Tag: river thames

Lead Love

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There are many items in the ‘mudlarking starter kit’ (for example, pins, hand forged nails, garnets), most of which I’ve now disciplined myself not to take home. However, there are a few objects that are just so lovely, I can hardly bear to leave them to fate.

Lead tube screw top lids rank in the top echelons of said items, although I do apply some fairly stringent ‘keeper’ rules, for example, how clear and/or interesting the embossed branding is.

Here is a selection of my favourite screw top lids, including Roger Gallet, Crest and my all-time favourite, a chunky number from J.B. Williams Company.

99% of the screw tops I find belong to toiletry packaging – usually toothpaste (or ‘dentifrice’), shaving creme and foam – and are mostly made of either lead, or lead-zinc alloy. From time to time I’ve also found tin and other metal screw tops.

It’s said that toothpaste was first placed in lead collapsible tubes in the 1850’s, although I have seen a contrary source which claims that Connecticut dentist,  Dr. Washington Sheffield, was the first to have introduced collapsible metal toothpaste tubes, much later, in 1892.

This practice, though known to be potentially poisonous, continued though the 1950’s. It also turned out the lead consumed the flouride in the paste, so by the time you got the toothpaste all the flourides were gone.

During WWII, used toothpaste containers were collected so the lead could be smelted to make bullets.

Toothpaste fact: its first use is recorded to have been as long ago as 500 B.C. in China and India!

The maker of my favourite screw top lid, the J.B. Williams Company Inc, was founded in 1849 by James Baker Williams – born 1818, strangely, also in Connecticut. I wonder if he was familiar with Dr. Washington Sheffield?

Williams began experimenting with various soaps to determine which were best for shaving, and eventually developed Williams’ Genuine Yankee Soap, the first manufactured soap for use in shaving mugs.

William’s shaving soaps were sold throughout the United States and Canada, and as a result of rising demand, the facilities were expanded several times in the late 1800s.

By the early 1900s, the company was known throughout the world. In addition to its line of shaving creams, the firm produced talcum powder, toilet soaps, and other toilet preparations.

The company continued to grow, hugely, until in 1977, it finally closed. The original 1847 factory is still standing, and, in 1979, was converted into a condominium complex. In 1983 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. What a treat to know, this is the original location of my favourite ever screw top lid!

Source: Big Fork Dentist, Intelligent Dental, Bloomberg.com

Night Larking

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Spoils of a pleasant night lark.

In no particular order – giant fish hooks, musket ball, lead shot, codd bottle stopper, modern key, loose change a half-cut Franc (modern, but a good story), fouled anchor and rampant lion naval livery button by Jennens & Co (again, good story, more to come later), a little lead pellet with an ‘S’ initial (a mystery, perhaps print related), a pleasing echinoid and giant hook that I like to imagine is a stevedores hook although it probably isn’t.

As ever, I’ll go into more detail with individual items in another post.

 

Some Rose Farthing Business

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Single-arch Charles I Rose Farthing

Excuse the farmer-cheek pink fingers, I’d like to present to you a pretty little Charles I rose farthing.

Dating from somewhere between 27th March 1625 – 30th January 1649, this rose farthing is a ‘single-arch’ type. Single-arch refers to the crown above the rose, as well as the crown on the obverse. Double-arch, you guessed it, has two overlaid crowns with the arch interlinking, centrally.

A ‘Transitional’ rose farthing, has a bit o’both – double-arched crown on obverse, single arched crown on reverse, above the rose. The coins are made from copper, yet in this condition remind me of a lacy doily. I’m not sure where the Royal Numismatic Society stand on that, but there ya go.

It doesn’t end there, though. Rose farthings come with many variations, styles, mules and types, and aren’t confined to the Charles I and James I Royal Stuart period. Farthings were first minted in England, in silver, in the 13th century. The etymology of the word farthing is derived from the Anglo-Saxo ‘foerthing’, ‘fourthling’, or, ‘fourth part, and signifies the worth of one quarter of a penny.

Rose farthings are hammered coins, as opposed to cast or milled coinage. The coins are produced by placing a piece of blank metal between two cast dies, then striking the upper die with a hammer to produce an image on both sides of the coin.

“Hammered coinage is the most common form of coins produced since the invention of coins in the first millennium BC, until the early modern period of circa the 15th–17th centuries”.

I am trying to discover whether my rose farthing had a brass wedge inserted into it. An educated guess says yes – see the missing wedge on my coin in the photograph above. See the photograph and text below for a an illustrated example of copper farthings with a brass wedge…

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Examples of brass wedge rose farthings

 

“The farthings of Charles I (1625-1649) were privately minted. The Rose farthings were issued late in the Reign and later Rose farthings had a brass wedge inserted to stop counterfeiting.”

Source:http://wbcc-online.com/new-releases/rose.html

 

 

 

For further reading on Stuart farthings, see this website here, http://www.stuartroyalfarthingtokens.com/, and here, http://www.britishfarthings.com/Royal/2/Charles_I_Rose.html.

Quirks, curios, collecting: The G.P.O.

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Lead Bag Seal, W6 postcode

Last year I started to collect mysterious little lead squares as they began to surface on foreshore trip after foreshore trip. Knowing that they were ‘something’, but not quite knowing what that something was, I popped them in my finds bag to investigate later.

Those little lead curios turned out to be mail bag seals from the General Post Office. The discovery led me to serendipitously uncover many quirks of collectable G.P.O. miscellany and ephemera – old telephone cables, telegraph insulator caps, for example – which also unmasked a plethora of G.P.O. appreciation societies for the strangest of objects. This, for example.

The G.P.O. was a magnificent empire, covering snail mail, telegram, telephone switching systems and telegraph cables. That meant motorbikes, franking machines, seals, home telephones, resin dials, stamps, hard hats, bells, boxes and bicylces – all sorts of consumerables and collectibles – started with the existence of Royal Mail communications.

The Royal Mail we all know and (possibly) love today started life in 1516 as exactly that – a postal distribution system for royal and government documents. In 1636 King Charles I legalised the use of royal postal distribution system for private correspondence between senders and receivers. The General Post Office (G.P.O.) was officially established in England in 1660 by King Charles II.

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G.P.O. Telegraph insulators, made by Bullers Ltd, London

In 1661 the office of Postmaster General was created (previously ‘Master of the Posts’, in Henry VIII’s time) to oversee the GPO, further formalising the service, and making sure that it would run properly. In 1678 the Royal Mail’s headquarters moved to Lombard Street to cement their monopoly and crack down on other informal postal services. Before the official Royal Mail held the monopoly on postal delivery services, certain coffee houses, such as Lloyd’s and Garraway’s, informally organised private transport of mail between their patrons.

The G.P.O. grew to combine both the functions of state postal system and communications carrier, with similar offices, like modern day sorting offices, established across the British Empire. When new forms of communication came into existence in the 19th and early 20th centuries the G.P.O. claimed monopoly rights on the basis that, like the postal service, they involved delivery from a sender and to a receiver. The theory was used to expand state control of the mail service into every form of electronic communication possible on the basis that every sender used some form of distribution service.

Astonishingly, this very same system lasted until 1969, when the G.P.O. was abolished, the assets transferred to The Post Office. This marked the transition from a Department of State organisation to a statutory corporation. Now I’ve outlined the potted history, I can share some of my little finds with you.

Photographed below are six of my best G.P.O. bag seals, one is clearly marked with a London, W6, postcode prefix. In addition to the small, square parcel sack seals, I often find little lead studs attached to a shank, again stamped G.P.O. These little beauties are lead tipped nails, used to affix G.P.O. cabling to telegraph poles and sides of buildings.

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“In 1911 the post office replaced wax seals with lead ones for sealing letter and parcel sacks (lead seals were used in the the larger post offices probably since Charles I opened up his royal mail to the public in 1635). The Post Office Controller of Stores supplied the lead to the seal manufacturers Dunham White & Co Ltd., J.N.Lyons Ltd., The Lead Seal Manufacturing Co. and Walkens, Parker & Co. Ltd, directly” 

Source: The British Postal Museum & Archive, Freeling House, Pheonix Place, London.

In the photo towards the top of the page are a couple of GPO goodies that I didn’t take home. More’s the pity, it would seem, as they are very popular collectables. On certain parts of the foreshore you can’t move for insulators, mainly ceramic white ones, made by various companies, but mainly Wade, and Bullers Ltd. Sitting alongside transport network insulators, bask in the Obscure Objects of Transport Beauty.  – NB despite the GPO’s sprawling tentacles wrapping around Britain’s telegraph network when it was nationalised in 1870 , that did not include railway telegraph circuits, which continued to run in parallel with the publicly-owned telegraph network.

Good news! The Postal Museum opens this July, 2017, once again making a trip on the Mail Rail possible. Check it out, here: https://postalmuseum.org/. In addition to booking a ride on the historical Mail Rail, you can also browse the Postal Galleries to “delve into 500 years of groundbreaking postal history and discover how a humble service revolutionised our lives.” Or perhaps you’d like a photographic tour of a mechanised sorting office from the 1960s? Say no more, Matt Tantony is here to help.

It is at this point that I shall bid you farewell, reader, but not before turning your attention to some of the more curious societies and collector groups that I have so far found on my great G.P.O. journey…

The noble and true GPO Nostalgia Home Page | LINK

The very upright Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society | LINK

The glamorous domain of British Insulators (not all GPO) | LINK

17th Century Combed Slipware

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❄️Mudlark’s Advent, day 8❄️
Oh, hello, what’s this? A deliciously crumbly, fruity chocolate tiffin, topped with Bakewell icing? No. It’s a lovely, fat chunk of Staffordshire combed slipware, dating from somewhere between 1690-1830.

Combed slipware, an earthenware ceramic decorated in slip, fired, usually, with clear glaze to the patterned side, was popular between 1690 and 1830. While production began in Staffordshire, combed slipware ceramics were also produced in potteries across the Midlands, Yorkshire and Bristol.

Combed slipware has an uncanny likeness to delicious party biscuits and Bakewell tarts, achieved by ‘combing’ through applied coloured slip (wet clay), often finished off at the edges with a ‘crimped’ or ‘coggled’ pie crust effect.

I think this fragment was possibly part of a round edged, rectangular meat plate, as it is so chunky and heavy. Intact loaf or baking dishes, cups and pots are on display at the Victoria & Albert museum, Museum of London and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Jacks, Snobs, Knucklebones, Chuckstones…

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❄️Mudlark’s Advent, Day 7❄️
Jacks, Snobs, Knucklebones, Chuckstones… what do you know it as?

Dating back to before the Greeks, the game of Chucks (I’m going with this name, as China clay dice, like this one I found on the foreshore, were used) has been as big a mainstay in the playground as hopscotch or catch.

It is “a traditional children’s game, played the world over, for which there is no formal organising body. Consequently, rules vary from country to country and place to place.
The game is also known by a variety of names including Jackstones, Chuckstones, Dibs, Dabs, Fivestones, Otadama, Tally and Knucklebones. All that is needed to play the game of Chucks is five small clay squares.”

” The simplest throw consists in tossing up one stone, the jack, and picking up one or more from the table while it is in the air. This continues until all five stones have been picked up. Another throw consists in tossing up first one stone, then two, then three and so on, and catching them on the back of the hand.”

Alternatives to the squares can be pretty much anything of a similar size – originally sheep knucklebones were used.”
Actually the ‘knucklebones’ used were astragalus, bones in a sheep ankle, or hock.

I knew the game as Jacks, but instead of clay dice, metal or plastic spikes connected to a central base were used. My grandmother kept a set in her old bureau. I never really got the hang of the game, but spent hours pinging them along her old chintz carpet, only to spend further hours trying to retrieve them from under the settee.

The game was relatively simple on the surface of it, chucking the squares up and catching them on the back of your hand, but variations of hand positions with names such as ‘riding the elephant’ and ‘sending the people to church’ made things a bit more tasty.

Other permutations including the use of a bouncy ball and clapping ones hands between catches. Not so simple after all!