A Chilly Afternoon's Mudlarking! by guest author Kate Wiseman

Hi, I was absolutely delighted to be asked to make a film about mudlarking* for the Time Tunnellers. 

If you don’t know, mudlarking is searching the Thames foreshore at low tide to see what historical treasures you can find, and you need a permit from the Port of London Authority to do it.  I’m always more than happy to talk about mudlarking, so I set off on a chilly late winter’s day to see what the Thames would give me.

Mudlarkers look for objects from the past on the banks of the Thames

The tide wasn’t particularly low, but the Thames was generous, as she usually is. My favourite finds were a tiny 17^th century pipe bowl and a lovely nugget of fool’s gold. Someone suggested that I break it open to see what it’s like inside, but I think it’s beautiful as it is. What do you think?? What would you do?

One of Kate's mudlarking finds

I didn’t come across my dream find: a bellarmine jug or witch bottle. They were used in the 17^th century to ward off witchcraft. Superstitious people filled them with nail clippings, hair, red thread and even urine to counteract witches’ spells. Often they would be buried under the doorway of a house, or beneath the fireplace. Others were simply used to transport alcohol and thrown into the Thames when empty.

I did find the handle of one, and also the eye from the representation of an angry-looking man. These were applied to the front of bellarmine bottles.  I dream about finding a whole one and if I ever do, I’ll be shouting about it from the rooftops. 

Clay pipes are one object that can be found by mudlarkers -
the original mudlarkers were poor children.

My first Mudlark Mystery, The Grinning Throat, features a witch bottle and on the front cover, Edie Lighterman, one of my protagonists, is shown holding one. That will have to do until I find a real one. Watch this space…

'My first thought is that it’s a pig that someone has lost to the river. Perhaps it fell off one of the barges that choke up the Thames. They’re a constant feature, toiling up and down, day and night, giving off black smoke that clings to the water.'

Joe (15) and Edie (13) are orphans living in Victorian London. Forever worried that they will be sent to the dreaded workhouse, they scratch out a living the best way they can by mudlarking on the foreshore of the River Thames and selling their finds to the notorious Hempson. One day they discover something macabre, and it will change their lives forever. 

The Grinning Throat is the first in the trilogy of The Mudlark Mysteries. Written by award winning author, Kate Wiseman, it is historical fiction at its best. Suitable for readers from age 9 and upwards.

The Grinning Throat has been longlisted in the historical Association's Young Quills 2024 award.

You can buy copies online HERE.

Kate Wiseman is an author and mudlark. She grew up in Oxford in the 1970s and was the first in her family to go to university, at the age of 38. She loved it so much, she went on to take a master’s degree as well. That gave her the courage to have a go at what she’d always dreamed of doing: being a writer. Kate loves visiting schools to deliver creative writing workshops based on mudlarking and her books. 

Find out more about mudlarking and Kate's other books at Katewiseman.co.uk

*Mudlarkers in London must have a Thames Foreshore Permit which can be obtained from the Port of London Authority. All objects which are three hundred years old or more must be reported to the Museum of London. Mudlarks arrange regular appointments with a Finds Liaison Officer who records the artefacts on the Portable Antiquities Scheme managed by the British Museum.

Clean Water for London? by Jeannie Waudby

I visited the fascinating London Museum of Water and Steam, to see how clean water saves people from disease.

We all know now what it’s like to go through a global pandemic. As Covid 19 spread around the world, it wasn’t immediately clear what we should do to stop it. Now we know the virus is mainly spread through the air droplets from an infected person’s nose or mouth. Throughout history, people have been faced with epidemics and the difficulty of trying to prevent them. For my last book, I researched the 1848 epidemic of cholera in London. Thousands of people died from this devastating illness, but at that time they didn’t understand how it was spread. People thought the disease was caused by bad air, or ‘miasma’. It’s easy to see how terrified everyone must have been and why they thought that the stink from the river was making them sick. They were right to think the river was the problem, but not because of the smell. The water in the Thames was contaminated by cholera-infected sewage.

A doctor called John Snow identified the source of a deadly cholera outbreak to a pump in Broad Street.

John Snow suspected that dirty water was the problem. In 1849 he wrote a paper querying whether water could be transmitting cholera, but he faced a lot of opposition. Many people, even officials, were convinced of the bad air theory. Others were keen to blame cholera on poor people. It wasn’t until 1854 that John Snow was able to prove his water theory. He followed the trail of people who fell ill with cholera, and discovered that the first person to catch it was a woman who had fetched water from a pump contaminated by cholera-infected nappies. It was only in the mid 19th century that germ theory came to be understood so that helps explain why people resisted this for so long.

Other diseases could be spread in water – for instance the deadly outbreak of typhoid that came from a poo in a well.

Many people got their water from stand pumps, wells or rivers but as the 19th century progressed more and more Thames water was pumped into buildings.

The problem was that as London rapidly expanded, the river was becoming more and more contaminated by sewage and industry. It even came to be known as ‘the big Stink’. Eventually the Thames was so dirty that the Chelsea pump could no longer be used and in 1838 a new one was built in Brentford – the Kew Bridge Waterworks where the museum now is. The water was lovely and clean here because it was still mostly countryside, and at first the river water was pumped directly as it was. This pump used steam and was enormous. It’s still in the main block now.

Soon after building the Waterworks, it was decided that the river water should be cleaned up before pumping it to Londoners’ homes. So a system of filter beds and reservoirs was created around the site. By 1848 all waste had to be discharged into street sewers. Unfortunately, these emptied into the Thames and unfortunately, when it rains heavily this still happens today.

It’s very interesting to see all the different pumps that have been rescued and restored at the museum. Pumping water went from wind power to steam to electricity. There is still a pump working away to supply water to Londoners but now it is underground. Almost certainly, some of the electricity will come from wind energy.

Writing Challenge

Clean water is a necessity of life. We are mostly made of water and we call our earth ‘the blue planet’ because so much of its surface is water. Poets have always written special poems to things, people, ideas or places that they love. This kind of poem is an ‘ode’. Can you write an Ode to Water? First make a list of the things you love best about water. Each one can become a line of your poem.

Here is my list:

Pushing my hands through blue swimming pool water

Raindrops on cobwebs

Wet pavements

Ice-cold tap water in winter

Soft dark green pond water

Jeannie Waudby is the author of YA thriller/love story One of Us. She has recently completed a YA novel set in Victorian times.

“Any Old Iron” Guest post by Elizabeth Wein

The garden of my house in Perth, Scotland, lost its iron rail fence in World War II – not to an enemy bomb, but to patriotism. All over the United Kingdom, iron railings got chopped down in parks and gardens to support the war effort. Here's a link to a newsreel from 1940 showing men collecting railings in a London park!

https://www.britishpathe.com/video/park-railings-for-munitions

The idea was that the iron would be melted down and used to make ammunition and armour for tanks and ships, although nobody’s really sure if that happened – there’s a rumour that London’s iron railings were all dumped in the Thames, and I’ve been told that Perth’s ended up in landfill on St. Magdalene’s Hill.

Iron rail fences on our road early in the 20^th century

Parliament’s Hansard report for 13 July 1943 tells us that somebody wanted to know what was being done with all that collected iron. Lord Hemingford commented, “It has been felt that an injustice has been done to a very large number of usually uncomplaining and patriotic people. This question of the requisitioning of railings and gates is rather like eczema; it is not very serious, but it is most confoundedly irritating, and causes a vast amount of bad temper.”

(source: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1943/jul/13/requisitioned-railings)

For years, whenever I looked at the stumps of those railings in my garden wall, I thought of them as my house’s wartime scars. What I didn’t realize was that World War II took away something far more tragic from my house than its decorative iron railings. It took away the boy who’d come of age in that house and who’d still lived there when he went to war as a young man, the only child of the couple who lived in that house for forty years. He left my house to go to war and he never came back.

He was a navigator in the Royal Air Force. He was part of a team of “pathfinders,” a dangerous job in which an advance aircraft would have to find and mark an attack site for a bomber squadron, dropping flares in the dark that would light up the enemy target.  On 7 Dec. 1940, he and five other crew members took off from RAF Stradishall in Suffolk in their “Wimpey” – a twin-engined Vickers Wellington bomber. They flew through atrocious weather in the dark to Germany, along with two other pathfinder aircraft, to mark the target for a bombing raid in Dusseldorf. They vanished later that night somewhere over the North Sea – “Aircraft failed to return,” is what the official reports said.

A Wellington crew

(source: https://www.lancs.live/news/lancashire-news/lancaster-bomber-brave-daredevils-who-24064051)

Let me tell you about Chick. (His real name was Charles.) He was a mild-looking young man with dimple in his chin – his RAF portrait is in black and white, but I think he must have been like Kate, his mother, short and lightly built, with brown hair, those amused eyes blue. Robert, Chick’s adoptive father, ran a fishmonger’s shop in Perth, where Chick helped out, but in 1939, with war looming, he joined the Royal Air Force as a reservist.

The road in front of our house in 1934 and 2022

Late in August 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, one of Chick’s mates who was also a reservist got his calling-up papers. The friend and a few others turned up at Chick’s house – MY house! – at eleven o’clock that night, and they all decided they’d have one last night on the town before they were called into action. Chick drove them from Perth to Dundee where, arriving after midnight, they had a couple of drinks and checked out a couple of all-night coffee stands before heading back to Perth at about three o’clock in the morning.

That’s when Chick ignored a stop sign, was spotted by a waiting policeman, and got pulled over for driving under the influence of alcohol – which apparently he didn’t have a very good head for!

He was fined £10 and given a six month driving ban. He was contrite and honest about what had happened, and solicitor who defended him pointed out that it was Chick’s “first time in trouble”! (Source: Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 Aug. 1939, page 6).

See my source note there – I got this story from an old newspaper. It’s available online in the British Newspaper Archive. Actually, everything I know about Chick – the details of the colour of his mother’s hair and eyes, the kind of plane he flew, the date of his disappearance, even his nickname – I dug up by accident simply because I just wanted to know more about my own old house.

And in the wider sense, isn’t that the real reason we dig up history – because we want to know more about our own house, our own city, our own people, our own world? To learn from them, to connect to them in their strengths and to correct their weaknesses?

I tell this as a coherent story, as if I knew these people, Chick and his family and friends. But what I know about them I found through scraps, fragments, puzzle pieces that I’ve fit together: RAF war graves memorials, stories and police reports and personal columns in local newspapers, internet queries on ancestry chat boards, wartime bulletins, photographs, voting records, passenger lists for ships and airplanes.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_Wellington#/media/File:See_How_Your_Salvage_Helps_a_Bomber_Art.IWMPST14695.jpg)

Look at that – the scrap metal from his own fence railings may have become part of the Wellington bomber that Chick died in.

All my stories begin this way – finding connections between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between daily life and drama, between the past and the present. I hope this gives you some inspiration for finding your own fascinating connections!

Elizabeth Wein is a recreational pilot and the owner of about a thousand maps; flight inspires her young adult novels and non-fiction. Her best-known book, Code Name Verity, was short-listed for the Carnegie award and became a number one New York Times bestseller in 2020. She has published three short novels with Barrington Stoke, including Firebird, which won the Historical Association's Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction in 2019. Look for her latest flight-inspired historical thriller, Stateless, published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.

Visit Elizabeth's website at https://www.elizabethwein.com/

Twitter: @ewein2412

Instagram: ewein2412

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein.

The link to my info on the Barrington Stoke site: 

Elizabeth's Barrington Stoke books

Elizabeth Wein: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)

Guest Blog: Did I time travel to the Great Flood of London 1928? by Eve McDonnell

This week we are delighted to introduce our first guest blog post, by longstanding friend of the Time Tunnellers, Eve McDonnell. Eve is the award-winning author of Elsetime, a beautifully written time-travel novel which we all loved. As well as being a writer, Eve is also an artist and designer, and designed the wonderful Time Tunnellers’ logo and banners for us.

 

Read Eve’s guest post to find out more about her time travelling, her unforgettable characters - Needle and Glory and their pet crow, Magpie - and the true story behind the devastating flood in Elsetime.

 

And look out for more guest posts from children’s historical fiction writers on the Time Tunnellers blog in the months to come!

 

Children's author Eve McDonnell

If you had one superpower, what would it be?  

Without question, mine would be the ability to time travel. Sometimes, perhaps when I am on a bustling shopping street or a quiet country lane, I close my eyes for a second and imagine that, when I open them, I will have travelled one hundred years back in time. What would I see? Would the air smell unusual? What sounds would I hear? Would the birds even sing to a different tune? I guess it was this curiosity that led me to one of my favourite pastimes, treasure hunting – searching the pebbles alongside a river or the sea for something sparkling: an old button once part of a queen’s gown, perhaps, or a key to a mythical treasure chest, or a war medal from a hero who saved countless lives. With the help of my imagination, I guess I do time travel – I can see and feel each treasure’s history by simply holding it in the palm of my hand.

It’s no wonder a hobby so rich in possible stories was the inspiration for my children’s novel Elsetime with its tale of a young 1860’s mudlark called Needle, searching the foreshore for treasures he could sell. Glory, a jeweller’s apprentice, sprung to mind too, and I imagined her taking those muddy finds and transforming them into treasures to behold under the eyes of her strict mistress, Mrs Quick. Glory and Mrs Quick had to be from the 1920s, my imagination assured me, but I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen to my new-found friends.

Then I found a newspaper clipping. It told of a real-life tragic event almost lost to history: the Great Flood of London in 1928. At its epicentre was Needle’s haunt – the stretch of foreshore alongside the Tate Gallery (now known as Tate Britain). I needed to know more, and my research began.

 

Almost a century ago, at the source of the Thames, families enjoyed a snowy Christmas akin to those portrayed in picture-perfect postcards. But, quick as a wink, the snow thawed, sending torrents of water along streams and brooks that fed the Thames. A deluge of rain in the days that followed raised the level of the great river higher and higher as it twisted and turned its way towards the bustling centre of London and out towards the sea.

As Londoners partied away the Twelfth Day of Christmas or snuggled their loved ones into bed in old basement flats, the raging river met its match: a powerful storm in the North Sea. At the turn of the tide, waves swelled higher at the mouth of the Thames than any ever seen before. Seawater tunnelled its way up the river, clashing with the deluge of snowmelt and rainwater. X marked the spot where the river narrowed and its depth deepened following foolish dredging to allow passage to larger ships. Not long after midnight, the embankment walls near the Tate Gallery gave way.

 

Freezing cold water raced down stone steps and into the homes of poor basement-dwellers, trapping them before they even knew their fate. Muddy water inundated the basement galleries of the Tate Gallery, destroying many fine pieces of art, including several priceless Turner paintings and drawings. Big Ben was surrounded, the Underground submerged. The moat at the Tower of London filled for the first time in nearly a century.

Fourteen souls lost their lives that night and, as my research deepened, so too did my shock and sadness when I read the names listed on that Daily Mirror 1928 newspaper clipping. One name stood out: Mrs Quick – a name I had already created for the owner of the Jewellery Emporium where Glory worked. That was a big gulp moment.

As I stared down at Mrs Quick’s name, it felt like a message from the past. Perhaps, with Mrs Quick’s help, I really did time travel to the night of the 6^th of January 1928. Maybe that newspaper clipping was my time machine, my imagination its fuel, and my planned destination would ensure the story of the Great Flood of London in 1928 was finally told.

To when would you time travel?

 

Eve grew up in Dublin before moving to the beautiful countryside of Wexford where she lives halfway up a hill with her husband, twins, Happy the dog and Fusspot the cat. Eve embarked on a career as an artist and worked in graphic design, brand development and marketing. Having recognised the similarities between a blank canvas and a blank page, Eve’s writing career kicked off following a visit to a fortune-teller who told her to Write! Write! Write! On the rare occasion where her head is not stuck in a children’s story, Eve enjoys facilitating creative writing and crafting workshops, and painting everything from rather grown-up pieces to fun children’s murals.

Eve’s debut novel for 9-12 year olds, ELSETIME, was published in 2020 by Everything With Words and was inspired by a real-life tragic event: The Great Flood of London in 1928. 

Meet mudlark Needle and an impetuous jeweller’s apprentice called Glory; a special crow and a hard-nosed taskmaster; a distinguished inventor and a deadly flood – all living their lives in Inthington Town just a stone’s throw from each other but with many decades between. 

Cover and internal illustrations by Holly Ovenden.

Order a copy of ELSETIME from your local independent bookshop or you can visit The Rocketship Bookshop in the UK or Halfway Up The Stairs in Ireland.

Find out all about Eve on www.evemcdonnell.com and follow her on Twitter @Eve_Mc_Donnell.