Well today i'm here going for a mudlark with Ted
Sandling who is the Author of the very inspiring book "A Mudlark's Treasures - London
in Fragments and it's a book that i absolutely love There's a previous
version of it but Ted's going to tell you about that later and we are here and we're hoping to
find some wonderful fragments of history ourselves That is right we are here i'm just overjoyed to
be mudlarking with you again Nicola, it's been far too long it has and it's brilliant too Ted
and i've got to mention you're also pretty nifty because i've seen it on your instagram at
this parcour activity, you know when you sort of run up walls and do little back flips and stuff and i am
hoping that you're going to do some kind of you know exciting backflip type thing down these
stairs you might be disappointed with that i think it will be a sedate mudlark today okay well if
you change your mind i'll be here with the camera Oh a wig curler! a wig curler with a WB . oh a wig curler that's fantastic! well half a wig curler these are just amazing i
love them so much they are 17th century though yeah stuck in Samuel Pepys' wig so they would
be the same on the other side like an hourglass and all of the ones i've found have WB on them
yeah i found one with WB and i looked it up and that's the most common maker there was obviously
somebody or people named WB who were prolific in making wig curlers i started to look into wig
curlers when i found my wig curler and i mean they used to wear wigs to cover up a multitude
of sins like diseases and what have you it's quite a fascinating subject so brilliant find i
remember reading in Pepys diaries about his response to wigs it was pretty much
in the course of a year where he saw the fashion beginning and was horrified by it and just
thought it was this decadent terrible thing and later on in his diaries he writes about going
into the barber to have his hair shorn ready for his first wig and it's a complete conversion
and it's very interesting i think the way in which fashion can overwhelm you you know you
you think you're resisting it and suddenly it seems the most natural thing in the world
to cut all your hair off and start putting on a pompadour but this is marvelous that is well
done you're on fire ted well we'll see how it goes so here in this old mud here we have the
most beautiful piece of metal poking out and not only is it gorgeous it's sardines sardines in oil and sardines ancient sardines
i think it's sardines dont you think it says sardines sardines yeah for a minute i thought it
said huitres but it's not no it is sardines oh it would have been better that is lovely though
because because vintage sardines are a delicacy it's funny because i find so many fish past pots. I don't want to slice my fingers. yeah hang on i'll help you with my my trowel i often find so many fish paste pots have you
ever found such a good sardine tin though? No. and i'm actually reading a book to my son right now called the
explorer in which is some children lost in the amazon rainforest and they find
an ancient sardine tin oh no you're joking they find an ancient sardine tin! so i'm going to bring this
home to him and the on the floor of the amazon rainforest they see an ancient and it gives them hope so
they're on an airplane that crashed so of course how extraordinary that
you've now just come down here and found a sardine tin! i love that yeah oh i have to find out who made it yeah let's see she said grabbing it from
him you grab so no i'm just still wondering oh yes look they're actually yes something
alimentaire, oh this is fabulous isn't it how very exciting is that it's obviously a lot posher than
the people who used to just take their spoon to a fish paste pot at lunchtime. i just don't want to give myself tetanus with an accidental slice
that wouldn't be a good idea oh that's marvelous we've got these we got thames
can you see the maker that's it let's have a look at the end in our
round up and just see what it is that's beautiful well done thank you very much i've
never been so excited about sardines before you got me very excited too it's pretty good sardines
right well i've just seen bart simpson over here seriously oh i don't know maybe it's not Bart. It kind of looks like bart though doesn't it i think that might be from like roblox oh
really oh i see i'm not up to date with roblox Ive found a couple of things over here which are very worn, but also really revealing so these are
triangular pins of biscuit of clay and they're really an important part of the
delftware making process of delft firing they're triangular pins that would sit inside
what's called a saggar a sort of big rough pot in which delftware pottery was fired or more
than delft but in particular for this story delftware pottery and saggerswould have triangles cut in them through which these would be inserted and the plates and
things would be resting very lightly on the the apex of that triangle so that the the glaze
didn't stick to anything as it was being fired so finding these here shows our proximity to
you know 18th century delftware potteries which is fantastic this area here is just filled with the
detritus of the delft pottery so lots and lots of biscuit that has all gone wrong you can see
there are a bit of glaze it's just oh yeah melted really badly so they've discarded it down here
this is all discarded many more pieces of saggar you get some fine biscuit too with a different body so here's a nice piece of delft work you can see the biscuit is exactly the same
as was lying around yes but this one is decorated can't quite tell what it is a windmill a vase
of flowers there's some really interesting bits here so that's also been fired then and just
discarded oh that's here so this is where the fire got too hot in the kiln and
the clay has vitrified it's turned into glass that's a lovely spot nicole that's nice and that
is beautiful it's that mossy green it's like jade half half a triangle so this is
what i was talking about when i said those pins fit through a
triangular hole in the saggar what have you found oh i just
love that just look at the way it's there in the mud it's so tantalizing and actually funnily enough
i've just seen another pipebowl down there now that's nice i love the way that
it's in the mud such a lovely picture Oh it's lovely though!
Can i see yours all right well mine's just a bowl but it's um it's a tiny one that's great isn't
it wonderful that you can find two things that are separated by an age as well yeah separated
by a century or so yeah definitely definitely that's nice it's quite a small it's delicate
for a georgian pipeline it's very delicate and it's much smaller than you'd expect it's nice
it might have a maker on the heel oh lovely i'll put it in my bag and then give it back
to you afterwards she said squirreling it away well that's the 1700s for sure definitely and it's
the right size and it's got a bit of a maker's mark on it that's lovely that's nice i always keep
the mud in it just in case there's some tobacco in the bottom were you posting about that recently
people sometimes think it's because i want to smoke it! now i have just seen a coin here actually i have but it's just being covered
up slightly now it's around here no that's a oh that's a george look at that that's
a george the second i think well done nicola well you were talking about
moving on to coins so i duly did i'm really glad that i was able to walk right
over it yeah perfect i love seeing the the profile yeah beautiful oh
what a stunner - that's so beautiful what have we got here it could be bottle stopper
oh and it is look it is it's purified milk and it's from somewhere but i can't quite read
that yet yeah an old milk bottle stopper lovely so this is another nice one um it is an old
bottle you can see here the the string course which is this rim of glass here on which uh you
tie the um the cover to the bottle and it's still got its cork in it's a really big hefty cork i
love it when you find bottlenecks still with the cork it's the thought that the last person who
yeah plugged it in there they couldn't find their corkscrew so they just smashed the top off the bottle but this
might be quite good for storing the pins that we find what a great idea it is now a pin cushion
very resourceful always got to be resourceful many years ago i saw a very well dressed
gentleman hunched down rather like i am and uh just making a very repetitive movement um
rather like I am and i wandered over to see what he was doing and he was picking up these pins
and he had a tobacco bag like a golden virginia plastic bag which he was methodically putting pins
into - because finding them it's just it's addictive you sit in one place and you keep spotting
more and more pins everywhere you look and we spoke about how pins were used before
zips were and whatnot we spoke about how how pins were used to fasten women's clothing and
pin money husbands would give their wives pin money to buy pins um and then he asked
me if uh i'd ever seen a 20-pound note i've seen a 20 pound note - just a few well not that
many but he asked me if i'd ever looked at them and he took one out of his billfold and on the
front of this old 20-pound note now it's turner but there was a picture of
um adam smith and a pin manufacturer it's a quote from the wealth of nations so
i went home and i got the wealth of nations and very very early on in the book adam smith is
describing how um the process of making pins um can be broken down and made more
efficient he says something like one man making a pin all on his own doing all the processes
could make maybe 10 in a day 10 but if you break down maybe it's 20 i don't know small number
if you break down the processes so that one man is pointing the pin and one man is uh
wrapping the head and one man is whitening it so you've got i don't know 10 people making
pins they can make 50 000 in a day and it's that sense of mass production of the assembly
line of breaking things down efficiently that lead from there to the industrial
revolution to you know to henry ford to China which is currently making however
many millions of iphones a day from these on the foreshore, that was so incredible to me
that you can go from absolutely tiny things and you leap to world spanning you know macro
economical shifting stories it's just incredible oh what have you got there i have just found this
rather beautiful bangle with nice red and black incised dots and i wonder if it might be bakelite. i think it might be do you think it might be 1920s oh it could it's got a bit of age to it.
and it's kind of got that sort of art deco feel but it's very irregular it's quite
amateurishly done it's not bone it's plastic so it's really cold there's this beautiful little tesserae
right here so that is a fragment of stone that would have been laid into a mosaic
floor and if you come around this way they could be roman but they're
more likely to be victorian oh look i don't think it's going to be that
long but it's still quite exciting just watching the extraction there oh there we go look at
that ah that's a nice one isn't it beautiful yes it is fantastic there we go
another one for you for my bag your bag let's have a look over here i think let's see oh yeah look you can see the
pipe stems in the mud there beautiful old nails as well lovely old nails just have a look over here oh i just
nearly tripped over a pipe well you've done a pretty good
job on the pipes today though oh oh yes yes i sense from here
that there is some stem on it not bad not bad so i think that's slightly later
yeah but really nice i love this old mark that's such a sharp thing down there
yeah i like that and that's probably a nice um maker on the heel we were just talking about coins and
i suddenly saw one and it's right down there not too far away from ted's boot i
think it might be modern can you see it i was just telling nicola that i have
coin blindness and although i'm almost standing on this coin i can't see it anywhere
i can see it there is it it's give me a okay oh it's a ha'penny oh that's the ship ha'penny i think
it's quite a good ha'penny actually yeah i think it's 1944 1944 so can you just make that uh
so just towards the end of second World Ward oh yes well keep talking about coins and then i
might find another one so this it's not much of a pipe
but it's tantalising because it has the maker's name i think on
it let's go rinse it off yeah most of my regular viewers will know
that i love a pipe with a maker on it (who doesn't love a pipe with a maker on it!) let's see what does it say i hope it's a name
i hope it's the name and i hope it's legible do you know what oh yeah it's Deptford - it's
a place oh yeah well it will be the place on that side and there should be the name on the
other side yes yes there is can you read that let's have a look - it's the other way around i'm sorry
i keep grabbing all your finds out of your hand i should make a note to the viewers that i no
longer have any of the pipes that i found today i know i've just realised i keep taking them
they're all in Nicola's pockets um i'm sure we we might be able to see it we can take a
photo of it yeah i think we're going to have to and then i can look up the maker i've got a few Deptford Pipes
let's add this one to your collection of my pipes this is nice and old and i don't know what it
is but i recognize the style oh do you know what i think i recognize that from my outings with
Richard Hemery, i mean it could possibly be the bottom of one of these german that's what i think
beer mugs or vases i think yeah yeah the sort of pinched base is really recognisable yeah
it really reminds me of that of the uh base of one of these german drinking ware vessels we will have to do a bit
of research absolutely take it and find out by the time this goes out we will know what it is
and how old it is but i i would say this is what sixteen hundreds yeah definitely maybe something
like that for sure really nice and old and lovely lovely find well everyone
look at our beautiful array of treasures a Mudlark's Treasures
absolutely a Mud Lark's treasures what a trove we have found today Nicola we have
amazing just look at that it's just such a large collection of objects all of which have such
a fascinating history really so we won't go through everything because the tide is heading
right up but there's definitely some things that i want to concentrate on and actually i
wonder if you could first just explain these absolutely we were talking about uh
we found a lot of delftware today and so delftware is predominantly 18th century this earlier
um but let's say 18th century um pottery in in london it's this sort of pottery often blue
and white it's called tin glazed earthenware um potters came over from the netherlands in
i think 1570s something like that originally um and it developed before it was
replaced by easier longer-lasting longer-lasting pottery so the way in which they
were fired was in dishes which were placed inside a saggar inside a kiln and a saggar was something like this
that protected the dish from the smoke of the kiln and the plates would rest on little triangular
sat through here and then it would sit on that and it would mean that the there was a tiny amount
of exposure between the glaze and and this pin so they were unlikely to to fuse to it and
get stuck so really really nice that we're able to find all three parts of that pottery process
brilliant thank you for that explanation i'm going to pop those back there what else have we got
we've got our favorite sardine tin these sardines in oil were manufactured by Joseph Peneau who
set up his company in Nantes in france in 1844 Nantes was very famous for canning and the
first canning factories were located on rue de la ville en bois which is where Peneau
proudly proclaims its locations on the tins Peneau even exhibited his sardines in london in
the great exhibition of 1851 and the english market was very important for him in 1872 his
son wrote to Joseph about their rival Levesque in an article in 1900 in the london express
Peneau is considered to epitomise sardines when the average englishman feels that a taste of
sardine is necessary for the purpose of enjoying life unless he can get Peneau's sardines in oil
he feels mortified - so who enjoyed tucking into this can of Peneau's sardines in oil back in the
19th century we've got these tessera here pins um of uncertain dates but nice enough loads of
pipes we've got loads of pipes some of them with makers i am obviously quite excited about the
little bit of stem because it's got the name it just adds that extra layer of intrigue and
interest really because a tiny stem can lead to the story of a person so i'm definitely going
to be looking them up hopefully there's enough letters there that we can find the maker very
happy with the coins and um yeah we've got a beautiful selection of treasures oh this um this
ancient bit of pottery that we need to do loads of research on it and find out what it is
we encountered a man today and i'll send you a photograph who found the top of a bartmann jug
i mean my dream is to find the face of a bartmann but he found the top of a bartmann jug still with
the cork inside so we found a bottle with a cork in it's nothing compared to finding a bartmann jug
with a cork in it's a massive cork we've never seen anything like it in all our time hunting on
the river but also not really in the literature so really exciting to see that and i'll
send you a photo so you can show it in the video and so what a lot of beautiful treasures and
talking of Mudlark's treasures... Nicola i have a book for you - Wow exciting! A Mudlark's Treasures so this
is a new edition of my book London in Fragments we've switched the titles around a little
bit and this is to accompany an audio book i recorded um reading out A Mudlark's Treasures - which is going to come out in may so this is a lovely book to read it's got
lots of pictures of the objects on the inside marvelous oh and look and you've signed it too
um i have the previous edition of your book and i love it and i'm often referring to it
for information about what i find and honestly everybody if you get the opportunity to purchase
this book now where is this edition coming out so this edition is coming out on the 18th of may
and so is the audiobook the audiobook will be on audible and this is from all good book sellers
did i hear something about a giveaway i think you might have heard something about a giveaway so
i'm really happy my publishers have offered a few books uh to Nicola's viewers so
if you would like to get a copy of this for free i think the idea is post a comment
in the comments and we'll do a sort of lottery thing yeah that's right so if you would like to be in with a chance to win a copy of Ted's book and i think we've got
three if you could put down in the comments #AMudlarksTreasures and then who knows you may be in for a chance
to win one of these beautiful books thanks Ted oh Nicola thank you so much for
inviting me out today i have had an absolutely wonderful time i can't believe how many treasures
we found in just a short walk by the River Thames me neither it's amazing isn't it such an endless
source of inspiration this river it really is excellent well here's to the next time
next time let's hope it isn't too long You can purchase A Mudlark's Treasures on Amazon or at any good book sellers https://smarturl.it/amudlarkstreasures.
