It’s been a very busy few months since my last blog post. We’ve been away travelling in Europe, reliving our inter-railing student days but with a touch more luxury. Decent train reservations and nice hotels rather than cheap nights in dodgy Eastern European youth hostels (I’m talking early 1980s – I’m sure they’re much nicer now) or dossing in a field somewhere in Belgium. Travelling in comfort is definitely de rigueur once you get to a certain age. We visited Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Amsterdam. Think Michael ‘Choo Choo’ Portillo (my Overseas readers might like to google him) but without the annoying flourescent suits.
I’ve been mudlarking too, not as many visits to the foreshore this year as I’d like, though this has picked up in recent weeks. Sometimes these visits have been a bit ‘smash’n’grab’ rather than a decent three hours or so, but even a quick lark is better than nothing and I’m grateful for even an hour of searching.
There have also been our Hands on History mudlarking exhibitions. Last month I made my way to Henfield Hall in West Sussex for a wonderfully busy and well attended event, where we mudlarks were guests of the Henfield History Group. There will be more exhibitions to come, including an exciting weekend at the stunning St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st June, from 10am to 4pm, free entry. A date for your diaries – do come!
Two weekends ago, just as the current heatwave was on its way, there were some decent low tides scheduled so I took myself down to the foreshore in South West London to see what the Thames might give me.
One of the wonderful things about mudlarking is that you never know what you’ll find. I arrived two hours before the predicted low for that day and could already see the tideline much further out than expected. Clearly it was going to be a corker, though that’s no guarantee of finding anything, as all mudlarks will tell you. But it doesn’t stop you hoping and it does guarantee access to areas of foreshore that are normally invisible and inaccessible.
Strolling along the tideline I saw something bizarre and more than a little disturbing. One of my nightmares, and that of many mudlarks, is finding something grisly on the foreshore – dead animals, human remains (which must be reported to police immediately) or eerie, potentially cursed objects. A fellow mudlark told me he’d recently found artefacts related to dark practices, felt extremely unnerved by this, and sensibly left them where they were. For those who are sensitive to this kind of thing, which is probably most of us, it can be an issue. I’ve thankfully never found human remains though mudlarks have been known to find Bronze Age skulls or bones relating to 18th/19th century convicts once kept on prison hulks moored on the river. When these poor souls died it wasn’t unknown for their bodies to end up in the Thames. However, I have found dead animals, unpleasant in itself, obviously – rats, a drowned puppy, foxes caught on the foreshore as the tide turned with no means of escape and, once, a dead cat in a plastic carrier bag. There’s no way of disguising this, it can be grim, but I made myself open the bag and take a look. It turned out to be what looked like an Edwardian gent’s efforts at amateur taxidermy. Moth eaten, mangy, glass eyes, not pleasant but at least not recent. I disposed of the poor thing carefully and respectfully.
Back to the bizarre thing.
This is what I spotted as I strolled about. Staring up at me, near a bridge from where I suspect someone had once lobbed it into the river, was this head. Picking it up, I couldn’t work out who this weather-beaten, toothless, bearded face belonged to. He was also very heavy, which might explain why his head was still intact with very little damage as far as I could see. Thrown into the Thames on a high tide the river would have broken his fall while he sank slowly to the bottom. Because of the exceptional low tide that weekend in SW London he wouldn’t normally have been visible.
I’ll admit I found him strange. The monotone colour, white face and black head covering, was dramatic and theatrical but also a bit unnerving, though that could just have been his direct gaze. Turning the head over there was a hole at the back, so clearly this had once been hung on someone’s wall. I didn’t feel any really negative ‘do not touch’ vibes from him so I decided to take him home with me and try to research who he was. However, the family weren’t pleased when I took him out of my finds bag in the kitchen and there was an overwhelming vote for me to take him back where I’d found him. My lot can be wusses.
Then the mudlarking hive mind came to my aid.
My Thames-found head was part of a collection of chalkware heads and figurines made by Bossons of Congleton, England. Bright, colourful creations, they were produced in the 1960s and were hugely collectible. When I posted about my Bossons head on another social media platform last week, a number of people messaged me to say that their parents, grandparents or some other relative had once collected these. They’re still collectible today though I have to be honest and say they’re not my taste. Maybe it’s me but there’s an odd vibe, a national stereotype to these faces, though they were from the 1960s when times and cultural attitudes were very different. Kitsch and slightly garish, Bossons produced Scotsmen, Albanians, Robin Hood, Country Squires, Nigerian gents, Arab Sheikhs, Swiss yodellers in Tyrolean hats, French onion sellers called Pierre, and plump-cheeked country milk maids. The range of Bossons heads was quite extensive.
My chap would have been once quite colourful, not the monotone he was when I saw him on the foreshore. It seems that decades immersed in the river had washed all the original paintwork away.
Having got him home and been unable to persuade the family that he definitely wasn’t cursed, I decided to take him back to the river the next day. I left him where I’d originally spotted him for someone else to find and then crossed over to the north side of the Thames to see what else might come my way.
There are times when the river takes your breath away.
This part of the foreshore in SW London has an ancient history. It literally holds secrets of some of the oldest settlements in what is now modern London. There are intertidal prehistoric peat deposits on both sides of the river here, at Putney and Fulham, when the landscape was once very different. The peat deposits contain diverse plant and animal remains giving important information on past environments and ancient landscapes.
In 2009 the Thames Discovery Programme (TDP) recorded three timber piles on the north bank of the foreshore at Fulham. Carbon-dated to the Iron Age (in Britain this is from 800 BCE to 43 CE, ending with the arrival of the Romans) it’s unclear what their function is. It’s known that there was a large Iron Age Roundhouse further upstream so it’s possible that the posts might have been part of a causeway or river crossing. Evidence of likely ancient ritual activity – the finding of worked stone tools and antler mattocks – has also been recorded in this vicinity so these tools may have been deposited in the Thames as offerings.
The three Iron Age timber posts come and go. They should be visible at every low tide but this hasn’t been the case for quite some time. The river has done it’s usual ‘thing’ of shifting, changing and re-arranging itself so the timber posts have been covered by stones and gravel for a while.
However, luckily for me, on this occasion they’d re-appeared and were visible again. As I crunched my way along the shingle towards them to take some photos I noticed a bottle lying on the sand in front of one of them.
Convinced it was bound to be broken I picked it up carefully but aside from a small chip on the rim it was complete. The cork was still in situ though closer examination of the contents revealed that whatever had once been inside had now been replaced by river water. My day was made, my mind was blown. Iron Age Britain metaphorically shaking hands across time with the 19th century. This is why I love mudlarking.
The bottle was embossed with the name ‘FELLOWS & CO. CHEMISTS. ST JOHN N.B.’ Made from clear glass, Victorian-era, definitely not a poison bottle as that would have been blue or green in colour. I still can’t believe it was just lying at the base of an ancient Iron Age timber post, deposited gently on that morning’s low tide as the waters slowly receded.
A quick online search revealed that Fellows & Co were Isaac Fellows and his son, James I. Fellows. Originally from St John, New Brunswick, Canada, they manufactured various household remedies, tinctures and medicines, also selling perfumes and other ‘fancy articles’ to the public, and advertising themselves as ‘Apothecaries to the Army and Navy’. Their most famous product was a tonic called ‘Fellows Compound Syrup of Hypophosphites.’ A further search of the contents of this ‘syrup’ revealed it contained some grisly ingredients – manganese, iron and alkaloid strychnine. Yet at that time it was deemed suitable for both adults and children. I’m making a wild guess that many patients felt far worse after taking it.
You can say what you like about the 19th century but they knew how to advertise and Fellows & Co advertisements were ubiquitous and prolific. They also had their own laboratories – in Montreal, Canada; Vesey Street, New York; and in 1881 they opened one at 7 Snow Hill in the City of London. The latter might explain how this bottle ended up on the Thames Foreshore at Fulham. It would have been manufactured in Snow Hill then distributed to apothecary shops across the capital, so its journey here wasn’t quite as far as I’d originally thought.
My Thames-found bottle hadn’t contained their famous Compound Syrup of Hypophosphites as this would have been embossed on the bottle. More likely it contained another type of tincture or tonic. Some fairly ambitious and wild claims were made about the Compound Syrup at the time. One was that it was deemed highly efficient in the treatment of Tuberculosis, Chronic Bronchitis ‘and other affections of the respiratory organs. It is also employed in various nervous debilitating diseases with success.’
Fellows & Co relied heavily on testimonials from patients who were ‘cured’ or from doctors who had successfully ‘cured’ their patients having used these products. A signed statement from the Mayor of St John, New Brunswick, was an example of the praise lavished on this product:
‘I, Aaron Alward, Mayor of the City of St John, in the Province of New Brunswick, having examined the signatures attached to the foregoing permit of reference, hereby certify I believe them all genuine. I can also testify to the high therapeutic value of Fellows Compound Syrup of Hydrophosphites, consider it deserving of attention by the profession generally.’
Unfortunately for the Mayor and others who helpfully submitted testimonials, in June 1918, the American Medical Association Journal declared a complete lack of evidence showing that this product had any therapeutic value. Fellows & Co eventually took this criticism on board and by 1928 all wild claims regarding cures were if not removed at least heavily muted and the syrup was rebranded simply as a ‘good tonic.’ Quacks and quackery, those who were making dishonest claims about their medical skills, expertise and promising cures, were now being taken to task.
There’s quite a community of collectors of vintage medicine bottles with numerous examples of different types of Fellows bottles for anyone interested in pursuing this further, all easily found online with a quick search. I haven’t been able to find the exact date the company was wound up but am imagining probably in the 1940s or 1950s. If any of my North American readers have any more accurate info please let me know.
NB A valid permit is needed from the Port of London Authority for anyone wishing to mudlark, metal detect or search the Thames in any way. Link to read more here:
Thames foreshore permits | Port of London Authority
Thank you for reading.
A Mudlark's Diary 