This is one of an intermittent series looking at “mudlarking” on the River Thames in London and occasionally on other interesting sites. Mudlarking 21st style is done for fun, profit, and interest in the long, long history of life in London. Mudlarking in the time of Darcy and Elizabeth was the province of people who were desperately poor, people who combed through the detritus and wreckage of the river’s shores in search of any small thing that could be sold for a coin or two.
Attending school in Virginia in the Sixties brought with it a special responsibility. The kids involved spent three years of their grade school and high school careers learning about Virginia’s history, which was viewed as Very, Very Important. I was one of those kids, and decades later, I can tell you that the year 1619 was a Red-Letter Year in the history of the state due to three Very Important Events: First, captive people from Africa were first brought to the colony, and we began the descent into slavery. Second, reputable and virtuous young women made the perilous voyage from England to marry the men who were already more or less settled there. This was always referred to as the Coming of the Maids. Don’t ask me why. The third and final event of the Red-Letter Year is that tobacco became for the first time a profitable crop, one that would go on to make quite a few people very wealthy while forcing quite a few others into lives of misery and bondage.
Smoking tobacco had been known in Europe from the mid-1500’s on and may have been introduced by explorers returning to Europe from the New World. The crop was well known to Indigenous people in the West, who smoked the plant in pipes that they constructed of clay. People in Europe seem to have begun making clay pipes at around the same time. Smoking also became associated with the many taverns, public houses, and coffee houses of London.
As one of the major shipping hubs in the world over the centuries, London seems to have inherited a major share of the world’s discarded clay pipes. They are somewhat like cigarette butts, only tidier. Pipe smokers would use them once or twice before discarding. They could be purchased at taverns or at tobacco shops as they became common. A manufacturing industry sprang up, and there were pipe makers whose names have been recorded and are familiar to this day.
How on Earth did something as fragile and brittle as fired clay survive for all this time in the mud and under water. The answer seems to lie partially in the “magic clay” that is part of the Thames in many places. It is not magical at all but rather has chemical properties that make it anaerobic. It protects whatever is buried in it from the destructive nature of oxygen itself. The cream-colored clay of the pipes turns a purplish-black when exposed to this mud. As soon as a pipe or other object is brought to light, the black stains begin to fade, and in only a few hours, the original color of the object is revealed. The mud also has a cushioning effect on whatever it covers, protecting artifacts from the destruction of wind, weather, tides, and human activities. Many times, the pipes are extracted from the mud in pieces. They were often made with stems as long as a man’s forearm, and while most of these have broken, it is possible to find them whole and intact, cushioned over the centuries by the Thames mud. Those long stems served a purpose. They made for a cooler and more enjoyable smoking experience and kept the smoker’s eyes and nose clear of the smoke.
People tossed their used pipes into the River Thames for over 300 years, and it’s possible to date a pipe and sometimes to determine who made it. The earliest pipes of the 1600’s have small bowls and are usually very plain. Maker’s marks do not usually appear. In the 1700’s, while some pipes stayed plain, their bowls grew larger. Pipes were often decorated with classical designs such as shells, scrollwork, fluting, feathers, and leaves. Their stems grew longer, and a small heel spur was put at the base of the bowl where it met the stem so that the pipe could be set down and remain upright. Makers proudly pressed their names and locations into the wet clay of the pipestems before firing them. By the 1800’s, the designs on the bowls had become amazingly elaborate and decorative. A pipe smoker could display fraternal affiliations such as the Masons. (My favorite among these is the fraternal order of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffalo, the RAOB.) Military affiliations such as branch of service or regiment could also be found. Bowls depicted all sorts of animals with horses being among the favorites. Human figures from mythology and the classics graced many bowls. Finally, we should give a nod to the “naughty” ones, designed to elicit snickers from their smokers and beholders.
Mudlarking plays a large role in my latest work of JAFF, “The Mudlark: Darcy’s Story.” I have enjoyed my explorations of the processes very much, and while I will probably never be able to visit the Thames, I am very curious about what might be found in my own home city, which is a seaport on the East Coast here in the U.S. My guess is that our harbor floor might yield a few remains of clay pipes with stories of their own to tell.
Acknowledgment:
I owe a great deal to mudlark Nicola White, who operates a Facebook page as well as a website, Tideline Art, relating her experiences on the Thames. She has a profound sense of the history of what she is uncovering, including the individual stories associated with these mute, seemingly random, objects. We can all thank Nicola and her colleagues for treating their finds with respect and for their contributions to uncovering many stories of human history.
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