"Ragged and dirty, and covered with vermin": The Mudlark

DVD cover of The Mudlark (1950). Image source: Amazon.ca

The (modern) mudlarks

My partner follows on social media a loosely affiliated group of amateur (and sometimes professional) historians and archaeologists who call themselves mudlarks. Modern mudlarks comb the foreshore of the River Thames looking for artifacts from the past: Roman coins or mosaic fragments, medieval pilgrim badges, Tudor signet rings, Stuart pottery shards, Georgian clay pipes, Regency shoe buckles, Victorian pub tokens, and buttons, handmade pins, keys, bottles, and other objects from the everyday life of many eras. Below Teddington Lock (about halfway between Windsor and central London) the Thames is a tidal river, with a maximum difference of about 7.5 meters (nearly 25 feet) between high and low tides at London's Tower Bridge, according to the Port of London's 2023 Tide Tables. As a result of this powerful daily surge of millions of gallons of water, detritus from the river accumulates on the foreshore with every tide.

The modern mudlarks have formed an association (the Society of Thames Mudlarks) and submit any find that is sufficiently ancient or valuable to the Museum of London for review. While some metal-detectorists also work the foreshore, true mudlarks rely solely on keen eyesight (aided, perhaps, by headlamps in the dawn and evening hours) to discover their treasures.

Malcolm Russell, in Wellingtons, kneepads and headlamp, mudlarking on the north shore of the Thames River in the City of London near the Cannon Street Railway Bridge. Photo credit: Matthew Williams-Ellis. Image source: Thames & Hudson

There are several fascinating books about mudlarking and how serendipitous finds of cast-off, lost or broken objects illuminate the social and cultural history of the metropolis. Among the many books on mudlarking my partner recommends:

Image source: The New Yorker

• Lara Maiklem: Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames, Liveright, 2021. From the jacket: "interweaving reflections from her own life with meditations on the art of wandering, Maiklem ultimately delivers. . .a timeless treatise on the objects we leave in our wake, and the stories they can reveal if only we take a moment to look."

Image source: Princeton University Press

• Malcolm Russell: Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames, Princeton University Press, 2022. Russell's profusely illustrated book tells "stories of forgotten people told through lost objects," covering enslaved people and immigrants; "mollies," "toms," courting couples and sex workers; artists and entertainers; criminals and addicts; street sellers, hawkers and quacks, among other urban subcultures.

Image source: Abebooks.com

• Jason Sandy and Nick Stevens: Thames Mudlarking: Searching for London's Lost Treasures, Shire, 2021. With Stevens' photographs on every page, this slim volume (under 100 pages) spans millennia, describing objects from prehistory to the (near-)present. It features chapters on megafauna, ritual offerings, medieval society, disasters, drinking culture, and World War II, among others.

(Left) A late-Victorian-era skirt lifter to keep the hems of women's dresses from getting soiled in the streets; (right) an 1899 halfpenny with "Votes for Women" stamped over Queen Victoria's profile. From Malcolm Russell: Mudlark’d: Hidden Histories from the River Thames. Image source: Thames & Hudson

The (Victorian) mudlarks

But 150 years ago mudlarking was something very different. In the 19th century the Thames was not only a working waterway packed with steamships, sailing vessels and coal barges, but also London's open sewer, where human and animal waste was dumped. What is now Farringdon Street/A201 was previously a canal known as Fleet Ditch, which ran from Hampstead through King's Cross, Clerkenwell and Holborn to the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge. Until it was finally covered over in the 19th century, Fleet Ditch flowed past Smithfield Meat Market, whose offal would be swept into the Fleet and washed into the Thames with every rainstorm, as graphically described in Jonathan Swift's poem "A Description of a City Shower" (1710):

Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. . .
Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.

As London's population increased from about 1 million in 1801 to over 6 million by the end of the 19th century, the pollution of the Thames grew ever worse. In June and July 1858 the city was subjected to the Great Stink, during which a choking, putrid stench from the river and its waste-covered foreshore spread over the city. In a Parliamentary debate on 15 July 1858, Benjamin Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, noted that the Thames, "that noble river. . .has really become a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors."

The Mud-Lark, from a Daguerreotype by Beard. Illustration from Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, v. 2, "The Street-Folk," between pages 136 and 137. Image source: Internet Archive

Mudlarks worked on the reeking, contaminated river scavenging coal, wood, rope, metal, lumps of fat, and anything else saleable from the muck of the foreshore and shallows. In Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4 ("Those That Will Not Work" [1], 1861), his co-author John Binny reported that mudlarks are "boys and girls, varying in age from eight to fourteen or fifteen; with some persons of more advanced years. For the most part they are ragged, and in a very filthy state. . .As soon as the tide is out they make their appearance, and remain till it comes in" (pp. 366-367). Binny provided a "Narrative of a Mudlark" whom he guessed to be about 13:

About two years ago I left school, and commenced to work as a mudlark on the river, in the neighbourhood of Millwall [on the Isle of Dogs], picking up pieces of coal, and iron, and copper, and bits of canvas on the bed of the river, or of wood floating on the surface. . .When the barge-men heave coals to be carried from their barge to the shore, pieces drop into the water among the mud, which we afterwards pick up. Sometimes we wade in the mud to the ancle, at other times to the knee. Sometimes pieces of coal do not sink, but remain on the surface of the mud; at other times we seek for them with our hands and feet. . .

Some of the mudlarks are orphan boys and have no home. In the summer time they often sleep in the barges or in sheds or stables or cow-houses, with their clothes on. Some of them have not a shirt, others have a tattered shirt which is never washed, as they have no father nor mother, nor friend to care for them. Some of these orphan lads. . .are ragged and dirty, and covered with vermin. (pp. 371-372)

The Mudlark (1950)

The title character of the 1950 film The Mudlark, which is set in the late Victorian era, is just such an orphan—a boy named Wheeler (Andrew Ray) who is about 10 years old. One night while searching the body of a drowned sailor that has washed up on the foreshore he finds a cameo of Queen Victoria. He doesn't recognize the image, but is told by a fence that the queen is "the mother of all England." When he learns that the queen lives at Windsor Castle the motherless boy decides to go there to see her. He manages to sneak past the guards into Windsor, and wanders in the vast halls in a daze until he discovers an empty banquet room.

Wheeler (Andrew Ray) exploring Windsor Castle in The Mudlark (1950). Image source: RareFilmFinder

A formal dinner is being held that night, and when an Irish maid, Kate Noonan (Constance Smith) enters the banquet room to complete the final preparations she discovers Wheeler. She doesn't sound the alarm, but can't smuggle him out of the castle until after the banquet. As the queen and her guests enter, Wheeler hides behind the curtains. Lying in the darkness he falls asleep, and his snoring leads to his discovery. Consternation among the residents of Windsor and a good scrub and delousing for Wheeler follow. John Brown (Finlay Currie), the queen's personal servant and confidant, takes the boy in hand and, once he realizes that he means no harm, gives him a tour of the castle; others surrounding the queen want the boy to be punished, and rumors start to fly that he is part of an Irish plot on the queen's life.

Queen Victoria (Irene Dunne) is still secluded in mourning for her husband Prince Albert, who died nearly 15 years earlier. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (Alec Guinness) has tried to convince her to show herself to her subjects in support of his reform projects, to no avail.

Prime Minister Disraeli (Alec Guinness) and Queen Victoria (Irene Dunne) in The Mudlark. Image source: TMDB.org

But when the queen finally meets the mudlark—he hides away in Windsor Castle a second time—she realizes that the time has come for her to reconsider her isolation at Windsor and re-enter public life.

The Mudlark, written and produced by Nunnally Johnson, is based on the 1949 novel of the same title by San Francisco writer and editor Theodore Bonnet. The novel and film fictionalize and relocate in both time and place the real-life incursion of 14-year-old Edward Jones ("the boy Jones") into Buckingham Palace in December 1838. [2] The Mudlark's visit to Windsor to see the queen is set in 1875, around the time that Disraeli's government was proposing a series of reform bills in Parliament, including:

• The Factories (Health of Women, &c.) Act, 1874, which raised the minimum age of factory employees to those who would turn 10 by 1876; limited the work of women and children in factories to a maximum of 10 hours, and the longest period of continuous work before an (unpaid) 1-hour meal break to 4.5 hours (meaning that women and children could be on site for a total of 12 hours, 10 of which were paid); established the earliest (6 am) and latest (8 pm) hours that women and children could be required to do factory work; and limited the factory work week to 6 days, with Saturdays a "half day" of 6 hours of manufacturing labor plus a half hour on additional tasks (such as cleaning). The Act did not apply to adult men, agricultural laborers, or miners;
• The Artizans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act, 1875, which promoted slum clearance and the development of new housing for workers;
• The Conspiracy, and Protection of Property Act, 1875, which excluded workers who were nonviolently striking and picketing from being charged with crimes of conspiracy;
• The Employers and Workmen Act, 1875, which defined servants as employees under contract and enabled workers as well as employers to sue in the civil courts if the terms of those contracts were abrogated (though in practice the costs of bringing suits were generally prohibitive for workers);
• The Public Health Act, 1875, which promoted the construction of municipal sewage systems and required new housing to include running water and sheltered privies, though earthclosets (latrines) were still permitted;
• The Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1875, which forbade the adulteration of food and drugs;
• The Elementary Education Act, 1876, which required children to be educated to proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and restricted (but did not ban) the employment of children age 10 or younger.

Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, albumen cabinet card (detail) by Mayall, circa 1868. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG x46496

The Mudlark's writer-producer Johnson and director Jean Negulesco were Hollywood-based, but the bulk of the film's cast and crew were British. The only American actor is Irene Dunne, the star of Roberta (1935), The Awful Truth (1937), and My Favorite Wife (1940), among many other films, who was unrecognizable to me in her prosthetic padding and with her (credible) British accent. Alec Guinness also does not look very much like himself, but does bear a strong resemblance to the historical Disraeli—all the more remarkable given that in 1875 Disraeli would have been over 70, while at the time of filming Guinness was just turning 36. (The makeup was by David Aylott.)

Guinness's excellent performance as Disraeli is capped by a stirring speech in Parliament in defense of his proposed legislation for improving conditions for working-class children. Referring to Wheeler, he asks, "How did this child manage to escape us? How did he manage to reach the age of 10 in the face of all that we did to prevent it?" Astonishingly, this speech, which goes on for nearly 7 minutes of the film's 99-minute runtime, is shot in a single continuous take, and of course it wins the day for reform. In reality the end of child labor, along with the establishment of the 8-hour workday and the five-day workweek, would take many more years of working-class struggle to achieve in Britain, and in our century remain to be achieved for those who harvest our food, sew our clothes, and assemble our electronic devices. Despite its paternalistic picture of social change and its elision of Disraeli's mixed legacy as Prime Minister (including his support of British imperialism), The Mudlark is very much worth seeing for Guinness's performance and for its glimpse of mudlarking's grim past on the Thames.

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1. In addition to mudlarks, Mayhew classifies among "those who will not work" prostitutes, thieves, swindlers, and beggars, including "naval and military beggars," "shipwrecked mariners," "blown-up miners," "bodily afflicted beggars," "starved-out manufacturers" [i.e., factory workers], "unemployed agriculturalists" [i.e., farmworkers], and "hand-loom weavers, &c." who had been permanently replaced by machines. Mayhew had a curious sense of what constitutes an unwillingness to work. ^ Return
2. Queen Victoria was not in the palace at the time, but at Windsor. Jones, who was spotted, chased, arrested and acquitted, entered Buckingham Palace twice more, in 1840 and 1841, and both times was arrested and sent to prison. Later he was arrested twice for loitering in the vicinity of the Palace, and finally "encouraged" to emigrate to Australia. Not quite the charming urchin of The Mudlark. During her long reign Victoria would survive eight assassination attempts. ^ Return