle of mud about as far from the present day embankment as I could possibly throw it? 

Well, perhaps it is. 

But there's more to examine before I admit a riotous and unruly imagination and pitch this pretty chain of evidence into the Thames... 

Thames Mudlarking — A Georgian Fob Story (Pt1)

The Thames Foreshore in London is a very peculiar place. Running through one of the worlds greatest cities, one that boasts a half-million year prehistory, a two-thousand year history, and was until recently the capital of the largest empire the world ever saw, the Thames is peculiar not because other great cities don't have rivers. Most do. It's peculiarity resides in the fact that it is narrowly embanked but also tidal. And so on a big spring tide the river can rise to within a gnats cock of the top of the wall but at every low its ancient detritus laden bed is exposed and accessible to all.

Spring high at Custom House

But it's a long fall down. Let's put it this way. Unless my life depended on it, I would never use one of the vertical access ladders. Luckily there are less dangerous steps spaced at fairly regular intervals. That means that your average day tripper out on a hunt can go down, reasonably expect to find things old and unknown, and go home with a handful of bits and bobs to adorn the mantle-piece. It also means the seasoned mudlark may reasonably expect to find something every once in a while that is not only very old but fit for display in a museum case. 

The discovery I made one sunny afternoon in May falls somewhere between those two polar extremes. Therefore it resides carefully stowed in my collection cabinet. Once in a while I get it out and look at it. I can't ever remember showing it to anyone.

A chalk-rubble barge bed being laid at UDC Wharf, Chiswick on Easter Sunday, 1929. (MOL Collections)

The Thames was once studded with barge beds. Wharves that dealt in bargeloads rather than shiploads required them so that the flat-bottomed vessels would land gently at low tide on level hard standing where unloading would commence. Otherwise they'd tilt the load precariously making already hard work harder for the stevedors. The find was made on one. Nothing unusual about that — many finds are.

Thames finds, and the majority made on the North Bank in the City (which except for the opening at Queenhithe Dock was once an unbroken chain of barge beds) often aren't as many believe they are, direct losses. Stuff dropped by people over the sides of boats or thrown into the water when broken or unfashionable. Most often they got there indirectly and derive from these long redundant and derelict constructions.

Erosion begins when water having breached the wooden revetment begins its levelling work and begins to claw back its original course. The channel once begun opens ever wider at each and every turn of the tide till eventually the entire bed is reduced to loose rubble and shifting shingle, its stark oaken bones the only reminder it ever existed. A whole barge bed can be made nothing in a decade.

A barge bed at a busy Victorian wharf

They were made out of what was readily available nearby and the kind of stuff that others would otherwise have pay to have carted away. Compacted street sweepings, industrial and domestic rubbish and hearth tippings, demolition rubble and the spoil from new building foundation excavations (that in London will always cut through earlier layers and much older rubbish pits) and all kinds stuffs from all kinds of sources was piled in and rammed down hard. So much so that the beds are concreted throughout. All of this is very gradually loosened and freed by the very gentle but powerfully persuasive action of moving water.

The wood ash and fine coal dust is taken away in solution. The sand and gravel is washed here and there. The wood and the bone are light and are all taken elsewhere. The fragments of brick and stone, the shards of glass and pottery, are dense and heavy and remain behind. Amongst what's left will be bits and pieces of real interest and most of these are of metal often preserved so beautifully that they appear to have made the very day before.

However this find was made on top of the rammed rubble capping of a bed at Trig Stairs that at the time was fully intact. The revetment was whole and serious erosion had never taken place there and so the finds it contained were still locked inside.

How did it get to be there?

Well, I think that's quite an interesting question. To be on top I think it had to have been lost or thrown directly into the river, not dumped into a containing wooden frame along with a million and one other discarded things.

If so then its discovery was something of a miracle of chance, not because it hadn't been found by a modern day mudlark, but because in the past the Thames was scoured by daylight and lamplight by those with a rather more pressing and urgent need who weren't there to oik out a treasure but to eke out a living. And they'd hunt down every last valuable, saleable, useable, combustible (and God forbid, edible...) scrap they could find.

I always like to think of it as one of the many pretty trinkets from Fagin's lost treasure box. And it would have secured a poor mudlark's family food supply for a month, I'm sure. But they missed it. And so did everyone else for two long centuries. 

And then one day I was picking over a sloping shingle bed that had always been rather good to me and when I'd finished with it began walking westward across the intervening barge bed to another favourite hotspot, when the faintest glimmer of old gold caught the corner of my eye.

It was a fragment of chain. At least I thought that's all it was until I picked it up when I realised it was attached to something beneath the gloopy mud. Gently teasing the chain I couldn't quite get beyond five inches before it stuck fast so I plunged my hand right in, scooped my hand beneath the lot and lifted as carefully as I could.

The whole fistful came out quite easily so I walked back to the shingle bank where squatting at the water's edge, I immersed the grey lump in the Thames, and there began the careful job of washing whatever the hell that chain was attached to, out.

Our History, In Pieces — Sprigging Luverly

Here's a nice desirable sherd of pottery and one that I had wanted to find for years before I finally did. It turned up in the most popular place for a family fossick on the entire Thames — at Bankside, and right outside Tate Modern. Quite how it had eluded others is beyond me, but there it was, half buried in the shingle and better, that patch yielded a number of other finds too. But that's how the Thames works. You don't wander off having found one thing. You stick at it right where the first find was made in the certain knowledge that you have discovered an area of fresh erosion that will continue to be productive until that erosion stops.

This is Roman 'terra sigillata' more commonly known as 'Samian ware', of course. A deep glossy brick red in colour, smooth and fine in texture and decorated with what's probably a legionary eagle. Surely there's no mistake about that. But hang on — what's that hole in the knob for?

Romans didn't drink tea... 

Not so far as we know, but the Chinese certainly did and when we British found out we built an Empire to rival Rome upon it.

The rise of the British Empire was fuelled by the stuff. It was the quintessential British beverage for three centuries and at the height of our power and influence late in the reign of Queen Victoria we consumed an astounding 6lb per person per year of dried leaf and fashioned teapots the size of pumpkins to brew it in.

As you can see, the teapot filled by the servant woman is rather small.
Hogarth's 'Apprehended by a Magistrate' from 'A Harlots Progress', 1732. 

Mercurius Politicus. September 1658

But in the beginning, our teapots were more the size of an orange than a pumpkin. And that's because tea was prohibitively expensive. It was more commonly available in coffee houses in the third quarter of the 1600's. The London newspaper, Mercurius Politicus, September 1658 announced,

'That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved, China Drink, called by the Chinese, Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee', is sold at the Sultans Head, a Coffee house in Sweetings Rents by the Royal Exhange'.

At the time tax due was calculated from its liquid form. They'd brew up in the morning, the tax officer would quantify the duty to pay on the total pints made, it was kept on the boil all day long and dispensed in tiny cups for an appreciative public of gentlemen. But in 1689 the tax rules were changed. The leaf form was taxed instead (at about 25%) when it became available to anyone wanting to brew at home, but only to those very few who could afford to pay £10 per pound (equivalent to £1,000 per pound today!) and just as importantly, also secure the teapot in which to brew it.

Yixing teapot, 17th Century. Later repairs.

Probably the first ceramic teapots Joe Public clapped eyes on were those imported along with the initial tea consignment the East India Company brought back from Java in 1664. The shipment contained 100lb of tea worth at least £1,000 and perhaps more, but just £10 worth of these pots.

Alien objects made of a vitrified red clay the like of which had never been seen before and decorated with strange relief motifs that must have been quite a sensation to our eyes, they sold out immediately. Imports increased as tea drinking caught on but there were never quite enough pots to go round and demand was increasing exponentially so John Dwight of Fulham set to work to create copies. He never got beyond experiments and seems to have never sold a single pot, but a couple of Dutchmen did.

Elers Teapot, circa 1690

John Philip Elers and his brother David came to England, found a seam of the right kind of clay in Staffordshire, and created the first convincing British versions of the Chinese pots. But they ran into trouble with Dwight who tried to enforce his patent. Ignoring it they carried on regardless.

They sold but few. And not because the demand wasn't there. It was. Their failure was down to the fact that they were paranoid in the extreme about keeping their methods secret, each hand crafted pot was extremely time consuming to make and their products just too expensive for anyone but the most wealthy to purchase. The Elers brothers were declared bankrupt in 1700.

However, the Staffordshire 'potbanks' weren't to be defeated. By that time the tea trade was becoming less of a legitimate business and more of a criminal operation because taxation was spiralling out of control finally reaching an astonishing 119% by mid century. The gap between those who could afford this luxury and those who wanted to enjoy it was widening so far that, of course, smugglers stepped into the breach and supplied it tax free cutting prices (and cutting it with all kinds of other noxious stuff) to the bone. The huge demand had been finally met so the pots just had to be made somehow.

 The Elers had destroyed all evidence of their secrets and methods so initially the potbanks made lead-glazed earthenware versions. These were what we had till 1740 when finally they cracked it. Solving the clay supply problem by improving refining methods they made stoneware versions available at last and better still, threw the pots quickly on a wheel. The market was soon awash with handsome red teapots 'just like' the Chinese originals and cheap enough for the middling and perhaps even working classes, to own and enjoy.

Staffordshire redware 'crabstock handled' teapot, Circa 1760

The sherd under scrutiny is a piece of that history. It is the lid from a teapot and of course it's not a Roman one but a British one made in Staffordshire circa 1740-70. The decorations are known as 'sprigs'. They were formed in a mould, released onto paper, then applied to the damp body of the pot with a little brushed on slip. The dense fine clay is very strong but also takes sharp detail very well and that accounts for a great deal of the appeal. The bird is as crisp as the day it was made, and yet the lid is in a sorry state.

It may have been finally discarded only when the owner grew tired of trying to keep from falling into the pot because they were so treasured that people would use them till essential parts were unserviceable. Unless the pot itself was broken in many pieces and beyond water tight repair it would be kept and mended with new parts fashioned in wood, silver, tin, brass, pewter, and even poisonous lead.

The decorations soon departed from strict copying of Chinese motifs. By mid-century, at the height of Rococo style and our insatiable taste for 'chinoiserie', a delightfully eccentric mixture of sprigs in all kinds of diverse (and increasingly English) designs adorned them. My little teapot lid's bird sprig may look Chinese enough but it may have been accompanied by of all things, a Tudor rose! 

It's just a broken old teapot lid but I reckon I could flog it for £20 on Ebay given the current buoyant market for interesting sherds. I certainly couldn't afford to buy the parent pot in the one piece, though, because an ordinary one would set me back £500 and a rare and fancy one a thousand or two more.

Maybe instead I should list it as,  'Roman Samian Ware Teapot Lid — Legionary Eagle — RARE!'  

And would probably get £30 or perhaps more in succeeding to convince many that it really was...!

But knowing just half the truth behind this little piece of our history is better than peddling a half-thruth to others, so I'll keep it by. Enjoy it for what it is.

Because I think it's just sprigging luverly.

Pot Sherds — Our History, in Pieces

Visiting the Thames Foreshore recently has been quite a disappointment. I only ever practise eyes only searching there and in the forty years since I made my first find in the shingle I have never tried any other method. I rarely scrape, never dig, never detect with a machine. And I like it that way or at least I always have...

However, now I'm seriously considering other methods because the place is picked clean. Where years ago I'd go down and pick up thirty or forty items of non-ferrous metal, some of which would be nice finds, occasionally very nice indeed, now I can barely find two or three and only then by really pulling out all the stops and using all the knowledge acquired in my long mudlark career.

The reason is that nowadays mudlarking is a social event. Families do it, friends do it, every bloody bugger does it! Last time I was there I met a group of four young ladies out for a social fossick. Such a gaggle of hens would never have been seen years ago because the foreshore back then was a fearsome place where nobody in their right mind stayed for long. Nobody except people like me, that is. Those who enjoyed the brooding desolation, the frisson of danger, and the fact that the surface was littered with old stuff.

It still is. But I'm afraid it's littered with what old stuff nobody wants. Bricks and rubble and peg tiles, butchered bones and teeth. Those things that remain when all the nice stuff is gone. And by nice I don't mean hammered coins and pilgrims badges, I mean the sherds of pottery that once you could easily fill a carrier bag with are nowadays noticeable by their absence.

They have become a collectible in their own right. You can amass a collection from the Thames covering every period of British history from Neolithic to Modern if you know what to look for. Of course, the majority of sherds are going to be of relatively recent productions and will hail from the period of London's greatest might and power — the Post-Medieval period from 1550 onwards and into the modern era.  But it's all down there. And people know it.

The thing is, nowadays you cannot go and handle old pots without owning them yourself and that means paying a great deal of money for the privilege because even the most quotidian of 18th Century productions are going to cost well over £100 and the choice stuff, the Ralph Wood figures, the Bow porcelain, the salt glaze and the slipware platters are worth many hundreds and often many thousands. They are simply out of the reach of most people, unless that is they find bits of such desirable things on the foreshore, range them in a collector's cabinet. And they can do that because down there such a thing is possible to achieve, and for free.

Actually, there's something romantic about sherds of pots that complete pots do not possess. I know why people like them. They are small pieces of things hard to imagine in their completeness until you know what they are and have seen examples in the one piece. There's a mystery to solve meanwhile between finding one and finding its parent object through study and research. That's a very enjoyable process.

And it's one I want to write about here. So, I've decided to run an occasional series about pot sherds starting with a very interesting one that was missed by the new breed of collector I've encountered lately but was found by myself and in the most public and popular place on the entire foreshore — the South Bank right below Tate Modern.