Trinkets of the Thames

It is said that after tobacco arrived from the New World in the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth took a discreet pull on a clay pipe before deciding against smoking. James I’s reaction was even stronger: he disliked the practice so much that he wrote A Counterblaste to Tobacco in 1604 and raised duties on it by 4,000 per cent. That didn’t prevent others from taking up the habit, especially in times of plague and disease, when it was believed that smoking kept dangerous miasmas at bay. As a result, after pottery shards, broken clay pipes in all shapes and sizes are the most commonly found historical artefact in the UK.

But as Lara Maiklem writes in her new book, A Mudlarking Year, this doesn’t make them any less interesting. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tobacco pipes weren’t just for smoking; their stems doubled as ammunition in firearms and doctors used them as catheters and to set the bones in broken noses, among other things. Pipe bowls, she informs us, were deployed “as suction devices to encourage lactation, tiny crucibles to melt lead and alloys for counterfeiting coins and, with a pig’s bladder, for blowing smoke into a patient’s bowels through their anus to relieve constipation”.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe, as Magritte might have said. A Mudlarking Year is full of such eyebrow- raising revelations, and Maiklem is adept at locating the storied treasure embodied by lost or discarded historical fragments. She has been exploring the banks of the Thames at low tide for more than two decades; it’s at once a hobby, a meditative retreat and a form of personalized material culture. In this book the finder is as significant as the found, the story of the discovery as valuable as the history of the object itself – and Maiklem writes as eloquently about shoe soles and her collection of broken pot handles as she does about the rare sixteenth- century posey ring that she discovers glinting in the mud.

Her previous, bestselling book Mudlarking: Lost and found on the River Thames (2019) was structured according to place, its chapters covering London’s riverside locations from “Tidal head” to “Estuary”, Hammersmith to Tilbury. Her new book covers much the same territory, but its chapters are organized according to the months of the calendar year in 2022. Over the course of the book Maiklem is elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians, there are excursions to Oxford for research and to Lyme Regis for fossils, and family life and other commitments become more pressing. Her freedom to spend time alone by the river is becoming limited.

For hundreds of years the most impoverished people have scavenged the Thames foreshore. In London Labour and the London Poor (1851), Henry Mayhew described seeing women, children and old people who “waded in the mud barefoot throughout the winter”, searching for lumps of coal, pieces of iron and anything else they could sell. Some enterprising Londoners took advantage of the growing Victorian interest in artefacts and antiquities. Two illiterate young men from the East End called Billy and Charley ran a profitable business making their own “river-aged” medallions and statuettes, which they sold to antiques dealers and gullible collectors. Maiklem respects their opportunism: “Most of the Fellows and Victorian gentlemen who had collected the contents of the boxes and cabinets in the museum room hadn’t got their own hands dirty in the process”.

Mudlarking as a middle-class hobby caught on in the UK more recently. In 1956 the self-described “accidental archaeologist” Ivor Noël Hume wrote that after the Second World War, “the river’s trinket box was opened virtually for the first time, and everything that could readily be seen was taken by the many mudlarks who foraged en masse”. He might have been surprised to learn of the increasing number of hobbyists and metal detectorists determined to find what remains in the trinket box. In 2018 about 200 licences were issued permitting searches of the river’s banks between Teddington and the Thames Barrier; now there are more than 5,000. The historical foreshore is at risk from damage done by careless foragers as well as by global warming and increasing pollution.

Mudlarking: Lost and found on the River Thames is a beautifully written book, absorbing and full of unexpected gems. “Most people are searching for something; perhaps mudlarks are searching harder than others”, the author writes, capturing the obsessive nature of her own searches. She describes how, to catch the low spring tide, she rose before dawn, took a commuter train from Kent and knelt in the mud beneath opaque sheets of freezing rain, peering between stones, rubbish and rubble. To most of us that would seem a bleak prospect. But to experience London in this way is, Lara Maiklem writes glowingly, to find “a unique wilderness amid urban chaos; it is wonderful, enlivening”.

Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer and researcher based in Cambridge

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