Billy & Charley’s Shadwell Shams
William Smith & Charles Eaton – better known as Billy & Charley – were a couple of Thames mudlarks who sold artefacts they claimed to have found in the Thames in Shadwell and elsewhere. Yet this threadbare veil of fiction conceals the astonishing resourcefulness and creativity that these two illiterate East Enders demonstrated in designing and casting tens of thousands of cod-medieval trinkets – eventually referred to as “Shadwell Shams” – which had the nineteenth century archaeological establishment running around in circles of confusion and misdirection for decades.
“They were intelligent but without knowledge,” explained collector Philip Mernick, outlining the central mystery of Billy & Charley, “someone told them ‘If you can make these, you can get money for them.’ Yet someone must also have given them the designs, because I find it hard to believe they had the imagination to invent all these – but maybe they did?”
Working in Rosemary Lane, significantly placed close to the Royal Mint, Billy & Charley operated in an area where small workshops casting maritime fixtures and fittings for the docks were common. Between 1856 until 1870, they used lead alloy and cut into plaster of paris with nails and knives to create moulds, finishing their counterfeit antiquities with acid to simulate the effects of age. Formerly, they made money as mudlarks selling their Thames discoveries to a dealer, William Edwards, whom Billy first met in 1845. Edwards described Billy & Charley as “his boys” and became their fence, passing on their fakes to George Eastwood, a more established antiques dealer based in the City Rd.
Badges, such as these from Philip Mernick’s collection, were their commonest productions – costing less than tuppence to make, yet selling for half a crown. These items were eagerly acquired in a new market for antiquities among the middle class who had spare cash but not sufficient education to understand what they were buying. Yet many eminent figures were also duped, including the archaeologist, Charles Roach Smith, who was convinced the artefacts were from the sixteenth century, suggesting that they could not be forgeries if there was no original from which they were copied. Similarly, Rev Thomas Hugo, Vicar of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, took an interest, believing them to be medieval pilgrims’ badges.
The question became a matter for the courts in August 1858 when the dealer George Eastwood sued The Athenaeum for accusing him of selling fakes. Eastwood testified he paid £296 to William Edwards for over a thousand objects that Edwards had originally bought for £200. Speaking both for himself and Charley, Billy Smith – described in the record as a “rough looking man” – assured the court that they had found the items in the Thames and earned £400 from the sale. Without further evidence, the judge returned a verdict of not guilty upon the publisher since Eastwood had not been named explicitly in print.
The publicity generated by the trial proved ideal for the opening of Eastwood’s new shop, moving his business from City Rd to Haymarket in 1859 and enjoying a boost in sales of Billy & Charley’s creations. Yet, two years later, the bottom fell out of the market when a sceptical member of the Society of Antiquaries visited Shadwell Dock and uncovered the truth from a sewer hunter who confirmed Billy & Charley’s covert means of production.
As they were losing credibility, Billy & Charley were becoming more accomplished and ambitious in their works, branching out into more elaborate designs and casting in brass. It led them to travel beyond the capital, in hope of escaping their reputation and selling their wares. They were arrested in Windsor in 1867 but, without sufficient ground for prosecution, they were released. By 1869, their designs could be bought for a penny each.
A year later, Charley died of consumption in a tenement in Wellclose Sq at thirty-five years old. The same year, Billy was forced to admit that he copied the design of a badge from a butter mould – and thus he vanishes from the historical record.
It is a wonder that the archaeological establishment were fooled for so long by Billy & Charley, when their pseudo-medieval designs include Arabic dates that were not used in Europe before the fifteenth century. Maybe the conviction and fluency of their work persuaded the original purchasers of its authenticity? Far from crude or cynical productions, Billy & Charley’s creations possess character, humour and even panache, suggesting they are the outcome of an ingenious delight – one which could even find inspiration for a pilgrim’s badge in a butter mould. Studying these works, it becomes apparent that there is a creative intelligence at work which, in another time, might be celebrated as the talent of an artist or designer, even if in Billy & Charley’s world it found its only outlet in semi-criminal activity.
Yet the final irony lies with Billy & Charley – today their Shadwell Shams are commonly worth more than the genuine antiquities they forged.
You may also like to read about
At The Boundary Estate
Arnold Circus
The Boundary Estate is one of the commonplace wonders of the East End. Hundreds live there and thousands pass through, so that over-familiarity may have rendered it invisible to some. Yet yesterday’s sparkling winter sunlight – that we enjoyed as a brief respite from the procession of rainstorms – offered the opportunity to examine its architecture anew.
Completed in 1900 as Britain’s first Council Estate upon the site of the Old Nichol, the Boundary Estate comprises a series of towers of diverse design, linked by the use of red brick and the inventive employment of vernacular architectural forms. Here are turrets and Dutch gables, and steeply pitched roofs that evoke Medieval tithe barns. Named after villages along the Thames and labelled in ceramic signs made by Doulton, there is an unapologetic Romanticism about these structures which, in their modest Arts & Crafts folksiness, would not look out of place in illustrations by Arthur Rackham or Charles Robinson.
More than a century later, the Boundary Estate continues to serve its purpose and to draw the affection of its inhabitants. The attention to detail and use of quality materials in these buildings coalesce in the realisation of an Estate that is domestic and humane, allowing a large number of people to live in close proximity within a civilised environment.
You may also like to read about
Bud Flanagan In Spitalfields
Bud Flanagan was born above his family’s fish & chip shop in Hanbury St
Today I publish reminiscences of Spitalfields written in 1961 by Bud Flanagan, the celebrated Music Hall comedian, part of the Crazy Gang and half of the legendary Flanagan & Allen double act. Born as Chaim Reeven Weintrop in 1896 into a Polish immigrant family who ran a fried fish shop in Hanbury St, Bud Flanagan began his performing career as a child in East End End Music Hall and came under the spell of street performers beneath the Braithwaite arches in Wheler St – that later featured in the song by which he and Chesney Allen are most remembered today, “Underneath The Arches.”
In common with Charlie Chaplin, who was his close contemporary and performed in Spitalfields at the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in 1899 where Bud Flanagan became a Call Boy in 1906, he adopted the persona and ragged costume of the dispossessed, revealing pathos and affectionate humour in the lives of those who were seen as downtrodden and marginal.
“The labyrinth of streets that go to make up the district of Spitalfields are narrow and mean. The hub of my world was the churchyard or, as the locals called it, “Itchy Park,” after the doss house habitues who would sun themselves on the benches or low stone walls that surrounded the park. They would sit there every day, scratching, yawning and looking into space. The cemetery was old and derelict, but it was a reminder that at one time Spitalfields was the centre of the weaving trade because nearly all the tombstones bore the inscription, “weaver.” Most of them were dated 1790-1820 and a few were still upright. Several had fallen over and on our way to school we would hop, skip and jump over them.
Hanbury St – where I was born – crawled rather than ran from Commercial St, where Spitalfields Market stood at one end, to Vallance Rd at the other, an artery that spewed itself into Whitechapel Rd at the other. On one corner stood Godfrey Philips’ tobacco factory, with its large ugly enamel signs, black on yellow, advertising “B. D. V. ” – Best Dark Virginia. It took up the whole block until the first turning, a narrow lane with little houses and a small sweet shop.
On the next corner was a barber’s shop and a tobacconist’s which my father owned. Next door to us was a kosher restaurant with wonderful smells of hot salt beef and other spicy dishes, then came the only Jewish blacksmith I ever met. His name was Libovitch, a fine black-bearded man, strong as an ox. From seven in the morning until seven at night, Saturdays excepted, you could hear the sound of hammer on anvil all over the street. Horses from the local brewery, Truman, Hanbury & Buxton, were lined up outside his place waiting to be shod.
Then came another court, all alleys and mean streets. Adjoining was Olivestein, the umbrella man, a fruiterer, a grocer, and then Wilkes St. On one side of it was a row of neat little houses and on the other, the brewery taking up streets and streets, sprawling all over the district. On the corner of Wilkes St stood The Weavers’ Arms, a public house owned by Mrs Sarah Cooney, a great friend of Marie Lloyd. She stood out like a tree in a desert of Jews. Stapletons depository, where horses were bought and sold, was next door to a fried fish shop, number fourteen Hanbury St where I was born. Next to that was Rosenthal, tailors and trimming merchants, then a billiard saloon, after that a money-lenders house where once lived the Burdett-Coutts.
Hanbury St was a patchwork of small shops, pubs, church halls, Salvation Army Hostels, doss houses, pubs, factories and sweat shops where tailors with red-rimmed eyes sewed by the gas-mantlelight. It was typical of the Jewish quarters in the nineties. The houses were clean inside but exteriors were shoddy. The street was narrow and ill-lit. The whole of the East End in those days was sinister.
Neighbours who slaved hard at their businesses left the district (once they began to save money) and moved to what was then nearly the country – Stamford Hill, a suburb in North London that was rapidly becoming a haven for the successful Jewish businessman and artisan. It was only a penny tram ride from Spitalfields to Stamford Hill, but often it took a lifetime of savings and struggle to make the move. When they got there, most were like fish out of water, sad at the parting from old friends and missing the old surroundings. Homesick, they even came all the way back to the East End to do their shopping. Eventually they were joined by their old neighbours, who too had crossed into the Promised Land.
Not everyone was lucky enough to move and among the stay-puts were my parents. First of all, they couldn’t afford it, and secondly the fish shop and barber’s made barely enough to keep a big family of five daughters and five sons. I first saw the light of day, if kids are not like kittens, on 14th October 1896. My parents, who had been in the country for years, could hardly be understood when speaking English. When a child was born the Registrar wrote down a rough phonetic version. I was named Chaim Reeven, which is Hebrew for Reuben and became Robert. My father’s name was Weintrop which the Registrar abruptly changed to “Winthrop.”
Ours was a district where the weak went to the wall and you had to keep your eyes open. When my father opened his fried fish shop, the salt cans were chained to each table and to the counter. But, as in every Jewish home, education was important and apart from ordinary school, I attended cheder for Hebrew lessons three nights a week. The East End at that time had several boys’ and girls’ clubs. I joined the Brady, named after a street tucked behind Hanbury St. We had ping pong, gymnastics and chess and it was a treat to get off the streets into the warm and play games without having fights, of which I had my share.
I became interested in conjuring and used to walk to Gamages in High Holborn and look longingly at the tricks they sold but without the coppers to buy them. To raise the money, I took a job as a Call Boy at the Cambridge Music Hall in Commercial St at the age of ten. The job was very handy. When the pros wanted fish & chips – and they wanted them every night – I went to my father’s shop. There were no wages, only tips, but I was soon able to buy my tricks and those I couldn’t afford I made. When the fish shop was closed on a Sunday, I let the kids in for a farthing, charging the older ones a ha’penny and gave them a show. Mothers would bring their children and soon there was a good sprinkling of grown-ups.
I was making a local name until one Sunday a big rat came out of nowhere and evil-eyed the audience. There were screams and before you could say “Abracadrabra!” the place had emptied. It did not do me any harm but word soon spread, “There are rats in the fish shop,” which was not surprising as we were next to a horse repository with its hay and oats. There wasn’t a morning when the traps had fewer than three or four big ones. I used to watch in fascinated horror as they drowned in a deep tub of water.
That was in 1908, the year the Music Hall artists decided to strike. Being only a call boy, I wasn’t worried by the strikers who picketed the Stage Door trying to persuade the non-strikers to come out. They weren’t really rough, only to the extent if grabbing a bottle of stout or some fish & chips out of my hand and asking whom they were for. I’d tell them and the lot would finish in the gutter. With tears in my eyes, I would run down the long corridor to the Stage Manager at the Prompt Corner and let him know what happened, but mostly I was left alone.
The management who owned the Cambridge also ran the London Music Hall in Shoreditch High St and Collins in Islington. The three halls were known as the L.C.C. – London, Collins & Cambridge. It was at the London that I made my first stage appearance.
Every Saturday at the 2:30pm they had an extra matinee when the acts worked for nothing. The place was packed with a good sprinkling of agents out front to see the fun and maybe pick up an act. The audience were like wolves, all ready for their Roman holiday, booing and jeering at anything they didn’t like. The Stage Manager in the corner, with his hand on the lever, was only too happy to join in the fun and bring down the curtain. The orchestra played with one eye on the music and one eye on the coins or rubbish that would be thrown at some unlucky act on the stage.
I was nearly thirteen and not too bad at manipulating cards and doing other tricks when I went to the London one Saturday afternoon together with my conjuring table and other props. I gave my name as Fargo, the Boy Wizard. The first prize was fifty shillings and a week’s work at the theatre.
The matinee produced some sixteen acts, most old-timers anxious for a week’s job and the cash, together with beginners who had never done a show outside their front room at home. The audience was as rough as ever and, at about 3:30pm, I came on. Being a kid, they were sympathetic towards me, but I was nervous and messed up my first trick. I had to pour water into a tumbler to make it beer and then pour it into another tumbler to make it milk. Alas, in my excitement, I had forgotten to smear the glasses with chemicals and instead of applause came jeers. Foolishly, I then asked to borrow a bowler hat. A bowler in Shoreditch! There was no such thing in the whole of the East End, let alone at the London Music Hall, Shoreditch. Well, I couldn’t do the trick with a cap and had to drop that illusion.
That started them off. Friends were in front, fellow scouts and Brady boys, but I got the bird. The curtain was rung down. I collected my props and and sneaked out of the Stage Door. There stood my father, waiting for me. A stinging right-hander caught me across the face, my ear is twisted, and I heard him saying, “I’ll give you, working on the Sabbath!” I was punched and pushed all the way home. My props lay somewhere in Shoreditch High St. I never saw them again.
I was growing to be a big boy but still working at the Cambridge. On my one free night, Sunday, we would go to the home of a man named Alf Caplin to sing songs and enjoy ourselves. He was a great pianist and one Sunday we decided to form our own quartet. We rehearsed an act and soon landed an engagement at a Dutch Club called “The Netherlands” situated in Bell Lane. The small stage was at the far end of the room and every Sunday there would be five acts, whose pay packet averaged about five shillings each. Dutch clog dancers and yodellers were the favourites. We called ourselves “The Four Hanburys, Juvenile Songsters,” and as there was plenty of club work in London on Sundays, we hoped to be recommended to other clubs.
We opened in harmony and it was nice bright tune, but after about eight bars the harmony was lost and we were all singing the melody but not not in tune. That was the first and only time I have ever been hit by a Dutch herring. I don’t know whether you have seen one but the brine and skin stick to your fingers when you eat them. So you can imagine what it does when one lands on your face. Several more came and that was the Four Hanburys finale.
Competitions were regular feature of the Music Halls and nearly every week the Cambridge had one. A singer, who also ran a competition, was a nice woman named Dora Lyric, married to a successful agent, Walter Bentley. Well, Dora was appearing at the Cambridge and also running the competition. One night there was scarcity of entrants. In desperation, her husband poked me with his stick and said, “Boy, you go on and sing one of Miss Lyric’s songs.” “Who me?” I echoed, trying to hide my eagerness and looking at the Stage Manager who nodded, “Yes.”
Dora Lyric had a popular song, “If you want to be a Somebody,” and I decided to sing that one. Being the only boy in the competition at that house, I won hands down and was picked for the final on Friday night. At the final, there were ten competitors who had won their respective heats, but I won the competition and that precious thirty shillings.
American acts had been coming over to play the Halls for some time now and they fascinated me with their new style and approach to the public and especially by their way of talking. British artists soon cottoned on and before time there was a spate of imitators of American-style acts, watching them from the gallery and then going round the corner to the Arches – a long street under a railway which carried the mainline to Liverpool St Station and ran from Commercial St to Club Row, a Sunday market where they sold mostly dogs and canaries. There the pros would practise to mouth-organ acompaniment, night after night, until they had copied the Yanks most intricate steps.
I became so interested in the Americans that I decided, after talking with them and reading about the States, that I must go there one day. The year was 1910, I was still at school and had about three months to finish. We were still in Hanbury St and on the day before I was fourteen, I made up my mind I was going to the New World, the place my dad tried to get to and never did. But my first impression of New York was a sad shock – Hanbury St, Spitalfields, seemed like the Mall in comparision…”
Chaim Reeven Weintrop (later known as Bud Flanagan) at the age of two with his brother Simon
The red premises are the former fish and chip run by Bud Flanagan’s family, where the young comedian staged magic shows on Sunday afternoons until a rat appeared and put a stop to it. The yard to the right was where Libovitch the blacksmith shoed the horses from the Truman Brewery.
Wolf & Yetta Weintrop fled Poland in the eighteen-eighties hoping to get to New York but settling in Spitalfields where they ran a fish & chip shop in Hanbury St
“On one corner stood Godfrey Phillips’ tobacco factory, with its large ugly enamel signs”
“Stapletons depository, where horses were bought and sold”
Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in Commercial St where Bid Flanagan was a Call Boy at ten years old
Handbill for Cambridge Theatre of Varieties
Bud Flanagan at the peak of his fame
“The Arches – a long street under a railway which carried the mainline to Liverpool St Station and ran from Commercial St to Club Row, a Sunday market where they sold mostly dogs and canaries. There the pros would practise to mouth-organ acompaniment, night after night, until they had copied the Yanks most intricate steps.”
[youtube Fh2Bsai1lJo nolink]
You may also like to read about
Brick Lane By Phil Maxwell
Publication 3rd April
This spring – with your kind assistance – I plan to publish the definitive photography book of Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell. Phil is the photographer of Brick Lane, he came in 1982 and has been taking pictures here ever since, creating a vast corpus of vibrant black and white photography that is a unique social record. His work stands unparalleled in the canon of street photography, both in its range and the quality of human observation that informs his eloquent images.
Laying myself upon your goodwill, I am asking any of my readers who are willing – to invest a sum of no more and no less than £1000 each to fund the publication of Brick Lane. All those who invest will be credited personally in the book and invited to bring a cheque along to a dinner with Phil Maxwell, hosted by yours truly. In April, prior to publication, I will present you with an inscribed copy of the book and, six months later, your investment will be returned to you – unless you choose to offer it as a donation towards the publication of further titles by Spitalfields Life Books.
In recent months, Phil has been working closely with distinguished book designer Friederike Huber who designed Colin O’Brien’s Travellers’ Children in London Fields and Don McCuillin’s In England, to create an elegant three hundred page photography book that everyone who knows Brick Lane will want to have and that can stand in perpetuity as a dignified testimony of time passing in the East End.
Following Colin O’Brien’s Travellers’ Children in London Fields and The Gentle Author’s London Album, Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell is the third title from Spitalfields Life Books -and Faber Factory Plus (part of Faber & Faber) will distribute it to bookshops nationwide.
If you are willing to be an investor and help publish Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell, please drop me a line at Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com and I will be delighted to send you further details. Additionally, you can support the publication of Brick Lane by pre-ordering copies here.
This is the first publication by Spitalfields Life Books in July 2013 Click here to buy a copy
This is the second publication by Spitalfields Life Books in October 2013 Click here to buy a copy
To invest in Brick Lane by Phil Maxwell please write to me The Gentle Author at Spitalfieldslife@gmail.com and I will send you further details.
Click here to pre-order copies of Brick Lane
You may like to take a look at more pictures by Phil Maxwell
Remembering Rose at the Golden Heart
Phil Maxwell’s Kids on the Street
Phil Maxwell & Sandra Esqulant, Photographer & Muse
More of Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies
Phil Maxwell’s Old Ladies in Colour
Phil Maxwell at the Spitalfields Market
Follow Phil Maxwell’s blog Playground of an East End Photographer
The Gates Of Old London
For a while, I have been seeking a set of prints of the Gates of Old London to show you and, over the festive period, I came upon these handsome Players Cigarette Cards from the Celebrated Gateways series published in 1907. As we contemplate the going-out of the old year and the coming-in of the new, they make the perfect post to complete the pages of 2013 for Spitalfields Life and give me the opportunity to send you my wishes for your happiness in 2014.
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of cigarette cards
So Long, Joseph Markovitch
Today we remember Joseph Markovitch who lived his whole life in the East End and died on Boxing Day, just six days short of his eighty-seventh birthday on January 1st. In collaboration with Photographer Martin Usborne, he created I’ve Lived In East London for Eighty-Six & A Half Years which stands now as his memorial.
Words by Joseph Markovitch & Photographs by Martin Usborne
“This is where I was born, right by Old St roundabout on January 1st, 1927. In those days it wasn’t called a hospital, it was just called a door number, number four or maybe number three. The place where I was born, it was a charity you see. Things were a bit different back then.”
“In the old days, when a man went to see the opera he had on a bowler hat. If you were a man and you walked in the street without a hat on your head you were a lost soul. People don’t wear hats any more … but they wear everything else, don’t they?”
“I worked two years as a cabinet maker in Hemsworth St, just off Hoxton Market. But when my sinuses got bad I went to Hackney Rd, putting rivets on luggage cases. For about twenty years I did that job. My foreman was a bastard. I got paid a pittance. The job was alright apart from that. If I was clever, very clever, I mean very very clever, then I would like to have been an accountant. It’s a very good job. If I was less heavy, you know what I’d like to be? My dream job, I’d like to be a ballet dancer. That would be my dream.”
“A lot of young kids do graffiti around Hoxton. It’s nice. It adds a bit of colour, don’t you think?”
“When I was a kid everyone was a Cockney. Now it’s a real mix. I think it’s a good thing, makes it more interesting. Did you know that I stand still when I get trouble with my chest? Last Saturday, a woman come up to me and said “Are you OK?” and I said, “Why?” She said, “Because you are standing still.” I said, “Oh.” She said she comes from Italy and she is Scots-Canadian, and do you know what? She wanted to help me. Then I dropped a twenty pound note on the bus. A foreign man – I think he was Dutch or French – said, “Mate, you’ve dropped a twenty pound note.” English people don’t do that because they have got betting habits.”
“My mother was a good cook. She made bread pudding. It was the best bread pudding you could have. She was called Janie and I lived with her until she died. I wasn’t going to let her into a home. Your mother should be your best friend. Our best memories were going on a Sunday to Hampstead Heath Fair”
“I like to go to the library on Monday, Tuesday and … Well, I can’t always promise what days I go. I like to read about all the places in the world. I also go to the section on the cinema and I read a book called “The life of the stars.” But I only spend thirty per cent of my time reading. The rest of the time, I like to sit on the sofa and sit quite a long way back so I am almost flat. Did you know that Paul Newman’s father was German-Jewish and that his mother was Hungarian-Catholic? You know Nicholas Cage? He is half-German and half-Italian. What about Joe Pesce? Where are his parents from? I should look it up.”
“I’ve never had a girlfriend. It’s better that way. I have always had very bad catarrh, so it wasn’t possible. And I had to care for my mother. Anyway, if I was married, I might be dead by now. I probably would be, if you think about it. I would have been domineered all my life by a girl and that ain’t good for nobody’s health. I’m too old for that now. I would like to have had a girlfriend but it’s OK. You know what? I’ve had a happy life. That’s the main thing, it’s been a good life.”
“If I try to imagine the future. It’s like watching a film. Pavements will move, nurses will be robots and cars will grow wings…
…you’ve just got to wait. There won’t be any cinemas, just computers in people’s homes. They will make photographs that talk. You will look at a picture of me and you will hear, “Hello, I’m Joseph Markovitch.” and then it will be me telling you about things. Imagine that!”
“I’ve seen the horse and cart, I’ve seen the camera invented, I’ve seen the projector. I never starved.”
“Lots of things make me laugh. Fruit makes me laugh. To see a dog talking makes me laugh. I like to see monkeys throwing coconuts on men’s heads, that’s funny. When you see a man going on to a desert island and he is stranded the monkeys are always friendly. You think the monkey is throwing things at your head but really he is throwing the coconuts for you to eat.”
Photographs copyright © Martin Usborne
The Hades Hotel
It is my pleasure to introduce this subterranean tale by Rosie Dastgir author of A Small Fortune as the last of our three Ghost Stories of Old London written specially for the season by Spitalfields Life Contributing Writers.
“Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, piles and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.” – Peter Ackroyd, London Under
They worked around the clock, the tunnel gang of twenty men. It was vital, they were told, to reduce the likelihood of settlement while the tunnels were constructed. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Even on Christmas Day. Jake and Ivan were two of twelve tunnellers who worked below ground at the front of the machine, while the remaining eight worked from the rear to over ground. Ivan was from the Ukraine, and Jake was his one English mate, who’d befriended him in the early weeks, when everything was mysterious and alien. Ivan longed for his family, and was counting the days till Christmas, his life reduced to a timeline until he was reunited with them. It was grueling, the work, tunneling deep beneath the Eocene clay of the muddy Thames, dirty and exhausting, and he missed the comforts of home. His wife and four children were expecting him on Christmas Eve, but he dared not make promises. He needed the overtime, and as they’d offered him the work, he’d be mad to turn it down.
At first, it had seemed a great adventure, working on the visionary Crossrail project, and being part of such an astonishing feat of engineering. But Ivan suffered bouts of uneasiness almost from the moment the work began, with excavations uncovering things that should be left well alone. Charnel houses were unearthed, and a Roman baptistery discovered. Nearby, a skeleton of a baby. They’d come across a massive femur and joked that it must have belonged to a giant that had roamed the earth in prehistoric times, only to discover they’d been fooled: it was a mammoth’s bone.
Wherever you looked, you could not escape the dead down there, layered in sediments, packed into the darkness that surrounded the tunnel. Many an evening Ivan had drowned his fears in vodka laced beer, wondering what he was doing here, toiling in the underworld beneath a city that was opaque to him, a massive, inscrutable sprawl, linked by stations with baffling names. He did not like to think about the weight of water that pressed down upon them as he operated the slurry clearing machine, sealed in a tight tunnel snaking through infernal darkness. As the days had grown shorter, the nights longer, he had been plagued with insomnia, too fearful to fall asleep for what his dreams might bring.
He arrived at dusk for work that day, to find Jake waiting for him at the mouth of the works site, smoking a cigarette, as he finished his tea. The previous night, the two men had been out drinking at the Star of the East in Canning Town, downing shot after shot, until they were legless. That was a new word for Ivan. It was how they survived, the drinking, or so they told each other. After closing time, Ivan had wound his drunken way home to the rickety high rise in Stratford where he lodged, miraculously reaching his front door unscathed. But Jake was not so lucky. He’d taken a fall on the matt black ice that skimmed the streets, skidding headfirst into the gritty path. His grazed forehead shone in the floodlit building site, pink and raw as an exotic peeled fruit.
“What happened to you?” Ivan wanted to know.
“Had a fight with the pavement outside my house.”
Jake grinned through a cloud of fag smoke while Ivan worked out the idiom.
“Fell flat on my face, didn’t I? Don’t laugh!”
“But it sounds funny, fighting the pavement. ”
“Hurts, it does. So, you got back in one piece, then?”
Ivan shrugged. “Suppose so.”
Jake scrutinised his friend’s pallid features carefully. “You look like you could do with a fry up. Get something later at the caf, yeah? C’mon, Santa Claus, Christmas is coming, and we gotta get tunnelling.”
A flurry of fat snow flakes drifted down from the sky, flecking Ivan’s moustache as he looked up for one last glance of the outside world before going to work.
“What would I do without you, Jake?” he smiled.
The question was heartfelt. For it was Jake who had taken him on the bus to Moorfields Eye Hospital, when he had woken up a few weeks ago to find that he was unable to see in one eye. The inexplicable blindness had been experienced by other tunnellers, a hushed epidemic that nobody mentioned on site. At the hospital, a doctor had prescribed him a course of eye drops and, before very long, his sight returned. But something disturbing had happened to alter his vision, so that he began to suffer strange sightings when he went back to work in the tunnel.
He began to see things, granular and grey, at the periphery of his vision while he drilled out the tunnel. The shapes were indistinct, though at times he experienced the rushing sensation of people passing through him, as though he were ethereal. At first he wondered if it was his eyesight, or a drink too many, that was producing these sensations. As time wore on, the sightings became more ominous.
That evening, he was dead tired as he went to work, his head and eyes throbbing with the effects of his hangover. At the bottom of the shaft was a door, scarcely visible, that he’d noticed once before. Nobody else could see it but him, and he saw that something hovered and fretted upon the other side. Flooded with unease, and yet unable to resist, he took the plunge and went through the door.
What he saw horrified him. Vast gloomy caverns, filled with legions of men in cages, wiry and filthy, digging foul earth by the light of flaming torches, their faces red and contorted as they sang mournful shanties. The walls were beaded with oily water, and evil gases plumed from the depths of the earth. Ivan found himself choking for air, his eyes stinging so much that he feared he would be blinded. Yet he could not tear himself from the scene, horrifying though it was. Mesmerised, he gawped in awe, as flames spewed forth at the rock face, green and orange and strange colours he had never seen before.
Then something made him long to flee for his life, but he was rooted to the spot. It was the shape, like a man but gargantuan, that had been hovering at the edge of his vision. The giant stood seven feet tall, a brawny figure, with blackened torso and harrowed features, waist high in water in the penumbral cavern. When he opened his mouth to speak, Ivan could not see his face.
You can’t imagine it, the evil, the horror that lies underground! You fear the fire at the rock face even more than the river Thames that threatens to drown you! You fear the very ground beneath your feet will swallow you up into the dreadful darkness, a pitch black void that sucks out your soul.
The foul air made Ivan gasp as he tried to take in the giant’s pronouncements. He gestured towards him with his outstretched hand, only to see it vanish, swallowed in darkness. Looking up, his eyes met Phineas’ hollow, unseeing gaze, his pupils round as saucers, violet black, as he spoke.
The infernal gases are terrible, poisoning the eyes, destroying the vision and damning the body and soul. Mark my warning, Ivan. This is the Hades Hotel.
Terror bloomed in his chest. He would be blinded for life like this ogre!
Best left untouched, these depths, best left unchartered, left well alone. You are defying the natural world – you were not made to carry out this desecration of the earth.
In truth, Ivan had little idea what, if anything, he had been made for. To take care and support his family, to live a long and happy life. Simple, earthly things that made him yearn for home.
“Who are you? What is it you want from me?”
You know who I am. You’ve seen me many times –
“That was you? The dark form at my shoulder?”
It was. My name is Phineas.
“But what on earth are you? A devil? A spirit?”
The giant seemed to soften for a moment, his unseeing eyes illuminated with a fleck of gold in the gloom.
I am nothing, a wandering soul caught in limbo. I left my wife a widow, my children fatherless, fending for themselves in the workhouse. And I am one of hundreds, Ivan. The damp and the darkness hastened our early deaths, snatching us down to the underworld. Like you, we drank beer laced with gin, to survive the horrors.
“You know what I drink? Are you watching me? ”
The giant sighed.
Everything, yes, it is my curse, for I am blinded yet a seer, like my namesake, Phineas, the Thracian king, tortured by what I must carry with me, for centuries, my warnings going unheeded in these dark, desolate tunnels. They keep digging! They keep digging! Deeper and deeper into the darkness, hollowing out the precious earth!
Fading into the craggy folds of darkness, Phineas grew indistinct.
“Don’t go!” Ivan cried. “Finish what you have to say!”
But apparition was gone, leaving Ivan uncertain that it had been no more than a figment of his own dark imaginings.
* * * *
Jake and Ivan ate breakfast together at the end of their shift, at Jake’s favourite café in Limehouse, where they served chips with everything, even pasta. Usually it was Ivan’s favourite antidote to a hangover, but his nerves had destroyed his appetite. He watched as Jake stabbed his fried egg with a fork stacked with black pudding, chips, and half a sausage, sliding his omelette to one side of the plate.
Jake fixed his gaze upon the food. “What’s up? Innit any good?”
“We don’t eat these baked beans where I come from,” Ivan said gloomily. “I’m sorry.”
Jake shrugged. “Whatever you say. Give ‘em to me – silly to waste ‘em. What’s up?”
“Do you know much about this tunnel we’re building? I mean, is there…. Has there ever been another one built like it?”
Jake finished a mouthful.
“Yeah, there’s loads of tunnels up and down the Thames – bridges and that. London’s world famous for it.”
“And round here? In the Isle of Dogs?”
“Yeah. Famous one it was – my great, great, granddad was a mole man, digging out the tunnels, that’s what they called them. Lots of them died, drowned, buried alive –“
“Really?”
“They say he drowned, my great great granddad, when the shaft was flooded… that’s what my dad says.“
Ivan’s heart thudded. “So when was it?” he enquired, as if his interest were purely historical.
Jake paused for a moment. “1840, round then? The first tunnel ever built under the river.”
“Round here?”
“Yeah, Isle of Dogs.” Jake paused for a moment. “Dreadful things went on down there, all for this railway, they said. My dad says there’s cousins of my great great granddad buried in the graveyard in St Anne’s, and there’s no trace of him. They never found his body.”
Ivan felt hot, and wiped his forehead with a ketchup stained napkin.
His mate grinned. “Nah, don’t be scared, mate, it’s safe as houses down there. Them engineers know a thing or two, they do.”
* * * *
Next day Ivan woke with dread. As the December greyness gathered outside, resolving into wooly darkness after a scant few hours of light, he knew he had no choice but to go to work as usual. He eschewed the eye drops for once, convinced that they’d been altering his vision and playing tricks upon him. As he approached the river, he was seized with the urge to turn back, go home to his wife and never return to this place again. Damn the job! Damn the tunnel! He fretted that he should find Jake and warn him of imminent danger that he felt sure would befall them if they continued their work.
He headed towards Poplar, where Jake lived, though he didn’t recall the address. Nothing seemed familiar in the orange-tinged fog, and he circled the streets without luck. He felt sure Jake lived in one of these squat blocks of flats, near a street with a Chinese sounding name. Amoy, was it? Or Canton? As the night stretched on, he grew despondent. And what was the point, telling his English friend? Jake would think him an idiot, dismissing his fears as madness. He’d told him it was fine down there, and he should know, shouldn’t he? An Englishman born and bred, the descendant of a tunneller himself.
A chill wind blew off the Thames, and the earth braced itself as snow began to fall, settling in a thick pall across the city. The landscape was illuminated, and Ivan felt his mood lift as he made his way into St Anne’s Church in Limehouse, drawn by the lamplit windows that glowed in the darkness. He settled himself in the churchyard amongst the weathered gravestones, their uneven granite forms glinting in the shadows. Reading the inscriptions of families perished centuries ago, he grew calm at last, safe in the knowledge that a boundary exists between the living and the dead. All would be well. He must go to work now, he thought, fending off his fears with a last cigarette, dragging slowly until his blood throbbed and buzzed in his veins. Never before had he felt so alive, or so alone. For a moment, he thought he heard voices, distant and haunting, but it was only the choir singing carols in the church, a skein of tones drifting into the ether.
The thought of the overtime he’d earn raised his spirits. He would leave in time for Christmas, just as he’d promised his wife.
* * * *
Christmas Eve crept up upon the world and held it in its grip. Hundreds of meters beneath the humming, light-spangled city, Jake and Ivan were working their last shift of the year before the holidays. Loyal cohorts, they kept watch for one another, as they toiled away, lulled into a stupor by the roar of the slurry clearing machine. Ivan shuddered, pushing away a fleeting image of Phineas, hovering beyond the door at the bottom of the shaft.
“Alright, mate?” Jake said, seeing his friend shiver. “Home in time for the Christmas goose, then?”
Ivan swallowed, clearing his throat of grit.
“Hope so, yeah.”
Midnight came. He and Jake were working alone, at the bottom of the deepest cavern, repairing hairline cracks in the concrete, when they heard the banging from the other side.
Ivan grew rigid with fear.
“What was that?” Jake cried. “That’s not right – “
The banging grew louder, intensified in its desperation, as the men listened in horror.
“The Thames is in! The Thames is in!” came a terrifying voice, booming from beyond the tunnel.
“Get out of here – quickly – Jake, run!” Ivan yelled. “Raise the alarm, warn the others! It is Phineas, come to warn us!”
Too late.
A plangent boom that seemed to come from the earth’s core to the surface of the ground above the tunnel, so that the land flexed and writhed as though it were alive, or so people said later. Ivan would never know, for he was trapped underground. The great river Thames was in, enraged, engorged, flooding the tunnel, bursting its walls.
“Run! Jake! Run! Raise the alarm – they’ll be getting to work any minute!”
They’d practised the emergency drill many times, the tunnel gang, so that Jake did not have to think what to do, racing for the escape shaft.
It was the imprint of horror upon Jake’s features that never left Ivan. A look upon his face that he had never seen before, and never would again, as the wall of water rose up before him, sweeping him to his end. In the blink of an eye he was gone.
Without thinking Ivan gave himself up to the river, its awesome force, tossing him round and round in a whirlpool that never ended, centuries whooshing past in a watery blur, ancient flint and muddy reeds clogging his mouth, flooding his ears, his nose, his head, battering and waterlogging his brain. This was not the abyss he had feared, the blackness that annihilated you. This was water, brackish and gravelly, life giving water, buoying him back to the surface. Like the great engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who built the word’s first subaqueous tunnel under the Thames, he floated up to the top of the shaft, and survived.
When they pumped upon his chest and revived him, the metallic taste of blood mingled with mud filled his mouth, spewing out like a fountain. A front tooth was missing from his jaw, and in its place, he felt something incredibly hard. It was a fossil.
Photo of Brunel’s tunnel courtesy Urban 75
Medallion courtesy Where Thames Smooth Water Glide
